Middle Path for Sri Lanka
Two parties have to find an middle path to meet eye to eye and find a compromise phase for the sake of whole Sri Lankans. Failure to find a compromise path put the Sri Lanka towards more authoritarianism and isolations. Result would be desperate attempts to stay in power by all necessary means, of which is we have already seen the roots of it.
(April 12, 2012, Copenhagen, Sri Lanka Guardian) International community is pushing the Sri Lankan government to comply with their own way of post war justice and reconciliation process. This seems end with the indictment of Sri Lankan current president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, and his brother, Defence Secretary, Gotabaya Rajapaksa and most high ranking officials. On the other hand, Sri Lankan government is barley recognising if they have committed any war crimes at all. Therefore, they are not even interested implementing home grown Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation’s recommendations towards post-bellum scenario. These two approaches have to come to middle path and find compromises in mid way for the sake of whole Sri Lankans.
Both sides occupied with their own political agendas. So called international community have a blanket of human rights and international humanitarian law to cover up their realpolitik. Sri Lankan government, present leaders of the country, finds no way out of the entanglement but to drag the whole country towards the authoritarian path to save their own asses for most of the cases.
Two parties have to find an middle path to meet eye to eye and find a compromise phase for the sake of whole Sri Lankans. Failure to find a compromise path put the Sri Lanka towards more authoritarianism and isolations. Result would be desperate attempts to stay in power by all necessary means, of which is we have already seen the roots of it.
There are no empirical case studies that could help the cause of international community either. It is highly unlikely that Sri Lanka will put on a long term reconciliation path if the demands of international community are met with the implementation of an open judge led inquiry. These demands are highly paradoxical since these are not materialised in their own jurisdictions.
Regardless intrinsic impossibility of finding truth the attempt itself is the reconciliation process that Sri Lanka has to go through. It is a long lasted ethical question if we ever can find the truth. The truth is the most suited and accepted interpretation of the historical events. Here the question become who has the upper had to interpret the truth of preceding events of the final few months and days to the conflict. So we are never going to find the truth by its own mean without prone to interpretations.
If Sri Lanka let along, the communities will find their own way of interpreting these sequences of events. These of cause will mostly driven by the government process; however incomplete and bias they are. And to say that these processes will not reflect the criticism of international community is an ignorant of the globalised information technologies and inevitable reflexive processes. But yearly reminders of a disputed truth are the last thing that put the country in a right direction.
Two parties have to find a middle path for the sake for Sri Lankan communities.
A.V. Anuradha Sampath is a Post-graduate student of ‘International Security and Law’ at University of Sothern Denmark. He can be reached at anu.sampath@hotmail.com.
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