The High Commissioner for Human Rights visit to Sri Lanka raises hopes for victims
Photo courtesy Reuters, via CFR
This week, the UN’s top human rights official, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein – the High Commissioner for Human Rights – is visiting Sri Lanka. He will see a country that has changed considerably since his predecessor Navi Pillay came to the island in 2013.
Since then, the increasingly authoritarian government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa was voted out of office. The new government, led by President Maithripala Sirisena, has taken notable steps to change Sri Lanka’s course on human rights. The climate for freedom of expression has improved and some of the key rights institutions are no longer firmly in the hands of the President and his closest confidants.
As someone who has worked on Sri Lanka for many years, I was struck during my last visit in January by how much the atmosphere had changed in recent months. In coffee shops around the capital Colombo, I and fellow activists could talk openly about pressing rights issues – something most people would have been too scared to do under the previous government.
But even if Sri Lanka in many ways is a better place today than a few years ago, it is still a country living under a cloud of the devastating armed conflict with the Tamil Tigers that ended in 2009.
The decades-long civil war culminated in the months leading up to May 2009, when government forces led an unrelenting assault through the Tamil Tigers’ strongholds in the north. I interviewed Tamil parents scared of forced recruitment by the Tigers who hid their children in wells. Thousands of families suffered months of torment as they were caught up in the bombing, many forced to dig bunkers and drink saltwater to survive. I have spoken with survivors dazed and traumatised from the warzone.
Last month, I was standing in an eerie landscape of craters and debris along a beach near Nandikadal lagoon where the conflict had raged six years ago. I was struck by the realisation that families had been forced to build their bunkers with wedding sarees – a precious family heirloom. In the midst of the debris you could still see what remained of the sarees now bleached pinkish-white by the sun – scattered on the sand like a funeral garland for all the dead and missing.
You don’t have to scratch the surface far in the North to feel the open wounds of war. In PTK in the shadow of an ugly government-sponsored ‘Monument of Conquest’, victims’ families talk of on-going surveillance. Trauma and distress is widespread. Displaced families – still waiting for land to be allocated – are struggling to put food on their tables. ‘We need help, we need support with livelihoods’ a common need asserted across Mullaitivu district.
