President Trump’s thoroughly confusing Fox Business interview, annotated

 President Trump told Fox Business Network's Maria Bartiromo on April 12, that his order to send airstrikes against a Syrian airfield took place during dessert with Chinese President Xi at Mar-a-Lago, as Xi ate, "the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you've ever seen." (Fox Business Network)

By Aaron Blake April 12 at 8:59 AM

President Trump spoke with Fox Business Network's Maria Bartiromo in an interview airing Wednesday morning, and it was par for the course for Trump.

By which I mean he rewrote history (on his views of attacking Syria), offered some cryptic comments (about FBI Director James Comey's job), and appeared to completely reverse course on strategy (saying he now wants to finish health-care reform before tax reform). He even appeared to brag about striking Syria while eating dessert with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

President Trump’s thoroughly confusing Fox Business interview, annotated.docx by Thavam Ratna on Scribd

South Africa’s Zimbabwe Moment

President Jacob Zuma is toying with land expropriation policies that threaten the country's economy — and his own leadership.

BY ERIN CONWAY-SMITH-APRIL 12, 2017

JOHANNESBURG — For the 23 years it has ruled South Africa since the end of apartheid, the African National Congress (ANC) has resisted populist calls to strip white landowners of their property and redistribute it to black South Africans. Now the party’s embattled leader is calling for exactly that, using incendiary rhetoric around land expropriation in a desperate bid to cling to power, and, when the time comes, deliver the ANC into the hands of his chosen successor.

As Jacob Zuma’s scandal-plagued presidency heads for yet another no-confidence vote after his abrupt cabinet reshuffle earlier this month sent the rand tumbling, he has called on black parties to unite in order to amend the constitution to allow land expropriation without compensation — a move that contradicts the ANC’s official policy, which calls for land acquisition based on “just and equitable” compensation.

The ANC previously pursued a “willing-buyer, willing-seller” approach to land reform but failed dismally. More than two decades after the end of apartheid, the vast majority of South African land remains in the hands of the minority white population. The party has sought to speed up the redistribution process with a bill that would let the government expropriate land without the owners’ consent as long as it pays fair compensation. The bill was recently referred back to parliament after lawmakers failed to get adequate public participation in the process.

Zuma has adopted a more aggressive stance, calling for a “pre-colonial audit of land ownership, use, and occupation patterns” to be followed by a new law to allow the expropriation of land without compensation. “We need to take bold steps that will transform our economy, including land ownership, very fast,” he said in a speech on Feb. 24.

The president’s rhetoric has drawn harsh rebukes from the political opposition. Mmusi Maimane, leader of the liberal, pro-business Democratic Alliance, the largest opposition party, on March 3 accused Zuma of having “gone rogue on land reform.” Others have compared Zuma’s approach to that of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, who famously expropriated thousands of white-owned farms only to watch the economy nosedive and inflation reach more than 500 billion percent, according to some estimates.

Few analysts see South Africa taking such a disastrous route, in part because most doubt that Zuma has the will or the political capital to follow through on his inflammatory rhetoric. But investors have already signaled their unease with his leadership, in particular over his recent firing of a respected finance minister, which sent borrowing costs through the roof and prompted rating agencies to slash South Africa’s credit rating to junk. Anti-Zuma demonstrations were held around the country on April 7, and protesters are expected to take to the streets again this week.

“Weak or removing property rights have been shown globally to be disastrous,” said Peter Attard Montalto, an emerging markets analyst for the financial services group Nomura. Mere talk of expropriation without compensation, he added, “conjures up the Zimbabwe scenario in people’s minds.”

Analysts say that Zuma’s populist turn is designed to drum up enough grassroots support to enable him to deliver leadership of the ANC to his ex-wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, a former minister and chairwoman of the African Union Commission. He is due to step down as the party’s leader at a crucial conference in December, where the ANC will anoint his successor.

“I don’t think [Zuma] actually believes in aggressive policy here, but he is happy to use it as a political tool and wedge in the party to help win the December elective conference,” Montalto said.

Zuma, a Zulu traditionalist, came to power thanks to a populist touch that energized a largely rural base of supporters. But as his popularity has waned, the president has found himself outflanked by more radical firebrands like Julius Malema, a former ANC youth leader turned Zuma rival who has been beating the land expropriation drum for years now — and gaining steam.

Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party, which made land reform a central pillar of its policy platform, is less than four years old. But already it is the third-biggest party in the country, playing kingmaker in last year’s local election and helping tip the opposition to victory in Johannesburg and Pretoria.

“Zuma and the rest of his gang realize that the ideas of the EFF are winning in society,” said Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, the EFF’s spokesman. “To remain popular they are plugging into those ideas.”

Meanwhile, the ANC had its worst-ever electoral showing last year, narrowly losing power in several major cities where opposition parties formed coalitions. While ANC leaders pledged to win back voters, the party has been distracted by factional battles before its December conference.

The ANC’s internal elective process does not permit open campaigning, and the debate about land expropriation appears to have become a proxy for competing factions within the party. There is significant opposition within the ANC to Zuma and his backers, who are viewed as a patronage faction, from a more pragmatic, pro-business faction associated with Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa.

Zuma has more than a passing interest in who succeeds him as ANC leader and, by extension, the country’s president. He is facing 783 counts of corruption and fraud related to a 1999 government arms deal, with the charges still winding their way through the courts. It is thought that Dlamini-Zuma would be unlikely to jail the father of her children.

Other party heavyweights have distanced themselves from Zuma by sticking to the more cautious party line on land reform. “The official ANC policy is expropriation with compensation. That’s our formal policy,” Pravin Gordhan told Foreign Policy earlier this month, before he was sacked from his post as finance minister. Gwede Mantashe, the party’s secretary-general, said that land redistribution should be sped up “within the existing legislative framework,” an implicit repudiation of Zuma’s position.

Zuma’s success in mobilizing supporters around his radical land reform proposal partly reflects the ANC’s failure to resolve this highly emotive issue in a satisfactory way. According to Mcebisi Ndletyana, a politics professor at the University of Johannesburg, this failure has made the issue ripe for manipulation by ambitious politicians, in particular Malema, who has spent the past few years loudly reminding black South Africans of the ruling party’s failure to deliver on struggle-era promises of land restitution.

“Increasingly, the ANC is realizing that the demand is gaining popular resonance,” Ndletyana said. “Not only is it gaining popular resonance, but [it] is also portraying the ANC as a sellout. [Zuma’s] advocacy of this issue has a populist agenda in mind, but the issue itself remains legitimate. That is why it has resonance.”

Regardless of whether Zuma succeeds in installing his ex-wife as his successor, experts say that pressure to tackle land reform issues is unlikely to dissipate, especially as South Africa faces sluggish economic growth and high unemployment. “The key question is, how will the ANC and the government handle this?” said Somadoda Fikeni, a political analyst at the University of South Africa in Pretoria. “Will this be done with respect for the law, or recklessly?”

Pew study: Governments around the world are tightening the screws on religious freedom


Sanwara Begum, 20, poses for a photograph with her 25-day-old daughter Aasma inside their shelter in Kutupalang unregistered refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, February 9, 2017. Sanwara Begum fled to Bangladesh from Khyeri Prang village in Myanmar, with her husband around two and a half months ago. Her husband Rafiqullah now works as a day labourer in Cox’s Bazar. "No one wants to leave their own home. We have come to Bangladesh only to save our lives. Myanmar is our home, we will move to Myanmar immediately if the situation becomes stable," Sanwara said. Source: Reuters/Mohammad Ponir Hossain

12th April 2017

RESTRICTIONS on religion and social conflicts involving religion increased for the first time in three years, according to the findings of the Pew Research Centre’s latest annual study on religious freedom.

The Pew Research Centre report Global Restrictions on Religion Rise Modestly in 2015, Reversing Downward Trend found that countries which are highly restrictive of religion via discriminatory laws, policies and other actions increased slightly from 24 to 25 percent during 2015.

Meanwhile, countries with “high or very high levels of social hostilities” spurred by private individuals, organisations or groups in societies increased from 23 to 27 percent.

SEE ALSO: Brunei, M’sia, Indonesia rated region’s worst violators of rights, religious freedom

Source: Pew Research Centre

The Asia-Pacific, along with the Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe have all seen increases in government harassment and the use of force against religious groups since 2007.

One in four people live in a country with high or very high levels of restriction or conflict around religion, which Pew says is spurred by the fact that some Asian nations ranking poorly in the index such as Pakistan and Indonesia are also some of the most populous on the planet.

China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Vietnam and Singapore were all listed as having “very high government restrictions on religion” by the Pew research.

Meanwhile, the small Southeast Asian communist nation Laos dropped out of this category between 2014 and 2015.

Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka had been listed “very high social hostilities involving religion” in 2014, but dropped out of this category in 2015.

SEE ALSO: Burma: UN to investigate crimes against Rohingya Muslims

Making up more than half the world’s population, Muslims and Christians were persecuted in the most countries worldwide.

The study showed that the number of countries where Jews were harassed fell slightly in 2015, after years of steady increases.

Interestingly, a recent Pew study of American attitudes to various religious showed that their feelings towards all faiths warmed, even under Donald Trump. Attitudes towards Muslims improved by around eight percentage points from the previous 2014 study.

Given ongoing reports of state-endorsed persecution and violence against Rohingya Muslims since 2016, it seems likely that religious freedom will continue to decline in the Asia Pacific in Pew Research Centre’s next study.

The future will be battery-powered

By Amelia Urry on Feb 21, 2017

The battery might be the least sexy piece of technology ever invented. The lack of glamour is especially conspicuous on the lower floors of MIT’s materials science department, where one lab devoted to building and testing the next world-changing energy storage device could easily be mistaken for a storage closet.

At the back of the cramped room, Donald Sadoway, a silver-haired electrochemist in a trim black-striped suit and expensive-looking shoes, rummages through a plastic tub of parts like a kid in search of a particular Lego. He sets a pair of objects on the table, each about the size and shape of a can of soup with all the inherent drama of a paperweight.

The future will be battery-powered.docx by Thavam Ratna on Scribd

Is mental illness real? You asked Google – here’s the answer

Every day millions of internet users ask Google life’s most difficult questions, big and small. Our writers answer some of the commonest queries

‘We have a fetishistic relationship to bodies and brains, a moth-to-light attraction to shiny imaging scans.’ Photograph: BBC

Jay Watts-Wednesday 12 April 2017

When people ask whether mental illness is real or not, my suspicion is that they really mean: does mental illness have a physical, material cause, in the same way as cancer or a broken leg? Can it be tested for, diagnosed and treated with the same certainty as a physical disease? Whatever the answer to that question, it should cast no doubts or aspersions on the very real suffering of people with mental health problems.

 

When we think of mental illness, we tend to think of categories such as schizophrenia, bipolar affective disorder, depression and anxiety. These categories cannot be verified with objective tests, in the way as, say, cancer or diabetes can. Neither do they tend to stand up to scientific scrutiny as distinct constructs. For people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, there is no specific treatment or predictable outcome. To take another example, most people with a diagnosis of depression have symptoms of anxiety, and vice versa.

 

Framing problems as being part of distinct disorders is a powerful thing to do, and loads of the categories that reach our diagnostic bibles appear relatively new, historically. Many can be traced back to the pharmaceutical industry, which has a direct interest in shaping behaviours and emotions into various symptoms, to be sold back to consumers as disorders requiring medication. This has led people to argue that these categories do not represent real illnesses.

 

Such arguments can come across as diminishing the lived experience of mental anguish, its embodiment, and the potential role of medication. Some mental health problems are less contested than others, and medication does save lives. It would be cruel to suggest a grieving widow unable to cope could not benefit sometimes from anti-anxiety medication, or to deny an option of antipsychotics to quell the intrusive, menacing, persecutory experiences that can accompany an acute psychosis.

 

 In the City: ‘There is little political will to combine increasing mental distress with structural inequalities.’ Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

 

The problem, though, is that the efficacy of such treatments, and the mechanisms by which they work, tend to be oversold and presented as long-term solutions. We are right to be cautious about the overprescription of antidepressants, to take one example. These tend to be prescribed along with a scientifically dodgy idea that the pills are rejigging an imbalance in serotonin, a chemical messenger in the brain. Similarly, emerging evidence suggests that the long-term prescription of antipsychotics may actually hinder recovery for many.

 

Psychological and social factors are at least as significant and, for many, the main cause of suffering. Poverty, relative inequality, being subject to racism, sexism, displacement and a competitive culture all increase the likelihood of mental suffering – as the survivor-led collective Recovery in the Bin brilliantly illuminates. Add into the mix individual experiences such as childhood sexual abuse, early separation, emotional neglect, chronic invalidation and bullying, and we get a clearer picture of why some people suffer more than others.

 

Crucially, all of these experiences affect our psychological and physiological makeup. For example, the Adverse Childhood Experiences studies show that childhood trauma, neglect and structural oppressions manifest later not just in mental distress but in chronically inflamed bodies stuck on hyper-alert (this we can pick up through blood tests).

 

Governments and pharmaceutical companies are not as interested in these results, throwing funding at studies looking at genetics and physical biomarkersas opposed to the environmental causes of distress. Sociologists argue that this is because citizens who consider themselves ill are easier to manage than people who consider themselves maddened by toxic families and injustice.

 

Mental health practitioners often try to sidestep this whole debate by claiming that most sensible professionals subscribe to a biopsychosocial model of mental distress. But unfortunately such a model nearly always ends up privileging the biological, despite the best intentions of many psychiatrists. As a society, we have a somewhat fetishistic relationship to bodies and brains, a moth-to-light-like attraction to shiny brain-imaging scans or a hint at a breakthrough in genetic research. Correlations between experiences and genetic phenotypes are conflated with evidence for molecular pathways that prove the existence of distinct disorders. Studies with only a few participants generate multiple headlines, and remain entrenched in the public imagination. At the same time, treatments that we know work fail to get funding due to the unconscious bias towards biological explanations.

 

Consider family interventions. Professionals have known for decades that reducing hostility, criticism and emotional over-involvement in families improves how well people recover from a number of serious mental health problems, regardless of how severe patients’ symptoms are. Yet despite the robust evidence base – up there with medication and individual therapy – family work is rarely available through the NHS.

 

Similarly, there is little political will to combine increasing mental distress with structural inequalities, though the association is robust and many professionals think this would be the best way to tackle the current mental health epidemic. The idea that mental suffering is a “real” illness residing in individuals, and especially in their genes, can therefore be damaging.

 

It is also not necessarily what the public wants, despite the current emphasis on the “just like any other illness” narrative. When researchers ask people how they understand mental illness, they tend to prefer psychosocial explanations to medical ones. Simplistic biological explanations tend to increase stigma, not least because they cement a division between ill and well people. Many people have felt silenced and traumatised by such accounts, feeling that the illness model shuts down their truth.

 

There is an implicit suggestion here that mental health problems have to be viewed as being equivalent to physical illnesses if they are to warrant society’s care and funding. This may inadvertently cement prejudice, given the contested nature of mental illness. Mental health problems are no less real, no less disabling, for occupying a peculiar space between inner and outer, meaning-making and meltdown, the inner world and the environments that shape us.

 

Rather than clumsily trying to squeeze people’s distress into different boxes, and attempting to convince the public that these reflect illness processes, as with flu or cancer, we must shift our focus to one that validates the lived experience of people who are suffering, however they choose to understand their pain.

 

Some will choose to conceptualise their distress as an illness, others as a result of trauma, others yet as an embodied response to the mixed messages that are rife in society about who and how we are supposed to be. Our guiding principle should not be whether such forms of accounting are true or false, but whether they are useful for any given individual at any given moment. Acceptance, after all – is the great friend of good mental health just as writing over one another’s truth is the great enemy.

Reforms Without Referendum, Or Referendum Without Reforms?

M. A. Sumanthiran, Mano Ganesan and Dinesh Gunawardena

by N. Sathiya Moorthy - Tuesday, April 11, 2017

• Thus, no national newspaper (read: English) got to highlight a recent statement of Upcountry Tamil leader and Minister, Mano Ganesan
• Mano Ganesan indicated that the ‘Big Two’, namely the UNP and the SLFP, were happy to confine the constitutional reforms processes near-exclusively to electoral reforms
• SLFP representative at the meeting made it abundantly clear that they were prepared neither for wholesale constitutional reforms nor a referendum to make it happen
• Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera of the UNP said that they could not afford a referendum-centric Constitution, just now

Whether or not there is a national consensus of some kind for pushing through constitutional reforms, as promised by the present-day rulers, there are already differences if any consensus has at all been achieved. On that would also hinge the question if any of the proposed constitutional amendments, including a new constitution, if agreed upon, would require a nation-wide referendum.

Reforms Without Referendum.docx by Thavam Ratna on Scribd

Sri Lanka Must NOW Begin The Task Of Filing Charges & Establishing A Hybrid Court

By Usha S Sri-Skanda Rajah –April 11, 2017

Usha S Sri-Skanda-Rajah

Come March 2017 UN Must Act On Sri Lanka – Part 3

In the wake of a hybrid judicial mechanism being rejected outright by Sri Lanka, this article digs in, regardless of its unconscionable behavior, to examining what Sri Lanka must do NOW, the obligations the country promised to deliver and its blatant duplicity, the Council’s missed opportunity in Geneva and what should have been the outcome of the 34^th session as a result of Sri Lanka’s wilful non-compliance and to exploring the avenues for justice available for Tamils..      

What Sri Lanka Must Do NOW

On the 23^rd of March 2017 Sri Lanka co-sponsored Resolution hrc34/L1 (hrc34/L1) on Accountability, Reconciliation and Human Rights in Sri Lanka, incorporating hrc30/1 (hrc30/1) it previously co-sponsored on 1^st October 2015 but failed to comply, giving new impetus to hrc30/1 in the form of hrc34/L1 – which was adopted by the UN Human Rights Council (Council) again without a vote. It is now incumbent upon Sri Lanka, as per its undertaking, to BEGIN the task of delivering the commitments it agreed under both resolutions – immediately. That would mean getting down to the important business of enacting legislation, appointing a special counsel, opening a special counsel’s office, establishing a hybrid court and filing war crimes charges, beginning – NOW.

The Obligations Sri Lanka Promised to Deliver and HC’s Call for Hybrid Court Same

The place to look, to have a better insight into what Sri Lanka’s obligations entail, is to read both, Operative Paragraphs 6 and 7 found in hrc30/1 and Operative Paragraph 4 found in hrc34/L1 in CONJUNTION with the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Prince Zeid bin Ra’ad al-Hussein’s ‘Conclusions and Recommendations’ under Paragraph 67 (a-j) captioned ‘Legislation and Justice’ in his February 2017 Report – the one he submitted to the Council on Sri Lanka – the obligations  in question cover the core provisions relating to both, for one, the creation of legislation to, “criminalize war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and enforced disappearances,” and the other, the investigation, prosecution, trial and punishment of those responsible for such ‘Mass Atrocity Crimes’. 

Not only has the Council under hrc34/L1 – Operative Paragraph 4 requested the High Commissioner to assess the progress of Sri Lanka’s implementation of his recommendations, it must be noted, the recommendations itself got the full endorsement of Member States – those that gave Sri Lanka a two year extension of the timeline for fulfillment of commitments under the resolutions, given with the expectation that the recommendations would be acted upon – with Member State after Member State, in their statements, during discussions at the Council, urging Sri Lanka to heed the High Commissioner’s recommendations.

This being the case, quite apart from the fact that the High Commissioner’s comprehensive 2017 report, based on proper assessment of all factors, gives form and meaning to hrc30/L1.

It’s worth mentioning at this point, notwithstanding hrc34/L1 – Operative paragraph 4 and the call by Member States for Sri Lanka to heed the High Commissioner’s recommendations, Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister of Sri Lanka, Harsha de Silva, backing away from a hybrid mechanism and finding somehow some ambiguity in the words in hrc30/1, when none exists – is now insisting, undoubtedly in error, that Sri Lanka did not sign up to a hybrid court.  Reading the requisite sections, there is no denying the High Commissioner’s recommendations are the right interpretation of Operative Paragraph 6 (and 7). 

Looking at hrc30/1 – Operative Paragraph 6, it becomes clear, the drafters undeniably were providing for a hybrid court: The Council, “notes with appreciation the proposal of the Government of Sri Lanka to establish a judicial mechanism with a special counsel… affirms that a credible justice process should include independent judicial and prosecutorial institutions.. and also affirms in this regard the IMPORTANCE of PARTICIPATION in a Sri Lankan judicial mechanism, including the special counsel’s office, of Commonwealth and other foreign judges, defence lawyers and authorized prosecutors and investigators.”

And then reading that Operative Paragraph 6 in CONJUNCTION with the High Commissioner’s core recommendations, paragraph 67 (a-j) given in full here below, it becomes even more abundantly clear that the Council and the High Commissioner were on the same page with the High Commissioner’s Recommendations calling for Sri Lanka to: 

1. Implement the recommendations of the Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers following the country visit in April-May 2016;
2. Review the Victim and Witness Protection Act with a view to incorporating strong safeguards for the independence and effectiveness of the victim and witness protection programme, in accordance with international standards;
3. Accede to the additional protocols to the Geneva Conventions, and to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court;
4. Enact legislation to criminalize war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and enforced disappearances without statutes of limitation, and enact modes of criminal liability, in particular command or superior responsibility;
5. Consider, as part of the constitutional reform process, the inclusion of a transitional clause to facilitate the establishment of transitional justice mechanisms and offer guarantees of redress to all those whose rights have been violated;
6. Adopt legislation establishing a hybrid court, which should include international judges, defence lawyers, prosecutors and investigators, to investigate allegations of violations and abuses of international human rights law and violations of international humanitarian law, and provide it with the resources necessary to enable it to try those responsible promptly and effectively;
7. Strengthen the forensic capacity of the police and judiciary and ensure that it is adequately resourced, including for DNA testing, forensic anthropology and archaeology;
8. Replace the Prevention of Terrorism Act by legislation that adheres to the best international practices;
9. Review all cases of detainees held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act with the aim of either releasing them or bringing them immediately to trial; establish a moratorium for the use of the Act for new arrests until it is replaced by legislation that adheres to international best practices; and review the cases of those convicted under the Act and are serving long sentences, particularly where convictions were based solely on confessions;
10. Promptly investigate and prosecute all allegations of torture and other gross human rights violations, and give the highest priority to long-standing emblematic cases so as to regain public confidence in the justice system; and implement fully the recommendations of the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment and of the Committee against Torture.

It must be borne in mind, a, c and e of paragraph 67 above, are additional recommendations, among other, the High Commissioner made in his February 2017 report under the caption, Legislation and justice.

High Commissioner Recommends Sri Lanka Accede to Rome Statute, TGTE’s Call

Read More

Multi-prong police probe into white van abduction

by Norman Palihawadane-April 11, 2017, 9:46 pm 

Police have commenced a multipronged investigation into Sunday’s abduction of a businessman in a white van at Ipalogama in Kekirawa.

A special police team was scrutinizing the details of records of the victim’s mobile phone while fingerprint specialists and others were probing the incident from other angles, police said.

The businessman, Ajantha Biyagama (38), was abducted in a white van by a group of armed persons, who arrived at his home on Sunday morning. His wife said the abductors had come in a cab and a van around 7.00 am and talked to her husband. The abductors had told them that they were from Bandarawela police station, she said.

After a discussion which lasted for nearly 30 minutes, they took the husband away with them saying that he would be taken to the Bandarawela police station to record a statement. Two persons who arrived with the group had removed the memory chips of the CCTV cameras installed at the home, the wife told police.

She said she had been to the Bandarawela police to inquire of her husband only to be told that no such person had been arrested.

Ipalogama Police said that the person alleged to have been abducted was working as a recovery division member of a finance company and seizing the vehicles in the possession of defaulters. There were three cases pending against him at the Kekirawa Magistrate Court, police said.

Sri Lanka: Has There Been Genuine National Reconciliation? – Analysis

By Dr. Archana Arul*- April 3, 2017

If there is considerable consternation in political circles in India over what took place at the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva recently over a two-year extension for Sri Lanka to come to terms with issues of the post-conflict era, it is only understandable.

Once again the international community, led by the United States and Britain, have given one more chance to the powers that be in Colombo to put in motion a judicial and political process that squarely comes to term with the national reconciliation process.

That there has been constant huffing and puffing on how to go about the procedural aspects of substantive issues in the island nation has been conveniently glossed over — for now, there is another extension and in the name of a Consensus Resolution on which there was no vote.

In the event of a division, member-nations would have been forced to spell out their views leading to embarrassing moments in the fashion they were going to characterise their versions of the goings on in Sri Lanka.

Colombo got the two-year extension to fully implement the commitments made under the 2015 Resolution but not before the top Human Rights official Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein made it known that Sri Lanka had registered only “slow progress” of reforms.

Consistently, since the end of the ethnic conflict in 2009, the governments in Sri Lanka have been accused of war crimes especially during the final weeks of the war. The issue is not only the alleged killing of Tamil civilians but also of those families who have been demanding a closure on those who have disappeared during the course of the 26-year-long brutal war.

The regime of President Mahinda Rajapakse scoffed at a United Nations probe into the alleged crimes of the Sri Lankan Army and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and even going to the extent of denying entry of United Nations officials into the country.

The coming of President Maithiripala Sirisena signalled a positive change in Colombo’s attitude, but two years down the line there is a perception that the new scheme of things have not come to terms with war crimes, torture, unlawful killings and forced disappearances. And adding to all this is the persistent objection to formal internationalisation of any probe on war crimes.

Statistics vary but it is generally believed that more than 100,000 persons — mostly Tamil civilians — perished during the conflict and perhaps an equal number that have not been accounted for. Even at the recent Geneva meeting, Sri Lanka’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Harsha de Silva maintained that his government was striving to establish law of the land and end impunity under “Sri Lankan-government-led processes”.

But Human Rights Watch echoed the views expressed by the Rights High Commissioner, especially in the rather slow implementation of the Council’s Resolution 30/1.

“The promised office on enforced disappearances has yet to be established, although enabling legislation was passed in June 2016. Legislation to establish three other transitional justice mechanisms pledged under the 30/1 resolution remain in draft form. We are also concerned about other undertakings in the resolution that have not been implemented” HRW said in a statement a few days before the latest Geneva session.

Even more telling was the observation on security sector reforms. “… barring a handful of prosecutions in high profile cases, has simply not occurred. Torture by the security forces remains endemic, a fact underscored by the recent report of the Special Rapporteur on torture as well as by Human Rights Watch and other groups.”

The government talks about a “zero tolerance” policy against torture while in Geneva, “but takes no action back home”, the HRW said, a view that is endorsed by independent observers and Tamil Groups, including the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora. To a very large extent, all these have been brushed aside by official Colombo in the past, especially by the Rajapakse regime, as having vested interests or pro-LTTE leaning sympathisers.

“Sri Lanka took a strong step in co-sponsoring resolution 30/1, raising hopes and the promise of reconciliation, reform and justice but the pace of progress, combined with contradictory government statements back home, risk undermining the confidence and trust so important to a successful outcome,” the HRW observed. In fact, one point that has been emphasised in the current debate is that the international body must have established benchmarks and time-lines for Sri Lanka as a way of ensuring its commitments to the international community.

In the absence of this, there is a nagging fear that the two-year extension is nothing more than extending a process that has not even been firmly established.

Further, one would have to bear in mind that the latest Consensus Resolution on giving Colombo another two years runs the risk of becoming embroiled in the election process of 2020. With Rajapakse hardliners keen on staging a comeback and the Sirisena group not wanting to abandon power, the net loser will be the national reconciliation process.

And heading the list of losing propositions will be a genuine probe into the civilian killings and disappearances — under the guise of national sovereignty. The world is already a witness to an “interesting” verbal duel between former Defence Secretary Mahinda Gotabaya and Army Chief Sarath Fonseka on who was responsible for the “top secret death squads” responsible for the killing of journalists and dissidents.

That there has been a change in the political environment in Sri Lanka over the last two years is there for all to see. But the question to be asked is if Colombo has used this change of atmospherics and perceptions to put in place a genuine national reconciliation process. This is going to take time as seen from other societies that have been ravaged by a civil war that took its toll in human and material terms.

To a country like India, the goings on in a friendly neighbour state have ramifications that are much beyond political, economic and strategic dimensions. It is also firmly entrenched in protecting the lives and livelihood of Tamils in that island nation who yearn to continue living there and with dignity.

*The author, an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Journalism and Mass Communication of the Faculty of Science and Humanities, SRM University, Chennai, specialises on issues of Identity, Assimilation and Alienation of Indian Diaspora. Comments and suggestions on this article can be sent to editor@spsindia.in