Sri Lanka’s separatist armed conflict
Prince Hussein-February 18, 2016, 9:03 pm
By Neville Ladduwahetty
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Al Hussein has made insulting and degrading comments about Sri Lanka’s judiciary in particular, and other institutions of the sovereign State, perhaps in a bid to humiliate and badger Sri Lanka into accepting international participation in the accountability mechanism. His efforts have turned out to be a diplomatic disaster, because what is realistically possible in Sri Lanka falls far short of the promised build-up contained in the UNHRC Resolution.
The approach adopted by the High Commissioner reflects an ignorance of the Constitutional constraints involved. These Constitutional constraints apply to any international involvement in any capacity, be it as Judges, Prosecutors, etc., if it involves revising existing judicial mechanisms in place, because of provisions in Article 4 and its relationship to Article 3 in the Constitution. Even Sri Lanka’s Foreign Ministry does not seem to be aware of these limitations. However, having subsequently realized the limitations involved, he did concede that "Whatever we see from our side, it’s your sovereign right to decide."
Sovereignty is the context and the only context to judge the manner in which the Separatist Armed Conflict was conducted. Despite references to defeating terrorism, the ideology driving the conflict initiated by the Tamil leadership at Vaddukodai in 1976, and very much alive even today ,was the "Creation of a Separate State – Tamil Eelam". Therefore, the conflict was a Separatist war that reached the threshold of an Armed Conflict; a threshold that has finally come to be acknowledged both nationally and internationally. Thus, International Humanitarian Law is what applies, as set out in "Protocol Additional to the Geneva Convention of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts (Protocol II), 8 June 1977.
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