The upcoming visit of UNHRC chief Volker Türk to Sri Lanka has revived limited interest in media discourses – and from expected quarters. Not all of them are Tamil, who have their litany of unaddressed woes, woes unaddressed not only by the government but also the UNHRC, on which they had counted the most, when the ethnic war ended 15 years back.
Most Tamils in the country have given up on it. Their politicians alone seem to talk to them, especially every March and September, when the UNHRC’s bi-annual sessions are held. This time, they were all busier with the local government elections first, and the complexities of individual mayoral elections in the Tamil areas of the North and the East.
Hence, they will take time to re-focus their energies and time on UNHRC-related issues. High Commissioner Türk’s visit could not have come at a better time, for the Tamil leaders to re-direct their energies back to war crimes and accountability issues. Needless to say, the government leadership will be concerned, meeting with the visitor, but they are not going to be overly worried.
Ours and theirs
At least the Sri Lankan State, independent of the party or ruler in power, has come to conclude that the UNHRC is a tool of the elite West to divide nations as ‘ours’ and the unknown ‘theirs’. And unfortunately for the victims of war crimes – and there were at least some, definitely – the last UNHRC resolution that provided for expanding the scope of the probe to the present has only helped dilute the cause, if there was genuinely one, to begin with.
Many in the Sinhala South especially believe that ridding them of the LTTE terrorism and the economic cost that it entailed was the greatest and possibly the only service that the Sri Lankan state had done for them since Independence. But victimised Tamils disagree. No one is defending the LTTE anymore, not in public, not in parlour discourses.
Yet, every one of them wants the ‘guilty’ from the other side, namely, the armed forces, identified and punished. It may be fair from their perception, yes – and so with those who have been moving and voting for the UNHRC resolutions, time and again. But neither side is even vaguely suggesting that ‘LTTE escapees’ from the country, and their Diaspora sponsors, including those that funded the LTTE, too, should be brought to book.
Rolling probe
Today, when the UNHRC in its upcoming Council meeting is going to discuss and debate Sri Lanka and possibly a new resolution to replace the one that is running out its term, the very authority flows from the three-man Darussman Report, commissioned for ‘personal information / education’ by then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Now, we have a new group of ‘nationalists’ in the country wanting the Darussman Report withdrawn, as they, like those in their ilk, dub it as ‘illegal’. Like the ‘Rolling Plan’ that some national governments have for their development, the current phase of the UNHRC resolution has become a ‘rolling probe’ but with nothing substantial achieved.
Over and above all these, the Tamils now want the recent ‘Chemmani grave dig-outs’ too to come under the UNHRC probe. The chances are that they are the skeletal remains of Tamil victims of the war – innocent people or LTTE cadres – but the age of the skeletons and their past as living humans, too, has to be proved.
Yet, Tamil leaders in the country have been demanding that the UNHRC boss visit the site. He is now scheduled to visit only Trincomalee. His meetings with government leaders, and possibly with some human rights groups, apart from self-styled intellectuals can be expected to go through tiringly past procedures.
The question is if he will be meeting Colombo Archbishop, Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith, who has now begun criticising the incumbent government of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, too, for failure in bringing the ‘real culprits’ behind the Easter blasts, to book. Whether or not he has been doing his theological work with a missionary zeal, he has been doing so on the Easter blasts front, no doubt.
Religious profiling
There is a widespread demand for the withdrawal of the controversial Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). The debate within the country is if it should have an alternate to the PTA, with adequate checks and balances – or, not. At a time when the ugly face of terrorism has shown its face across the world, there is general acceptance over the need for some kind of a ‘preventive’ detention by the state.
There may not be many member-nations in the UNHRC or the larger UNGA that do not have a preventive detention law, especially post-9/11. For a nation of its size, Sri Lanka has experienced almost all forms of terrorism – ideological, ethnic / linguist, religious and socio-political.
The ruling JVP was a prime example for ideological terrorism, though in its time as a ‘militant, insurgent group’, the term was not as popular as it is now. The LTTE’s face was that of ethnic terrorism. Likewise, the Easter blasts were a product of ‘religious terrorism’.
Then you have all the violent acts during the Aragalaya protests, in which coordinated arson attacks were staged on the properties of ruling party politicians across the Sinhala-Buddhist South. The properties belonging to then President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Prime Ministers Mahinda Rajapaksa and Ranil Wickremesinghe were in the list.
There are any number of individual cases where PTA misuse has come to light. The latest is that of Mohamad Liyaudeen Rusdi, who was detained under PTA, for displaying stickers on Israel and Palestine. Thankfully, the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka (HRCSL) intervened, as Rusdi’s detention was obviously based on pre-meditate and biased ethnic and religious profiling.
Truth be told, if a Sinhala-Buddhist holding similar views as Rusdi on the issue in question had displayed those stickers, he might not have been arrested. The police would have simply ignored or overlooked him, and no one would have been wiser.
Semantics, optics
The Sri Lankan State’s position on the UNHRC front is predictable and well-known. Under President Dissanayake, it is not going to change. Needless to recall, no western government has seriously sought the UNHRC probe to cover non-military personnel allegedly involved in those reported episodes of war-crimes.
It is unlikely that this session will have such requests, not certainly forming a part of a new resolution – if the present one is modified and extended for a further period. To put it all in perspective, the UNHRC process has lost its relevance to new-generation Sri Lankans, Tamils, Muslims and Sinhalas.
Even if the Tamil polity and INGOs made their people believe in the process, today, it has out-lived its utility, if the original idea itself was only to pull wool over their collective eyes – at least pending a decision on what to do with the State actors and majority / majoritarian Sinhala sections. That is saying a lot.
Politicising the process
All of it has boiled down to semantics on the one hand and optics on the other. The UNHRC, like all UN institutions including the International Court of Justice (ICJ) decide not always on merits. Instead, they do so in terms of the political mood of individual nations that are in a position to decide.
This in turn has politicised the entire process. For instance, the original idea for a UN probe into allegations of war-crimes in Sri Lanka flowed from the western perception that Colombo was excessively siding with a China that was growing in geo-political and geo-strategic ambitions. They could not – or, did not – punish China. Or, their early attempts, like the Tiananmen Square failed.
So, the next best was to target China’s prospective ‘client states’. Sri Lanka fitted the bill. Leave aside the yearnings of the victimised Tamil community in the country, for the West, the UNHRC route was the best to ‘discipline’ Colombo. After all, Sri Lanka too needed to be taught a lesson, for the temerity of ‘insulting’ western leaders and nations that tried to argue the LTTE’s case for secured exit from the war zone and the country.
This in turn only pushed Sri Lanka into the waiting hands of China, whose veto-vote in the UNSC, the country knew it would badly need, as and when pushed to the wall. Their attempts at successive ‘regime-changes’ only helped alter domestic politics and election results in Sri Lanka, but their friends till the previous day, too, showed that they had a mind of their own, priorities of their own.
Down the years and UNHRC sessions, the West has learnt its lesson – or, so it seems. Sri Lanka is yet to be taught one. It is difficult for Sri Lanka to be taught a lesson without dividing the island-nation, but that comes with its bag of geo-strategic and geo-political risks that the West cannot stomach, now or ever. The question is if the UNHRC has at all served the purpose of the West.
That is to ask, who will represent the nation at the UNHRC, and who may represent Sri Lanka at the UNGA for the annual address later this year. Will President Dissanayake appear in either or both of them – to put a finality to speculation from his presumed international sponsors on his government’s position on war crimes, et al, and also matters of geo-strategic and geo-political importance, when in the Sri Lankan context, they all should be discussing geo-economics and geo-economics alone.
(The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)
