The latest innovation by the US-trained SL military commander of Jaffna, Major General Udaya Perera, is the introduction of 7-member teams patrolling every interior village in the peninsula. The Sri Lankan State, while waging a propaganda campaign to the outside world that it has reduced military deployment in the North, has seized thousands of acres of public and private lands for the establishment of Sinhala Military Zones in the Jaffna peninsula. Permanent camps, built larger than ever before, have been ceremonially opened recently by the SL presidential sibling and Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa at several places under the propaganda of relocating the camps away from civilian properties, while the SL President Mahinda Rajapaksa who visited Jaffna came with an open lie on the figure of the occupying SL troops present in the North.
SL Commander Major General Udaya Perera, after his role in the genocidal onslaught in 2009, was posted to Malaysia as deputy ambassador after the war. In 2011-2012, he was trained in US Army War College where he was also rewarded with an Alumni Award.
After completing his US Army War College, he was appointed as commander of Ki’linochchi district, where he ‘experimented’ new methods in keeping the people gagged.
Recently, he had introduced so-called ‘Red Army’ patrols in the Ki’linochchi district.
In addition to deploying armed Sinhala soldiers as bicycle patrol units to monitor the civilian activities in the interior villages of Jaffna peninsula, the SL military command in Jaffna is also forcing a section of ex-LTTE cadres, who have been forcibly ‘recruited’ to the so-called Civil Security Department (CSD) for exploitation by the occupying SL military, to serve as informants to the new patrol units.
Each unit consists of 7 armed soldiers, who patrol their target villages in bicycles several times a day.
The Sinhala soldiers of the new units are trained in surveillance and intelligence operations, informed sources said.
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