A postscript on the IDPs

By Kath Noble

(October 07, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) From the responses to my piece of last week about the ongoing detention of IDPs, it would appear that Sri Lanka is divided in two. There is the group that secretly believes that the people in Menik Farm only have themselves to blame for their fate because they chose to stick by Prabhakaran all those years, and the faction that has long been convinced that the Government spends its time dreaming up new and ever more vicious ways of harassing people from minority communities. The one thing that these competing distortions of reality have in common is the assumption that the debate is about how much you sympathise with the IDPs.

Yes, I feel sorry for them. Just because David Miliband, Ranil Wickremesinghe and the other usual suspects are busy using the plight of the IDPs for untoward purposes doesn’t mean that the rest of us should deny ourselves a human reaction to their suffering.

Many of them have been forced to abandon their homes several times. They have lost all their belongings. The fighting will have claimed at least one of their close relatives, if not more. They lived through the final stages of the conflict as the human shields of desperate terrorists who would stop at nothing to guarantee their own survival. They were bombed and shot at almost incessantly for months. They lived in the most makeshift conditions and they didn’t have enough to eat. On escaping from that particular hell, they were taken to camps that they have not been allowed to leave ever since.

It has been tough for them. We must acknowledge that fact, whatever else we have to say about the situation.

Sympathising with the IDPs is important in ensuring that we pay sufficient attention to the suitability of the current arrangements at Menik Farm, but it is not a sensible basis on which to suggest their release. Suffering is an inevitable consequence of war, and there is no sense in pretending otherwise.

I am interested in security. In the aftermath of three decades of pretty relentless fighting and so many deaths on all sides, Sri Lanka has to be serious about it. The prospect of further attacks and even a return to full-blown war is much feared by all of us who know what this country has been through, not just the people whose families are in danger.

This is why screening was a good idea. It is obvious that LTTE cadres would have travelled down from the Vanni with the IDPs. Many surrendered as they reached the Army frontlines, either because they had been compelled to join up in the first place or because they accepted that their struggle was over with the loss of Prabhakaran and their final sliver of territory, but assuming that an enemy as cunning as the LTTE hadn’t arranged for some of its people to live and fight another day would have been stupid.

The Security Forces have had a significant amount of time to do this now. The IDPs have been in Menik Farm for between four and nine months.

Some of the readers who took issue with what I said last week argued that the Government should not set a limit on screening and that to suggest any such thing was to be lax on security. They felt that the process must be allowed to continue at its own meandering pace for as long as necessary until the last cadre is identified.

Besides the problem of how the Security Forces are going to know that they have finished the job, this being a rather different task to killing Prabhakaran and re-establishing control over the entire landmass of Sri Lanka, there are a number of points that require attention. Let me note down a few.

The longer screening goes on, the more unlikely it becomes that the process will uncover serious cadres. The same day as my column appeared in The Island, a senior officer in the Police department was reported as saying that 20,000 people had escaped from Menik Farm to date. Having been there, the news that some IDPs had managed to get out didn’t surprise me in the slightest, although the figure was much higher than I would have guessed. Security is lax, despite the presence of barbed wire, and that’s without considering the option of paying a bribe. Indian authorities have stated that LTTE cadres that they arrested had paid as little as Rs. 50,000 to be let out of the camps.

I don’t think that it is reasonable to claim that people determined to continue their fight against the State would have sat patiently in their tents while all this was going on, leaving such a massive number of harmless civilians to risk their lives and permanent freedom to break out and spend at least the near future in hiding. It just doesn’t make sense.

We also have to ask how many serious cadres were in the Vanni at the end of the conflict. Some 10,000 LTTE cadres have already been identified and are being held separately, according to the Security Forces. A fair number will have been killed in the fighting. If the Police statement of last week is accurate, the majority of the people who have escaped from Menik Farm are also serious cadres. This gives us a rather large total. It is curious that Prabhakaran had to go to the trouble of stealing children if he had so many serious cadres available to him.

These points will undoubtedly be of no interest whatsoever to readers who believe that Sri Lanka must not risk letting go serious cadres with the IDPs, no matter how few in number. Just keep on screening, I can already hear them chanting.

What this could mean in practice is most bizarre. Harmless civilians might spend as long waiting for the authorities to clear them of involvement with the LTTE as the Government is intending to take to rehabilitate people who admit to being fully committed members of the organisation. Proving your innocence isn’t so easy.

It seems to me that this is going to end not when the last cadre is identified but when the Security Forces recover their perspective. Having made so many sacrifices, it would be wrong to blame them for this, but decisions are supposed to be taken in a more logical fashion, especially when the consequences are so immense. This will happen in the fullness of time, and it would be easier not to question the Government about it. That doesn’t make it the right thing to do.

I see a more important risk. While serious cadres are busy escaping from Menik Farm, the majority of harmless civilians are being held against their will. Whatever the conditions are like, they are powerless to improve their situation and they have no idea how long they will have to spend in the camps. For some completely inexplicable reason, the authorities haven’t even managed to reunite all the families who were separated on the journey down from the Vanni, although the Government correctly identified this as the top priority for the IDPs several months ago. The longer screening goes on, the angrier they will become.

If the Security Forces respond to disturbances in the way that they did last week, shooting at or in the vicinity of people who got a bit unruly as they were moving from one zone to another, it is going to be pretty bad. According to some reports, a child was paralysed.

We are talking about people who lived all those years under Prabhakaran. They were subject to the crudest of propaganda about the Government and they can probably remember when it was mostly true. Giving them such huge reasons to hate may not look like a threat in the regular sense, but it simply cannot be good for security.

The responses that I found most bemusing were those that persisted in claiming that demining was relevant to the ongoing detention of IDPs. One reader even suggested that I was so unfeeling that I didn’t care whether they got blown up.

Release doesn’t equal resettlement. If the people in Menik Farm were given the choice, those with family or friends willing to take them in and those who had the means to arrange temporary accommodation elsewhere in the country would be able to go off and do that, while others could remain in the camps. A fair number might well decide to hang around, given that they will get food and shelter, but this would be voluntary and therefore without the unfortunate implications for their attitude towards the State.

Security being vital, other measures could be taken to guard against however many serious cadres may still be amongst the IDPs doing something untoward when they got out. Discussing what these could be would be better done by experts.

It is only when such people do not bother to think that the rest of us have to get involved in the debate. I am sure that most Sri Lankans don’t fall into either of the categories that I mentioned in my opening paragraph, although the length and bloody nature of the conflict has undoubtedly inflated the number that do. As such, there is every reason to believe that a sensible outcome will emerge. I just hope that this happens sooner rather than later, and these comments are intended to encourage that.

-Sri Lanka Guardian