Sri Lanka : ten actions

By Satya Sagar

(June 14, New Delhi, Sri Lanka Guardian) Every unpunished massacre in history always spawns a dozen more as those who carry out new carnages are confident they will never be condemned.

“Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Adolf Hitler was supposed to have said in a speech in August 1939, on the eve of Nazi Germany's invasion of neighbouring Poland .

Hitler was reminding his generals of how the Ottoman Empire annihilated over one and half million Armenians during World War 1 and got away with it. Assuring complete impunity he in fact exhorted them not to show any mercy or compassion to Polish men, women, and children.

We do not know whether the current rulers of Sri Lanka took inspiration from the champion of ‘Aryan supremacy' when they decided to go in for a ‘final solution' against their own Tamil population. There is no doubt however that the massacre of over 20,000 Tamil civilians in just the last week of fighting against separatist rebels could not have been possible without assurances of impunity by the Sri Lankan government to its armed forces and to the government itself by powerful sections of the international community.

In Hitler's infamous quote above replace the term ‘Armenians' with ‘Tamils' and the phrase ‘speaks today' by ‘will speak tomorrow' and you have a very likely scenario of what could happen to memories of the recent violence in Sri Lanka . Already the grievances of Sri Lanka 's Tamils are slipping off the global agenda rapidly.

Of course the Mahindra Rajapakse regime is not unique in carrying out crimes against humanity without fear of punishment and the list of states in similarly evil mode is long. The US in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Chinese in Tibet, the Indians in Kashmir and their north-eastern states, the Israelis in Palestine, Pakistan in the Swat Valley, Sudan in Darfur….the list goes on.

However what is clear now, almost a decade into the global ‘War on Terror' started by the United States, is that if states use the same methods as terrorists then the world should consider governments also as terrorists and treat them in similar fashion. To avoid doing this under any pretext is to go back to the stone-age principle of ‘might is right' and a negation of every quest for justice waged by human societies and every norm of decency established through these struggles.

While the violence carried out by non-state actors cannot be condoned it is crimes of the state that need to be targeted first as the damage they do by use of violence with impunity is far greater in the long run. The very idea of a legitimate state is that they ‘play by established rules' and any deviation should be seen as a threat to everyone and forever - till full accountability is established.

In the case of Sri Lanka therefore a very concerted global effort is required to hold those responsible – both in Sri Lanka and internationally- for the death, injury, rape and torture of innocent men, women and children. Failure to do so is a sure recipe for the repetition of these crimes by the very same culprits, whose confidence can only be boosted by the indifference of the world around them.

Here are ten actions that are urgently required to keep local memory of the Sri Lankan genocide alive against the grave danger of global forgetting. I realize this is going to be a ‘wish list' of sorts, but I have always believed that wishes have an uncanny way of coming true if you wish hard and work persistently enough.

1) Establishment of an international tribunal to investigate accusations of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the Sri Lankan government in its war against the Tamil separatist movement. The tribunal must also examine the role of foreign governments and agencies in the Sri Lankan conflict;

2) Accurate documentation, to whatever extent is possible, of every murder, brutality, rape, torture carried out by the Sri Lankan armed forces during its recent campaign. Preservation and collection of evidence – or even establishing cases of destruction of evidence- is crucial to the success of prosecuting the criminals;

3) Filing of cases against individual Sri Lankan officials and citizens for crimes against humanity in whichever courts around the globe that are willing to take these up. If some of these accused Sri Lankan officials happen to have dual citizenship in another country the justice systems of those countries should be targeted first;

4) Global campaign for immediate access for humanitarian workers, international observers, media and human rights groups to the thousands of Tamil civilians kept in concentration camps by the Sri Lankan government. This is urgently required to prevent further human rights abuses from happening;

5) A global campaign for the immediate release of Tamil doctors and other humanitarian workers arrested by the Sri Lankan government on false charges of being ‘LTTE accomplices'. The despicable nature of the Sri Lankan regime is clearly revealed in its attempts to prevent even neutral voices from speaking out against its crimes in any manner.

6) Global campaign for an international moratorium on loans to the Sri Lankan government for any purpose together with a boycott of Sri Lankan products and tourism on the same lines as the one against the repressive military junta in Burma. Since a lot of Sri Lankan politics, like everywhere else, is about getting to power and making money there needs to be economic retribution too against those behind the recent genocide of innocent civilians;

7) Global campaign for the freedom of media and civil society in Sri Lanka and investigation into cases of human rights abuses against opponents of the Mahinda Rajapakse regime. Journalists and media groups around the world in particular must be mobilised because silencing the Sri Lankan press is a crucial part of the Sri Lankan government's strategy to erase all memories of its atrocities;

8) An inquiry into the role, over the last few decades, of the Indian government in the Sri Lankan conflict and establishment of culpability of politicians and diplomats responsible for aggravating the conflict or their role as accomplices in crimes against humanity. This is a task that civil society in India must take up as to both ensure justice for those in Sri Lanka who have suffered due to the Indian state's meddling as also to prevent it from carrying out similar actions against its own citizens;

9) An international investigation into the failure of the United Nations to prevent the genocide of Tamil civilians despite ample warnings and also into accusations that senior UN officials suppressed information about atrocities carried out by Sri Lankan armed forces. It is time for the world to put the UN and its highly paid bureaucrats on the chopping block for repeatedly flouting the principles on which this noble institution was once founded and destroying the faith of all those who believed in its integrity.

10) Organise an international meeting on Tamil Eelam, the right to self-determination of the Sri Lankan Tamils and to highlight atrocities against them by the Sri Lankan state. The meeting should ensure space for a wide range of views, opinions and ideas on finding lasting peace with justice to all communities on the beautiful island of Sri Lanka .

(Satya Sagar is a journalist, writer and videomaker based in New Delhi . He can be contacted at sagarnama@gmail.com)

-Sri Lanka Guardian