Hardly a day passes in this country without major drug detections and underworld killings. Inspector General of Police Priyantha Weerasooriya, speaking at this year’s Police Day ceremony in Colombo on Thursday (03), said police had seized large amounts of narcotics, including 1,416 kg of Crystal Methamphetamine, 946 kg of heroin, and 1,282 kg of cannabis and taken into custody 1,612 illegal firearms, including T-56 assault rifles and pistols, so far this year.
Sri Lanka is awash with illegal firearms, which have found their way into the underworld during the past several decades. Protracted armed conflicts led to an exponential increase in the number of lethal weapons in the wrong hands.
Immediately after the 2024 regime change, the MPs who had obtained repeater guns from the Defence Ministry were asked to return those weapons, and they readily complied for obvious reasons. But those guns account for only a fraction of the weapons issued to politicians and others over the decades. In January 2019, the then Defence Secretary Hemasiri Fernando disclosed that about 4,700 pistols and revolvers had been licensed but there was no information about those who had obtained them. Some individuals possessed as many as 15 small firearms each, he said.
One may recall that in 2023, the then State Minister Pramitha Tennakoon informed Parliament that the defence authorities had issued about 700 firearms to 154 politicians in the late 1980s, when the JVP went on a killing spree, but none of them had been returned. That figure cannot be accurate. According to anecdotal evidence, thousands of firearms were issued to politicians under threat during that period, and almost all of them have gone missing.
In the late 1980s, the JVP did not spare anyone who refused to obey its illegal orders. Its death-dealing sparrow units physically eliminated anyone who had the courage to voice dissent. Some political activists threatened by the JVP banded together to protect themselves, and the armed groups they formed, such as the PRRA (People’s Revolutionary Red Army) became as ruthless as the JVP killing squads; they eventually helped beat the JVP at its own game. Some of them switched their allegiance to the UNP, and worked as its shock troops.
The leftist parties and the SLFP, too, had to protect themselves against the JVP hit squads. The UNP set in motion a Caravan of Death, which scoured the country, killing JVP activists and suspects. What happened to the firearms used by pro-UNP vigilantes to carry out those extrajudicial killings?
Chris Smith, an expert on the proliferation of firearms, especially in South Asia has in his report, In the Shadow of a Cease-fire: The Impacts of Small Arms Availability and Misuse in Sri Lanka, has revealed that the weapons given to politicians in the late 1908s numbered more than 11,000. Many of them were not returned. The National Commission against the Proliferation of Illicit Small Arms (NCAPISA), established by President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga in 2004, once quoted a senior police officer attached to the Police Central Armoury at the time as having said that 80% of those weapons had been returned. Even if so, going by Smith’s figure, more than 2,200 weapons have gone unaccounted for.
The proliferation of illicit firearms in Sri Lanka can be attributed to several key factors, according to researchers; they include gunrunning, illegal operations carried out by rogue elements in the police and the armed forces, local arms manufacturing, and criminals gaining access to arms caches of the LTTE. It may be recalled that the Colombo Crime Division produced 12 suspects before the Colombo Chief Magistrate on March 22, 2019, for having supplied weapons retrieved from buried LTTE arms caches in Kilinochchi to criminal gangs elsewhere. It was revealed in January 2025 that as many as 73 T-56 assault rifles had gone missing from an unnamed army camp. Soon after the decimation of the JVP’s military wing in 1989, a police sergeant sold a large stock of firearms, seized from the JVP and stored in the Kuliyapitiya police station, to underworld gangs at Rs. 15,000 each. The police could recover only some of those weapons.
The police must go all out to find the illegal firearms used by the JVP during its second uprising (1987-89). Most of the JVP’s arms caches have not been traced. SJB MP Dayasiri Jayasekara told Parliament on 27 Feb. 2025 that more than 2,000 illegal firearms looted by the JVP between 1987 and 1989 had gone missing. The JVP attacked several police stations and military camps and grabbed weapons. In April 1987, it seized the entire arsenal at the Pallekele army camp. Now that the JVP-led NPP has formed a government and launched a campaign to eliminate gun violence, the Defence Ministry may be able to ascertain information about those missing firearms, as we argued in a previous editorial comment.
The NCAPISA dealt extensively with the issue of illegal weapons in circulation in Sri Lanka. Its survey report contains valuable information, which, however, needs to be updated. Defence authorities should study this document thoroughly and commission a fresh survey on illicit firearms while carrying out operations to neutralise criminal gangs and seize lethal weapons in their possession.
The need for the police and the defence bigwigs to adopt a broader and more strategic approach to ridding the country of the scourge of illegal firearms, which snuff out lives almost daily, cannot be overstated.
from The Island https://ift.tt/qkEIFpo
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