Blustering Colombo Winds Up The United Nations One Too Many Times
By Rohan Jayasekera -March 28, 2014
Rohan Jayasekera
I thought it would come to nothing, but I was proven wrong. I underestimated the power of Colombo’s bluster to lose friends and influence where it mattered. The UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva has voted to conduct an independent investigation into Sri Lanka’s conduct of the closing years of its long and bloody war against murderous Tamil Tiger separatists.
The UN is a docile creature, but Sri Lanka registered its contempt for its work by pulling at its tail one too many times. Right to the end, as the UN session opened last week, Colombo was ordering the arrest of human rights activists interviewing survivors of the war, as suspected terrorists.
Detainees Ruki Fernando and Father Praveen Mahesan were just the kind of civil society observers that the UN’s independent investigators would approach once it landed. The threat was not lost on either Sri Lanka’s rights NGOs or the UN itself. UN senior human rights official Navi Pillay described the arrests as ‘provocative’ at a time when the world body was meeting to decide further action.
And provocative it was, to Sri Lanka’s disadvantage, with the members of the UNHRC voting 23-12, with 12 abstentions for the UN investigation today, and a $1.4m budget to run it. Sri Lanka’s ambassador, Ravinatha Aryasinha, slammed the resolution as a “serious breach of international law,an infringement of state sovereignty and (a) pre-judgement of the outcome of domestic processes.”
Yet a less confrontational approach might have seen off what Colombo saw, not wholly unreasonably, as a challenge to its sovereignty. Certainly plenty of other states saw it the same way, including its Asian partners China and Japan, the latter abstaining from Thursday’s vote, as did South Africa, whose handling of its own post-conflict reconciliation, accountability and human rights issues sets the gold standard for the process.
But the country’s war leader, President Mahinda Rajapakse, wanted his victory over the terrorists polished and shining a light on his post-war political future. No question regarding the conduct of the war was to be easily tolerated, whether by his own citizens or the UN.
Colombo has treated the UN with disdain from the start of its appalling final assault on the Tigers north-eastern stronghold five years ago, when Tamil civilians, aid workers and terrorists alike were blasted by government forces across a virtual free-fire zone. Maybe tens of thousands died.Read More
