Prisoners of the Past — says Dayan Jayatilleka

Elmo Jayawardane, reviewing Dayan Jayatilleka: Long War, Cold Peace

Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka has not stopped at merely hitting the nail on the head; he’s gone a lot deeper! The man has taken a Black and Decker and drilled the skull of the reader and carefully pushed in 498 pages of faction and action (shameful and laudable) that relate to our “Long War” of almost three decades.

It is a timely publication too. The International Tambourine Men gathered in Geneva flaunting their lily white innocence in attempts to barbecue us. At least, we the ordinary habitants of this land should know how the cookie crumbled while we suffered the consequences of divisibility for thirty grisly years. Of course the ‘mea culpa’ rests with none other than the leadership. They festered the wound of ethnic divide and titillated political maggots that nearly annihilated us as a nation. We need to know some truths that have been gagged and swept under the carpets by both sides, ably assisted by the good Samaritans who sat on the third seat preaching negotiated peace. ‘Long War, Cold Peace’ is the answer. Dr. Dayan is punching hard, in a ring where he knows the rules, and he is not holding anything back. There is a good possibility that the book may take him to the mouth of a long menacing serpent in the political game of ‘Snakes and Ladders.” But then, with his historically valuable contribution in ‘Long war, Cold peace’, he will walk tall among people who really matter. 

Canberra, India ‘water down’ UN resolution on Sri Lankan human rights

Amanda Hodge, in The Weekend Australian, 23/24 March 2013

THE UN Human Rights Council has for the second year running condemned ongoing human rights abuses in Sri Lanka and called for an independent investigation into allegations of war crimes by both sides in the 26-year civil conflict. But international rights campaigners yesterday blamed Australia and India for the final watering down of the resolution, thus easing the pressure on the Sri Lankan government, by putting domestic political concerns ahead of human rights. Both countries eventually voted in favour of the US-sponsored resolution, which expresses concern at reports in Sri Lanka of continuing enforced disappearances, extra-judicial killings, torture, threats to the rule of law, religious discrimination and intimidation of activists and journalists.

After pushing for more conciliatory language, India tried unsuccessfully at the eleventh hour to toughen the resolution under pressure from allied Tamil parties that walked away from the ruling government alliance over its failure to take a hard stand against Sri Lanka. The resolution passed late Thursday with 25 votes in favour and 13 against. Sri Lanka rejected the motion and questioned the “inordinate and disproportional level of interest in a country that successfully ended a 30-year conflict against terrorism”.

US sponsors and human rights organisations have been pushing for several years for an independent, international war crimes and human rights investigation and expressed their disappointment yesterday at the failure of the Human Rights Council’s second resolution to demand such a probe. Instead the resolution asks the Sri Lankan government to conduct its own “independent and credible investigation into allegations of violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law” and to implement the recommendations of its Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission.

New York-based Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth said the original UN resolution had been watered down at the insistence of India, which had been seeking a consensus vote that would garner Sri Lanka’s co-operation. And he claimed Australia’s “belated” support for the resolution – which he attributed to fear that overt criticism would prompt a fresh flood of Sri Lankan asylum-seekers – meant an opportunity was lost to persuade regional fence-sitters to support the vote. “We know Australia fears any criticism of Sri Lanka that could turn the spigot on boatpeople, but we would hope Australia would press for an end to this impunity for mass murder,” Mr Roth told The Weekend Australian yesterday. “Frankly, Australia should not allow itself to be blackmailed by Colombo in this way.In the end the Australian government did the right thing by supporting the resolution, but it would have been more helpful if that support had been articulated earlier. It might have helped us to more easily overcome some of the reluctance elsewhere in the region.”

A 2011 UN panel found credible evidence that both the Sri Lankan military and Tamil Tiger rebels committed human rights abuses in the final months of the war in 2009, when thousands of civilians were trapped in a thin strip of land in northern Sri Lanka as fighting raged around them. It found as many as 40,000 may have been killed in the final five months alone, though the Sri Lankan government estimated the death toll at 9000.

Its Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission cleared the military of allegations it deliberately attacked civilians, though it did find some individual troops were guilty of violations.

Human Rights Watch yesterday claimed Sri Lanka’s “campaign of rampant denial, distortion and intimidation should be sufficient evidence that the Sri Lankan government will never hold its forces accountable and that an independent, international investigation is needed . . . Rather than take the Council’s concerns seriously, the Council has failed victims again this year.” Amnesty International also criticised the watered-down resolution, but commended the highlighting of ongoing human rights violations.

The resolution encourages the Sri Lankan government to co-operate with UN special mandate holders, but does not name envoys such as the special rapporteur on torture who has been blocked from visiting the country. Sri Lanka’s UN representative, Mahinda Samarasinghe, said the resolution failed to acknowledge progress made by the government in ensuring justice.

ALSO SEE Shamindra Ferdinando, “Geneva vote: GTF appreciates US role, not entirely satisfied with resolution,” in The Island 25 March 2013,http://www.island.lk/index.php?page_cat=article-details&page=article-details&code_title=75487

The UN hacks off its own toes

Kath Noble, courtesy of the Island, 21 November 2012, where the title is “The UN’s plan for making white people feel better”

Last week I felt like I had been transported back in time. We were back in those awful first six months of 2009, when I was by turns horrified at the plight of the people caught up in the fighting in the Vanni and disgusted with the way in which the international community was responding.

Of course, we all wanted to stop the war. I hate violence. But as I argued then and continue to believe, at that point, the only way the war was going to stop was with the defeat of the LTTE. Prabhakaran would not give up on Eelam. He was going to continue his vicious campaign against the Sri Lankan state and all its communities until he was caught or killed. Our task, therefore, was to minimise the damage. We had to try to ensure that it was done with as little death and destruction as possible.

Taming the Tigers of Sri Lanka’s bloody past

Dinoo Kelleghan, in The Weekend Australian, 25 August 2012

 Two former female Tigers prepare for a mass wedding ceremony in 2010 – Pic in The Australian

AT the next Olympics, one of the shooters selected to represent Sri Lanka could be a former sniper of the Tamil Tiger terrorists, once trained to kill Sri Lankans. A member of the swimming squad could be an ex-member of the Sea Tiger suicide cadre.  Their rehabilitation into athletes training to represent the state they once tried to bring down is the culmination of an extraordinary journey of hope by both sides of the 30-year civil war that ended in 2009, although there remain deep-seated problems about the government’s reluctance to accede to calls for a political solution involving autonomy for Tamils. Critics, moreover, say the rehabilitation process – into which millions of dollars of foreign aid has been poured – is a poisoned well because the military is in charge.

UN praises resettlement work in Lanka, but laments donor funding shortages

Courtesy of Daily Mirror, August 2012

 John Ging, UNOCHA

A top UN official yesterday praised the progress made by the Sri Lankan Government in resettling over 440,000 people since the end of the civil war three years ago, and called for continued donor support for the country, where many people still lack basic services. “The scale of what Sri Lanka has accomplished over the past three years – the pace of resettlement and the development of infrastructure – is remarkable and very clearly visible,” the UN News Center said quoting the Director of Operations of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), John Ging, who just finished a three-day visit to the country.

Deeper Issues: “Protests, Devolution and Solidarity” — A Discussion with Jayampathy Wickramaratne

Prachi Patankar and Jinee Lokaneeta, Sunday Island, 11 March 2012 ***

On March 4, Sunday evening, Dr. Jayampathy Wickramaratne spoke at a public meeting titled, ‘Post-war Sri Lanka: The Political Solution and its Historical Context’, organised by the South Asia Solidarity Initiative (SASI) at the Brecht Forum in New York City. We were fortunate to engage Wickramaratne, a long-time member of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), a former senior advisor to the Ministry of Constitutional Affairs, and a member of the team that drafted the 2000 Constitution Bill and signatory to the Majority Report of Experts Committee to the All Party Representative Committee in 2006. Wickramaratne gave us a fascinating account of how the story of devolution – sharing of power with the minorities particularly Tamils and Muslims – has repeatedly come up in the context of Sri Lanka and unfortunately remains an elusive goal at the current moment under the present Government.

While the major international stories on Sri Lanka have been about the war between the LTTE and the Government, and since the end of the war, the demand for war crimes investigation; Wickramaratne’s talk challenged the audience to look at a strong tradition of constitutionalism and the piecemeal way in which the question of devolution has been brought to the centre stage of Sri Lankan politics. Focusing on some of the key phases in which devolution became an issue, Wickramaratne suggested a remarkable story of how in recent years there has been much more of an acceptance of the need for power sharing by the dominant political parties.

Renton, Indi, Pradeep: Three Perspectives for Lanka in THE NATION, 26 February 2012

Renton de Alwis: “When will we learn to think like Sri Lankans”

A plea to all Sri Lankans … regardless of race, cast or creed and to all leaders of nations who seek to take on what is ours to do. When will we learn to think like Sri Lankans and not as people belonging to different political parties, races or interest groups?
I know and agree that there had been and there still is much that needs to be made right in our political and social systems in many spheres. There is much wrong that I’m, like most of you longing to see corrected. There is still a lot of hurt, negative emotion, disappointment and even dismay in our midst. Yet, I believe that we need to protest and protest strongly, when other nations seek to interfere in what is basically our problem to solve.

The Torture Scene in “Killing Fields” and Gordon Weiss

Michael Roberts, courtesy of Colombo Telegraph where it appeared a few days earlier.. with a different title. The version here has minor embellishments.

 Frontispiece images in the Gordon Weiss web-site — http://www.gordonweissauthor.com/press.html#

                                                 ONE

In the course of my researches into the emergence of Ceylonese nationalism in the British period, I delved in considerable detail into an event that was referred to then as “the 1915 riots” – the term “riots” in South Asia being a mechanical reproduction of the terminology of the British legal lexicon to describe affrays of all sorts. In 1915 this shorthand phrase referred to the assaults on the Mohammedan Moors (as they were called then) in the south-western quadrant by elements of the Sinhalese population (Roberts 1981). Amidst the complex processes that promoted this outbreak let me isolate a particular factor: a critical force inspiring the attacks was the incitement by those whom I have referred to as “stirrers” (Kannangara 1984; Roberts 1981; 1994a).

The outbreak of the July 1983 pogrom against Tamils living in the south-western and central regions of Lanka encouraged scholars to redefine such events as “pogroms.” On this occasion too, anecdotal testimony from friends and the article by Valli Kanapathypillai (1990) indicate that incitement by a diverse body of chauvinist stirrers was one factor behind a campaign that legitimised the terror wrought by depicting these activities as acts that would “teach Tamils a lesson.”

Dwelling on some anecdotal tales I was motivated in the 1990s to pen a literary essay of protest against the horrendous acts of July 1983: “The Agony and Ecstasy of a Pogrom: Southern Lanka, July 1983.” This article was written during a lonely sojourn in Charlottesville, Virginia, where my isolation promoted reflexivity. Central to this intervention was the deployment of two horrifying photographs extracted from the Tamil Times. In subsequent years I discovered that these images had been captured by a brave cameraman, Chandragupta Amarasinghe, who supplied me with better copies and clarified details about the mayhem around Borella Junction that 24^th/25^th night in July (Roberts 1994b, 2003).

Rajapaksas inch towards a census of the war dead

Namini Wijedasa, courtesy of LakbimaNews,  27 November 2011

It has been a slow journey but the government is finally accepting that civilians might have died as a result of military action during the final stages of its war with the LTTE. This change in position is attributable in no small measure to the report of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission, which is due to be released shortly. Although its contents are not officially known, it is reported that the LLRC has recommended further investigation of certain incidents that witnesses say happened. The LLRC process has shown that information about the battle–how it was conducted, who did what, when and where–is widely available among people in the North and East. Thirty months after the end of the war, it is no longer viable to maintain a tenuous position of ‘zero civilian casualty.’ Indeed, it  would be foolhardy and dishonest to do so. Speaking at the ‘Inaugural National Conference on Reconciliation’ at the Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute of International Relations and Strategic Studies in Colombo, Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa spoke in more detail about civilian casualties than he has possibly ever done in public.   It was not the first time the government took a tentative step towards admitting to civilian casualties. Earlier this year, its publication Humanitarian Operation Factual Analysis (produced in response to the devastating report of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s panel of experts) admitted: “Despite the clear intent of the Government of Sri Lanka and the numerous precautions taken, it was impossible in a battle of this magnitude, against a ruthless opponent actively endangering civilians, for civilian casualties to be avoided.” But this was all it dared to say on that subject. Last week, the defence establishment edged a bit further. Defence Secretary Rajapaksa said the government has made a proper assessment of the number of civilians killed and missing during the last stages of the conflict. Arbitrary figures of between 10,000 and 40,000, he insisted, had “no basis in reality.” The assessment was done by the Department of Census and Statistics through Tamil public officials in the relevant districts of the North and East. The questionnaire specifically addressed the issue of people who died or went missing during the ‘humanitarian operation.’ The government has identified by name all such persons, Rajapaksa said. The results of the census will be released in the near future.

Dilemmas of POWs in Practice and Law: both Then and Now

Kenneth Anderson, reviewing three books on POWs in Lawfare. November 28, 2011, http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/11/prisoners-in-war/

Three Books on Combatants, Civilians, and Prisoners of War risoners in War

Ed. Sibylle Scheipers (Oxford 2010);The Treatment of Combatants and Insurgents under the Law of Armed Conflict
Emily Crawford (Oxford 2010); Civilian or Combatant? A Challenge for the 21^st Century Anicee Van Engeland (Oxford 2011).

As historical practice, determining the status of individuals as combatants under the laws of war has not been the center of legal and political controversies.  There has always been friction around the legal edges of ‘who is what and on what basis’ – witness the controversies over unprivileged belligerency with respect militias and fighting bands in border regions in the American Civil War. But at the very least, since the rise of mass conscription armies beginning with the Napoleonic Wars and the rise of armies comprised of male citizens in democratizing societies, the focus both political and legal has been upon the substantive treatment of combatants taken prisoner in war.