Liam Fox's role in the politics of Sri Lanka

By Randeep Ramesh | The Guardian
.............................................................................................................................................................................................

Liam Fox is a well-known figure in the corridors of power in Sri Lanka. For decades, a vicious civil war between the two main ethnic groups – Tamils and the Sinhalese majority – had meant daily life in the small island nation was punctuated by spasms of destruction.

The fight was about territory: pitting the north and east against the south. It was also religious: Hindu Tamils against Buddhist Sinhalese. And by the time the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were routed in 2009, it had claimed almost 100,000 lives.

Fox had first arrived in 1995, landing at the palm-fringed airport as a junior Foreign Office minister. A little more than a year later, such was his influence with the Sinhalese elite, who essentially run the country, that he had persuaded the rival parties not to attempt to outflank each other while negotiating peace or ceasefires with the brutal rebel separatists of the LTTE. The "Fox agreement" was a landmark, the first time an outsider had managed to broker such a consensus in a notoriously violent political setup.

Fast forward more than a decade. The old Sinhalese powerbrokers had been ousted in favour of a more militaristic clique, led by the president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, and his brothers Gotabhaya, the defence secretary, and Basil, a political fixer. During a chance meeting in Singapore in 2007, Fox – by then shadow secretary of state for defence – fell in with one of Rajapaksa's lieutenants, the foreign minister Rohitha Bogollagama. He was back in the game.

The Labour government, along with the United States, had viewed the new president as a dangerous populist whose military buildup and wooing of China needed to be restrained. Concerned that the Sri Lankan army was indiscriminately bombing and killing Tamil civilians, the west ratcheted up pressure on the regime. Fox, a neocon in outlook, took a rather different view. And his new friends turned to him for help.

In the last few months of the war Fox, who was seen in the capital Colombo as a possible future Tory leader, became an influential messenger boy – carrying back rebuttals to western capitals from Sri Lanka. At the beginning of 2009, the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, attempted to send a special envoy to the island and the US offered to evacuate the 100,000 civilians trapped in the last 20 square miles of territory under LTTE control. The foreign minister told Fox, who happened to be on a visit to Colombo at the time, that the government was declining "offers of assistance" until it had "cleared the north from the clutches of the terrorists".

However, since the LTTE was crushed, the clamour for a war-crimes investigation has grown. While Rajapaksa remains apparently invincible at home, the net is tightening abroad. Channel 4's documentary Sri Lanka's Killing Fields appeared to show the shelling of areas where civilians sheltered, executions of captured LTTE combatants, and dead female Tamil fighters being loaded on to a truck. A United Nations panel found "credible allegations" that the ghttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifovernment had committed war crimes and offences against humanity. There were calls for an independent international inquiry, and reports that "tens of thousands" of civilians had lost their lives and that most casualties in the final phases of the war were caused by government shelling.

The UK supplied arms to Sri Lanka throughout its bitter civil war – comfort for arms manufacturers but none for Sri Lankan taxpayers. Colombo has increased the defence budget by 6%.

© The Guardian