Louise Arbour, a political football in the Sri Lankan arena

By: Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha

(October, 13, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The Sri Lankan government recently invited the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit Sri Lanka. The poor lady is now here, and has found herself the focus of a series of articles in which she is presented as the potential saviour of the Sri Lankan people. Her visit is presented for instance as a test for the political leadership of the country. No matter that simultaneously this claimant declares that the ‘political intellect of the country has sunk to its lowest depths…the political intellect remains in a state of stupor.’

What is this stupor? Certainly those who view the lady as a modern day St George, battling a dragon, are very clear about what the battle is about. They are sure that she will recommend a UN monitoring mission, and all their arguments are intended to ensure that that mission is established.

Whether or not Louise Arbour came here with a determination to recommend such a mission, as they have all assumed, is not relevant. Though some foot soldiers in the human rights army were already gearing up their applications for positions in that mission, the Sri Lankan government which invited her has to assume that she is adult enough to reflect on a situation she came here to observe, and to decide what recommendations may best serve the purpose she is dedicated to achieving.

What is more interesting is the motivation of those who have predetermined that such a mission is essential, and who are counting on her to promote their agenda. Foremost amongst these it would seem is the UNP, as represented by Mr Lakshman Kiriella, who not only keeps requesting such a mission but even claims that nothing can stop it if the UN recommends it. He goes so far as to claim that there would be an economic embargo from the European Union if the government tried to stop it. Sadly he has now been joined by Mr Mangala Samaraweera, who has reiterated the constant refrain of his erstwhile critics in claiming that Sri Lankan government is ‘being isolated by world’.

Then we have Mr Basil Fernando, a doughty activist in the past who had to flee the country when the UNP death squads were in their element, who compares Sri Lanka with the Nepal of 2005 and the Cambodia of 1989. The former accepted a High Commissioner’s office to ‘monitor human rights in order to deal with the conflict that existed between the authoritarian regime of the king and the Maoist rebels’. In Cambodia it was not a human rights office, it was a Transitional Authority that had in effect to run the country because of the ‘crisis as four factions were engaged in an armed struggle which led to the collapse of Cambodian society.’

But, as Aristotle put it, recalled in time by one of the Human Rights Watch activists in Geneva, the roots of injustice lie in treating like things in unlike ways and unlike things in the same way. This had clearly not occurred to the Portuguese ambassador to the UN in New York, when, talking on behalf of the United Nations, he clustered together Sri Lanka and the Sudan and Somalia and Iraq and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Portuguese ambassador in Geneva, who had engaged with the Sri Lankan Mission there along with his colleagues, was much more circumspect and laid aside the resolution he had originally indicated he had been instructed to put forward.

There is reason to suppose that he did this because of the constructive engagement pursued by the model Sri Lanka Mission in Geneva. That indeed is the policy of the government, to discuss issues openly, weigh up advice, and respond constructively. After all, we have a democratic government, elected twice as it were, in elections that have been universally accepted as fair, except for the plaintive cry of the UNP that they were deprived of the mass vote they were anticipating. Interestingly, the EU monitors for the 2004 election gave it a clear bill of health except in the North and East, which produced the 22 TNA MPs the UNP was counting on to give it a majority.

Despite such successful and we trust productive engagements, which the government continues to pursue, not only in Geneva, not only with Ms Arbour, but also with the world at large – and in particular our Asian friends who seem in Mr Samaraweera’s view no longer to constitute the world – the Human Rights army believes that there is only one way to engage, one way for Ms Arbour to react to the Sri Lankan situation, one way for the Sri Lankan government to respond. The pluralism that should be the pride of Sri Lanka socially is to be avoided in moral and intellectual activity, whether Ms Arbour’s or that of the rest of us.

What are the weapons they use to pursue their agenda? Sadly, chief amongst them is falsehood, persistent falsehood, on the Goebbellian grounds that if you lie loudly and often enough, people will believe you. So we were assured a couple of months back that there would be a EU resolution against Sri Lanka. When that did not transpire, we were told that Sri Lanka narrowly escaped censure. We were also told that Sri Lanka was saved by ‘banana republics and potty regimes’, which presumably characterizes all the countries in Asia and Africa and the Americas and the whole Non-Aligned Movement who pledged their support for Sri Lanka. Jehan Perera, normally more moderate than most of his peers, argued that the UN Human Rights Council was so myopic that it would not discuss the situation in Myanmar, his article appearing on the very day I believe that a debate on Myanmar did take place.

People of course believe what they want to believe. However it is only in Sri Lanka that such beliefs appear as responsible journalism, combined with an awesome respect for things Western, and a naïve belief that all Westerners are deeply interested in the Sri Lankan situation. Thus there was a categorical claim that the European Union Parliament was to debate the human rights situation in Sri Lanka, when in fact all that happened was that one parliamentarian set up a discussion with Human Rights Watch which attracted just one other parliamentarian. And even Basil Fernando showed his rather sad devotion to the mother country when, in citing a ridiculous article that appeared in Sri Lanka, he claimed falsely that it was from the ‘London Daily Mirror’.

Then there is emotional language. None of these characters obviously has read Orwell, and his strictures on clichés and extravagant adjectives. Basil Fernando cannot conceive of abuses, they have to be gross, a crisis must be acute, a situation must be abysmal, helplessness is utter. The adjective political is applied to lunacy, realism, intellect and disasters, plus another half dozen or so words. Dr Saravanamuttu has now decided to dwell on words such as apparatchiks and fellow travelers, and accuse the targets of his criticism of abuse and invective, whilst relishing his own use of words such as silly, myopic, callous, antediluvian, obsolete and obsession.

Does all this matter? It would not, in the ordinary world, but Sri Lanka is not ordinary. In this country relentless propaganda has contributed to change of government that nullified the wishes of the electorate. Mrs Bandaranaike was the victim of this in 1964, Mrs Kumaratunga in 2001, though she now seems to have forgotten this.
More seriously, it is not only the opposition that wants such change, or the few foreigners who, as an American recently put it, have an unhealthy nostalgia for the Wickremesinghe regime. The most concerted determination to upset the government comes from the LTTE, which has been anxiously plugging the Human Rights angle when it found that others did not work.

The tragedy is that it has so easily found followers for this. Most of them may be sincere, but they have then to be seen as at best illogical. There is for instance the influential European Union official, who was at the forefront of threats about economic sanctions, who seemed to oppose elections in the East since he had been advised that they would be controversial. His principle reason seemed to be that no remedies had been found for the strictures of the European Union monitors on the last parliamentary election.

He does not seem to have revealed the source of his advice. Not entirely coincidentally, the most vociferous opposition to elections in the East has come from the TNA, who were the chief beneficiaries of the flaws noticed by the European Union monitors. But that factor would escape the notice of a doubtless idealistic European who has no time to go into details.

The link between our Human Rights army and the LTTE became clear when Tamilnet on September 30th reported on a meeting at which the speakers included Ms. Sunila Abeysekera, Executive Director, INFORM, Ms.Karen Parker, Mr. David Rampton, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Dr. Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, Executive Director, Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA), Rev. Fr. Alphonsus Bernard, Director, CEPAHRC, Jaffna, Fr.Jeyakumar (HUDEC, CARITAS Jaffna) and Mr. Kasinather Sivapalan, Deputy President, Northeast Secretariat on Human Rights (NESOHR) and local nominee to SLMM Trincomalee. Karen Parker, it should be noted, is the American lady who put up a spirited defence of recruiting children over 15 as fighters in her intervention at the UN Human Rights Council.

Now there is nothing wrong in engaging in discussion and debate with the LTTE. The Sri Lankan official delegation to the Council also had this privilege, as regards Mr Sivapalan, who it seems is now resident in Ireland, and Fr Bernard, who also has been abroad for some time. The problem with those Sri Lankans who are usually in Sri Lanka is that they would not engage in the debate to which we had invited them, nor did they invite us to their discussion, which was publicized after we had all left Geneva. The representatives of the UN and Western missions who came to the debate we had set up would doubtless have welcomed listening to an exchange of views, but instead of that our own home grown activists and the LTTE representatives now living abroad had their own cosy little meeting at which they seem to have agreed with each other, like Lear’s Pelican Chorus.

On the strength of such meetings, these Catos, who in their little Senates give themselves their own laws, have decided that ‘The fact of grave human rights crisis has been established.’ So they can assert that Ms Arbour’s ‘visit is not a fact finding mission’. I have no idea whether Ms Arbour shares this view. But one would hope that she is experienced enough to ensure that her office is not used as a tool for political agendas that have no place – particularly when shared by terrorists – in the constant struggle to promote human rights worldwide.

The write is a Secretary General, Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process