In an interview on Sri Lanka

So your next book, The Arrogance of Power – Myth, Decadence and Murder by Rajan Hoole. Don’t tell me he’s been killed as well.

No. He was a mathematics professor in Jaffna, but after the assassination of his colleague Rajani Thiranagama (with whom he wrote The Broken Palmyrah) he went underground. He severed all ties with his friends and relatives, because it was simply too dangerous . So he has spent the last 18 years in hiding, where he continues to report on human rights abuses. His human rights group really has done phenomenal work.

So what is his book about?

He has been producing report after report, volumes and volumes of them. The book is a compilation of those issues and an excellent history of human rights and the deterioration of state institutions. It’s a very thick book, going into an immense amount of detail, and stretching from the 1970s to 2000. It is also, of course, about the arrogance of power – a detailed chronicle of violations by the state as well as the LTTE, the deterioration of the judiciary, the police and so on.

Could you give some examples?

Well one example is when the LTTE shot down a civilian airline flight in 1998, killing all passengers on board. And no one wanted to accept any responsibility for it, even though so many people had died. There is detailed documentation of the army’s massacre of Tamil civilians in the east of Sri Lanka in the 1990s. But there’s also lots of stories about individuals, people who have lost family members, a woman who loses her father in the riots, and a brother to the militant movement, individuals who get caught in the middle and have nothing to thank either side for. But Rajan ties it into broader issues, issues for society as whole. It’s really the ultimate record of this brutal conflict, what has happened to our community and to our country.