US Navy trains with Sri Lankan forces at Trincomalee, site of naval torture facility

The United States and Sri Lanka have concluded their sixth Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training exercise, hosted by the Sri Lanka Navy at Trincomalee, the site of a naval facility documented as a torture centre and where eleven abducted young men, most of them Tamil, were held before they disappeared.

The exercise ran from 27 to 31 July across Colombo, Trincomalee and the Indian Ocean, and involved the US Navy, the US Coast Guard, the Sri Lanka Navy and the Sri Lanka Air Force. American assets included a P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft, alongside personnel from Destroyer Squadron 7, Task Forces 72, 73 and 76, the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific and a Coast Guard maritime engagement team.

Training covered maritime domain awareness, tactical medicine, explosive ordnance disposal and visit, board, search and seizure operations, with the exercise concluding in an awards ceremony at which Commodore Dhanesh Pathberiya, Flag Officer Commanding the Naval Fleet, received an award from the US defence attaché, Lieutenant Colonel Matthew House.

"In a critical region like the Indian Ocean, our partnerships that we foster through exercises like CARAT are paramount to upholding stability," said Captain John Baggett, commander of Destroyer Squadron 7.

House said the exercise reflected "the United States enduring commitment to our security partnership with Sri Lanka", pointing to the joint response to Cyclone Ditwah last year as evidence of what the relationship enables.

The base at the centre of the exercise

Neither governments account of the week made reference to what the Trincomalee naval base is known for among Tamils. The International Truth and Justice Project has documented a site within the heavily fortified base, known as "Gun Site", where it estimates between 75 and 100 people were unlawfully detained in inhumane conditions and subjected to systematic torture and sexual violence. The facility was operated by naval intelligence, and witnesses described the white vans used in abductions entering and leaving under naval intelligence control without scrutiny. Its existence, reported by the ITJP in 2015 on the basis of survivor accounts and GPS coordinates, was subsequently verified by the UN Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances.

Trincomalee is also central to the "Navy 11" case, in which eleven young men, most of them Tamil, were abducted in and around Colombo between August 2008 and February 2009, held for ransom at the Colombo and Trincomalee naval bases, and never seen again. They have been named as Kasthuriarachchi John, Thyagarajah Jegan, Rajiv Naganathan, Soosaipillai Amalan, Soosaipillai Roshan, Kasthuriarachchi Anton, Prageeth Vishvanathan, Thilakeshwaran Ramalingam, Mohamed Dilan, Mohamed Saajid and Ali Anwar. Two of the eleven were father and son pairs.

The ITJPs 2019 report, The Sri Lankan Navy: A Collective Blind Eye, set out a wider pattern of abduction, torture and enforced disappearance by the force. No senior officer has been convicted. Wasantha Karannagoda, Navy Commander from 2005 to 2009 and named as the fourteenth suspect in the Navy 11 case, saw charges against him dropped by the Attorney General in 2021, a decision condemned by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and Amnesty International, before being appointed a provincial governor.

Washingtons own sanctions

The contradiction runs directly through American policy. The United States sanctioned the naval intelligence officer Chandana Hettiarachchi, the main suspect in the Navy 11 case, in 2021, and imposed visa bans on Karannagoda and his wife in 2023, with Canada and the United Kingdom following with their own measures. Washington has, in other words, formally penalised senior figures from the same service with which its navy now trains, at the same base where the abuses took place.

The exercise also showcased the material dimension of that partnership. The Coast Guard team trained aboard SLNS Gajabahu, formerly the US Coast Guard Cutter Douglas Munro, while navigation drills were conducted on SLNS Vijayabahu and SLNS Samudura, both also former American cutters transferred to Sri Lanka, using a US-provided rigid-hull inflatable boat. The US embassy described this as demonstrating how American security assistance builds Sri Lankas long-term maritime capabilities.

That assistance flows to a military that has never been held accountable for the Mullivaikkal genocide, in which tens of thousands of Tamils were killed in 2009, and which continues to occupy vast tracts of Tamil land in the North-East. Successive American administrations have called for accountability in Geneva while expanding defence cooperation with Colombo.