By Stephen Keim | ABC Net
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It is sometimes about who speaks the truth. If someone of sufficient importance states that the emperor is naked, the rest of us are forced to acknowledge what we already knew, namely, that the old fool had been parading in the nude for some time.
So it is with Sri Lanka and war crimes during the closing months of the civil war which formally concluded in May 2009. The evidence that the both the Sri Lankan government and its civil war opponents, the Liberation Tigers of Tiger Eelam (LTTE), engaged in war crimes has been known for some time. Britain’s Channel Four released on 25 August 2009 mobile phone footage (apparently taken by Sri Lanka soldiers) of extra-judicial killings of bound and naked captives by government soldiers and broadcast more footage of the same incident on 30 November 2010.
The following week, one of the bound victims of the execution was identified as a young female LTTE news broadcaster whom government sources had identified as having been killed on 18 May 2009. This fact linked the footage to government actions in the very final days of the civil war.
The highly respected International Crisis Group (ICG) published a report on 17 May 2010 calling for a full investigation into war crimes committed in the closing months of the civil war. The report concentrated on detailing evidence available to ICG in relation to a limited number of incidents (although the authors indicated that evidence was held with regard to numerous other such incidents).
One incident discussed in the report involved deliberate government shelling an area in a newly established No Fire Zone to which the United Nations and other aid agencies had relocated at the direction of the government. Government officials were fully aware of UN position and the fact that large numbers of civilians had camped nearby for safety. The location was just off the A35 highway near Suthanthirapuram Junction.
The ICJ report is very graphic, obviously based on eye-witness reports. In part, it reads as follows:
“At around 3:00am on 24 January the security forces shelled in and around the distribution centre. A shell landed between five metres and eight metres from the UN bunkers, in the middle of some IDP shelters. At least 11 civilians were killed and more wounded in this attack, including women and children. A WFP driver was hit in the back of the head with shrapnel. The decapitated body of a young woman landed in front of the UN bunker. A UN vehicle was damaged by shell fragments and covered with pieces of flesh and other debris from the explosion.”
In any domestic context, either the UK television station Channel 4's footage or the ICG eye witness accounts would have been sufficient for a proper investigation to be demanded by all and sundry.
Not in the world of international diplomacy.
Certainly not if one needs Sri Lanka’s support on any other issue. Certainly not if you want Sri Lanka to prevent its war victims from climbing into boats to travel to Australia claiming refugee status.
Australia’s response to the actions of the Sri Lankan government has been very muted as the 2009-10 DFAT annual report records. When Australia’s then foreign minister, Stephen Smith, visited Sri Lanka in December 2009, he had nothing to say about war crimes investigations. His mission was to seek Sri Lanka’s assistance to stem the flow of asylum seekers. Australia may have changed its foreign minister but its focus remains unchanged.
Now a new voice has drawn attention to the evidence of war crimes by the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE. The combined voice belongs to a panel of experts appointed by the secretary-general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, to advise him. The panel consisted of Marzuki Darusman (a former Attorney-General of Indonesia) as Chair, Steven Ratner (an academic international lawyer based at University of Michigan Law School) and Yasmin Sooka, a distinguished South African human rights worker.
The experts have used the phrase “credible allegations” of breaches of international humanitarian law; of war crimes; and of crimes against humanity. The panel has called for a genuine accountability process to be carried out by the Sri Lankan government and for a similar process to be conducted by the international community to monitor the government’s effort; to conduct its own independent investigations; and to collect and safeguard evidence.
The panel found five core categories of potential serious violations committed by the forces under the control of the government of Sri Lanka. The first such category is the killing of civilians by wide spread shelling of civilian areas. This included the use of heavy weapons to shell civilians in three consecutive no fire zones in which the Government had encouraged the civilian population to concentrate.
The forces shelled these areas despite knowledge gained from surveillance by unmanned aircraft that these were civilian areas and despite being told by NGOs, the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The panel found that the majority of civilian casualties were caused by government shelling and that the government excluded international organisations from the conflict zone to limit external pressure and observations by those organisations.
The panel found that the government systematically shelled hospitals in the frontline area despite the location of such hospitals being well known to the government.
The government systematically deprived civilians in the conflict zone of food and basic medical supplies including supplies to treat wounds by deliberately underestimating the number of people behind the front lines and by preventing sufficient supplies from being delivered by humanitarian groups.
The panel found that the civilian survivors of the conflict were subjected to further human rights violations after the war ended. This included placing survivors in overcrowded camps; by screening for LTTE cadres in a non-transparent way by excluding the ICRC from such processes; and by executing and disappearing some suspects. Women survivors in particular have been exposed to various forms of sexual harassment and violation.
The panel also found that, outside the conflict zone, the government continued to attempt to silence media and other critics through a variety of actions including the use of white vans to make people disappear.
The panel also found six core categories of potential violations by the LTTE. These included using civilians as a human buffer; killing civilians who tried to flee LTTE control; using military equipment in the proximity of civilians; forced recruitment of children; use of forced labour to dig trenches; and killing civilians through suicide attacks.
The panel conducted a legal analysis of the conduct which comprised the credible allegations and found that such conduct if proven to occur was likely to amount to war crimes (breaches of international humanitarian law) and breaches of international human rights law.
It is not surprising that the panel found sufficient evidence to come the conclusions that it did. It is a little surprising that it was not waylaid by diplomatic pressure and prevented from being as forthright as it has been. One might well think that such strong findings by a group carrying the secretary-general’s authority might well change the selfish dynamics of denial by many in the international community and even of some within the Sri Lankan government.
The question remains, however, whether the panel’s conclusions will be acted upon. Will the international community realise that the game is up and everyone knows what it has been trying to ignore. Or will it sit on its hands and hope that the illusion of the emperor’s new clothes again get to cover the nakedness of those who committed serious crimes during the final months of the Sri Lankan civil war.
Meanwhile Australia’s focus is on possibly reintroducing some form of temporary visa for refugees and finding off shore processing sites for asylum seekers in Papua New Guinea and Malaysia. There seems little interest in pressing for accountability for the crimes that led many people to seek asylum in Australia.
Stephen Keim has been a lawyer for over three decades and is a senior counsel for the state of Queensland. He is president of Australian Lawyers for Human Rights. Stephen won the Australian Human Rights Commission 2009 Human Rights Medal.
© ABC Net
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