A people-centred foreign policy

By Kath Noble

(January 06, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) While Mahinda Rajapaksa and Sarath Fonseka passed yet another week bickering over the apparently burning question of who deserves most credit for the war victory, a small fishing boat carried five Tamils to India. They claimed to be refugees. Sri Lanka could never be their home, they told a journalist reporting for The Hindu from Ramanathapuram, because they would always be treated differently.

Such incidents often go unnoticed here. We are so used to the idea that people want to leave, it doesn‘t register as news.

This time, however, when asked how they’d managed to get across the Palk Strait, the asylum seekers happened to say that it had been an easy journey because there were fewer patrols since the defeat of the LTTE. Now a security matter, they had to be taken seriously. The Navy issued a stern denial, reassuring the world that there had been no let up in monitoring of the seas around Sri Lanka.

No doubt we ought to be glad. Cutting off supply lines was crucial to the Government’s success in reuniting the island and ridding the world of Prabhakaran, and it obviously wouldn’t be a good thing to allow weapons to be smuggled in again. There are still plenty of people who might use them, given half a chance.

That isn’t the only issue, of course. There is also the drugs trade to consider. It’s already a big enough nuisance and anecdotal evidence suggests that the problem continues to grow.

Whether or not it was easy for the asylum seekers to get away is hardly the point. What makes people want to leave Sri Lanka is the rather more important question.

It would make an excellent focus for Rohitha Bogollagama, who announced on New Year’s Day that the country would be following a people-centred foreign policy in 2010. He will need to find a way of making that statement meaningful in any case, or we might be tempted to wonder if he intends it to be something like Tony Blair’s ethical foreign policy, which turned out to be no more than a splendid excuse to drop bombs on people. That would be decidedly 2009, the Minister should realise.

The Tamils who traversed the Palk Strait last week are five among a huge number. Many thousands of people have fled Sri Lanka over the years, and the phenomenon doesn’t appear to have stopped with the end of the war.

Of late, there has been extensive coverage of attempts by several groups to get as far as Australia, one of whom has been involved in a stand-off with the Indonesian authorities for the last three months, having been forced to dock in a port near Jakarta. Another boatload has been persuaded to give up a similar protest on the customs vessel that rescued them from their sinking ship in the middle of the Indian Ocean, with the majority of its passengers leaving Indonesia for third countries a week or so ago. The Australian government promised that their cases would be assessed quickly.

Then there has been the saga with the Sri Lankans on the Ocean Lady. The Canadian courts are still in the process of deciding their fate.

The Foreign Ministry is in the habit of dismissing all these people as economic migrants. They see the kind of money that can be made in the West and they will do anything to have a go at securing a comfortable future for themselves and their relatives, its representatives tend to say. If they can’t get visas to move legally, they pay smugglers.

It’s true, but it can’t be anywhere near the whole story. Compared with other countries in South Asia, there’s relatively little desperate poverty in Sri Lanka. There are free education and health services and a big public sector providing secure if not very comfortable jobs for both skilled and unskilled workers. An awful proportion of Colombo’s population lives in slums, but these are nothing compared with the deprived areas near major cities in India, for example. Economically, Sri Lankans are not that badly off. Of course there will be young people willing to take a chance at making their fortune, but they know that it isn’t always easy to do more than survive in Western countries, especially now that their economies are suffering the effects of the global financial crisis.

To that has to be added the very serious risks taken by those opting to be smuggled out of the country. An excellent piece of journalism that appeared in the Sunday Leader a few weeks ago about boats operating from Negombo highlighted this very well. It quoted an agent as saying, ‘We tell anyone who is thinking about going that they must be ready to die.’ Indeed, many people disappear on the way. Boats run into poor weather or coral reefs and sink. More often, their occupants succumb to disease, as they are crammed into a tiny hold without sanitation. Water and food can run out if there are delays.

Incidentally, this article noted that the Navy was perfectly aware of these operations and happily looked the other way. With smugglers earning some Rs. 30 million per trip, there is apparently plenty to spare for bribes. That sounds like another security problem that could do with solving, and promptly.

What is less well publicised is the length of time asylum seekers have to spend in detention if they are caught, as many are. Conditions are often quite bad, especially for those stopped before they reach the West.

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees, which is mandated to look after the nearly one million people whose cases are in the process of being reviewed worldwide, drew attention in one of its recent publications to the plight of a Sri Lankan family who had spent almost two years in a detention centre in Bangkok. They had no idea how much longer they would have to wait to find out if their refugee status had been approved. Meanwhile, husband and wife were separated and kept in overcrowded cells without even enough space to lie down. Other people in the same facility had been held there for seven years, waiting for the Thai government to decide whether or not they qualified as refugees, so that they could either be resettled or returned to their countries of origin.

The other standard response of the Foreign Ministry to this kind of story is to declare that anybody wanting to flee the country must be a terrorist. Again, this is sometimes the case, but it is clearly not always so.

In any case, there should be no need for people who were involved with the LTTE to run. Only the senior leaders are to be punished, according to the Government’s policy, and almost all of them are dead. The sole survivor from that level of the organisation, according to the University Teachers for Human Rights, is already in London. The junior cadres are to be rehabilitated, which means helped to return to civilian life. If they fear this enough to leave the country, there must be something wrong with the programme. It is supposed to be about providing them with new skills and knowledge, so that they can return to their homes and find useful work. The Government needs to make this clearer, if it believes that members of the LTTE are so determined not to participate.

Whether people other than economic migrants and terrorists are leaving or not, the world certainly believes that there are refugees amongst those undertaking the trips. The deal referred to earlier with Australia, for example, implicitly recognised that the group concerned had a genuine reason to fear persecution here.

This is what might just succeed in grabbing the attention of Rohitha Bogollagama. He needs to convince the leaders of other countries that Sri Lanka is capable of protecting all its citizens, else they will continue to bring up annoying questions about human rights. What’s more, the Minister will get the blame if there are many more upsets like the loss of the GSP Plus trade concessions from the European Union.

It cannot be a propaganda exercise. The Government has to create an environment within the country in which it would be laughable for anyone to suggest that Tamils are discriminated against. Relying on the vagaries of interpretation and explanation will not be enough. The war is over, after all, and expectations are quite rightly much higher now. Sri Lanka has to build up a new image of the dynamic, progressive and inclusive state that we all know it can be, and this has to be based on reality. People have to feel that it is true.

This first week of January would seem to be a good time to begin. The only problem is the elections, which look set to ensure that politics continues to be about nothing other than the trading of insults for some time to come.

(The writer can be reached at kathnoble99@gmail.com)