EDITORIAL: Screw the brain

 "The report did have some apparent editorial mistakes such as naming Basil Rajapakse as secretary of defence, and debatable assumptions like LTTE should be held responsible only for those atrocities done within the territory under their control, when in fact most of their bomb blasts targetting civilians were in Colombo."

by Thrishantha Nanayakkara

(April 28, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) From the day the panel appointed to advice the UN secretary general on the possible areas of human rights violations in the last phase of the war in Sri Lanka handed over their advisory report, a swirl of political arguments has started to sweep across Sri Lanka. At the epicentre of this swirl is a friction between two interpretations of reconciliation. The view held by the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) is that reconciliation is about forgetting the past and moving forward. Others argue that we have moved forward like that three times in our history and are most likely to do in the future. Therefore, reconciliation involves using specific experiences in the past to address fundamental flaws in the notion of citizenship, judiciary, law enforcement, and democracy, to move forward to a more enlightened future where we do not repeat past mistakes. The UN report is not on the entirety of the 30 year war, but on the conduct of the war in the last phase, nor it has condemned the war altogether. Why is the last phase of a war important? It is important because the approaches and strategies, both diplomatic and military, taken during the last phase of the war lay the foundation to achieve the ultimate goal of the struggle - a fundamentally different society - living in peace. The real change takes place in the steps taken in terms of reconciliation based on the immediate memory of the war. According to Professor Viet Nguyen of the University of Southern California, every war is fought twice. Once in the battlefield, and then in the memory. What affects reconciliation most is the immediate memory, and early memories of the war comes in ripples in later debates of social reforms with their impact modulated by how the reconciliation process took place. For instance, a major part of Japanese constitution was written soon after the World war II, based on talks during the last few weeks of the war, and all other memories are viewed through that template. The movie "Hotaru (fireflies)" is a classic example.

Among the recommendations of the panel's report, what struck me most was the recommendation to issue death certificates to those who are missing. This may sound very insignificant to most, but mere official acceptance that somebody is not alive any more allows the rest of the family members to move forward with their lives, and to process other legal matters related to the death of a family member. It could simply mean that a woman can re-marry somebody else legally. Doesn't it directly contribute to both definitions of reconciliation? If so, how dare we reject the total report out-right? Other recommendations such as to release a list of names of those who are in detention, to consider lifting the law of emergency under which several political opponents were arrested, also do have their merits under both definitions of reconciliation.

The report did have some apparent editorial mistakes such as naming Basil Rajapakse as secretary of defence, and debatable assumptions like LTTE should be held responsible only for those atrocities done within the territory under their control, when in fact most of their bomb blasts targetting civilians were in Colombo. Moreover, the report had claimed that the famous LLRC was set up to find facts to blame past Governments - a political motive of low taste - without much elaboration. However, the GoSL could address these issues item-wise without resorting to generalizations.

Talking to friends, I get the feeling that the present approach of putting nationalistic politics at the forefront does not serve the grand goals of reconciliation. In fact president Mahinda Rajapakse had made bold statements like "I am ready to sit on that electric chair for the country", which completely misleads the Naive public, because Sri Lanka is not a party to the Rome treaty for him to sit on that chair. Even the call for mass demonstrations on May day will only help this Nationalistic political consolidation, not reconciliation, nor to convince other countries that we are genuinely interested in reconciliation.