Sri Lanka's war criminals want welfare

Former Sri Lankan troops, including personnel from the Special Task Force (STF), and several military welfare associations took to the streets of Colombo last week, staging a protest near Fort Railway Station to demand legal rights and financial benefits for those injured during the armed conflict. 

The demonstrators subsequently marched towards the Presidential Secretariat, pressing Anura Kumara Dissanayake's government for immediate action on what they described as unmet obligations, including pension payments, to veterans of the war.

Under the Dissanayake administration's austerity-driven 2026 budget, welfare programmes across the board have come under pressure, with the president telling public employees in parliament not to protest and that "the government has no funds."

The Special Task Force was established initially as a specialised armed police unit, with former British Special Air Service personnel brought in to provide training. Researchers including Phil Miller, in his 2015 report Exporting Police Death Squads: From Armagh to Trincomalee, established that the unit was shaped in part by techniques developed by British forces during the 'shoot-to-kill' era in Northern Ireland, and that mercenaries with SAS backgrounds played a formative role in its early training.

In a 2018 report, the International Truth and Justice Project identified 56 STF individuals who should not be deployed as United Nations peacekeepers owing to their alleged involvement in extrajudicial killings. In 2018, Police Scotland came under significant public criticism for continuing to provide training to STF personnel despite the extensive record of documented abuses.

The STF are accused of a litany of massacres including the Trinco 5 killing, where five Tamil students were murdered on a beach in 2006.

No one has ever been held accountable.