The High Court (HC) of Puttalam on 12 December acquitted poet and teacher Ahnaf Jazeem of the charge against him framed under the draconian Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act as amended (PTA), three-and-a-half years after his wrongful arrest. The acquittal is based on the failure of the State to prove the alleged offence, as none of the State witnesses testified against the poet. In spite of the established fact that the whole case was concocted, the Court refused to declare the prosecution as “frivolous and vexatious” and denied awarding any State costs to Jazeem.

Jazeem was arrested at his home in Mannar, by the Police Counter Terrorism and Investigation Division (TID), on 16 May 2020, in the climax of an allegedly anti-Muslim racist campaign of the Government of former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, as part of a broader onslaught on the democratic rights of the people. The Government endeavoured to link Jazeem to the Easter Sunday terror attacks of 21 April 2019, and to the “Save the Pearls” organisation, one of the patrons of which was the human rights lawyer Hejaaz Hizbullah, who was also wrongfully arrested, detained for months and prosecuted in connection with the Easter attacks. 

The post-Easter Sunday attacks’ arrests, detentions and prosecutions of hundreds of Muslim youth and political leaders, and the continuous surveillance of areas where the Muslim community live, heightened under the Rajapaksa Government, and were intended to humiliate and intimidate Muslims and fan racialist sentiments within a section of the vulnerable Sinhalese majority of the Island. 

With the subsequent revelations of the facts behind the Easter Sunday attacks and of the alleged complicity of the ruling elite in the attacks or in not preventing the attacks well-known by the intelligence apparatus, people largely came to cognise the true nature of the racist crackdown on Muslims, intended to divide the working class on ethnic lines. These revelations, along with the unprecedented economic and financial crisis and corruptions widely discredited the Rajapaksa Government, leading to the mass struggles (also called the “aragalaya” in Sinhalese) of April-August of last year (2022), that toppled the regime in August 2022. 

The eldest son of a poor farmer’s family, Jazeem was 26 years old when arrested, and was employed as a Tamil language teacher in a private international school named the “School of Excellence”, whose dormitory, where Jazeem stayed with about 15 students, was housed temporarily in a building owned by the “Save the Pearls”. Jazeem had by then published a poetry anthology titled Navarasam (Nine Moods). The arrest notice alleged him for “publishing books and teaching students on (Muslim) extremism and racism”. This reference to the book was to Navarasam. 

Jazeem was unlawfully detained under the hand of Rajapaksa for 13 months and remanded for another six months, until he was bailed out by the HC in mid December 2021. During the period of detention, he was kept incommunicado for several intermittent weeks, denied meetings with his parents or lawyers for months, physically and mentally tortured, and forced to confess and admit to allegations which the TID levelled against him in Court reports. The TID kept the poet tied to a table in handcuffs, day and night, for over five months.

Jazeem’s lawyers filed a fundamental rights (FR) case in the Supreme Court (SC) in April 2021, along with authoritative translations of the said poetry book. The Attorney General filed the indictment against him in mid August 2021, under Sections 2(1)(h) [“by words either spoken or intended to be read or by signs or by visible representations or otherwise causes or intends to cause the commission of acts of violence or religious, racial or communal disharmony or feelings of ill-will or hostility between different communities or racial or religious groups”] and 2(2)(ii) [“Any person guilty of an offence specified in paragraph (h) of subsection (1) shall on conviction be liable to imprisonment of either description for a period not less than five years but not exceeding 20 years”] of the PTA. The charge had dropped the TID’s allegations made in respect of the poetry book, as by then it was widely known that the poetry book contained nothing advocating racial violence or Muslim extremism. Jazeem was charged for “indoctrinating” his students with ideas “to arouse feelings of racialist or religious or communal ill-will or hatred between different races or religions”, during a two-month period at the end of 2019. If the offence was proved, Jazeem would have been subjected to imprisonment up to 20 years.

During the trial, the State led evidence of the principal of the School of Excellence and four of Jazeem’s students. One of the students was even declared by the State Counsel to be an adverse witness. Most revealingly, another student testified to the fact that the statement obtained from him was not read out to him before his signature was taken on the statement. The Police, especially the TID and the Criminal Investigations Department (CID), are notorious for obtaining forced confessions and statements from arrestees, which would be used against them in court under the PTA. Thus, the acquittal was made under Section 200(1) of the Code of Criminal Procedure [“When the case for the prosecution is closed, if the Judge wholly discredits the evidence on the part of the prosecution or is of opinion that such evidence fails to establish the commission of the offence charged against the accused in the indictment or of any other offence of which he/she might be convicted on such indictment, he/she shall record a verdict of acquittal; if however the Judge considers that there are grounds for proceeding with the trial he/she shall call upon the accused for his/her defence”], which dispenses with the requirement of the defence opening its case. 

While knowing very well that the case against Jazeem is a frame-up, as a cover-up, the Ministry of Defense enlisted Jazeem in a list of designated persons related to terrorist financing for two consecutive years since 2022, and confiscated his bank accounts, where there was not a penny. In spite of appeals, Jazeem still remains in the blacklist, and so, is unemployed.

Jazeem’s freedom was secured by the masses. The campaign, “Defend Poet Ahnaf” initiated in early 2021 by the Action Committee for the Defence of the Freedom of Art and Expression (ACDAE) and the World Socialist Web Site for the immediate and unconditional release of Jazeem gathered widespread support from academics, journalists, artistes, working-class youth and other sections of the middle class, cutting across ethnic divisions. A number of local and international organisations, including the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, supported the defence campaign and called for the poet’s immediate release. 

The betrayal of the unprecedented mass struggles of 2022 by the trade unions and the pseudo-Left paved the way for the parachuting of United National Party Leader and Opposition Parliamentarian Ranil Wickremesinghe as the President following Rajapaksa’s ousting. Committed to saving the crippled financial system, Wickremesinghe entered into a loan deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and launched severe austerity measures which included import restrictions, price hikes, the drastic lowering of the income tax threshold, privatisation, commercialisation, pension targeted domestic debt restructuring and large subsidy cuts.

To suppress the anti-austerity protests by the working people and students, Wickremesinghe brutally deployed the military and the Police, arresting several hundreds. Social media activity was allegedly highly censored and some activists and journalists were attacked, some were arrested and prosecuted. Far-Right racist elements were given a free hand to contain social unrest. The whole Parliament has been largely discredited among the working class, and a significant section of the middle class. 

This greater unpopularity of the whole ruling establishment and the constant watch by the masses of the development of Jazeem’s prosecution prevented the Government interfering with the witnesses, so that the truth finally prevailed. History is witness to the fact that, in a different political climate, “truth” would have been shown to be proven otherwise.  

Few weeks ago, another victim of the same anti-Muslim campaign, activist Ramzy Razeek was discharged from the case filed by the CID. Arrested one month prior to Jazeem, Razeek was kept in remand for five months. Later, in mid-November, the SC declared that his FR had been breached by the Government and awarded Rs. 1 million compensation. Having learned from the recent mass struggles, the Court has stepped in to save the system, not taking the risk of the people losing its last bit of trust in every organ of parliamentary democracy. 

The ruling class is well aware that it sits on a social powder keg. As with other Right-wing governments of the world, the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) has no option but resorting to military Police measures to face the rising middle-class struggles. Defence of democratic rights is a task of the working class, and that requires the uprooting of the rotten capitalist political system. This needs the independent mobilisation of the working class and all those who defend democratic rights around committees of action that will unite the working class across ethnic lines and organise industrial power to win political power to implement socialist policies.

(The writer is an attorney-at-law who was part of the legal team that represented Jazeem)

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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication.