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by Rohini Hensman
Who is Responsible?
(April 30, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) There can be little doubt that the bus bomb which killed 26 and injured many more at Piliyandala last Friday, as well as the earlier suicide attack at Weliweriya, were the work of the LTTE. Its leaders keep reminding us that their strategy of seeking a military solution backed up by acts of terrorism and war crimes remains unchanged.
While it is true that Tamils in Sri Lanka have suffered injustice and violence at the hands of the state, this does not justify or excuse acts of terrorism aimed at civilians. And while it is true that there is an ongoing war between the Sri Lankan state and the LTTE, such attacks are defined in international law as crimes even when committed during a war. Apart from terrorist attacks in the South, the LTTE has killed and ethnically cleansed Muslim and Sinhalese civilians from areas of the North and East when it occupied them. All these actions are war crimes and crimes against humanity: no struggle for self-determination, no matter how brutal the opposing power, can justify them.
The LTTE has made its stand on a democratic political solution to the conflict absolutely clear by killing – or trying to kill – every single Tamil of any standing who was working towards such a solution. Rajani Thiranagama, Neelan Thiruchelvan, Lakshman Kadirgamar, T. Subathiran, Kethesh Loganathan and many others have paid with their lives for seeking a political solution compatible with respect for human rights and democratic principles. Others have managed to survive only by fleeing Sri Lanka or putting themselves under the protection of the government: Courses which rob them of a large part of their freedom of action in their struggle for justice. Tamils in the areas under LTTE control are likewise subjected to appaling oppression, including child conscription and use as human shields (both war crimes), forcible conscription of adults, complete denial of freedom of expression and association, torture, and killings. Given these characterisics of the LTTE, what options are there in dealing with them?
War Crimes by the State
The suicide attack at Weliweriya took place against the backdrop of a sensational report released by UTHR (J), naming state security personnel responsible for the murder of five students in Trincomalee in January 2006 and seventeen humanitarian workers of Action Contre la Faim in Mutur in August of that year. It is useful to recall at this point that UTHR (J) is high on the hitlist of the LTTE, which has killed one of its leading members and issued death threats against others and their relatives. It would, therefore, be absurd in the extreme to accuse them of wishing to whitewash the LTTE in any way, especially given their fearless criticism of that group all along. Indeed, their unbiased reporting of human rights violations was one of the reasons why they were awarded the prestigious Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders. The other reason was the meticulous character of their investigations and reporting. We therefore have every reason to take their Special Report No. 30 seriously, and it certainly carries conviction.
These two cases are particularly important because they were cold-blooded killings which cannot be explained as ‘collateral damage’ or ‘being caught in the crossfire’. Nor were they committed by government allies like the TMVP, but by the government’s own security forces. In other words, just like the killings at Piliyandala and Weliweriya, they were terrorist attacks on unarmed civilians, identified in international law as war crimes, which cannot be excused by the fact that the state is waging a war against a ruthless terrorist group. The fact that the state tried (unsuccessfully in these cases) to blackmail the families of the victims into lying that the victims were LTTE operatives suggests that there are many more cases of state terrorism passed off as killings of LTTE members.
These war crimes were compounded by the involvement of various branches of the state at all levels – the police and STF, the judiciary, the armed forces and Defence Ministry – in the crimes themselves, and in attempts to cover them up. The reason why a human rights group could solve the mystery while the state could not becomes evident when we find that there has been systematic intimidation (in some cases murder) of family members and witnesses, while others have been forced to flee the country due to death-threats. No wonder no progress was made when the criminals were assigned the task of investigating the crimes! And no wonder the government objects so strongly to UN human rights monitoring, when it has so much to hide! The failure of even the Commission of Inquiry to solve these cases confirms the IIGEP's criticisms of it, and underscores the fact that the CoI is in no way a substitute for UN human rights monitoring. If there is still no indictment of the perpetrators of these vile and despicable crimes after the excellent detective work done by those who provided information for the UTHR (J) report, we can conclude that the government is using the CoI as yet another figleaf to cover up its human rights violations.
Is this the way to fight the LTTE? Most emphatically not! The absence of genuine criminal investigation and of the rule of law, which allows the state to commit war crimes with impunity, also allows the LTTE to get away with murder. And the hatred generated by the state’s abuse of human rights and perversion of justice can be used by the LTTE to recruit suicide bombers for its own criminal purposes. Given the radical undermining of the rule of law by the government, the only way to break this vicious circle is to invite a UN human rights monitoring mission to help with the task of investigating both crimes by the LTTE and crimes by the state, and bring the perpetrators to justice.
Is There a Military Solution?
Suppose we grant that war crimes by the state engender war crimes by the LTTE and ought to be stopped, isn’t it still the case that the LTTE, given the kind of group it is, has to be defeated militarily? This is a question that requires serious scrutiny.
There are hardliners within the LTTE who will never give up; these people may need to be fought militarily. But they first need to be isolated. A large section of the LTTE’s fighting force consists of conscripts, both children and adults. The heart-breaking story of Jenny, a young girl forcibly conscripted by the LTTE, desperate to rejoin her family but killed by the Sri Lankan Army before she could do so, is typical of this section. These people would gladly leave the LTTE if they could; they are hostages, and the aim should be rescue them, not kill them. If they knew the government was trying to rescue them, many more would try to escape the LTTE, thus weakening it militarily.
Then there are voluntary fighters who join the LTTE because they are so bitter about six decades of oppression of Tamils by the Sri Lankan state, beginning with the assault on the citizenship and franchise of hillcountry Tamils, and ending with crimes like those against the ACF workers. Ending war crimes by the state will go some way towards convincing these people that the government is not as bad as the LTTE, but it is not enough. Most of them would not leave the LTTE unless they are convinced that their democratic rights would be protected by the Sri Lankan government.
This is where a credible political solution to the conflict becomes critically important, and it looked as if the government were serious about finding such a solution when it set up the APRC. The majority report of its panel of advisors, and Chairman Tissa Vitharana’s report, marked significant progress. If the process had continued to completion, most of these voluntary fighters would have left the LTTE, isolating the hardcore. Instead, there was sabotage of the process by some elements in the government and outside, who could not reconcile themselves to the idea of democratic rights for minority communities, and were even willing to retain the present system of dictatorship – which is what the executive
presidency really is – in order to avoid granting them. The process ended in a fiasco earlier this year, when the President forced the APRC to present a watered-down version of the twenty-year-old 13th Amendment, which was already part of the Constitution, instead of their own report.
Subsequently, Mahinda Rajapaksa announced at the Independence Day celebrations that ‘The practical solution is to bring the provincial administration closer to the people within the framework of the Constitution,’ making it clear that so far as he was concerned, the APRC process, premised on proposals for a new constitution, was dead and buried. Its members were sent on foreign trips at the expense of the taxpayer to study devolution in other countries, but it had already been decided that any proposals that went beyond the existing constitution – which was part of the problem, not of the solution – would be ruled out.
It is true that the hardliners in the LTTE will never give up their violent campaign for a totalitarian Tamil Eelam, unless forced to do so; but they will never be defeated militarily until their supporters have been weaned away by a government that respects the human rights of Tamils and offers them a democratic political solution. From this perspective, it becomes clear that the present government can never defeat the LTTE. It is clear, too, that the LTTE alone is not responsible for the atrocities at Weliweriya and Piliyandala. The government is also responsible, because such attacks are a foreseeable and inevitable result of the strategy it has chosen: a purely military solution with impunity for war crimes.
The First Time as Tragedy, the Second as Farce
So, who can defeat the LTTE if the current president and political leaders are incapable of doing so? The UNP leadership has once again demonstrated its opportunism by failing to declare firm support for a democratic political solution, while the TNA, too, remains ambivalent about its support for such a solution. There are minority parties willing to support a democratic constitution in defiance of both the president and the LTTE, but their leaders are understandably afraid of exposing themselves to assassination by alienating both sides at the same time; moreover, it would be impossible for them to change the constitution by themselves, or even lead a campaign for doing so. So, it seems unrealistic to expect any change within the lifetime of the current government and presidency. But the next parliamentary elections could provide a window of opportunity for defeating the LTTE and ending the war, provided preparations begin immediately.
In this context, the Left could play a critical role, acting as a pole of attraction for politicians from all parties who support a democratic political solution to the civil war, and making the next election a referendum on this issue. It is disappointing indeed that it has failed so far. The old Left – the LSSP and CP – must be familiar with Marx’s aphorism that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce; yet they appear to be proving it true in their own conduct. The first time – when the same Colvin R. de Silva, who had predicted that ‘Sinhala Only’ would lead to two nations presided over the 1972 Constitution, which entrenched a Sinhala Buddhist unitary state without protection for the rights of minorities – was tragic indeed, leading to a civil war that has claimed close to 70,000 lives. The second time – when instead of presenting the interim APRC proposals, Tissa Vitharana handed back to President Rajapaksa a mutilated copy of the 13th Amendment which the president had just handed to him – was pure farce. Unless the old Left is able to break with this tradition of abandoning their principles in order to form governments with Sinhala nationalists, it will continue to be marginalised.
The parties that broke away from the LSSP and CP due to their betrayal of the rights of minorities could also be potential members of an alternative pole. Unfortunately, many of them have illusions in the LTTE’s agenda for a totalitarian Tamil Eelam, because of their doctrinal acceptance of Stalin’s definition of a ‘nation’ combined with Lenin’s arguments for the right of nations to self-determination. Unless they are able to examine these articles of faith critically, and conclude that the LTTE’s agenda has to be rejected completely, they will falter in their support for a truly democratic solution to the civil war. As for the JVP (which is now in disarray), its ‘Leftism’ is so completely drowned out by its Sinhala nationalism that it is hard to see any support for democracy emerging from it. But some of the elements who broke away from it after the last insurrection could be part of an emerging force for democracy.
The next elections may seem a long way off, but unless preparations for them begin soon, they will be upon us before we know where we are, and it will be too late to create a democratic alternative to the totalitarian politics tearing Sri Lanka apart. Bob Dylan asked how many deaths will it take till we know that too many people have died? Let’s not leave the answer blowing in the wind any longer.
- Sri Lanka Guardian
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