War-Fighting Seminar: The heavy guns stayed silent

By Banyan | The Economist
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Rights groups had called it an attempt to whitewash war crimes. Many of the delegates who attended this three-day seminar, conducted by Sri Lanka’s army, were of course hoping for something better than that. Its panels were supposed to help teach the world’s counter-insurgency boffins how Sri Lanka’s army defeated the Tamil Tiger rebels while pursuing a “zero civilian-casualty” policy that supposedly forsook the use of heavy weapons. But few of the truly difficult questions were raised, and in the end none were answered.

The seminar ended on June 2nd, only a day after a UN special investigator at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva showed video of Sri Lanka soldiers in the war’s final days, apparently executing civilians. He called it “trophy footage” and evidence of serious human-rights abuses.

And it doesn’t stop. On June 3rd, on the margins of sessions held by the UN Human Rights Council, Britain’s Channel 4 is set to screen a special one-hour investigation that it says will feature “devastating” new video evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity, committed by both the Sri Lanka government’s forces and by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (the LTTE).

The government’s response to every suggestion that it may be culpable for war crimes has been one of enraged denial. The seminar was like a prolonged exercise of the same. Ground commanders who had led troops in the scrutinised final battle against the rebels in 2009 were fulsome with self-congratulatory speeches claiming that the number of civilians killed by military fire was minimal.

As they would have it, the Tigers launched barrages of artillery and mortar fire at their troops from among civilians cowering in the congested no-fire zones declared by the army. And the army refrained from retaliating in kind.

But when members of the audience questioned the panellists about how they managed to crush the Tigers without killing civilians—given that the rebels held hundreds of thousands of people hostage, a massive human shield against their rapidly advancing forces—the replies were, at best, unconvincing.

One of the panellists, Major-General Shavendra Silva, who now serves as Sri Lanka’s deputy envoy to the UN in New York, said the army used “position targeting” as well as marksmen and snipers to identify and shoot only rebels and rebel targets.

But the army has long maintained that the Tigers fought in civilian clothes towards the end. So how could the snipers have picked out their men from the innocents? General Silva did not explain. Just when the questioning seemed like it was about to be trained on the subject of civilian casualties, the moderator hastily announced lunch.

The only speaker to address head-on the allegations of human-rights abuses—and the army’s implausible waffling about them—was not a Sri Lankan. David Kilcullen, an Australian consultant on counter-insurgency, said it was difficult to see how the international community could accept the Sri Lankan model without a frank and honest discussion of these allegations of abuse.

Mr Kilcullen offered that Sri Lanka might argue that whatever it took to defeat such an enemy, and so to end the conflict, was morally justifiable in the special circumstances of the final campaign. But even at the end of this seminar’s third day, Sri Lanka was doing nothing of the sort.

© The Economist