The Report on Sri Lanka: Horrific vs Ethnic
Facts and External vs Internal Hybridity
by Rajan Philips-September 19, 2015
Two h-adjectives have come into circulation after the release of the UNHRC Report on Sri Lanka, last Wednesday, in Geneva: horrific and hybrid. There is nothing new in the facts stipulated as horrific in Geneva, but stipulating them as horrific does not bridge the ethnic gap in the agreement about those facts. What is new is the recommendation to establish a hybrid court having international jurists collaborating with their local counterparts. But can international hybridity overcome Lanka’s nationally divisive ethnicity? Would it make more sense to promote internal hybridity while privileging external hybridity? Internal hybridity must involve Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim judges and lawyers and other officials professionally working together rather than politically fighting one another. Just as important, transitional justice must involve a more inclusive and reflective process instead of the usual adversarial court room drama. Hybrid or otherwise, an adversarial court process will invariably degenerate into a pettifogging theatre generating mutual recriminations rather than facilitating inter-ethnic reconciliation. In Sri Lanka’s litigious culture there are quite a few legal luminaries itching to argue the case for patriotism with or without a political brief.
Sri Lanka is a "Hybrid Island" as Neluka Silva entitled a 2002 symposium celebrating the island’s historical and cultural hybridity and debunking myths of ethnic purity. Ironically, Dr. Silva’s book, "The Hybrid Island" was published during the peace process launched by Ranil Wickremesinghe during his first stint as ‘elected’ Prime Minister. Before long the optimism of hybridity and of peace was overwhelmed by conflicting ethnic assertions. More than a decade later, and six years after the end of the war, Ranil Wickremesinghe is Prime Minister again but in a wholly different, and hybrid, political context. He is now the partner in a hybrid, or tandem, Executive arrangement with the country’s elected President, Maithripala Sirisena. Together, they preside over a hybrid (UNP-SLFP) national government and a hybrid (with TNA opposition) parliament. In a happy, or unhappy, depending on the eye of the beholder, h-adjectival coincidence, the UNHRC is now recommending a hybrid court to adjudicate on the horrific crimes of the twin agencies, the Rajapaksa government and the LTTE, that rejected peace and hybridity and fought a war for ethnic purity.
What a difference can two elections and a new government make? The patriotic sky would have been brought down by now if the Rajapaksas were still in power. Wimal Weerawansa would have been the national megaphone creating political noise pollution. Now he can hardly hear his own voice in the wilderness. The new government has reportedly provided a "cordial response" to the Geneva Report, noting the report’s emphasis that it was a human-rights, and not a criminal, investigation. The President and the Prime Minister convened a press conference to affirm the government’s commitment to work with the UNHRC and international agencies. The President even went to the extent of claiming that if the Rajapaksas were in power, the tone and strictures of the Geneva report would have been ‘100 or even 1,000 times’ worse for Sri Lanka.
The Prime Minister irately scoffed at the suggestion in some quarters for parliament to pass an "Amnesty Legislation", which would logically imply presumption not of innocence but of guilt. The government has also indicated that it would create and use new judicatures to investigate not only human rights violations but also corruption during the prosecution of the war. General Sarath Fonseka is all for any inquiry, insisting that nothing untoward happened under his watch. The TNA gave a measured response, welcoming the recommendation for a hybrid court, calling upon the government to implement the recommendations of the report, and asking the Tamil people "to use this moment as a moment of introspection into our own community’s failures and create the right culture and atmosphere in which we can live with dignity and self-respect, as equal citizens of Sri Lanka."
Complacency and Complexities
To modify Mao’s famous dictum, complacency is the enemy of study, complacency is also the pitfall of political foolishness. Political opinion in Sri Lanka can change faster than a weather vane. President Sirisena and Prime Minister Wickremesinghe are certainly not unmindful of this danger and in their press conference they specifically appealed to the media to play a responsible role in the wake of the Geneva report rather than providing sensational outlets to chauvinistic machinations. Intentionally or otherwise, the hybrid national government, its cabinet obesity notwithstanding, would serve the smart political purpose of neutralizing the traditional partisan opposition to reconciliation initiatives. At the same time, the government should not underestimate the capacity of the UPFA-SLFP rump in parliament to create mischief outside the parliament. While the rump should never be denied its freedom to shout, the government must not hesitate to mobilize its forces to outshout them with a tit for every tat. One would hope that Mr. Sirisena and Mr. Wickremesinghe would have learnt from the mistake of their political inaction between January and July when the Bring-Back-Mahinda movement enjoyed a political free ride to grow from a Nugegoda rally into a national menace. The Colombian and non-Colombian dimension of their political partnership is without precedent in Sri Lanka and they need to use that for more positive purposes than handing out cabinet portfolios in large numbers.
The first general recommendation of the Geneva Report is to set up a High Level Executive Group (HLEG) for the purpose of overseeing the implementation of the recommendations of the new report and all earlier reports, internal and international, including the LLRC recommendations. In my view, the proposed HLEG should not be ignorant of political imperatives and should not be shy of its political obligations. Even if the HLEG were to be supposedly apolitical and professional, there should be a parallel high level political group to look after the political side of implementing the recommendations of various commissions. Such a group should actively involve the JVP, the JHU and the TNA along with the two major governing parties. What is not needed is the all-party charade that President Jayewardene and President Rajapaksa effectively used to justify inaction rather than develop road maps for action. What is needed is a high level political group of like minded people representing Sri Lanka’s ethno-political spectrum. Without specifically focused political hybridity at the highest level, judicial hybridity, internal or international, would be a non-starter.
The fundamental weakness of the Geneva Report, in my view, is its reluctance to openly recognize Sri Lanka’s ethnic fractures and fragmented positions in regard to both ‘facts’ and the methods of dealing with those facts. In a revealing statement, the Report welcomes the new government’s intentions and commitments but is cautious that they are not enough "to convince a very skeptical audience – Sri Lankan and International." There is no single audience in Sri Lanka, but multiple audiences – hearing, as well as speaking, in different voices, and raising and getting frustrated in, different expectations. Sri Lanka is a living case study of a more universal contradiction in the field of human rights, one that academics characterize as the widening gap "between the promises of the universal human rights regime and the political realities in national contexts." The gap in the case of Sri Lanka needs to be bridges not so much to prove an academic point or score an international forensic victory, as to bring immediate redress to the thousands of victims. Taking steps to repairing their lives should be the top priority. That would also be the first step in a long and arduous journey.
There is a great deal more to the Geneva Report than the two h-adjectives that I am polemically questioning. The overriding question arising from the Geneva Report is who will do what, when and how? There are no easy or short term answers to any one of this four-part question, and every answer will carry a different consequence for the ‘victims’.
