IC-ing on Sri Lanka’s cake

By N.Sathiya Moorthy

(June 15, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) There is a saying in Tamil, which when translated means, “Even if it had stopped raining, the drizzles continue.” The human rights violations of the kind alleged to have been committed by the Sri Lankan armed forces in the end-game of the ethnic war could not be dismissed as mere drizzles, but then a uni-focussed international attention on those concerns weeks after the war had concluded could only impede an early return to normalcy.

Sure enough, sections of the international community, including UN front organisations, have not lost an opportunity to equate the LTTE alongside the Sri Lankan State while talking about end-of-war violations of human rights, blaming them both for avoidable killing of tens of thousands of civilians in the process. With the LTTE all but gone, it is anybody’s guess if there is any meaning to all those claims to parity and equity in distributing responsibility and accountability on this count.

It is nobody’s case that the guilty should be spared, but questions do arise why these worthies were maintaining near-stoic silence when successive Governments in Colombo were shouting from roof-tops about the LTTE’s recruitment of child soldiers and turning the civilian population into mere human-shields in village after village, in battle after battle. If there was any war-crime, it began there. It got aggravated when the LTTE in a cruel, yet masterly stroke converted all those human-shields into hostages – and left them to the mercy of the advancing troops of the Government.

If the strategists of the armed forces had thought that they could have a less violent end to the war by pushing the fighting LTTE cadres into a corner, and then ‘bleeding’ them to surrendering by denying them access to food and medicines, weapons and ammunition, that was not to be. They were not obviously prepared for the way the LTTE thought and acted. If there was any slip-up in the forces command, it began here. The rest became unavoidable, thereafter, mandated as the army was to end the war with zero-civilian casualty, whatever that could have meant in the kind of battleground situation that they were faced with.

Thus when an internal inquiry inside the Sri Lakan armed forces may want to fix where they went wrong in a way that contributed to global accusations of an unprecedented kind, the international community should also ask itself why they went wrong in not wanting to haul up the LTTE for ‘war crimes’ when it was relevant and mattered the most. Maybe, an international effort at bringing the LTTE leadership to book when it mattered the most could have made a great difference to the way the war came to be prosecuted – and ended, too.

It is one thing for civil society groups to talk about war crimes of the Government kind while prosecuting a war, and an entirely another thing for the Colombo leadership to satisfy itself that there were no ulterior motives of the ethnic kind in their doing so. After all, the ghost of ’83 is hard to erase from human memory in such a short span, and it is this that is at the back of the mind whenever someone talks of human rights violations in the Sri Lankan context.

The international community can heave a sigh of relief that the post-war victory celebrations across the country have gone without any major incident of the kind, particularly in the Sinhala-dominated areas. It was so also in the Tamil enclaves like Wellawatta in the national capital of Colombo, where the Sinhala preponderance in politics and society are only but natural in a majority-driven electoral system that the nation adopted as far back as 1931.

That there are more Tamil-speaking people in the national capital – including Muslims and Upcountry, Indian-origin Tamils – should not be lost sight of either. They are now in relative peace, and should have fewer complaints about midnight knocks of the military kind as the State gets less and less concerned about the presence of LTTE sleeper-cells and their regrouping as days pass into weeks and months should be a welcome trend. Though it is too early to predict the course of events, but then the Government and the armed forces should take that extra care to make those civilians feel respected, not suspected.

If there is one thing that the international arraignment of the armed forces is sure to achieve, it is to delay the process of demilitarisation nearer home. By itself, it is both a complex and complicated process, punctuated by political suspicion and inelligence information about the continuing presence of LTTE moles in the midst of civilian population.

There are also one too many soldiers for a population of Sri Lanka’s size that it would be difficult for an unsuspecting Tamil not to walk a mile down the road anywhere in the country without crossing someone in uniform. It would be more so in the Tamil-exclusive areas, where the army and the Government will have continued cause for concern, at least until they are convinced that all would be quiet on the Northern front.

More importantly, no Government in Sri Lanka’s place can be expected to pressure the armed forces into holding itself accountable for war-crimes of the kind that the international community is hauling up against them in what they both consider has the greatest ‘humanitarian rescue mission’ of the kind that the world has never seen before – and should never have to see again. By the same token, the Government cannot expect the armed forces wanting to withdraw to the bunkers, and wait until the day another war could force them to come out – and go through similar motions, and face similar charges.

It cannot be gainsaid that unprecedented situations call for unprecedented responses, the effect of both could not be gauged by any existing yardstick. The US, for instance, could not be blamed for the ‘Afghan war’ in the post-9/11 scenario. There too, the shells and air-attacks did not spare civilians, or civilian inhabitations, which the US armed forces were better equipped to know and identify as such. While there may definitely a case for the Sri Lankan State to apply balm where found required, to wanting to nail it down to the past would only impede the processes and prospects of normalisation in the future.

-Sri Lanka Guardian