An indigenous and regional response to international pressure

By Jehan Perera

(March 23, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has reaffirmed his determination to appoint a panel of experts to advise him on Sri Lanka’s adherence to its international obligations pertaining to human rights. This has evoked a predictably negative response from the Sri Lankan government and, indeed, the more nationalist sections of civil society, whose position was that the elimination of the LTTE was necessary even at high cost for the restoration of normalcy in the country. The government’s consistent position on this issue has been that whatever happened during the period of the war with the LTTE, and subsequently, is an internal matter. The government has also been very critical of those international and local organizations that have called for investigations into the allegations of human rights violations, with the local ones feeling more under threat than their international counterparts.

The biggest concern for the government in regard to the calls for such investigations is the charge of war crimes that allegedly took place in the last phase of the war. Such a charge can conceivably target the highest political authorities who had responsibility over the military. The President of Sudan has suffered this fate. He has been indicted for alleged war crimes in that country’s civil war. As a result President Bashir has had to limit his movements abroad for fear he might be arrested in a country that decides to cooperate with the International Criminal Court and its enforcement mechanisms. The reach of international law has become so unpredictable that high level Israeli government officials now find themselves compelled to restrict their international movements.

The danger for the Sri Lankan government leadership is that unless the issue of human rights violations and possible war crimes is effectively resolved it will continue to haunt them. International human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have become strong critics of the government’s human rights record. They have been in existence for several decades and are likely to continue to be in existence for several more decades to come. They have a mandate to investigate and prevent human rights violations worldwide. Once they believe that they have a case they are not likely to drop it, as it is part of their mandate and rationale for existence.

The government also faces another problem from beyond its borders that is unlikely to go away on its own. This is the more than one million strong Tamil diaspora, which is a very well organized and powerful lobby group. During the early years of the war, in the 1980s and 1990s, they were a formidable lobbying group for the LTTE and for its cause of a separate Tamil state. This changed with the September 11 terror attack in 2001 in the United States, which turned the international community against those who employed terrorist means to achieve their political ends. However, the elimination of the LTTE and the end of terrorism in Sri Lanka can once again strengthen the hand of the Tamil diaspora to lobby against Sri Lanka in the countries where they are now living.

Mounting pressure

The existence of international human rights organizations and the Tamil diaspora means that the pressure on the Sri Lankan government with regard to the human rights situation will not go away. The government may choose to ignore, denounce or resist this pressure, but the pressure will remain. The indications now are that the pressure will increase rather than decrease. The manner in which the UN appears to be standing its ground with regard to establishing an expert panel on Sri Lanka is an indication of this growing pressure. This will also embolden activists amongst the Tamil diaspora to increase their own lobbying efforts which give them a purpose that is larger than merely earning a mundane living abroad.

In this context, the swift mobilization of the Non Aligned Movement to oppose the UN decision to appoint an expert panel would have come as a welcome gesture of solidarity to the Sri Lankan government. In a letter to Mr Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary of the Non Aligned Movement which represents more than seventy countries said that the appointment of a panel of experts to monitor a member state was in contravention of the mandate of the UN. The strongly worded content of this letter was reminiscent of the equally strong statements that made last year in Geneva at the meeting of the UN’s Human Rights Council. The attempt by a section of that Council to pass a resolution critical of Sri Lanka and calling for an investigative mechanism to be set up was defeated by the majority of members.

The swift mobilization of the Non Aligned Movement, and last year of the majority of countries in the UN’s Human Rights Council, is a testimony to the diplomatic capacities of the Sri Lankan government. Many in the Non Aligned Movement would remember Sri Lanka’s successful hosting of the Non Aligned Conference in 1975, which took place in the newly constructed Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall, a gift from China. Even today these countries see a need to keep together to resist international initiatives against some of their members that could be used to set a precedent and be used against them also in the future.

One of the strongest statements made after Sri Lanka’s victory at the UN’s Human Rights Council last year was the one made by the Indian representative. His statement was extremely critical of the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navaneethan Pillay’s actions, which he described as overstepping the UN’s mandate by probing the affairs of a member state. Much the same sentiment can be seen in the statement of the Non Aligned Movement in opposing the UN Secretary General’s special measures to assess the human rights situation in Sri Lanka.

Indian assistance

One of the reasons for Indian and other third world activism to keep the UN and other international bodies from intervening in Sri Lanka against the government’s wishes is not difficult to see. These countries have their own concerns that a course of interventionist action taken against Sri Lanka could also set a precedent against them in the near or distant future. For instance, Indian has for many years been resisting international efforts to mediate or engage in fact finding missions in Kashmir, where a high level of human rights violations has been reported. Other states of the Non Aligned Movement would also be having similar concerns, as they battle ethnic movements for autonomy and secession and have to endure a high level of human rights violations in doing so.

But with the international pressures for intervention mounting on Sri Lanka, it would be judicious if the government were to adopt a problem-solving approach that would take the concerns of the international community into account while safeguarding Sri Lanka’s own sovereignty and national interests. Accordingly, the Sri Lankan government can consider putting in place a credible investigation mechanism of its own to look into what happened in the past. This could be a fact finding commission accompanied by a truth and reconciliation process. It may be possible to reveal the truth of what happened, and the context in which those situations arose, where disclosure and not punishment is the goal. Such a process can distinguish between acts that primarily had a military motivation behind them, as against those in which a criminal motivation predominated.

The second component of the problem-solving approach would be to implement a political solution to the ethnic conflict. Even now the basic framework for such a framework exists in the form of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which is an outcome of the Indo-Lanka Peace Accord of 1987. The Provincial Councils that have been established in term of that law are now well accepted by the general population who are now quite familiar with the Provincial Councils. Strengthening the Provincial Council system so that they will serve the people of the south and west, in addition to the north and east, could become the foundation of a political solution to the ethnic conflict. It could be used to address the unmet needs of the Tamil-speaking minorities of the north and east, without unduly upsetting the Sinhalese ethnic majority that the hand of Tamil separation is being strengthened.

I was in Calcutta last week to attend an international conference on the rights of minorities where Justice Rajinder Sachar, who was the chairperson of the high powered committee appointed by the Prime Minister in 2005 to investigate into the situation of Muslim and other minorities, delivered the concluding lecture. In discussion he suggested to me that India could reconcile the Tamil diaspora to working alongside the Sri Lankan government and civil society if justice was done to the Tamils in Sri Lanka. There are multiple advantages of working closely with India to fashion a solution to the ethnic conflict, and harmonizing with the Tamil diaspora is only one of them. Another important advantage would be to draw on India’s extensive knowledge on schemes of political autonomy and non-territorial autonomy which is has pioneered, and which can be considered as indigenous to Asia. President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s much stated goal of an indigenous political solution may not be too far off if pursued with the requisite zeal.