In the months following the defeat of the Japanese in the Philippines, the US Army’s Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) was busy finding collaborators, Japanese agents and those sorts of people. Getting arrested by the CIC was the best thing that could happen to a collaborator or informer because at all events, the CIC guys wouldn’t kill you. But as you can well imagine, a lot of the people who had worked as informers for the Japanese, who had worn the bag with the eyeholes over their head while they pointed out guerillas who were savagely killed and tortured by the Imperial Japanese forces were hunted down ruthlessly by those Filipino underground men with scores to settle. I suspect much the same thing happened in Europe, both judicially and extra-judicially. The judicial story is well known. High ranking Nazis were hanged, as were the Japanese. Yamashita was hanged in Los Banos, Laguna. It turned out that Yamashita wasn’t really responsible for the Battle of Manila. That was a Japanese Navy operation. But MacArthur had him hanged anyway, some say because someone had to go to gallows for Bataan and the Death March, even if Homma was responsible. Yamashita was available and so to hangman he went.

So the balance of probability is that the camps are being combed by the Sri Lankan equivalent of the CIC, though probably less restrained. There will be precious little in the way of “human rights” for the ex-Tigers trying to pass themselves off, I am afraid. Nor will there be any shortage of innocents unjustly accused. In the immediate aftermath of a war, passions run high. Killing, so recently licit, has not yet become fully illicit again. That will take a while. It will be drumhead justice, with neither a drum nor much formal justice anywhere in evidence.