Pre-empting international enquiry on war crimes

(November 20, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Giving into pressure from some of the right thinking sections of the international community pursuing a just and reasonable result to the accusations of crimes against humanity committed both by the Liberation of Tamil Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Sri Lankan State, the Sri Lankan government has finally admitted its guilt. This is primarily to get over the impasse on the GSP plus and to de-fuse the international pressure by dragging the red herring across its trail. To pre-empt further pressure, Rajapakse has appointed another of those farcical “independent committees to "comprehensively examine and provide recommendations".

As we did previously in regard to the Commission on the Muttur massacre of the 17 aid workers and the killing of the students in Trincomalee we can once again give the assurance, considering the deplorably corrupt state of the Sri Lankan justice system and its players, that this committee would not go anywhere but to the scrap heap. We are told that the committee would be headed by a legal expert D S Wijesinghe, Minister for Disaster Management and Human Rights, a politician with his expertise in law which bears no relevance in determining the culpability of these crimes given the abject corruption in all aspects of civil administration and the justice system not to mention their moral standards.

As for the LTTE, with their leadership destroyed there is none left to answer charges preferred against them and therefore proceeding against the LTTE would be futile. Therefore the only party left to answer charges of war crimes against their adversaries, the Tamils, is the Sri Lankan State.

Taking cover under the notion of sovereignty does not absolve the terrorist State of Sri Lanka from its responsibility and culpability in war crimes, crimes against humanity and the ongoing genocide in terms of the international nature of the international law. In justifying the horrendous human rights abuses the defence secretary and brother of President Rajapakse, Gotabaya Rajapakse, at the outset, propounded his doctrine: “anything is fair” in that the Sri Lankan government was at war with its own Tamil subjects and their leadership, made out to be part of the global war against terror purportedly to be helpful to George W Bush. The tenets of this Goebbelsian doctrine also manifests in the brutal attacks on the independent media personnel resulting in murders, assaults and torture of their personnel both Sinhalese and Tamil.

The war waged was actually one between the Sri Lankan State and the de facto Tamil State with the leadership controlling a major portion of their traditional homeland for the liberation and self-determination of the Tamils consequent to the continual terrorist acts by the State as the only recourse available, notwithstanding the merits and demerits of their strategies and the Tamil people accepting their leadership under the given circumstances.

Technically, the principal war crime committed by the LTTE was the recruitment of child soldiers chiefly engineered by the Minister Muralitharan alias Karuna forgiven and rewarded by being made a minister of State for the good work of betraying the LTTE leadership driven to do so by embezzling their funds. With the abundance of time hanging on his hand he entertains overworked political observers and journalists around the world providing them comic relief with his refreshingly brilliant ideas, intellectual insight and the equally bright flashes of his visionary thinking while assuring the Tamils that at all times they are in the safe hands of His Excellency, President Rajapakse. Better and higher things, we understand, are in store for him, before he is finally thrown away like an old shoe.

On the own admission of the politicised former army commander General Fonseka appealing to Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism, the military had to overlook the traditional rules of war, (namely the Geneva conventions), and even kill LTTE rebels who came to surrender carrying white flags during the war. It is now evident that those who surrendered were brutally tortured before being killed. Later on, speaking to a predominantly Sinhala Buddhist audience at a Buddhist temple in Washington he stated that thousands of Tamils suspected of being involved with the LTTE amongst the IDPs now interned in Vavuniya have to be destroyed (just like that) a synonym according to him to be rehabilitated or resettled, lost in the translation.

It has to be inferred that the IDPs are virtual prisoners of war considered either terrorists or potential terrorists harbouring terrorists or their relatives. If they are considered terrorists then in Fonseka’s words they have to be destroyed. Until the “real terrorists” are sought and destroyed, perhaps the IDPs will remain incarcerated along with the others paying the same price. If they are regarded prisoners of war, then they have to be treated as prisoners of war in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. If these IDPs have not so far been considered prisoners of war, then what are they? As one IDP remarked they have to prove that they not terrorists every second in the day! If they are in fact prisoners of war, then they should be afforded the basic dignity and the privileges afforded to prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention. Every crime now being committed against them is a war crime or a crime against humanity for it is a fine line that distinguishes one from the other.

Other war crimes by the Sri Lankan government included the repeated shelling of civilian hospitals and civilians in the no fire zones, the aerial bombardments of other civilian institutions and their means of livelihood, dropping of cluster bombs and other chemical weapons, attacks on churches where Tamil fugitives from war sought refuge, damages to civilian sources of agriculture and livelihood. The 280,000 IDPS, men, women, the infirm and the children have been entrapped within the razor wires and kept within for months have not been told why they are there. 40,000 of the detainees are children under 5 years of age, 65,000 are children aged between 5 and 18 years of age, 40% of pregnant mothers and 50% of lactating mothers in the camps are said to be anemic and 50,000 or more suffer from mental instability caused by the trauma and confinement.

As to the crimes against humanity, those endured by the Tamil people in the hands of the terrorist State for the past 50 years are innumerable. The LTTE had also its share in no small measure: assassinations of politicians, summary punishments, the expulsion of the Muslim people from their traditional homelands in Mannar and Jaffna and the prevention of Tamil civilians from fleeing from the war zone during the final stages of the war. These pale in comparison to the magnitude of those committed deliberately and systematically against the Tamil people by the Sri Lankan State from the early 1970s claimed to be their its own citizens. Torture, unlawful arrests, murders, execution like killings, rape, disappearances as a means of destroying without answerability that could put Pinochet of Chile to shame, abductions, false imprisonments, murders of journalists who dared to speak the truth, their imprisonment, and attacks on them incarcerations, embargos on medicines and essential food items and many more have been the hallmark of Sri Lankan terrorism against the Tamil people. Terrorism and the Human rights abuses were directed against the Tamils committed deliberately and systematically purely because of their ethnicity. The above are just a few. Even today many of the IDPs said to be released to go back to their elusive homes go disappearing unaccounted for and those in custody are tortured.

The programme of genocide by State backed pogroms was put in train in the year 1956 with the intention of “destroying an ethnical and racial group on account of their race and ethnicity” with no end in sight. The subsequent denial during the recent war and just prior, of adequate food, water and medicine, the use of cluster bombs and chemical weapons, the repeated attacks on civilian hospitals wantonly killing patients, the massacre of thousands of civilians during the war, preventing and punishing of doctors for treating the injured, promoting maternity and infant mortalities also by the denial of milk food and other infant food to babies, the massacre of more than 10,000 civilians bombed and allowed to die The burning of a cultural icon in the Jaffna library as far back as in 1981, with cabinet ministers on sight privy to the burning, attempts to obliterating their history, degradation by the confiscation and illegal occupation of traditional lands and attacks on churches and temples were all definite instances of genocide.

War crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide against the Tamil people have all been committed with impunity with the patronage of the State and they continue to be committed.

The well meaning sections of the international community will be privy to soon destroying a nation if they are to only stand and watch to be hoodwinked by a mock investigation by a State that has taken the whole world for a ride through the rat cunning of those responsible believing that others are insane enough to be deceived. If you want to understand them at their own wave length and learn their intent, you have to descend to their level of thinking. The major players cannot but betray their innate racism as revealed in their comments about the Tamils. Only New Delhi and Ban ki Moon can relate to this kind of crude diplomacy and tactic. Until these crimes are brought to justice, for the Tamils, it will be an unrelenting nightmare.

The possibilities of humanitarian intervention must be explored thoroughly to save the Tamil people from extinction. The scope of the international law would be a joke if the well meaning sections of humanity are to turn their backs to it.

(The writer , editor of the 'eelam nation', an online journal.

-Sri Lanka Guardian