By Shihar Aneez | Reuters
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Sri Lanka's northern cities hold local polls for the first time in many years on Saturday amid opposition and poll monitor complaints of intimidation.
Healing after a 25-year war between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) that ended in May 2009, Tamils in the northern city of Jaffna, long the centre of Sri Lanka's Tamil culture, feel there is little to gain from voting.
"There were a number of elections like this and a change has never happened. I have little doubt that this is also going to be the same," said Thuvaraki Nakeswaran, 22, a journalism student who will vote for the first time in her life.
"I will vote for those who think to help Tamils."
She is among 350,000 voters in 16 constituencies registered to elect local leaders. But voting in Jaffna, as it did in war time, will take place with a heavy military presence.
Tamils in Jaffna are reluctant to speak in public due to the presence of government intelligence officers and soldiers, and many Reuters approached gave a brusque "No comment."
Free expression has not been a way of life for decades: either the government or the LTTE routinely killed, beat, harassed or otherwise punished critics via unidentified gangs.
Rajapaksa has launched many infrastructure projects under a rebuilding programme he has dubbed the "The Northern Spring", some of which are rejuvenating roads and railways that fell into neglect during the war.
But building trust between Rajapaksa, who is from Sri Lanka's Sinhalese ethnic majority, and Tamils is a difficult task. No government since independence in 1948 has given Tamils much confidence, and many have grown up around the LTTE's rabidly separatist and anti-Sinhalese doctrine.
"I am your friend; I am your relative; You can trust me," one poster of Rajapaksa says. "We will build our villages together."
The campaign posters of Rajapaksa and candidates from his ally, the Eelam People's Democratic Party (EPDP), were all over Jaffna, but those of the opposition were scarce.
SELFISH MOTIVE
The evidence of development and economic revival, which Rajapaksa has said will help Tamils rebuild their lives, are ample in Jaffna. Numerous private banks have opened up in the town and many roads are under construction.
"There is a selfish motive behind the government's development programme and it's Sinhalisation that really has been taking place," a 59-year old man told Reuters on condition of anonymity because he feared reprisal.
Sinhalisation, a term espoused by the LTTE, refers to the moving of Sinhalese people into areas the separatist group said were traditionally Tamil-majority, throughout Sri Lanka's nearly three millennia of history.
"All the jobs created through these projects are given to Sinhalese people," the man said. "The government has never involved us in the development projects either through providing job opportunities or giving the contracts to Tamils here."
Thambithurai Hariharan, a 55-year-old farmer, complained that the development has not helped bring down the high cost of living or created jobs for the unemployed.
"Now some agricultural produce is brought here from the rest of the country despite being grown here. That has reduced our profit margins," he said.
© Reuters
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Tamils sceptical of development, voting in Sri Lanka's war-weary north
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Sri Lanka local polls get underway
Xinhua
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Two and a half million people are to vote at more than 2200 polling stations with some 20 political parties and independent groups contesting the elections.
Sri Lankan Tamils in the former rebel held town of Kilinochchi in the north of the country turned up in small numbers early Saturday to cast their votes and select a local council representative after more than 25 years.
The local council elections are being conducted in several parts of Sri Lanka but the focus is on Kilinochchi as well as Jaffna in the north where former war displaced minority Tamil communities will vote, two years after a 30 years war came to a bloody end.
Most of the displaced people were in temporary camps since the end of the war, in conditions which drew criticism from international human rights groups, and were later resettled over the past several months.
Saturday's elections were already marred by reports that some Tamil voters were intimidated or had their voting cards forcefully taken away by unidentified groups.
"We have received complaints of unidentified groups visiting the homes of some people in Kilinochchi and forcefully taking away their voting cards last night," Rohana Hettiarachchi from a local election monitoring group told Xinhua.
There were also reports of a house belonging to a supporter of a Tamil political party being set on fire in Killinochchi.
The election was going ahead with one death reported so far in Anuradhapura, in north-central Sri Lanka.
A police unit tasked with monitoring election related violence also said that the polls were so far being conducted in a peaceful manner.
Gamini Navaratne of the police elections unit said that they have been given strict instructions to take stern action on anyone attempting to disrupt the polls.
The election results are expected to be announced Sunday and the ruling party led by Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa is expected to win the ongoing elections.
In the first stage of the elections held in over 200 local councils in March, the ruling party recorded a landslide victory.
© Xinhua
Friday, July 22, 2011
Colombo uses white-van to harass, threaten Radio Netherlands journalists
JDS News
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“Radio Netherlands Worldwide recently sent two undercover journalists to Sri Lanka. They wanted to see the post-conflict situation in the north and east two years after the bloody defeat of the Tamil Tigers. However they were “white-vanned” and forced to abort their trip and return to the Netherlands,” the RNW said on Thursday.
On an interview by the staff presenter Dheera Sujan after their return to Netherlands, the two journalists, who have faced the white-van threat, said on Thursday that their motive behind the visit to Sri Lanka was to find out the truth of the widespread claims “that the Tamils are still living under a lot of pressure and there are a lot of human rights abuses in the North and the East of the country”.
Police raid
They said that a team of ten police personnel, including the regional chief of police, has visited their hotel room on a late midnight and interrogated them at length in a threatening manner, after receiving a tip of their presence there.
“You can imagine, ten people coming into the hotel room in the middle of the night and interrogating -- it is quite intimidating,” said the male journalist, who is called as Philip considering the safety of the people they talked to in Sri Lanka.
White van
Another journalist, called here as Olivia said that a group of men in a white van have followed the bus they were travelling to another part of the country and waylaid them.
“They tried to rob and they succeeded partly in that. It was very scary,” she said.
Philip said that one of the four men has stolen their larger bag while the other man attacked Olivia and tried to rip the bag off her back.
“Whilst this was going on, another man jumped in front of the van wielding a gun waving it around. We wondered if this is just a straight forward piece of criminality. But everybody we’ve spoken to since then including embassy staff and NGO staff and journalists who have experience having lived in Sri Lanka - everybody says ‘you have been white-vanned’,” he said.
“This is an expression in Sri Lanka. This is how the authorities intimidate people, especially journalists. A gang of thugs who come along and either kidnap or in this case stage a robbery to make you feel very unsafe,” journalist Philip said.
Impact of Channel 4 documentary
“Anybody talking about the UN in Sri Lanka today run the risk of alerting the police to them, because the Sri Lankan government is very sensitive of any accusation of war crimes following the Channel 4 documentary which was telecast a few weeks ago,” he said.
Sri Lankan authorities have been routinely threatening, intimidating, harassing, kidnapping, torturing and killing local journalists in the past, but this is for the first time that they have targeted foreign journalists, that too using the notorious white van.
“We are coming into a new period in Sri Lanka. For the last few months, what is happening is a dossier being built by the international media, which could potentially lead to an international tribunal that will bring senior politicians and senior figures from the war and from the present day to book. I think that the powerful people in Sri Lanka fear that,” he said.
Rubbishing the government’s claim of successful progress of resettlement and rehabilitation, the Netherlands journalists said that the actual situation on the ground does not reflect any of that sort.
Ready to fight again
They said they managed to speak to at least nine former Tamil Tiger rebels who have been under “rehabilitation” and that they were “ready to take up arms again if the conditions under which Tamils have to live in the North and the East continued into the year ahead”.
“They said even though, they have no organisation and the Tamil Tigers or LTTE infrastructure that ran much of the north and east of the country for many years till the end of the war in May 2009 does not exist anymore, they still maintain that they would look to fight again without the support of the leadership and without Velupillai Prabhakaran,” Philip said.
“That spoke volumes of the state of despair that a lot of Tamils are still living in,” he said, adding that the victims were mainly expecting an international investigation.
He said that the ex-Tamil Tiger rebels have expressed willingness to face any such international investigation, which in contrast, was not the case for the Tamil Tiger leadership in the past. They refute liability on their side in the past.
Scared to talk
Commenting on her take on the plight of the people they have met, Olivia said that they were “very scared of the authorities, very careful of what they want to say and that’s why we also have to be careful in what we say about what we saw there”.
“The people are still in danger for meeting us and that says a lot about the state of the country at the moment,” she said.
“What happened to us and what we have been told that keeps happening to reporters who dig a little bit, who criticise the government little bit, show clearly that there has been a culture of impunity for a long time. Justice is something that we are used to in the west. We have a procedure. We can pursue people who do wrong to us but that does not exist in Sri Lanka,” Philip said.
Quoting various Human Rights reports including the one that was released last week, Philip said that there were hundreds of cases of torture, kidnap and murder by the Sri Lankan police.
“It is not going anywhere, nobody is looking at it. Nobody does anything about it and nobody takes it seriously. The culture of impunity is the biggest danger for a long lasting peace in Sri Lanka now,” said Netherlands journalist who has faced a very strange experience in Sri Lanka.
For more details: RNW team threatened in Sri Lanka
© JDS
Friday, July 22, 2011
War over, fear still stalks polls in north Sri Lanka
By Shihar Aneez | Reuters
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Voters in the separatist Tamil Tigers' self-declared capital of Kilinochchi, and in Mullaittivu where they were defeated by government forces in May 2009, will elect local councilors for the first time in 29 years.
The northern Jaffna district, under military control in the latter half of the 26-year civil war, will be holding its first local government election in 12 years.
President Mahinda Rajapaksa, eager to gain support in the north, toured the area this week to launch development projects and promised more of them, in a war-ravaged region that remains firmly under military control.
"More money has been allocated to your province than the other provinces. There is no place for communal politics in Sri Lanka in the future and narrow-minded politics is unwanted in the future," Rajapaksa, who is from the Sinhalese ethnic majority, told a crowd in mostly rote Tamil this week.
Rajapaksa's government led the offensive to destroy the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), culminating in a final battle in May 2009 that ended the guerrilla group's campaign for a separate state for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority.
Since then Rajapaksa has promised to rebuild the north, shunning calls for political reconciliation in favor of economic development under what he calls "The Northern Spring."
But violence has persisted, and militias who fought for the government have used force to retain their influence. Election monitors have catalogued many violations, including the use of state resources for campaigning, and the use of violence.
"Everyone knows certain sections of the military and the political groups operating in Jaffna are behind these (violations)," Keerthi Thennakoon, executive director of the Campaign for Free and Fair Elections (CaFFE), told Reuters.
"A well-calculated fear psychosis has been created among Jaffna and Killinochchi voters."
Dead dogs and funeral wreaths
Opposition politicians, including those elected from the north, have complained they have little access to the area and say they expect intimidation to keep turnout low.
"Unknown people have placed a killed dog in front of one candidate's house while other candidates have seen a funeral wreath on their front doors," parliamentarian M.A Sumathiran, from the former LTTE political proxy the Tamil National Alliance, told Reuters.
He said soldiers are going from house to house "insisting people must vote for the government party, and with all this intimidation of our candidates and the public, no action has been taken so far."
The government has denied any wrongdoing.
The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), a Sinhalese Marxist party which in past decades led two violent insurgencies, said the military would not let them put up campaign posters and followed candidates during canvassing.
"The government badly needs to win this election at any cost to show the international community that their undemocratic and controlled governance in the north has resulted in development and thus people are supporting them," JVP parliamentarian Anura Kumara Dissanayake told Reuters.
Rajapsksa is under heavy pressure from the West to engage in political reconciliation of a sort acceptable to the TNA, and to investigate accusations of war crimes during the war's final phases to which a U.N.-sponsored report has drawn attention.
© Reuters
Friday, July 22, 2011
Hard times in Sri Lanka's war-ravaged north
By Charles Haviland | BBC News
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It is a land that lost all its people. They retreated with the Tamil Tigers as the civil war swept through Kilinochchi more than two years ago. There are burnt-out husks of houses.
But new huts are now scattered among the trees. There is a bonfire by the roadside and small shops that returnees have opened.
A few soldiers pass on bicycles. People walk by the roadside like strangers rediscovering the land of their roots. Hundreds of thousands have left army-run camps to come home.
Entry to this region has been heavily restricted for years. But the BBC was given unconfined, though temporary, access to Kilinochchi district.
Tempered by tragedy
Chandrasegaran Thayakaran, his wife Vinodha and their four-year-old son Dhanushan are working together to put up a modest wooden-framed house in Unionkulam village.
The boy scoops up sand and carries it to the building site, patting it down carefully.
Chandrasegaran, now 22, married at 17 to escape being recruited by the Tigers.
The family lived through months under bombardment in the war zone and a year in a camp. They got a UN grant equivalent to $230 (£143) when they came out.
Since then they have had some cash help from the Save the Children charity and pawned their possessions to get by. Chandrasegaran gets some casual labour work.
Any gladness at returning to his village is heavily tempered by tragedy.
"I lost my mother, my little brother and my elder sister and brother in the war," he tells me. "We've come here without our family. So we're not really living happily."
At least people in this newly resettled community are supporting each other.
Chandrasegaran's two friends were both wounded in the war. Now they are helping the family build. The three laugh and joke as they go off by motorbike.
Everyone has had a difficult homecoming, haunted by trauma and loss.
Nagamma Chandran, a widow of about 50, lives with her mother and teenage son in a shack of tin and tarpaulin built with help from the Dutch refugee organisation ZOA and the UNHCR.
She lost her brother in the war. She and her mother are sick and she cannot find work; nor can they afford transport to a hospital.
"We've been here almost three months. Since then we have got nothing, no help. We get 100 rupees ($1) per month each in aid money," she says.
"The government is not helping us. I have sent a lot of letters, but there's no reply."
In Kilinochchi town - once the Tamil Tiger headquarters, now a government garrison town - I meet the chief local government officer, R Jegathiswaran.
She says the government is doing all it can to help the displaced people returning home.
They extend livelihood assistance - support for home gardening, livestock development or small businesses.
But she admits that some people "could not get" it - perhaps an acknowledgement that some, like the landless villagers we met, fall through the safety net.
'Bombastic monument'
"I can say the government has provided enough assistance to the people. Although they've received all the things provided by the government and some of their livelihood assistance we have provided through NGOs, they want to get more and more.
"Whatever they get, they have to be satisfied with that."
he town centre of Kilinochchi is very different from the hinterland around it.
Half a dozen soldiers, supervised by an officer, lovingly tend a huge - some say bombastic - monument to the government's war victory.
One soldier snips the grass with scissors to keep it neat. They are on duty here around the clock.
Its centrepiece is a massive concrete cube representing the Tamil Tigers' violent insurrection.
It is pierced and cracked by a big bullet, said to symbolise the "sturdiness of the invincible Sri Lankan army", and topped with a flower of peace.
The adjacent tablet says President Mahinda Rajapaksa was "born for the grace of the nation".
Not many local Tamil people seem to visit. One man tells us he finds the monument insulting.
But others flock to admire it, including a busload of Sri Lankan tourists, among them a Buddhist monk from the central highlands.
As in the countryside, everyone in town is newly returned.
Almost all have lived through terrible war experiences.
Yet Kilinochchi is now achieving a kind of normality, though under the ever watchful eyes of soldiers on every corner.
At the main bus stand, people buy transport and lottery tickets. Children eat ice-cream. There is even a souvenir shop selling T-shirts saying "Reawakening Kilinochchi", situated by a huge water tower dynamited and toppled by the Tigers.
Back in her village, Nagamma makes tea. She, like other destitute returning refugees, struggles to afford the basics of life.
I ask her if she wants punishment for those responsible for her brother's death.
"We don't need another war or fight," she says.
"We've lost a lot because of the war and it mustn't happen again. Our time is finished now, but at least the remaining children must be happy.
"Every day I pray to God for a peaceful country, where every person of every race can live in peace."
© BBC News
Friday, July 22, 2011
Sri Lanka, human rights and foreign policy in a tweet
By Phil Lynch | ABC.Net
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It read "4 corners tonight on Sri Lanka deeply disturbing. UN Human Rights Council can't simply push this to one side. Action needed. KRudd".
The program, Sri Lanka's Killing Fields, was indeed deeply disturbing. It documents serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law against Tamil civilians by Sri Lanka's military, including systemic rape, murder and the targeting of hospitals and health care clinics. The allegations are not new, however. The program aired in the UK on June 14. Both the US State Department and Human Rights Watch issued reports on possible war crimes in Sri Lanka as far back as 2009.
What struck me about the Foreign Minister's tweet was the implication that the UN Human Rights Council has failed to act with sufficient resolve or urgency on Sri Lanka. It struck me because, at the council's last session on June 15, Australia failed to even identify Sri Lanka as a 'situation requiring the council's attention'. Australia did make a strong statement calling for the council to act on Syria, Libya, Iran and Fiji. Unlike states such as the US, the UK, France, Spain, Sweden and Denmark, however, we were resolutely silent on Sri Lanka. Each of those countries and many others, by contrast, called for 'immediate action' to 'ensure accountability' for 'grave allegations' as to breaches of human rights and international law in Sri Lanka.
A critical analysis could attribute this silence to Sri Lanka's cooperation with Australia to prevent the flow of asylum seekers. The 2011/12 federal budget included $10.8 million to deploy Australian Federal Police liaison officers to Sri Lanka (as well as to Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand) to 'combat people smuggling'. The Sri Lankan Department of Immigration and Emigration is a recipient of Australian aid dollars.
A more generous analysis, to which I am inclined, attributes the disjunct between Australia's statement in Geneva and the Foreign Minister's tweet to our lack of a comprehensive strategy on human rights and foreign policy. Without such a strategy, Australia's action on international human rights often lacks coherence or clear priorities for action. This was evident again just a few days ago, when the Foreign Minister, in announcing a new aid and development strategy, said 'for the first time, human rights has been formally included within the core development objectives of the Australian aid portfolio'.
This is a positive development. It will come as some surprise, however, to the UN's Independent Expert on Human Rights and Foreign Debt, Cephas Lumina, who just three weeks earlier, was lambasted by Australia for his 'inaccuracy' in 'asserting that AusAID does not have an overarching human rights-based approach guiding its policies and programs'.
Kevin Rudd is a highly capable, energetic and ambitious Foreign Minister who professes a strong commitment to human rights. Australia's candidacy for a temporary seat on the UN Security Council, conceived and actively and appropriately pursued by the Foreign Minister, pitches us as a 'principled advocate of human rights for all'. And so should we be. The realisation of human rights should be a primary goal and instrument of Australian foreign policy. As a goal, we should commit to promoting human rights and the rule of law as a key foreign policy priority. And as an instrument, we should protect human rights to secure related goals such as peace, security and sustainable development.
If Australia's human rights rhetoric is to translate into effective outcomes, however, we need to develop a more principled and coordinated approach. A comprehensive strategy, similar to those developed by the Netherlands and Sweden, could integrate human rights in all areas of Australian foreign policy and, like those countries, capitalise on the benefits of doing so. Those countries have also appointed permanent Human Rights Ambassadors - a post which does not exist in Australia - to ensure an active and consistent approach to human rights at the international level.
With an ever-shrinking foreign service, the Foreign Minister should also establish a Human Rights Advisory Group, comprising experts from NGOs, academia and human rights bodies, to provide external advice on foreign policy and options for addressing human rights problems. Mr Rudd's UK counterpart, foreign secretary William Hague, established just such a group in 2010 and tweeted only a few days ago that 'the Group's expertise has already proved valuable in informing our human rights policies'. It is imperative, he wrote, for governments to 'hear from experts at forefront of reporting and documenting human rights abuses'.
Mr Rudd, I look forward to the tweet that reads 'Just announced comprehensive human rights strategy & 100 concrete actions Australia will take to advance human rights around world. KRudd'. That would be 140 characters worth far more than 1,000 words.
Phil Lynch is executive director of the Human Rights Law Centre.
© ABC - Drum TV
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Politicians’ “fear” of freedom of information - CRCMO
By Melani Manel Perera | Asia News
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Now more than ever, there is “a need to empower people” and develop a political culture in which all agencies of the government are “accountable to the people”. For this reason, CRMCO is organising an ‘Awareness Raising” day for 5 July.
Being informed on all issues is an essential prerequisite to keep politicians accountable and limit any possible abuses of power, it said.
For Gamini Viyangoda, a member of the organisation, “The government is always trying to keep people in the dark. However, citizens have a right to know what happens to them and in what circumstances.”
In September 2010, opposition lawmaker Karu Jayasuriya introduced a Freedom of Information bill to parliament. At the time, the government put the proposal on hold, promising that it would draft its own bill.
Seven months later, nothing has been done. Hence, last month Jayasuriya submitted his own proposal, again.
© Asia News
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Sri Lanka: war atrocities - Who, Us, What?
By Satarupa Bhattacharjya | Outlook India
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These are some of the horrific images from the Channel 4 documentary, Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields, which depicts the relentless bloodbath in the final months of war between the LTTE and the government in 2009 that claimed, third-party figures suggest, over 40,000 lives. It took Channel 4 two years to source these grotesque images, apparently caught on mobile phones and small cameras by victims and perpetrators (as war trophies). Not only does the film echo incidents mentioned in a UN panel report released two months ago, it also appears to belie the post-war statement of Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa, “Soldiers carried guns in one hand and the human rights charter in the other.”
In Sri Lanka, though, the veracity of the documentary has been challenged. Asked whether he found the visuals shocking, Sri Lankan army spokesperson Maj Gen Ubhaya Medawala told Outlook, “What is shocking is that Channel 4 fabricated such a story. It was designed to tarnish the country’s image and that of its armed forces.” At a press conference last week, external affairs minister G.L. Pieris said, “The Channel 4 video footage on Sri Lanka is a part of a vicious, politically motivated campaign against the country.” These views have the endorsement of the average Sinhala on the road, from rickshaw drivers to workers at departmental stores to young professionals. They feel that western governments are “victimising” Colombo and, more importantly, that reopening old wounds would only hurt the process of reconciliation.
But for many Tamilians, the walk down the road to reconciliation must include justice for those who suffered state brutality. Rajan Hoole, a founder member of the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), feels the Channel 4 film is “partly the consequence of the government keeping international observers away...to fight a war without witnesses, and then failing to respond to the worldwide concerns for the civilians during and after the war and adopting a course of total denial.”
Colombo’s concerted attempts to bar independent observers has been borne out by former UN spokesperson in Sri Lanka Gordon Weiss’s comments in the film. He accused Colombo of “intending to remove independent witnesses” from the north as fighting peaked between 2008-end and early ’09. The UN was asked to get out of the war zone by the Rajapaksa government which said it could not guarantee the safety of its staffers. In his book out now, The Cage, Weiss writes, “...I believe that the tactical choices the Sri Lankan army was directed to make, and which contributed to the deaths of so many civilians, warrant a credible judicial investigation of the kind that the Sri Lankan state, in its current guise, is no longer capable of mounting.” About the film, former foreign ministers of UK and France, David Miliband and Bernard Kouchner, recently wrote, “If foreign policy is about anything, it should be about stopping this kind of inhumanity.”
Sri Lankan ministers and media commentators here are quick to counter such opinions: what about Libya where nato’s air-raids are even killing children? Have you forgotten Iraq and Afghanistan? Young Facebook users, born well after the civil war began, talk about the West’s “hypocrisy” in status messages. This isn’t to suggest that there is no dissenting voice from the Lankan political class. Former foreign minister and opposition parliamentarian Mangala Samaraweera told Outlook, “The government’s denial of human rights violations may lead to its further isolation in the international community...in defence of sovereignty, nobody has the right to ill-treat its own citizens.”
The documentary, available on YouTube, has outraged the ever expanding circle of critics abroad. When it was screened at the United Nations Human Rights Council, Geneva, in the first week of June, some viewers cringed; one cried openly. The British House of Commons even debated whether the visuals could be considered as evidence of war crimes. Last year, talk about rights violations prompted the European Union to suspend its trade concessions to Sri Lanka.
But the government remains seemingly unperturbed. A fortnight ago, the Sri Lankan army had organised an anti-terror international seminar in Colombo, touting its model of counterinsurgency and winning encomiums from many participants. And on the sidelines of last week’s 15th St Petersburg International Economic Forum, Rajapaksa was assured of support from Dmitry Medvedev and Hu Jintao, his Russian and Chinese counterparts. With Chinese investments in major infrastructure projects here growing and now with Russia’s GAZPROM ready to explore oil and gas off the island’s Mannar coast, a new axis is on the move.
The growing Chinese influence has further weakened the Indian approach which, many here contend, was anyway weak on multilateralism in Sri Lanka. Says Dr Hoole, “When India places the onus on bilateral relations, the human and political rights of the Tamils tend to become hostage to Sino-Indian rivalry, as appears the case now.” Tamil National Alliance parliamentarian Suresh Premachandran feels that India’s foreign policy in Sri Lanka has failed, pointing out how New Delhi has been unable to get a devolution package for the north and east. He adds, “India had satellite images of the war...its government knew how many people were killed. India must decide whether it wants to isolate itself from the Sri Lankan Tamils.” With the government change in Tamil Nadu and AIADMK leader Jayalalitha’s negligible influence over the UPA, it scarcely matters that the state assembly recently passed a resolution asking New Delhi to impose economic sanctions on Colombo.
Even pro-government Tamil politician Dharmalingam Siddarthan says human rights issues, if left unattended, would further widen the gap between the Sinhalese and the Tamils. Despite the civil war ending in 2009, the island remains a nation at war with itself.
© Outlook India
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Jack-boots in the island country
By Karthick Ram | Himal South Asian
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Introducing the ‘Leadership Training Programme’, an obligatory three-week course for university entrants. Trained by the best in business – men in military uniforms. Training to be held at your friendly neighbourhood Lankan military camp. Send in your child and he will turn out a patriot. Even if he comes from the other community.
And university students of the other community, the Tamil community, received a pleasant surprise when they found summons for this course lying at their doorstep – written in Sinhalese. A Tamil contact from Colombo pointed out the comic aspect of this. ‘Imagine Palestinian students getting summons in Hebrew for a military training course from the occupying Israeli army,’ she said. The parallel seemed apt. Israel requires all its citizens above the age of 18 to attend compulsory military training. The rigorous course at the Israeli Defence Forces lasts 3 years for men and 2 for women. Besides the physical drills and conditioning of the body, the army drills in a state of paranoia and conformity into the trainees. ‘Look! You are engulfed by Arabs! Love your country! We need to kill if we need to live!’ At the end of the course, most Israelis buy this. A nation of zombies is created and to challenge this requires not just phenomenal courage, but also phenomenal creativity. Agamben’s famous state of emergency becomes the state of mind for an Israeli citizen. Lanka follows similar path…
As far as racialization is concerned, the Sri Lankan military outshines their Israeli counterpart. Over 98% of the Sri Lankan Armed Forces is Sinhalese. They are celebrated heroes of the chauvinist sections of the Sinhalese population, who consider them the ‘saviours of the Sinhala-Buddhist race’. If they end up as educators, one can already imagine the kind of lessons that will be taught. A BBC report has said that the training will include ‘physical drills and conflict management’ in order to ‘increase mental and physical fitness’ among students. It is the mental part that is the most worrying. In a country where left-liberals speak in the language of conservatives and conservatives are rabid fascists, a mentally fit Sri Lankan is a Sinhala nationalist. And that is how the Army would train its students. To become ‘authentic’ Sri Lankans.
The timing seems ironical. On18 May, Tamils world over mourned the massacre of over 40,000 of their kin by the Sri Lankan armed forces two years ago. Ever since its ‘victory’ over the LTTE, the Sri Lankan army has systematically destroyed all traces of the rebel outfit’s existence. ‘Peace’ in Sri Lanka was the name of camps where over 300,000 Tamils were detained in pathetic conditions. ‘Unity’ meant repeated sexual assaults of captured Tamil women and forced pregnancies. And ‘Order’ meant torture and executions. Veracity of this was proven by different footages of the Lankan Army’s brutalities on the Tamils. While international agencies like the Permanent People’s Tribunal and the United Nations have lambasted the Sri Lankan government for its (mis)conduct of the war and its wanton targeting and abuse of Tamil civilians, the Sri Lankan government seems to be desperate to project an image of a united country. And this is why when the recent UN report accused the government of committing war crimes in its military operations against the Tigers, the government went head over heels to mobilize international support to prevent prosecution of those involved.
While such antics were played out in the international circus, the local theatre in Sri Lanka had a different drama. A seminar on ‘Defeating Terrorism’ was held from 31 May to 3 June. Co-sponsored by China, the event was attended by military representatives from over 40 countries including India, Pakistan, Russia, Kenya and other countries who have had quite flawed democratic traditions. The top personnel in the Sri Lankan Defence sector have credited their success to the militarization of the country’s society. Sri Lanka’s external affairs minister has asked for a reworking of international laws in a way that would enable governments like his to combat terror more effectively. Those who have seen the execution videos from the last stages of the war on the LTTE, where captured men and women were paraded naked, abused and then shot, can have an idea of how a ‘war on terror’ approach based on the Sri Lankan model would be.
The move to involve students in courses conducted by the military is an attempt to defuse, especially among the Tamils students, any attempt to protest the past actions of the Lankan state. Considering that the Tamil liberation struggle led by the LTTE was itself assisted by an active student community, Sri Lanka would love to erase all possibilities of some likeness of the past re-emerging. The military apparatus that it seeks to incorporate in universities, then, is not an isolated aberration but is part of the very aberration that is the Lankan state.
A Tamil from Jaffna said over chat that he would send his son to India for graduation and then, if possible, abroad. ‘We have seen what the army has done to our people. It is not right for the murderers of our children to become their tutors. It is not right.’ But it is. In united Sri Lanka, it is.
© Himal
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Tigers caged but Tamils' tale goes on
By John Zubrzycki | The Australian
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After a decade of war and no sign of a military solution, only a political settlement with moderate Taliban can achieve long-sought stability and pave the way for a withdrawal of Western troops.
But what happens when there is no middle ground, no moderates to appeal to and a bitter ethnic divide driven by nationalistic chauvinism on the one hand and an ingrained persecution complex on the other?
Sri Lanka endured 26 years of civil war and 70,000 deaths before the army achieved what many thought impossible: it crushed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, one of the 20th century's most tenacious and violent insurgent groups.
In May 2009, Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran and most of his top lieutenants were killed in a final bloody battle in the northeast of Sri Lanka. So proud was the government of its achievement that it held an international conference in Colombo earlier this month to showcase its military-led model for defeating insurgencies.
But there is a downside to using force as a first and last resort, even when the enemy as violent and fanatical as the Tamil Tigers.
In April, the UN released a damning report that outlined suspected war crimes committed against civilians by both sides in the conflict. About 40,000 people were killed in the final months of the war as the Tigers herded thousands of civilians on to a narrow strip of land bounded by the ocean on one side and a lagoon on the other where the guerilla group made its suicidal last stand. The Cage, as it became known, resembled a vast internment camp for 330,000 desperate civilians who endured a five-month-long siege.
The UN report charged the Sri Lanka government with repeatedly shelling safe zones set up to protect civilians, including hospitals and food distribution lines. The Tamil Tigers were accused of holding civilians as human shields, recruiting child soldiers and firing on those who tried to flee.
Gordon Weiss's The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers documents in chilling detail the lead-up to this tragedy and its brutal aftermath. As the spokesman and communications adviser to the UN mission during the final years of the conflict, Weiss, who is Australian, witnessed an unfolding drama that would have far-reaching implications for the region.
The present debate over asylum-seeker policy was largely provoked by the sudden rise in Tamil boatpeople arriving in Australia in 2009 and 2010 to flee the conflict and its aftermath. If anyone has any doubts about the push factors driving that spike in arrivals, this book is essential reading.
But Weiss's study of the Tamil conflict is also an accessible and compelling narrative of Sri Lanka's often violent and tortured history. Ceylon, as it was known at the time, achieved independence in 1948 without the bloodshed experienced by India and Pakistan. The first Sinhalese majority government under D.S. Senanayake was an enlightened administration that incorporated the island's minority groups, the Tamils, Burghers and Muslims.
But this golden era was short-lived. Sinhalese nationalism that had been simmering below the surface manifested itself politically with the passing of the Sinhala Only Act in 1955. The act sparked riots that left several hundred Tamils dead and was an ominous taste of a much bloodier and drawn-out conflict.
A new constitution introduced in 1972 further restricted the rights of Tamils, who began agitating for an autonomous homeland in the north and east of the country through the Tamil United Liberation Front. Tamil youths, disillusioned with the failure of peaceful resistance, began to take up arms.
In July 1983, after the government displayed the bodies of 13 soldiers killed by a landmine, troops in Colombo went on the rampage targeting Tamil homes and businesses. Up to 3000 Tamils were killed and thousands more sought refuge in government-controlled camps or fled abroad.
Aided by elements of this new diaspora, the Tamil Tigers grew to become one of the world's most feared and effective guerilla groups.
It was the Tigers who perfected the technique of suicide bombing as a means of terrorising a population for political ends, counting among their victims India's prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, who had sent an expeditionary force to Sri Lanka in a failed bid to crush them.
At the height of their insurrection, the Tigers had their own navy, a rudimentary airforce using specially converted Cessnas and small, highly effective suicidal penetration teams.
Weiss pulls no punches in tackling the atrocities committed by the Tigers. But he is equally scathing about the failure of the successive Sri Lankan administrations to deal with the aspirations of the Tamil minority and brutal tactics employed by the Sri Lankan Army to quash the rebellion.
He also details the desperate attempts by a UN convoy in the final weeks of the war to assist those civilians trapped in the Cage. Despite the government's insistence that it was pursuing a policy of "zero civilian casualties" by honouring the no-fire-zone status of the enclave, Weiss presents sufficient evidence to quantify the charge that war crimes were committed by the Sri Lankan Army.
But the UN does not emerge unscathed. When the UN Human Rights Council was issuing numerous resolutions condemning Israel's invasion of Gaza, it could barely muster one on Sri Lanka despite credible allegations of war crimes.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon failed to use the UN's moral authority to denounce the tabulated killing of civilians, in the interests of keeping open channels of communication with the Sri Lankan government, and also of humanitarian access.
This proved to be a tragic mistake. As Weiss points out, the UN's excuse that casualty reports could not be verified, unwittingly supported the deceptive "zero civilian casualties" narrative the Sri Lankan government maintained.
Could the civil war have been averted? If the grievances of Tamils had been addressed in the years after independence through constitutional safeguards as well as social and economic development, Weiss believes it could have. Even after the war started opportunities for a negotiated settlement were constantly stymied by inflexibility of the Sri Lankan state on the one hand and the violence and nihilism of Prabhakaran on the other.
The defeat of the Tigers, however, does not necessarily mean peace will prevail. Weiss's depressing conclusion, backed by ample evidence, is that Tamil grievances are being addressed with government-backed tyranny as the state extends a hegemonic hold over all aspects of civil society.
Weiss's book will not be popular with the government in Colombo, but there is nothing in it that will give succour to the Tamil cause as espoused by the Tigers.
Its value lies in its dispassionate analysis of the cause of Sri Lanka's tragic civil war and how such conflicts can be avoided.
John Zubrzycki is a senior writer on The Australian. He covered South Asia for the paper from 1994 to 1998.
© The Australian
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