Ethnic Strife, Fratricide, and the Peace vs. Human Rights Dilemma

By Rajan Hoole
University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna)
Courtesy: Oxford Journal

Abstract

(March 28, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The rapid intensification of the conflict in Sri Lanka during the mid-1980s followed the July 1983 communal violence. Agents of the state perpetrated human rights violations, including attempts at demographic transformation through massacres and the displacement of minority Tamils.

The accompanying rise of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam through the brutal elimination of rivals brought another dimension to the conflict. Conventional human rights work, which dealt exclusively with the State, distorted the problem. The new totalitarian cult of the hero within a disillusioned Tamil society portended internal terror, recruitment of women and children, debasement of its own civilians in peace and war, and a barbarous approach to civilians from other communities.

Amidst the devastation of 1987, a group of academics from the University of Jaffna, drawing on wider discussion within the community, wrote the Broken Palmyra in a bid to tell the whole truth and challenge the fatal trend. Through this experience, the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) [UTHR(J)] was born. Its reports have endeavoured to expose and challenge all perpetrators of abuses irrespective of affiliation. Its members also engaged with the university community and those outside against violence, whether out of narrow ideologies or sheer anger. The risk was knowingly taken and Dr Rajani Thiranagama, a leading member, paid with her life.

Throughout its 20 years, UTHR(J) has challenged peace activity that privileged ‘peace’ over human rights, whose culmination was the recent Sri Lankan peace process with Norwegian facilitation. Both sides had powerful camps with fixed ideological obsessions, which either tried to manipulate the peace process or exploited its vulnerabilities to go on the rampage. The combined effect discredited the process and strengthened extremism on both sides. The collapse of the process owed to a theoretical aversion to mechanisms that pose a strong deterrence against human rights abuse by any party. The Sri Lankan experience is a further warning that a peace process that fails to advance human rights is doomed.

Keywords: Appeasement, Cease-Fire Agreement (CFA), dissent, majoritarian, Tamil liberation struggle, totalitarian

   Peace vs. Human Rights – Lessons from Sri Lanka

We have much to learn from other conflicts, their resolution, and how the challenge of human rights is addressed in each. At the same time, every conflict is unique in its ideological nuances and history. In Sri Lanka, the induction of ethnic chauvinism into the competition for votes led to a culture of majoritarian populism to the detriment of the country's independent institutions. The dominant mindset of Sinhalese leaders became one of dismissive authoritarianism towards political demands for autonomy from the Tamil minority.

The polarization in the country between the urban elite and rural poor in the Sinhalese south and between the state and the Tamil youth, in a global climate of liberation struggles, led to the Sinhalese youth insurgency of 1971 and the formation of Tamil militant groups. The aims of the latter ranged from solidarity with the Sinhalese working class to secure autonomy within a socialist state in Sri Lanka, to a separate state of Eelam. The communal violence of July 1983 was the turning point and, by 1984, the Tamil insurgency took on the proportions of a civil war.

In the course of dealing with insurgencies, the Sri Lankan state has resorted to large-scale extra-judicial killings, against Tamils from the early 1980s and also against Sinhalese youth in 1971 and the late 1980s. Currently, well above a thousand Tamil youth have been victims of targeted killings by state agents since early 2006. In the meantime, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) that took control of the Tamil militancy by brutally eliminating other groups could not, for that very reason, countenance any semblance of democracy. It would settle for nothing less than totalitarian control of the North-East.

By the mid-1980s diverse peace groups had become active. Their modus operandi was to meet leaders on both sides and communicate messages between them. Their rationale was to stop the meaningless loss of life and to somehow get the two sides talking. Whether given the obduracy of both parties, talks would lead to sustained peace or to greater bloodshed after a respite, is a question they have continued to evade, despite the cyclic nature of talks and wars for over two decades. But they have been clear that raising human rights issues and participation from the Tamil people are non-starters where the LTTE is concerned. The state too has, for over three decades, stonewalled on investigating and punishing security forces personnel responsible for grave abuses. The peacemakers have accepted this constraint, without asking themselves whether it is at the root of the cyclic nature of the tragedy.

Given the convoluted nature of the problem, human rights activism too has reached a point of fatigue. Human rights groups have documented and exposed violations by the state since the 1970s and by the LTTE and other groups since 1988. They undoubtedly had a restraining influence on the state, but there is no end in sight to mass killings and other grave abuses. What should their realistic objectives be? This is the essence of the peace vs. human rights dilemma as it has played out in Sri Lanka.

State and Non-State Actors in the 1980s

The struggle of the Tamil youth against the Sinhalese hegemonism of the state began in the 1970s. One stream, which attracted a following from the universities and high schools, came from left political activism and was inspired by liberation struggles in other parts of the world. It tried to eschew communalism and win allies from among the Sinhalese and Muslims. The other stream, inspired by the rhetoric of Tamil nationalist parliamentary politics, espoused military heroism, of which the LTTE became the archetype. After the July 1983 violence, many young Tamils suspended their education, joining half a dozen militant groups, and went to India for training. They were at heart unmindful of their chance group affiliation, but were united in purpose against the state.

When people joined these groups they were unaware of the insidious undercurrents that were unique to the Tamil struggle. It is clear in retrospect that the actions of Prabhakaran, the LTTE leader, from the early 1980s were motivated by totalitarian ambitions. He had, from 1982, targeted effective leaders in other groups.1 The leaders of other groups began to have acute security fears of spies and assassins leading to torture and killings on Indian soil, especially among the larger groups. Within the LTTE, its internal spy network identified cadres who evinced signs of independence, and eliminated many of them.

The ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka began in earnest after the state-instigated communal violence in July 1983, leaving over 2000 Tamils dead. India became involved in arming and training Tamil groups after the government went back on an agreement with India in November 1983 to implement a political settlement based on devolving powers to the majority Tamil-speaking northern and eastern provinces – the North-East.2

The conflict escalated sharply in late 1984 when the government began forcibly uprooting Tamils and as its first step settled Sinhalese convicts north of Trincomalee to break the contiguity of the Tamil region. Subsequently massacres were committed by both sides with killings by the State becoming indiscriminate and intense (Hoole, 2001: Chs 14.3–14.6, 15.7, and 20). Tamil organizations were kept busy documenting violations by the state, obtaining affidavits, and sending these to human rights agencies abroad. Several of these organizations were brave in the face of state terror. This was human rights work as then understood. There were other developments that some of us felt were menacing. On 14 May 1985, in reprisal for an army massacre in Valvettithurai, LTTE leader Prabhakaran's native sea town, an LTTE team went into the well-defended Buddhist sacred city of Anuradhapura where they walked past the panic-stricken guards and massacred about 120 pilgrims including women (Hoole, 2001: p. 231). Many decent people regarded such a reprisal as legitimate in the light of the state's brutality. Some of the left-leaning Tamil groups condemned it. Fighting off the ambivalence of our own feelings had become a challenge to all who wanted to preserve their humanity.

Many sane, ordinary people were beginning to wonder about a ‘freedom struggle’ that coached its cadres to massacre innocent women and children. What would happen when this violence turned inwards? New developments came thick and fast. In the Jaffna peninsula, the security forces were confined to camps with militants occasionally firing rockets into them.3 In January 1986, the Government took the fateful step of authorizing the use of aerial bombing and shelling on civilian areas. The victims were mainly again civilians killed by their own government. In early 1985, reports of internal killings within three major armed Tamil opposition groups began to surface. As the first step in asserting its monopoly, the LTTE launched a well-planned strike on its chief rival – the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation (TELO).4 No quarter was given; many were killed unawares. The dead and dying were brought onto street junctions, piled up, and burnt. The total ran into hundreds. It was a warning to the people as well. The press was silenced. By the end of 1986, a totalitarian regime under LTTE direction had imposed itself on Jaffna.

Human rights work went on as before, dealing exclusively with the state. Even those who agreed privately that something had gone diabolically wrong with the Tamil struggle were terrified to express this view, and in public pretended that all the wrongs were on the side of the government. Many leaders of civil society and the Tamil church became shamelessly sycophantic. Visitors to Jaffna, mainly left-leaning Sinhalese and church lay and clergy, were eloquently regaled with catalogues of grievances against the state. Most visitors who met with LTTE leaders were impressed and scoffed at those among us who cautioned them about the fatal totalitarian sickness within. This was our first brush with peace activism.

Having decimated the other groups, the LTTE desperately tried to redress their military vulnerability by recruiting women and children. The government made rapid advances, often massacring scores of civilians in the areas it retook. In April 1987, prompted by India, the government declared a unilateral cease-fire aimed at starting talks with the LTTE. The latter responded by once again massacring Buddhist pilgrims in a convoy and by setting off a car bomb in Colombo, killing about 250 civilians in all (Hoole, 2001: p 244). As our first initiative we tried to mobilize academics and religious leaders to tell the LTTE that the current scenario offered no hope and they must break the stalemate by giving a reasoned response to the political proposals brought by India in December 1986. LTTE intelligence became aware of this and warned off some of us at night.5

Two weeks later at the end of May 1987, the Government launched a ground attack to retake the LTTE's last bastion – the Jaffna peninsula. At this point, India intervened and pushed through the Indo-Lanka Accord with a political settlement under which the groups decimated by the LTTE were to enter democratic politics alongside the LTTE. The LTTE, which had invested heavily in terror to secure itself as the self-defined sole arbiter of the Tamils' destiny, could not come down to join election politics. The LTTE soon began attacking opponents and when in early October 1987 it massacred scores of innocent Sinhalese in the East, the Indian Peace Keeping Force overseeing the Accord had no alternative but to take on the LTTE.

We felt at this stage that we would serve the community best by doing what its leaders ought to have done some time ago – telling the whole truth. This was how we came to write the Broken Palmyra dealing with the history of abuse by the Sri Lankan state, the militant groups, and how the Indo-Lanka Accord, which offered hope, was twisted into another nightmare (Thiranagama et al., 1990). We talked to many people and we had learnt a lot through our engaging with fellow staff and Indian officials to reopen the University of Jaffna after the Indian Army's takeover of Jaffna in late 1987. This experience formed an important backdrop to our methodology in subsequent reports of the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) [UTHR(J)].6 On several occasions we, and particularly Dr Rajani Thiranagama, a founding member of UTHR(J), challenged Indian officers on the harm caused to civilians during their military operations. We did not think of ourselves as human rights activists then. That came in July 1988.

In August 1987, soon after the Indo-Lanka Accord, the Sinhalese People's Victory Front (JVP)7 unleashed a reign of terror in its bid to capture the state, harping on the Indian peace keeping presence in the North-East as an affront to national pride. We joined our colleagues in the South in forming the University Teachers for Human Rights and began putting out reports under UTHR(J). Soon half the university staff in Jaffna became members. Our reports dealt with violations by all sides, giving an analysis of the political context of the violence, the plight of the people caught up in fratricide, reprisal killings, and the fate of children, as young as 10, used by the LTTE as assassins and casual bombers.

In giving due credit to Indian and later Sri Lankan officers who acted with humanity, restrained their men under provocation, and spared innocent civilian lives, we were deviating from the well-trodden path of human rights reporting. We felt that our effort would be dishonest unless we exposed the pernicious culture in what purported to be ‘our side’ especially in its cynical use of civilians and children. When a total stranger showed restraint under these conditions, we felt it was in the best interests of humanity to acknowledge it.8

Being from a tradition of left activism, Dr Rajani Thiranagama was very particular that as university teachers amidst a social catastrophe, our main concern should be the people. Staff members engaged with the Indian military authorities and at the same time challenged students to face up to where partisan killings out of anger and intolerance were taking us. Thiranagama also led the way in activism among the wider community by bringing together women who were victims of the violence of all sides. The idea was to use the University to build something that would offer hope to the wider community.

The LTTE sent spies and watched us warily. The Indian Army was irritated by criticism, but had to maintain a quasi-legal facade and we felt we could risk continuing our activities. We felt that the silence and passivity of the community had become part of the problem and there was no hope unless it asserted itself by taking responsibility for what was done in our name and for the use of children to fight our ‘liberation war’. We wanted to change the prevailing arid one-sidedness.

The first time we had a sense of running a grave risk was after our second report of March 1989. We sent copies to a pro-LTTE member of the Valvettithurai Citizens' Committee since we had approached them for some details of Indian Army atrocities and we also wanted to engage with such people. In one incident where an Indian Army patrol shot dead two sisters, we received help from the Citizens' Committee member to approach the family (UTHR, 1989: Report No. 2: Ch. 4.6). He later expressed displeasure at our reporting of the incident. Wherever possible our aim had been to capture the more complex human aspect of a tragedy rather than to present a simple picture of raw savagery.9

A friend of the Citizens' Committee member gave one of us some friendly advice. He said ‘if you want to write this kind of thing, you will have to do it from an army camp’. He then almost innocently gave us some momentous information, several weeks before it was public. He said that the LTTE would first make a deal with the Sri Lankan government to get the Indian Army out, and would then fight a long war with the Sri Lankan government for the separate state of Eelam. We could never get peace activists to understand how the LTTE's mind works.

In December 1988, R. Premadasa of the United National Party (UNP) had been elected President of Sri Lanka amidst the virulent JVP insurgency. He made a covert deal with the state's erstwhile arch-villain – the LTTE. With a view to stealing the nationalist thunder from the JVP and on the strength the LTTE deal, Premadasa went public in mid-1989 calling for the Indian Army's exit. He accused them of having failed to disarm the LTTE as required by the Accord. At the same time, Premadasa recklessly armed the LTTE to attack the Indian Army and promised them untrammelled power over civilians in the North-East. The Indians weighed the options and decided to go.

On 21 September 1989, the day after the Indian government announced the withdrawal of its forces from Sri Lanka, LTTE assassins killed Rajani Thiranagama as she was cycling home after completing viva voce examinations for the medical second-years. It was a warning that under the Premadasa deal they were taking over and any hint of dissidence was fatal. The LTTE had obtained a pre-publication copy of our book, the Broken Palmyra (Thiranagama et al., 1990), and had portions of it translated into Tamil. When we completed the book in mid-1988, we discussed the danger that would arise from its publication and decided that for the book to be meaningful, we would all put down our names collectively. Thiranagama had once supported the LTTE and had left in disillusionment. She was the first person to leave the LTTE and voice her criticism as a former insider, purely in political terms.10

Over the coming months the LTTE abducted and later executed thousands of dissidents, with complete government solicitude. The Indian and Sri Lankan governments were on paper committed to fostering the North-East Provincial Council, formed as an exercise in devolution under the 1987 Indo-Lanka Accord. India, having given firm guarantees to those participating in the Council, was deserting them. As the Indian Army quit, a combination of the LTTE and the Sri Lankan forces mauled those who had cooperated with the Indians. Among the victims were hundreds of young conscripts the Indians cynically placed in the Tamil National Army, supposedly to protect the Provincial Council after they had quit. They were massacred by the hundreds even after surrender. Despite the momentary calm, many Tamils knew that the bizarre alliance between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan state portended doom.

In June 1990, 3 months after the Indian Army quit and the government had brutally crushed the JVP rebellion in the South, the LTTE began the second ‘final’ war for its separate state, killing hundreds of policemen it had imprisoned. It deliberately left the Tamil people at the mercy of incensed government troops who had tasted blood hunting the JVP.11

The origins of the conflict in Sri Lanka merit recounting in some detail as they provide the origins also of the peace vs. human rights debate in the country and background to the evolving strategic thinking of UTHR(J).

Post-September 1990: the Illusion of Peace Without Human Rights

UTHR(J)'s work expanded further in the 1990s. The organization began making regular trips to the East and documented the large-scale massacres against Tamils by the government forces and against the Muslims and Tamil dissidents by the LTTE, especially during 1990–1992. We did a major report on the LTTE's forced evacuation of Jaffna civilians in 1995 in the wake of the army advance, in which we also dealt with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) abandoning the Jaffna Hospital Zone where the injured and displaced had gathered under its protection (UTHR, 1995: Special Report No. 6).12 The irony, that this happened on the fifth anniversary of the LTTE's expropriation and expulsion of the native Muslim population in the North, was not lost on the Tamils forced likewise to abandon their homes.

We were the first to draw attention to the Army's resort to mass disappearances in Jaffna from July 1996 (UTHR, 1996: Special Report 7), following an LTTE suicide attack in Jaffna and its demolition of the large Mullaitivu army camp. On a number of occasions, the people were caught between a government that cut corners, indifferent to their plight, and a ruthless rebel outfit. On 29 September 1998, the Lionair passenger flight from Jaffna to Colombo crashed into the sea killing 55 passengers and crew. In a report citing evidence, we showed that it was in fact shot down by the LTTE. These flights were also used by INGO and UN staff. The crime of a peculiarly grave nature was hushed up and the families of the mainly Tamil victims were left in the lurch. The government was protecting both itself and the operator who had received warnings from the LTTE not to charter flights to the security forces, of which the passengers and mainly foreign crew were kept in ignorance (UTHR, 1998: Bulletin No. 19).

An issue that brought us notice during this period was our exposure of the LTTE's use of children and its conscription of children sometimes as young as 10 years old in the East from September 2001 (UTHR: Bulletins 23, 26–31, Special Reports 13–16). Despite the international attention and the Government's crocodile tears, children conscripted by LTTE continue to be mauled today in a callous war (UTHR: Bulletins 45 and 46).

From our beginnings we have been in conflict with peace activism that argued for a totalitarian peace by appeasement of the LTTE. The period 1991–1992 saw the first open cleavage between human rights and peace activism. Many peace activists were happy with the 1989 accord between President Premadasa and the LTTE, and did not want to pay heed to our fears that the dream honeymoon would end in a human rights debacle. Peace groups were dismayed when the LTTE suddenly ditched the accord with Premadasa and precipitated a ruthless war.

During 1992, the emerging differences between peace and human rights advocates were evident both within the NGO community at home and at the meetings of the NGO Consortium in Europe comprising INGOs active in Sri Lanka, several of whom remained well disposed to us despite differences. It was during this time that our Report No. 9 (1992) stirred the relatively placid waters of NGO circles with our reference to the peacemakers'

inability to grasp [the reality of the two warring parties' sole concern with power while unleashing violence on the people] which has allowed them to concentrate only on asking the LTTE what they want and then reporting back to the other side, and releasing empty statements which repeat the LTTE pronouncements, such as the one that they are prepared to talk without any preconditions and so on.

Confusion was further sown into these fora by leading Tamil churchmen, who travelled widely and had the ear of certain Roman Catholic organizations as well as the World Council of Churches. Some of them whitewashed ongoing repression by the LTTE at home, telling international audiences that the Tamils were fully behind the LTTE, and the exceptions were ‘not quite Tamil’.

An issue that was very close to us then was the LTTE's mass detention and execution of dissidents. Through the early 1990s we documented corroborating information from lists of its detainees initially displayed in the Jaffna LTTE public relations office, and from escapees and ex-detainees who had spoken to LTTE guards involved in torture and mass executions. To the best of our knowledge, the number was above 3000. Our attempts to interest others ran foul of moves to appease the LTTE. Western agencies generally thought we were exaggerating and our word was of little use unless some westerner felt motivated to assess the evidence.

We argued that peacemakers were legitimizing the LTTE because it baffled them and inspired a dreadful awe by using its destructive power to kill and to make or break agreements in a manner that defied everyone else's logic, purely to secure recognition of its totalitarian demands. It was very irresponsible for peacemakers to cover their failings by raising the LTTE to the position of leaders and defenders of the Tamil people who are, at best, its prisoners (UTHR 1992: Report No. 9, Ch. 1.3).

We argued repeatedly that talking peace with the LTTE, without insisting on firm human rights checks, is a road to disaster, and the way forward is to press the state to respect human rights and put to forward an equitable political settlement that would cut the ground from under the LTTE. Mrs Chandrika Kumaratunge, leader of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), the main contender for government besides the UNP, became President in 1994 and after a brief attempt at negotiation with the LTTE, another round of war, and a stalemate, she presented constitutional proposals tending towards federalism in August 2000, which failed. Elected Prime Minister, in December 2001, Ranil Wickremasinghe, then leader of the UNP, brought in the Norwegians as peacemakers and signed the Cease-Fire Agreement (CFA) in February 2002.

The Oslo Peace Process and Human Rights

Soon after the cease-fire that began the Norway-backed peace process in 2002, the LTTE showed that far from being deterred by the peace process, it would only use it to pursue its ideological obsession towards totalitarian control of the North-East more thoroughly. The Norwegian peacemakers tried to silence or discredit those who exposed the LTTE's child conscription and killing of unarmed political opponents, using the extended access it gained under the CFA.

Asked about the Amnesty International report on the LTTE recruiting child soldiers, Vidar Helgesen (Norway's Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs), said that the LTTE had denied it, while they themselves had been unable to verify it. We noted, ‘ ... despite being the head of the facilitation mission to Sri Lanka, [Helgesen] has chosen neither to look for the evidence, nor examine what was presented’ (Daily Mirror, 2002).

It soon became evident that Section 2.1 of the CFA, which dealt with civilian protection, was in practice of no more than ornamental value. Article 2.1 of CFA stated: ‘The parties shall in accordance with international law abstain from hostile acts against the civilian population, including such acts as torture, intimidation, abduction, extortion and harassment’. We observed,

[It is clear that the Norwegians] are mainly interested in the cease-fire and in dealings between the Government and the LTTE, and not directly in human rights. There would have been merit in this approach were it stated frankly. There would then have been no need for Norwegian officials to equivocate on matters like child conscription. More importantly, the gaps in the process would have been clearly identified for others concerned to act. (UTHR, 2002: Special Report No. 13)

The commanding interest of the peacemaker, Norway, in the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) determined the Mission's outlook. Their job, as SLMM officials repeatedly said, was to monitor the cease-fire and not human rights. This in time made Article 2.1 of the CFA on civilian protection look like a confidence trick to disarm critics. Those who later lobbied for separate human rights monitoring found the Norwegians unhappy.

In November 2003, President Kumaratunge took over key ministries, including Defence, crippling the Wickremasinghe government. She blamed it for not checking a threatening LTTE build-up near Trincomalee. Later the same month, November 2003, the LTTE hacked to death three Muslim farmers in the same area. Kumaratunge's leading police officials blamed a mysterious ‘third force’ – the same dodge used by the SLMM on occasions to spare the LTTE (UTHR, 2003: Bulletins 32 and 34). It was business as usual.

From a civilian standpoint, the worst exhibition of Norway's and the SLMM's role was after Karuna split from the LTTE in March 2004.13 Karuna agreed to discharge child soldiers under him and was seeking some form of legitimacy and protection from both the government and the international community as he and the cadres were at risk of being massacred by the LTTE. Norway's peace envoy, Erik Solheim, met the LTTE leadership on 11 March 2004. Just after the meeting, Solheim said, ‘We will not interfere in an internal matter of the LTTE’. He further clarified, ‘exactly’ as Norway did not involve themselves in discussions between the Prime Minister and the President of Sri Lanka, they would ‘not take any part in the discussion between the LTTE leadership and Mr. Karuna. The first is an internal matter for the South and the second is an internal matter for the Northeast’. Equating the LTTE and the government was a politically damaging faux pas.

Having set the stage, Norway and President Kumaratunge stood back and abetted the LTTE leadership as they bloodily crushed the eastern rebellion in April 2004 and scores of former LTTE child soldiers were killed (UTHR, 2004: Bulletins 35 and 36).

Although President Kumaratunge refused to protect Karuna's men and left them at the LTTE's mercy, her intelligence services predictably began using them as paramilitary hit men against the LTTE. The latter meanwhile targeted not only security officials and Karuna's men, but also unarmed members of dissident political parties. The CFA drafted by Norway in consultation with the LTTE had specified that all paramilitaries should be disarmed without defining who they were. This became a source of mischief, since to the LTTE ‘paramilitaries’ were mainly a label for its political opponents, whom its ideology decreed were ‘traitors’ not fit to live. The Norwegians and the SLMM tended to act as though they partially agreed.

In a statement on 13 June 2005, the Co-Chairs14 representing the international community, while calling upon the LTTE to stop abuses, ‘likewise call[ed] on the Sri Lankan government to take decisive action to ensure that killings are stopped and paramilitaries are disarmed immediately as required in the Cease-Fire Agreement’. This too was unhelpful, by its failure to distinguish between legitimate dissent and paramilitary activity, especially after the confusion created by Norway. It also sent the signal that the international community was not going to take serious note of the LTTE killing its democratic opponents, whom even the Norwegians treated in effect as ‘paramilitaries’.

The international community's skewed understanding of peace is attested by an observer who followed the struggles of an independent local human rights collective and was privy to the thinking of several Western embassies in Colombo:

... under the rubric of constructive engagement, donor willingness to fund explicitly pro-LTTE projects – projects that make no claim to be balanced or to listen to all voices – is accompanied by a general reluctance to support any human-rights model that might complicate the dominant approach to peacemaking (Keenan, 2005).

End of the Oslo Process: a Familiar Script

The peace process initiated by Norway in 2002 and backed by the Western nations and Japan was also a testing time for human rights organizations. International backers of the peace process urged ‘constructive engagement’ to transform the LTTE. The LTTE, in turn, put on a show of quasi-legality through the establishment of quasi-state structures, a legal system, a police force, and prisons to impress visitors who included human rights advocates, while blatantly continuing with child conscription and political killings. The LTTE was enabled to reap political capital without making any real improvements to their human rights record or commitments to current or future respect for human rights. Meanwhile, the government too used the peace process to place questions of horrendous past abuses on the backburner and reap benefits from looking good, while keeping the repressive apparatus intact for future use as became evident from the mass of targeted killings and abductions from 2006.

The peace process came unstuck in 2005 after 4 years of continuous provocation by the LTTE and the expected Sinhalese extremist mobilization. The extremists have never in their excesses distinguished between Tamil civilians and the LTTE. To the rhetorical question, ‘what have you done in 4 years to restrain the LTTE’, the international actors had no convincing answers. On the other hand, a political settlement had never been discussed seriously during the process, partly because the LTTE was fixed on the trappings of a state and viewed talks about a political settlement as a snare. Also, governments representing the Sinhalese polity found it easy to make promises at peace talks, but much harder to deliver against extremist opposition. This enabled LTTE supporters to cover their tracks claiming that no Sinhalese government would ever agree to a federal settlement and in fact every attempt to work towards one was aborted.

By April 2005, the government too had given a nod to tit-for-tat killings (UTHR, 2005: Special Report 19, Part II) while continuing to affirm its commitment to the peace process. As the situation deteriorated, both the peacemakers and human rights advocates had tarnished their credibility to a point where they lost all capacity to make an impact on peace or respect for human rights.

From the beginning of 2006 onwards, human rights NGOs, both national and international, became increasingly active against human rights abuses, primarily by the state. However, their work focussed on censures by the international community rather than work on the ground in Sri Lanka to protect communities under siege from all actors, or encouraging a genuine domestic debate on human rights to emerge. Even as gross violations by the state reappeared and horrendous abuses by the LTTE continued, the human rights movement in Sri Lanka could not emerge from the politics of the internationalized peace process and years of reluctance to hold the LTTE to account.

While it reduced the level of violence, most people not involved in the top-down peace process accepted it passively. Once it began to fail in that respect it was open to attack, and there was nothing to stop the Sri Lankan security forces and politicians doing what they have been only too accustomed to doing since 1971 – killing as many as it takes. That is the plight in which the country has been finding itself since 2006.

One argument holds that cease-fires and talks, even without clear objectives, are good because talking changes the dynamics of a conflict. UNP spokesmen later cited the Karuna split from the LTTE in early 2004 as a smart example. From a human rights standpoint the split was welcome, as it opened the prospect of freeing child conscripts and giving those in the East a better deal. However, the peacemakers frowned upon it and made life for people in the East a further nightmare of bloodshed.

We have persistently argued that it is pointless trying to check the impunity of a rebel outfit that does not care for the people, unless the state is first made answerable for its horrendous abuses. Over the years, we named several army officers responsible for civilian massacres. Naming based on corroborated testimonies had no effect since no local court or commission evinced a willingness to investigate high-ranking officers. With a view to keeping certain cases alive we produced detailed reports with evidence naming the key state officials who instigated the execution of the five students in Trincomalee on 2 January 2006 and 17 aid-workers of the Action Contra la Faim (ACF) on 4 August 2006 (see reports after April 2006, and especially Special Reports 24, 27, and 30).

The Challenge of Peace with Human Rights

Every attempt at a peace settlement – in 1987, 1990, 1994, and 2002 – ended in unrestrained impunity and lawlessness. To placate international pressure, governments multiplied structures – a Human Rights Commission for one, a Ministry for Human Rights and a witness protection law is being mooted. Lacking real independence, these structures themselves deal in public relations to suppress the shameful reality, offering little succour to the victims. A Presidential Commission of Inquiry15 was appointed in late 2006, supported on invitation by an International Independent Group of Eminent Persons (IIGEP)16 to look into 16 grave violations including the ACF case. Following the departure of the SLMM, the IIGEP withdrew in March 2008, citing as the overall reason, the ‘Government of Sri Lanka lacks the political will to ensure the success of the Commission of Inquiry’ (IIGEP, 2008).

As international interest burns itself out, what was earlier at least going on record is now happening in isolation and obscurity. Witnesses and victims' families in high-profile state violations, as in the ACF case, are being severely harassed by the police to cover up. After a generation of conflict, both peacemakers and human rights advocates working at cross-purposes have failed to bring the people much-needed relief. Having sensed rightly that any hint of democracy and public space is inimical to the LTTE, appeasement seemed to peacemakers the way forward. Beginning from 1986, the stakes became so high among internationally well-connected peacemakers that they became irritated when anyone talked of the need to secure the democratic and human rights of all Tamils (Hoole, 2001: Chs 23.5–23.7). Appeasement gained credence also among Sinhalese, both left and liberal, who were frustrated by the Sinhalese polity's proverbial inability to deliver a credible settlement. Ignoring the fault lines of the LTTE's history, they were impressed by its military performance against the state forces, and began to see this as the only leverage towards a settlement. Once they made the LTTE key to a settlement, appeasement followed. This line thus gained both international and local respectability.

Our constant urging has been to treat the just political rights of the Tamil people as a separate issue from the LTTE. After what the minorities had suffered from the state in communal and military violence, discrimination, and demographic gerrymandering through deliberate displacement and Sinhalese colonization schemes, it is dishonest to pretend that the unitary state steeped in these practices could be trusted to implement corrective measures (Hoole, 2001: Chs 2, 5, 9–12, and 20). Some Sinhalese leaders acknowledged that this state of affairs was untenable and tried to make amends, notably in 1957, 1966, 2000, and 2002. Whichever party was in opposition scuttled every attempt and none of the leaders had the conviction to stand up to what they had begun and instead let matters lapse (Loganathan, 1996; Hoole, 2001).

We have always held that the due rights of the minorities, taking into account Sinhalese concerns, could ideally be met in a united Sri Lanka under federalism. When peacemakers make the Tamils' due rights hostage to the LTTE concluding successful negotiations, a pernicious logic of distrust is opened up. The LTTE would settle for nothing short of a separate state, which alone could satisfy the ideological expectations in which it has trapped itself. It has a record of undermining or killing those who sought a fair deal for the Tamils within a united Sri Lanka.

The Sinhalese people need to be taken into confidence, especially in dealing with a volatile force like the LTTE. President Kumaratunge, despite the hopes she initially raised, made accountability before the law a farce like her predecessors and successor. Her time from 2001 to 2005 was merely spent trying to keep her hold on power. But from her election as President in 1994 to 2000, she showed that a leader could talk to the Sinhalese people honestly about the rights of Tamils and Muslims and win them round. That must be the way forward.

The state of distrust and disbelief in which the Norwegian effort left the country made it possible for the installation of a government in 2005 to unlearn the key lessons of 60 years and go back to crude repression. That too is not necessarily because the current President Rajapakse is any more of an extremist or opportunist than past leaders. The short-term decisions he took to ride the minor extremist surge in 2005 were based on electoral calculations. He beat Wickremasinghe by a mere whisker, and that too with help from the LTTE, which forcefully manipulated the election.

Had the peacemakers taken pains to understand the force of ideologies and built mechanisms to counter human rights violations by either side, this costly ignominy could have been avoided. There is a need for taking stock of the last 25 years, by peace as well as human rights advocates jointly.

Preventive Activism and Oppressively Nationalist Ideologies

The Tamil and JVP-led youth insurgencies in the 1980s were both rooted in the government's refusal to deal with Tamil unrest politically and trying instead to teach the Tamils a lesson by unleashing communal violence in July 1983. In the face of worldwide opprobrium, the UNP government banned the JVP, cynically blaming it for communal violence it was innocent of, thus driving it underground. The JVP uprising in 1987 had become a vicious fight to the death in the Sinhalese South leaving little room for intervention. This underlines the need for human rights activism to come in preventively at the very beginning, warn, mobilize opinion, and lobby against harmful decisions whose consequences are often several years down the line. Left too late, human rights advocacy could accomplish very little except register protest.

It is therefore necessary to build up a climate of global opinion and constantly engage with governments to deter them from adverse actions against sections of their own populace that sow the seeds of violence for many years to come. Often, these actions are initially political, legal, and administrative in nature. The experience of human rights groups is invaluable in contributing to such an endeavour. An indication of the state of a nation is the health of its democratic institutions. Today, patriotism has become the cloak for high persons in Sri Lanka to extort, kill and intimidate the press with complete impunity.

The crisis of democracy in Sri Lanka involves two ideologies. Tamil nationalist ideology tried to match the claims of Sinhalese nationalist ideology, which held that the country was hallowed to Buddhism from antiquity and that the Sinhalese are the guardians of this legacy. The Tamil counterpart held the North-East to have been the homeland of the Tamils from antiquity. The liberties Tamil nationalist ideology took with history were hardly more than the liberties taken with history by Sinhalese nationalists. Both were exercises in filling up copious blanks in known history and are at the core violently oppressive. This is evident in audience-based equivocations on the terms ‘Tamil homeland’ and ‘Sinhalese Buddhist country’.

Under an equitable political settlement and an invigorated economy, the polarization would die down as the different peoples have a long history of living together. But in a crisis it is different. Tamil ideology as developed by the LTTE became ideologically intolerant and is guilty of massacring hundreds of Sinhalese and Eastern Muslims and collectively driving out Muslims from the North, most of whom are still refugees.

Again LTTE ideology could not have become such a menace without the vicious communal violence of July 1983, and the appropriation of the Sri Lankan state by the proponents of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism. From a standpoint of peace and human rights, these ideologies have little historical basis and should be constantly challenged as viciously nationalist. At the same time, it is important to understand the history of the peoples and their fears and try to find solutions by circumventing ideologies.

In politics, the damage begun by the Sinhalese majoritarian ideology is only too evident in postcolonial Sri Lanka. But it must be added that the Sinhalese masses are becoming disillusioned with communal politics and the ruin it has wrought. They are desperate to give peace a chance.

For those of us born into a minority in young, independent Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and who grew up with its vicissitudes, a collective indignation against Sinhalese ideology was part of our upbringing. The beginnings of the Tamil militant movement in the early 1970s were in our early adulthood – a ‘terrible beauty’ as Yeats ambivalently put it in Easter 1916. It was some elder leftists who warned us of the fascist direction of Tamil nationalism when the incipient LTTE in 1975 assassinated the non-nationalist Jaffna mayor, Alfred Duraiappah, who had been for years excoriated as a traitor from Tamil nationalist platforms. By 1986 it was clear to many of us that this offspring of Tamil nationalism was as much a menace as its Sinhalese counterpart. And we, who shared its history, were the only ones in a position to understand it thoroughly and had both a moral right, and duty, to challenge it.

For outsiders who saw the LTTE as simply a victim phenomenon, appeasement seemed a just way out. For us it was much more than a rebel group. The obduracy of the Sinhalese polity had made the LTTE an emerging oppressive state with a multinational dimension, that requisitioned resources from the Tamil diaspora to the detriment of civilians in Lanka. Thus in our work we always articulated the position that there is no short cut to peace without human rights. And peace with human rights entails holding both the LTTE and the Sinhalese polity answerable for their crimes against humanity.

-Sri Lanka Guardian