Fantasies on a Political Football

By: Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha

(October, 19, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) When I wrote last week about the manner in which Louise Arbour was being made use of, I little thought that, when she failed to come up to scratch, she would soon enough be kicked to touch, to be replaced on the field by a series of hot air balloons. But today, Thursday October 18th, we had another barrage of falsehoods and inconsequentialities, based loosely on her visit, that made it clear that what she had in fact said was of little interest to the Human Rights industry.

The most inflated of the balloons were our old friends, Sunila Abeysekera, Nimalka Fernando, Rohan Edrisinha and Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, now elevated into members of the Sri Lankan Human Rights Commission. One electronic news service claims that they have resigned from the Commission in high dudgeon, thus proving Louise Arbour’s point that the Commission was ineffective.

The real story is very different. More than a year ago they accepted appointment to a committee set up by the Ministry of Disaster Management and Human Rights to recommend reforms. They rarely attended meetings of the Committee, according to the attendance records of the Ministry. When one of them did the usual feather dance in Geneva about the wicked Sri Lankan government, a Director at the Peace Secretariat pointed out that she could have made these points at the committee.

This evidently precipitated the resignation of all four, because of the three reasons given in various news items, the criticism figured in two. One was that SCOPP had criticized them, another was that the government was trying to muzzle them by putting them on the committee. The third was that the committees were not serious. If it took them, the cutting edge as it were of the HR industry, more than a year to recognize this, and then resign after attention was drawn to their membership, which they seemed to have long forgotten given their poor attendance, it is not surprising that progress on reforms is so slow.

The fact that the resignations coincided with Louise Arbour’s report, that they have obtained wide publicity internationally, that they are now claimed to be resignations from the Human Rights Commission itself, may all be entirely coincidental. But the whole business would have seemed very funny, were Human Rights not a serious business, warranting attendance and attention at any institution one agreed to serve in, however small, that sought to address issues.

So much for the highest floating balloon. Meanwhile a host of journalists engage in detailed critiques that are not especially logical. One takes off from Louise Arbour reference to reports about the TMVP and other armed groups to go into paroxysms about the Karuna faction, without registering that her criticism was muted compared with her categorical condemnation of the LTTE. Interestingly, senior UN officials, such as Ms Arbour and Mr Alston and Ms Coomaraswamy and the Secretary General in extrapolating from the Allan Rock Report, do not mince their words about the LTTE, in marked contrast to their junior colleagues resident in Sri Lanka who have yet to issue public condemnations of the LTTE’s current campaign of forced recruitment and its refusal to commit to demobilizing all child soldiers.

Given that Ms Arbour complained that she was not allowed to go to Kilinochchi, where she would have liked to convey direct to the LTTE her deep concern about their violations of human rights, the fact that – despite the government, and indeed the President himself, urging her to go East – she said that she had no time to do that indicates that she could not have thought the complaints in that regard so serious.

Or is it that the journalist believed yesterday’s reports that the government had not allowed Louise Arbour to visit the East? Last week saw an American blog that passes for high powered and intelligent claiming that the fact that the government had not allowed her to go to Kilinochchi proved it had something to hide. LTTE websites continue to claim that she was not allowed to go to Kilinochchi because the government feared what they would reveal about government violations. All this hot air is based on the assumption that no one will actually bother to read Louise Arbour’s report, which explains why she wanted to go to Kilinochchi and what she would have done there, and says nothing of the sort about the East which the government regretted very much she declined to visit.

Then we have another long article explaining not very precisely why Sri Lanka should take a leaf from the Nepalese book and invite a UN Monitoring Mission. The article itself goes into detail about the wonderful work the Mission is doing there in monitoring the arms surrendered by the Maoists, inspecting facilities where they have been stocked and all that. The fact that in Sri Lanka there was no attempt to ensure that the LTTE did surrender its arms – except way back in 1987 when the Indians failed signally in the attempt – seems to have been forgotten.

Other differences have also slipped the attention of the many writers who go on and on about Nepal. The current Nepalese government was not part of the conflict, indeed it was in virtual alliance with the Maoists to bring down the autocratic rule of the King – and the army the rebels were fighting was seen as the instrument of the King, not of the government that took over when he finally yielded. The difference between that situation, and the one in Sri Lanka which has a democratically elected government, has passed all these critics by.

Instead, as though it were gospel, they cite the pronouncement of Ian Martin, who worries that the Sri Lankan government is much less complaisant than the Nepalese one. They have evidently forgotten that Ian Martin, idealist as he is, had wanted to look at LTTE regulations to see how they conformed with international law, just as though they were those of a sovereign state. The most recent UN pronouncement in this regard, that of Radhika Coomaraswamy, makes it clear that the LTTE is expected to conform to Sri Lankan national law.

But doubtless the Human Rights industry will continue to accept inflated claims for LTTE edicts. After all, though in all fairness our fantastic four did not themselves blow themselves up to be members of the National Human Rights Commission, the exaltation of their resignation from a body they scarcely bothered to attend has been fuelled by their own portentous pronouncements. The idea that the government would want to muzzle them is as silly as the supposition that they could be muzzled. Hot air will always rise, and no one should grudge it the most exalted of heights, even if mingled there with less savoury smells.

The writer is a Secretary General, Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process in Government of Sri Lanka.