Sunday 25 December 2011
The LLRC Report does make the point that the government must attend to Tamil grievances but did we need a seven-man presidential Commission costing millions of rupees for platitudinous recommendations that the government will ignore? The real substance that locals and the international community were waiting for was whether war crimes were committed and human rights trampled in the closing stages of the war. In Chapter 4 on Humanitarian Law Issues (the term war crimes is taboo as per the Terms of Reference) the learned commissioners have most firmly and unambiguously confirmed that such was indeed the case. Of course you guessed it, by the LTTE and only the LTTE!I have insisted for two and a half years that a thorough investigation of war crimes and human rights violations by the armed forces and the LTTE, and the accountability of the country’s political leaders, must be undertaken. One major thrust of Chapters 3 to 5 is denunciation of the LTTE; so this one-sided Commission has served one-half of my pleas. Bravo! We are making progress, are we not? Seriously, I am not playing cynic; I agree with half of the Commission’s findings.
What about the other half? The rest of Chapter 4 reads like plain vanilla whitewash, naivety and acquiescence in swallowing the military’s version. Some passages are incredible; the learned commissioners are puzzled who was shelling makeshift hospitals and the now internationally notorious Pudukudiriuppu (PKT) hospital. Was it the military? Perhaps it was LTTE cadres themselves; no, maybe it was little green men from Mars! The Commission has handled the military and the regime with kid gloves. What independent forensic evidence did it collect from the ‘crime scene’ to confront the military? If it did not confront field commanders with the massive deaths, what then is the value of the Report?
The Commission’s findings pertaining to LTTE atrocities are credible and known; conscription of child soldiers, cowardly use of civilians as human shields and shooting their Tamil brothers like dogs when they attempted to flee, placement of artillery pieces in the thick of civilians, and such other monstrosities of psychopaths like Prabhakaran and his commanders. But for the LLRC to follow this with a whitewash of the symmetric crimes, equally well known, of the regime and the military, is what fatally deprives the report of respectability and credibility.
The way out – clever
To be fair however, the report does contain statements made by a large number of witnesses who condemned the conduct of the military. I suspect there may be a reason why the commissioners included this evidence but refused to draw conclusions obvious there from. In circumstances of gross repression as in Sri Lanka it is a brave man who will draw self-evident inferences from evidence that incriminates the armed forces or the political leadership.
The way out the Commission has chosen is a clever one; record and reproduce the evidence, say you don’t think the charges of human rights violation have been proved, and then leave it to the public and the international community to draw obvious inferences. Intelligent people at home and abroad may get the hint; read the contents, ponder the discourse, but ignore the conclusions that the learned commissioners have felt constrained to draw. Admittedly, this thesis is speculative.
Similar remarks can be made in respect of casualties (dead and injured) where the evidence of several parties is recorded but the Commission ducks conclusions other intelligent humans would draw. Another example is that scores of abductions, formal arrests and white-van encounters of persons who thereafter disappeared into a hellhole. Copiously documented, yes, but the findings are lukewarm.
No statement of condemnation of the state’s repressive forces (no such reticence when it comes to LTTE atrocities), no assignment of accountability, and the usual platitudes about the authorities needing to attend to these matters; of course the same authorities who were the culprits in the first place.
The Channel-4 video
One of the weaker sections of the report deals with the horrendous Channel-4 videos, on whose authenticity the commissioners heap suspicion. Nevertheless, they refrain from calling it a fake and opt to recommend “further investigation.”
They rely on the evidence of Chauthara de Silva, a Singapore PhD and Senior Lecturer at Moratuwa, and Professor Yfantis of the University of Nevada, an expert in Computer Science, but to the best of my knowledge not in digital image processing. (I may be wrong). My PDF copy of the LLRC Report does not include their reports but the main text contains extracts from Yfantis. Some footnotes taken from de Silva’s report are naive and express opinions on scenery, background and appearance of stains; matters that have little to do with video technology and tampering.
Laboratories in US and studies commissioned by a UN Special Rapporteur have certified the video as authentic. The response of Channel-4 to the de Silva and Yfantis reports will be interesting, but the matter will be settled conclusively only when Chnnel-4 reveals how the videos came into its possession.
For now my comment is that an investigation commissioned by the Government of Sri Lanka will carry little credibility – GoSL has no one but itself to blame – and underlines the importance of an independent international probe of not just the videos but also the whole war crimes issue.
How will the IC respond?
The LLRC match is being played out for the sake of international actors. If GoSL wants to settle the national question it knows what it needs to do and could have done so a long time ago; no need for commissions. End the military occupation of Tamil areas and close down the High Security Zones, implement full devolution of power, and release Tamil youth held in illegal detention for years. For starters, these few steps will do more than a hundred commissions of inquiry. This game is not being played for reconciliation with the Tamils; it is being played to get the human rights and international agencies baying for blood off the government’s back.
Will the human rights lobbies and Western governments take the bait and concur with the LLRC that the regime and its armed forces stand acquitted of war crimes and human rights violations? My guess is as follows; non-governmental and human rights lobbies will not take the bait, New Delhi will be delighted to go along with the report; as for Western governments, let’s watch for a bit.
