UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has reaffirmed his determination to
appoint a panel of experts to advise him on Sri Lanka’s adherence to
its international obligations pertaining to human rights. This has
evoked a predictably negative response from the Sri Lankan government
and, indeed, the more nationalist sections of civil society, whose
position was that the elimination of the LTTE was necessary even at
high cost for the restoration of normalcy in the country. The
government’s consistent position on this issue has been that whatever
happened during the period of the war with the LTTE, and subsequently,
is an internal matter. The government has also been very critical of
those international and local organizations that have called for
investigations into the allegations of human rights violations, with
the local ones feeling more under threat than their international
counterparts.
The biggest concern for the government in regard to the calls for such
investigations is the charge of war crimes that allegedly took place
in the last phase of the war. Such a charge can conceivably target
the highest political authorities who had responsibility over the
military. The President of Sudan has suffered this fate. He has been
indicted for alleged war crimes in that country’s civil war. As a
result President Bashir has had to limit his movements abroad for fear
he might be arrested in a country that decides to cooperate with the
International Criminal Court and its enforcement mechanisms. The
reach of international law has become so unpredictable that high level
Israeli government officials now find themselves compelled to restrict
their international movements.
The danger for the Sri Lankan government leadership is that unless the
issue of human rights violations and possible war crimes is
effectively resolved it will continue to haunt them. International
human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human
Rights Watch have become strong critics of the government’s human
rights record. They have been in existence for several decades and
are likely to continue to be in existence for several more decades to
come. They have a mandate to investigate and prevent human rights
violations worldwide. Once they believe that they have a case they
are not likely to drop it, as it is part of their mandate and
rationale for existence.
The government also faces another problem from beyond its borders that
is unlikely to go away on its own. This is the more than one million
strong Tamil diaspora, which is a very well organized and powerful
lobby group. During the early years of the war, in the 1980s and
1990s, they were a formidable lobbying group for the LTTE and for its
cause of a separate Tamil state. This changed with the September 11
terror attack in 2001 in the United States, which turned the
international community against those who employed terrorist means to
achieve their political ends. However, the elimination of the LTTE
and the end of terrorism in Sri Lanka can once again strengthen the
hand of the Tamil diaspora to lobby against Sri Lanka in the countries
in which they are now living.
MOUNTING PRESSURE
The existence of international human rights organizations and the
Tamil diaspora means that the pressure on the Sri Lankan government
with regard to the human rights situation will not go away. The
government may choose to ignore, denounce or resist this pressure, but
the pressure will remain. The indications now are that the pressure
will increase rather than decrease. The manner in which the UN
appears to be standing its ground with regard to establishing an
expert panel on Sri Lanka is an indication of this growing pressure.
This will also embolden activists amongst the Tamil diaspora to
increase their own lobbying efforts which give them a purpose that is
larger than merely earning a mundane living abroad.
In this context, the swift mobilization of the Non Aligned Movement to
oppose the UN decision to appoint an expert panel would have come as a
welcome gesture of solidarity to the Sri Lankan government. In a
letter to Mr Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary of the Non Aligned Movement
which represents more than seventy countries said that the appointment
of a panel of experts to monitor a member state was in contravention
of the mandate of the UN. The strongly worded content of this letter
was reminiscent of the equally strong statements that made last year
in Geneva at the meeting of the UN’s Human Rights Council. The
attempt by a section of that Council to pass a resolution critical of
Sri Lanka and calling for an investigative mechanism to be set up was
defeated by the majority of members.
The swift mobilization of the Non Aligned Movement, and last year of
the majority of countries in the UN’s Human Rights Council, is a
testimony to the diplomatic capacities of the Sri Lankan government.
Many in the Non Aligned Movement would remember Sri Lanka’s successful
hosting of the Non Aligned Conference in 1975, which took place in the
newly constructed Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall
which was a gift from China. Even today these countries see a need to
keep together to resist international initiatives against some of
their members that could be used to set a precedent and be used
against them also in the future.
One of the strongest statements made after Sri Lanka’s victory at the
UN’s Human Rights Council last year was the one made by the Indian
representative. His statement was extremely critical of the UN’s High
Commissioner for Human Rights, Navaneethan Pillay’s actions, which he
described as overstepping the UN’s mandate by probing into the affairs
of a member state. Much the same sentiment can be seen in the
statement of the Non Aligned Movement in opposing the UN Secretary
General’s special measures to assess the human rights situation in Sri
Lanka.
INDIAN ASSISTANCE
One of the reasons for Indian and other third world activism to keep
the UN and other international bodies from intervening in Sri Lanka
against the government’s wishes is not difficult to see. These
countries have their own concerns that a course of interventionist
action taken against Sri Lanka could also set a precedent against them
in the near or distant future. For instance, Indian has for many
years been resisting international efforts to mediate or engage in
fact finding missions in Kashmir, where a high level of human rights
violations have been reported. Other states of the Non Aligned
Movement would also be having similar concerns, as they battle ethnic
movements for autonomy and secession and have to endure a high level
of human rights violations in doing so.
But with the international pressures for intervention mounting on Sri
Lanka, it would be judicious if the government were to adopt a
problem-solving approach that would take the concerns of the
international community into account while safeguarding Sri Lanka’s
own sovereignty and national interests. Accordingly, the Sri Lankan
government can consider putting in place a credible investigation
mechanism of its own to look into what happened in the past. This
could be a fact finding commission accompanied by a truth and
reconciliation process. It may be possible to reveal the truth of
what happened, and the context in which those situations arose, where
disclosure and not punishment is the goal. Such a process can
distinguish between acts that primarily had a military motivation
behind them, as against those in which a criminal motivation
predominated.
The second component of the problem-solving approach would be to
implement a political solution to the ethnic conflict. Even now the
basic framework for such a framework exists in the form of the 13th
Amendment to the Constitution, which is an outcome of the Indo-Lanka
Peace Accord of 1987. The Provincial Councils that have been
established in term of that law are now well accepted by the general
population who are now quite familiar with the Provincial Councils.
Strengthening the Provincial Council system so that they will serve
the people of the south and west, in addition to the north and east,
could become the foundation of a political solution to the ethnic
conflict. It could be used to address the unmet needs of the
Tamil-speaking minorities of the north and east, without unduly
upsetting the Sinhalese ethnic majority that the hand of Tamil
separation is being strengthened.
I was in Calcutta last week to attend an international conference on
the rights of minorities where Justice Rajinder Sachar who was the
chairperson of the high powered committee appointed by the Prime
Minister in 2005 to investigate into the situation of Muslim and other
minorities delivered the concluding lecture. In discussion he
suggested to me that India could reconcile the Tamil diaspora to
working alongside the Sri Lankan government and civil society if
justice was done to the Tamils in Sri Lanka. There are multiple
advantages of working closely with India to fashion a solution to the
ethnic conflict, and harmonizing with the Tamil diaspora is only one
of them. Another important advantage would be to draw on India’s
extensive knowledge on schemes of political autonomy and
non-territorial autonomy which is has pioneered, and which can be
considered as indigenous to Asia. President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s much
stated goal of an indigenous political solution may not be too far off
if pursued with the requisite zeal.