Even as we meet today, the LTTE is conscripting unwilling persons hidden by their families in covered trenches and jungles and forcing them to the frontlines in the Vanni where the Government is bent on advancing. They form the bulk of current casualties, leaving their wives suddenly widowed and their families in shoddy, ill-equipped refugee camps. The people have lost everything.(Oct-02-2007)
(October, 03, Colombo,Sri Lanka Guardian) Ladies and Gentlemen, it is my privilege to thank the Martin Ennals Award Foundation for choosing the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) among the laureates for 2007. I do so also on behalf of my colleague K. Sritharan. We remember our inspiration Dr. Rajani Thiranagama, whose life of promise, with those of two students Manoharan and Chelvi, was cut short by the LTTE. Many staff and students of the University of Jaffna enthusiastically supported the UTHR(J) in the early years and were then driven to silence by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). There were many who supported us from all walks of life, and often at great risk, whose names we cannot mention.
We dedicate this award to the hundreds of democratically minded youth, women and men, who took part in various forms of struggle whether non-violent or violent, to fight for dignity and justice for the Tamil community. They paid the ultimate price for questioning not only the politics of Sinhalese chauvinism and narrow Tamil nationalism but also the militarism and totalitarianism inherent in the workings of the various actors.
When we commenced our work at the University of Jaffna in 1987, we had no illusions about the Sri Lankan State and its capacity for ideologically directed violence against the minorities, especially the Tamils. The two bouts of communal violence targeting the Tamils in 1977 and 1983 were major catalysts in giving birth to the Tamil militant movements. The LTTE which had a totalitarian agenda virtually eliminated the other militant groups in 1986 through heart-rending scenes of fratricide. It brought about paralysing disillusionment within the Tamil community, which was beginning to have hopes in a negotiated settlement.
Thus from the start while giving violations by the State and its Sinhalese ideological compulsions their due, we suppressed nothing. We found it no less important to address internal violence within the Tamil community arising from the LTTE's ideological character. This LTTE’s fascist ideology also made it virtually impossible for it to live with any political settlement outside a separate state of Eelam, in the name of which it had killed as traitors those who stood for a federated Lanka. The LTTE perfected the suicidal cult in a way that mainstream political and social analysis finds difficult to explain. Rather than see it as a crime forced on the people and a tragedy for the community, it becomes easy to dismiss it as some oriental religious trait. Faced with the State’s ruthlessness, the LTTE mobilised the hysteria of nationalism, and blinded people from seeing others’ points of view and paralysed their capacity for independent action.
We began our work in 1987 when the Indian Army took control of Jaffna. Apart from the callousness of an army, we saw that many instances of civilian tragedy were deliberately engineered by the LTTE for propaganda. We gave a frank account of how both sides had acted in our book, The Broken Palmyra and the first two reports of the UTHR(J). Our early work discussed the thwarting the Indo Sri Lanka Agreement, by both the LTTE and the Government and how the Indian Peace keeping Force were pushed to strong military action by the LTTE’s calculated provocations resulting in many violations by the IPKF. In addition to challenging the LTTE’s terror against civilians, we also took on its use of children in lethal tasks such as assassination and throwing grenades at army patrols. By our activity in the University we tried to give life to an institution which was once a hub of political debate and student activism in the early 1980s and had become paralysed by the terror unleashed by the LTTE. The silence and helplessness of the University is an even greater tragedy given the spate of disappearances and targeted killings of youth in Jaffna today.
In 1988, students, staff, both academic and non academic, began coming together to face the antagonism of the IPKF, associated groups and the LTTE, to create space within the University to represent the larger interests of the people when all other structures, political and social, were paralysed. While it was dangerous to document abuses by the LTTE, the LTTE found it of some advantage to tolerate our work during that time due to our exposure of IPKF violations. In particular instances we commended IPKF officers, as Sri Lankan officers in later years, for their display of humanity and moderation. The LTTE signalled total repression of the Tamil community when IPKF’s withdrawal was announced. The LTTE was in consequence being handed over the Tamil areas in prearrangement with the Government.
In the LTTE`s absolutism, internal criticism is viewed as treachery, and on September 21st ,1989, the day after IPKF announced its withdrawal, it assassinated its most vibrant critic Dr. Rajani Thiranagama as a warning to rest of us. Even after her assassination, we tried to continue our work in Jaffna and invited many national and international human rights and civil society leaders to Jaffna for the 60th day memorial of Dr. Rajani Thiranagama’s assassination. It is our privilege to mention here that Mr. Martin Ennals was one of the prominent persons who visited Jaffna with many international and national figures to show solidarity with our work on November 21st 1989.
Then, in June 1990 the next bout of war began. This was when the LTTE ended the Government’s first attempt at appeasement, which allowed the LTTE to imprison thousands of Tamil dissidents in several underground prisons in the North. Many were tortured and killed. The honeymoon with the government had also served the purpose of getting the IPKF out. Given the bitterness of the new round of war, it fell to us to record the LTTE`s cynicism in deliberately inviting reprisals against civilians, the terrible reprisals by the government forces and the LTTE`s ideologically directed violence against the Muslims including the ethnic cleansing of the entire Northern Muslim population and the mosque massacres in the East. In order to carry on with our work, we were forced escape from Jaffna after the war started in 1990 and to lead a semi-underground life in the South.
With a change of government in 1994, there was another opportunity for a negotiated settlement. Instead the LTTE chose war. Another change of government resulted in another round of talks brokered by Norway in 2002. Although the Government and the LTTE committed themselves to a federal settlement, the LTTE proceeded with the conscription of children. Simmering conflict, largely engineered by LTTE provocations, made it clear to many people on the ground that it was using peace talks as a respite to prepare for a more severe round of war. The Government too responded, not by outflanking the LTTE politically by reforming the State to be more democratic and accountable and seeking a political settlement which would satisfy Tamil democratic aspirations, but simply bought time by covering up the LTTE’s violations and conscription of children. These became the major focus of our reports at this time.
The LTTE`s simple programme is to undermine any healthy development in the Sinhalese south for a political settlement, and by some foul act of violence to provoke the State’s inherent harshness towards the Tamils. It was in character for the LTTE to abet the election of a president with nationalist leanings and then deliberately provoke war. It saw this as the most promising way to a separate state.
We thus have the picture that while the LTTE continued immovable at its habitual worst, the State too showed no serious intention of moving away from the debilitating status quo that had kept this nation of promise a stunted object of derision for five decades. Whenever we saw a humane and enlightened approach by some military officers, we documented these so that these exemplars would shine a few lights in unmitigated darkness and a catalyst for reform and re-evaluation. Although we are aware of the institutional nature of the State, during the two decades of war, when people were many times left at the mercy of military officers by deliberate actions by the LTTE inviting the Army to massacre for the benefit of its propaganda, we saw these exceptions in the worst of times as important.
After more than three decades of conflict, the country still continues to bleed. Democratic institutions are fracturing beyond a point of repair, while the leaders are blinded by the arrogance of power. Their short term political interest helps the LTTE to thrust and hold the Tamil civilians in a regime of war claiming with some logic that there is no alternative.
Ours is another tragic instance where identity politics has taken a devastating toll on communities in a multi ethnic and multi religious country through a combination of lack of visionary leadership and political opportunism tied to an exclusivist majoritarian agenda. We have also seen that in the name of liberation and right to self determination, groups with a narrow nationalist agenda have opportunity to impose on them a regime of unlimited destruction where the people stand to lose everything.
Monitoring human rights and making oppressors accountable are in reality very difficult and Humanitarian Law has limited impact in arresting the situation once the war dynamic is in place. Now we are seeing how in the name of “war on terror”, the human rights paradigm developed after the pervasive devastation of the Second World War is called into question. The limitations of human rights mechanisms, including those within the UN, are evident today and are subject to manipulation and appropriation by the larger powers. In several instances, those struggling for democracy and justice in the Third World, are caught between the machinations of global powers and the reactionary politics of fundamentalism and narrow nationalism. The local practitioners of the latter find a novel pretext for their behaviour towards their own citizens in what big powers do half way round the globe.
Once emotions are heightened, individuals lucky enough to flee their war-torn homes often lost all feeling for those they left behind, romanticised their plight, glorified the LTTE and covered up its crimes even against their own fellows. Other foreigners even found career opportunities writing anthropological articles and one-sided human rights narratives in the name of academic research and human rights campaigns. Their critiques of the State are valid but they besmirched rather than enhanced the potential for peace in our country and co-existence among communities. They completely threw a veil over the suffering of the people from internal terror. In this environment, our work, although called suicidal, was essential to keeping alive the voices of sanity and preserving dissent against heavy odds.
In this context our work of documenting human rights abuses by state and non state actors in a situation of armed conflict, with the aim of arresting dehumanising trends and advancing accountability by giving a place to the people’s narratives, we hope, would also make a small contribution towards the major re-evaluation needed to address the limitations of international human rights mechanisms.
The retreat of Third World States and their elites into sovereignty or cultural relativism cannot address the concerns of ordinary people. Tolerance and openness are becoming increasingly important as we face these challenges. If the political changes and processes cannot accommodate and manage these contradictions, these states will generate political and institutional crises such as we have in Sri Lanka.
The minorities in Sri Lanka need a political settlement to emerge out the two decades war and violence. Our reports have continued to bring out political analyses, documented institutional degradation, and even challenged our colleagues in civil society. In documenting human rights abuses, we challenged both Sinhalese chauvinism and narrow Tamil nationalism as they blinded people from seeing crimes committed in their name, whether purportedly “in defence of a state’s sovereignty” or “liberation from majority oppression”. We continue to challenge the myth propagated by the LTTE that they are the sole representatives of the Tamil people and the claim by the Sinhalese extremists that all Tamils are LTTE supporters bent on division of the country. We appealed to the humanity in all communities. While our work may have had little impact on the overall process, we are confident that it has set a qualitatively different reference point for those who want to see a united Sri Lanka which respects the rights of every community and veers decisively from its past.
Our political foundations, owe in part to solidarity with struggles of peoples against oppressive regimes. Rajani was active in working with several groups around the world during her doctoral studies in Britain in the early 1980s. Palestine, South Africa, Eritrea and Nicaragua drew much of our attention at that time. An important lesson to be drawn is that while the struggles of people for dignity are always legitimate, the failure of the rest of the world to act in time, frequently result in undesirable leaders with narrow-nationalistic, anti-democratic ideologies hijacking the legitimate struggles of peoples with tragic results. Today, we express our solidarity with the struggle for democracy in Burma.
In Sri Lanka now, there is only a foundering political process to reform the state, so as to ensure the democratic rights of its peoples and particularly its minorities. The unitary state in Sri Lanka over the last three and a half decades has symbolised repression of minorities including state inspired violence. Equally important today is the right for people in parts of the North-East under government control to return to their homes and live without fear of being picked out by state affiliated killer squads. These squads are part of government policy. Law enforcement is completely disingenuous. Police investigation is directed more towards the disappearance or intimidation of witnesses rather than the prosecution of killers. The state forces pummel areas of intended advance with MBRL fire and aerially dropped bombs, destroy whole villages and find that they cannot advance.
Even as we meet today, the LTTE is conscripting unwilling persons hidden by their families in covered trenches and jungles and forcing them to the frontlines in the Vanni where the Government is bent on advancing. They form the bulk of current casualties, leaving their wives suddenly widowed and their families in shoddy, ill-equipped refugee camps. The people have lost everything.
This is a war against so-called terror, with merely a token acknowledgement of the need for a political settlement to buy time and satisfy the world. It is a war using excessive munitions against a weakened LTTE, where the LTTE has become a pretext for crushing the Tamil people in the interests of a Sinhalese hegemonic state.
When a state has devoted increasing portions of its income to fight a minority based insurgency for over 20 years, it must ask itself some salient questions, whether, for one, democracy simply means the unconditional will of an ethnic majority? Whether the LTTE transforms or vanishes, the political grievances of minorities need to be addressed so that human rights would be sustainable. In Sri Lanka, democracy and human rights are closely intertwined and could rest on a good foundation only if there is progress towards a political settlement and reform of the state.
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