Sri Lanka: In Search Of Truth & Reconciliation
Mark Salter
Is Sri Lanka on the path to establishing its own Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)? The answer, at least if Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe is to be believed, is ‘yes’. Speaking at a recent meeting in Kilinochchi – the wartime capital of territory ruled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) during its 23 year-long conflict with government forces (1983 – 2009) – Wickremesinghe suggested that setting up an TRC was now a priority, the aim being to establish a process and mechanism for ‘telling the truth related to the war’, ‘expressing regret for the past’ and ‘asking forgiveness in order to establish genuine reconciliation’. Like others before him, too, Wikremesinghe pointed to South Africa as a model for how to design such a process.
Critics will be quick to detect the hand of instrumental politics in this move. With the next Geneva review session of the UN Human Rights Commission now less than a month away, it is indeed tempting to see an announcement of moves to establish a TRC as a sop designed to keep the international community at bay over demands for demonstrable progress on accountability for alleged war crimes. And given the government’s past record of last-minute official announcements prior to UNHRC review sessions – most recently in 2017, with regard to an Office of Missing Persons(OMP) – a certain measure of political sang-froid over moves to establish a TRC indeed seems in order.
That said, it’s important to keep in mind that setting up a TRC was one of four core elements of the wide-ranging and ambitious transitional justice (TJ) strategy outlined by then Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera at the UN in autumn 2015: the others being the OMP, an Office of Reparations and – most controversially within Sri Lanka at least – a hybrid court to address war crimes allegations.
Samaraweera envisaged an 18-month timeframe for rolling out the new set of TJ instruments. In practice, however, progress on realizing this agenda has been either painfully slow or – in the case of a hybrid court – non-existent. Following seemingly endless debates regarding its mandate and composition the OMP was finally established in May 2018. To date it has held victim consultations and produced an interim report but not much more, compounding suspicions – notably among the northern Tamil population that bore the brunt of the carnage during the conflict’s final stages – that it will prove to be yet another ultimately toothless official instrument incapable of providing victims with the information they most want: the truth regarding the thousands of civilians and combatants still officially ‘missing’ almost 10 years after the war’s ending.
With regard to an Office for Reparations legislation enabling its establishment finally passed through parliament in October 2018, though there was some criticism of the envisaged mechanism as lacking in independence from government. No doubt at least partially due to the turmoil that descended in the wake of the (ultimately failed) late November takeover attempt by President Sirisena in cahoots with former president Mahinda Rajapaksa, little has been heard of the Reparations Office since, and it remains to be seen what happens once – of if – the Office eventually gets up and running.
Finally, at this juncture moves towards setting up the hybrid court proposed in 2015 appear to be completely stymied. If anything, indeed, things have moved backwards, with a succession of government officials, President Sirisena included, lining up over the past few years to voice criticism of everything from international judges’ prospective involvement in a court to wholesale rejection of allegations of war crimes committed by Sri Lankan armed forces.
In response to this situation, some will argue strongly that unless and until issues of accountability are adequately addressed in Sri Lanka, moves to establish bodies such as a Reparations Office or TRC are little more than window-dressing and should be treated accordingly. A more nuanced position might be to welcome the (limited) progress made to date on implementing the 2015 transitional justice agenda while also urging the government to move forward resolutely on all four pillars.
At the same time it’s important to underscore the fact that in Sri Lanka, as in all post-conflict contexts, there are critical issues of timing, sequencing and balancing what may sometimes appear to be competing objectives in the context of an overall transitional justice agenda. By its very definition transitional justice implies compromises and as such the delivery of less than perfect outcomes, not least with respect to justice itself. In transitional contexts, in other words, no one, either victors or victims, gets everything they want and/or quite possibly deserve.
