Au Sri Lanka, l'armée intensifie sa répression au nom de la 'guerre contre la drogue'

Les centres de détention forcée pour les personnes usagères des drogues militarisent le "traitement", ignorant la nécessité d’une approche de santé publique et de la décriminalisation. Pour en savoir plus, en anglais, veuillez lire les informations ci-dessous.

Deep inside Somawathiya National Park in Sri Lanka, surrounded by barbed wire and electric fencing to keep the elephants away, lies the military-operated Kandakadu Drug Rehabilitation Center. Formerly an army camp set up to forcibly reform the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) militants who fought against the government during the 26-year civil war, it has now pivoted to treating drug-dependent people from all over the country.

In June 2022, Anthony Pathmaraja, whose name has been changed to conceal his identity, was being treated at the Kandakadu center for heroin and methamphetamine addiction, when he — along with 600 other inmates — tore down the gates and fled from the center into the jungle.

Their escape was triggered by the death of a fellow inmate, who, Pathmaraja claimed, had been beaten, waterboarded and ultimately murdered by the soldiers operating the center. “We heard the screams in the next room all night,” Pathmaraja, the son of a migrant worker, told New Lines. “In the morning we protested, demanding they let the media in, but when they refused, we broke out.”

Pathmaraja hid in the jungle for three days dodging crocodiles and elephants until he finally surrendered to the police after he contracted a painful throat infection from drinking river water. “I was very scared [in the jungle], and I couldn’t swallow once the infection set in, but I didn’t want to return no matter what,” he said.

Fifteen years after the end of the ethnic conflict between Tamil separatists and the Sri Lankan government, which claimed over 100,000 lives, Sri Lanka is dealing with a new crisis and engaging in a new war: a war on drugs. Conflict-ridden areas often struggle with increased substance abuse, partly due to new drug routes that emerge as a result of instability and inadequate rule of law.

While data on drug-related activities in Sri Lanka is largely limited to arrests, this number has been steadily increasing in the last five years. According to the National Dangerous Drugs Control Board (NDDCB), over 89,000 people were arrested in 2019, compared with around 162,000 people in 2023, and arrests for methamphetamine possession, in particular, skyrocketed during the same period — to nearly 13 times more than the number in 2019.