Gotabhaya Rajapaksa made the rare admission of the government's controversial counterinsurgency tactics in a recent interview with a Colombo based English daily.
The shocking claim comes a week after his sibling, former president Mahinda Rajapaksa, acknowledged for the first time that the troops committed mass crimes during the war.
In Sri Lanka, with tens of thousands of unresolved enforced disappearances, “white vanning” is a euphemism for abduction and torture - based on the vehicle commonly used.
The former defence secretary had said that Intelligence agencies used white vans claiming that such methods have been used in Sri Lanka for a long time.
When there was a suspect, he was taken in for questioning through such means,” Gotabhaya Rajapaksa told Daily Mirror.
“It was not something introduced by me. These methods have been adopted all over the world. Maybe our intelligence agencies used Hi-Ace vans which are white. I did not introduce it. It happened under all the previous Governments. If you take the violence during the JVP era, everybody, barring the very young people, knows how youth were whisked away by unknown people all over the country.”
His reference to the “JVP era” was the late 80s when a Sinhala youth uprising led by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) was militarily crushed with extrajudicial killings and abductions.
Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, a senior military officer during the time, functioned as the military coordinator in Matale district in Central Sri Lanka where the second biggest mass grave containing 154 human skeletons was found in November 2012.
'Normal procedure'
He claimed that the feared practice of White Vanning was used exclusively against Tamil Tigers waging a war for self-rule. Rajapaksa lamented that he is being ‘pinpointed’ for the continuation of an age-old practice, which wasn’t “normal procedure”.
“I do not know why I am being pinpointed today. During our time this had never been done to abduct any political opponent, which was not the case in the 88/89 period.
Most people above 30 years of age remember what happened during that time. What happened during our time was only to counter the activities of deadly terrorists.
By 2005, there was a huge network of the LTTE in the south. They had infiltrated the south in a big way.
They were able to kill so many people like politicians and military personnel as a result.
They were fighting all over the country. They had an intelligence network and armed caches in most places in Colombo and the suburbs.
We had to trace them including suicide cadres, spies etc. When you fight terrorism, you cannot stick to the normal procedure.
They were fighting in a different way using clandestine guerrilla methods. We had to counter that in a similar manner. That is the way that the intelligence agencies work.” (JDS Lanka)
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