Sri Lanka: Heading Towards Systematic Stratocracy
By Kishok Jeyachandran -August 12, 2014
Kishok Jeyachandran
Five years on from the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka, the international community’s patience with the government in investigating gross violations of human rights and international humanitarian law is exhausted.
It comes almost five years after the end of Sri Lanka’s protracted and bloody civil war—a conflict that saw the death of tens of thousands of civilians and the ‘disappearance’ of thousands more. And it comes because no one has been held accountable for any of the gross human rights abuses and serious violations of international humanitarian law committed by both sides to the conflict.
The final phase of the war was a bloodbath. As the brutal, secessionist Tamil Tigers were pushed back into a rapidly shrinking pocket of territory in the north-east, they forced more than a quarter of a million civilians to move with them and essentially serve as forced laborers and human shields. Ignoring the human misery, Sri Lankan troops launched indiscriminate attacks. More than 20,000 and maybe up to 40,000, civilians were killed in the last months of fighting and even more were injured.
Hoping to silence the ensuing domestic and international outcry, the Sri Lankan government established a Lessons Learned Reconciliation Commission (LLRC). The commission was not designed to bring accountability and its mandate, membership and conduct were all faulted. But the LLRC did conclude that the state was obliged to investigate more fully the circumstances under which violations of human rights law and the laws of war could have occurred and where such investigations uncovered wrongful conduct to prosecute the wrongdoers. It warned that a transparent legal process and strict adherence to the rule of law were prerequisites of peace and stability.
