Democracy, transparency and the war

By Shani
Courtesy: The Island

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall – think of it, ALWAYS." – Mahatma Gandhi

(December 19, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) This latest report from the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) documents the final chapter of Sri Lanka’s war 26-year war. Drawing on individual eyewitness accounts, it chronicles the relentless violence experienced by survivors of the conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam between September 2008 and May 2009, when the Sri Lankan government ultimately crushed the LTTE leadership and declared victory. What these survivors’ stories make clear is that for both parties, the key to military dominance lay not in brilliant strategies, but in an utter disregard for the lives of civilians and combatants alike, driven by their leaders’ single-minded pursuit of personal power.

Both sides treated truth as an enemy. Outsiders who could bear witness to these events were kept out or silenced; dissent on either side was crushed; the poor and powerless were treated as cannon fodder and in the case of Tamil civilians, ultimately locked up to prevent them from revealing what they had experienced. As the report notes, Sri Lanka’s "war against truth has grave implications for the future of democracy."

But this report is more than a catalogue of war-time atrocities; it provides an analysis of the social and political underpinnings of the conflict that made atrocities possible, and that have historically shielded the people who committed such crimes from justice.

This report is a call to Sri Lankans of all communities to examine their history and take control of their present; to acknowledge the degeneration of the country and its democratic institutions, to demand justice for the crimes that have been committed in the name of fighting terrorism or securing Eelam,and to declare "never again.

Propaganda and the Truth

The above and what follows is a verbatim extract from the Special Report No 34 of the University Teachers (Jaffna) released this week. We make no apology for using this column space for re-publishing substantial extracts of this report because the issues raised in the report need a wider readership of the concerned citizens of our country. We have left out the eye witness accounts of various incidents during the final phases of the war despite the UTHR reports having a reputation for careful research from credible sources. We wish to avoid propagandists from diverting attention from the real issues raised in the report by beginning some controversy on some detail in the eye witness accounts. That is exactly what has happened to the issue raised by General Fonseka in his interview to a Sunday newspaper.

Sarath Fonseka was the Army Commander during the entire period of the last phase of the Eelam War. As a professional soldier, he has quite rightly stated that he would take full responsibility for all actions of the Army during his period as Army Commander. In his newspaper interview, he did make reference to an issue concerning the attempted surrender by some LTTE leaders after mediation by a third party. That was not a new revelation. That had been aired and published in several news web sites and newspapers months earlier. The present attempt to denigrate Fonseka for those remarks stating that he was "letting down" the Army and even breaching the Official Secrets Act is nothing more than election propaganda. Sooner rather than later, the truth has to emerge and the UTHR report is in this direction. As always, the report is a balanced one, where necessary it is critical of both leading Presidential candidates. That is why the UTHR report is essential reading for all who value democratic rights in our country. We return to the UTHR report.

Were all civilian deaths and the destruction necessary?

It was bloody war and international norms were breached by both sides, which by trapping people in the conflict zone wrought large scale death and destruction.

The State systematically marginalised and restricted the operation of international organisations, subverting their efforts to humanise the conduct of the war and secure reduced casualties. It convinced the majority of people in the country (and many outside), that utter annihilation was only way to deal with the forces like LTTE. At the same time the Government blatantly lied about the real number of civilians trapped in the zone, and the number killed by their disproportionate use of force in the form of intense shelling and bombing.

The LTTE’s callous attitude towards the civilians, its forced conscription and the violent and coercive methods it used to prevent people from fleeing for their lives, further helped the government to successfully neutralise any criticism against their modes of operation.

Perpetrators must be brought to account.

It is also imperative for international human rights activists and organisations to go beyond mere condemnation of the way in which this war was conducted and recognise what it has shown us about the limitations of the present broader architecture of international Human Rights and Humanitarian mechanisms and institutions, which failed utterly to avert this disaster.

Social and political forces with narrow ethnic or religious ideological trappings continue to undermine democracy in most of the developing nations. These are not new phenomena; the world had seen many major religious crusades to wars between nations which in the modern era led to the creation of international institutions, conventions and treaties. The unequal economic and military power structures operating at a global level continue to undermine these institutions while allowing local actors to blame the external powers for their own failures.

In Sri Lanka, the political elite continues to fail the people, and whatever potential the country had to move towards a healthier path of development and prosperity has been continuously undermined by narrow electoral politics. The country is at a crossroads. Improvement will not be achieved by relying on the political elite in the belief that they will have at last to moderate self interest and address the many underlying social and economic issues which caused the war.

The callousness of Sri Lanka’s powerful towards their own people has been clearly shown in the persistent undermining of state institutions, the deterioration of which has been met with major armed resistance again and again. Today politicians continue to use this war, this monumental tragedy, for political capital in their narrow power game in the South, while the removed and insensitive Tamil Diaspora tries to further polarise people in their home country with their meaningless rhetoric and slogans of Transnational government.

There is only one way forward. An initiative to forge a broad multi-ethnic and multi-religious movement that challenges these narrow ethnic and religious agendas and Sri Lanka’s climate of impunity; that demands accountability for the grave and systematic violation of human rights that has for so long prevented Sri Lanka from progressing. This should be the priority for all those who desire to fight for social justice and human rights.

Where have we failed?

The war, its end and aftermath has left us all with a task of reckoning. This is not a task just for the Sri Lankan Government, or the Sinhalese in whose name it acted, or for those who supported the LTTE from the privilege of exile (who are to a great extent responsible for the misery of their fellows). It is also the duty of those of us within the Tamil community who opposed the LTTE’s politics and practices, and who tried to expose what it was doing to the people in the name of liberation.

We, and others who share our views, too are imbued with a sense of failure. We might say that our analysis was correct on where the LTTE’s brand of politics would inevitably carry the people and that its end would be catastrophic. But then what is the virtue in having been right?

We protested when the LTTE was in the early 1990s filling up its prisons with dissidents, many of them of the highest character and commitment, and was exterminating thousands of them to keep the people in the dark about what it was doing to Tamil society. Some called us liars, and many others found us interesting. But nothing was done to stop it. Soon many international NGOs caught the peace bug and did not want to touch the LTTE’s human rights record, while not disputing what we said about what the Government was doing. The peace bug was so potent that this lobby managed to shift the blame on to President Kumaratunge when she talked peace in early 1995 and the LTTE started war, after using talks to stock up petrol and cement and getting the Army to vacate Pooneryn.

We protested similarly when a large bandwagon followed cheering the Norwegian peace process, seeing in it as a brilliant stroke, while ignoring the LTTE’s unremitting conscription of children and continuous killing of dissidents using the access provided by the peace process. Those who shared our views were rebuffed and in the predictable course of things, Sinhalese extremism, which too consistently criticised the process for its own reasons, attained the upper hand. People who were genuinely concerned about protecting the rights of the Tamil people and wanted to find a political settlement in the South, were marginalised.. The present cataclysm is the result.

Many people who were critical of the Norwegian process told us we should support the recent war because the Government was getting rid of the LTTE, and were angry that we were instead exposing the violations of the Government. Sadly today, equating dissidence with treachery has become the linchpin of the Government’s war against democracy and the media, just as it was for the LTTE for many years, and with devastating results of Tamil society.

We must confess that even as we opposed the ideology of the recent war and the manner in which it was fought, we were not alert enough to the full enormity of the human toll. In retrospect, there were several reasons for this lapse. Estimates of the numbers killed and wounded communicated to us by civilians who were coming out of the war zone were well below figures being cited by the UN and other sources. At the same time we believed that under such enormous international pressure, the Government must show some real concern for the civilians. In this we were proved wrong.

Historically, the abysmal operational standards maintained by the Sri Lankan military have largely gone unchallenged by the international community because so much of the blame for provoking attacks lay with the LTTE. When the Army made its first abortive attempt to overrun Jaffna on 9th July 1995, it inundated civilian areas under barrages of shells, fired without any warning and then on the following day bombed the church in Navaly where a large number of refugees had gathered, killing in all nearly 300 men, women and children.

There seemed to be something inevitable about the army’s violations, given the manner in which the LTTE had used peace negotiations as a prelude to launching a new round of war. We covered all this and the subsequent disappearances in Jaffna, but these did not feature in public discourse at the time as war crimes, partly because the Government was then perceived to be intent on a political settlement, while it was the LTTE that was undermining the effort.

In 2009 it was different. Neither side was talking peace, and neither side cared what happened to civilians who got in the way of their war efforts. The rhetoric of Sinhalese supremacism with ideological overtones of conquest was being voiced from the highest echelons of power. Attacks on the media, and the continuous slaughter of civilians for several months spread the stink far and wide. The situation was compounded by the way the survivors were treated to suppress the tragedy of the war.

-Sri Lanka Guardian