Monday, May 20, 2019

Who Is Going To Protect The Lives Of Tamils In Sri Lanka?

By Kumarathasan Rasingam –MAY 19, 2019

Kumarathasan Rasingam

The Easter Sunday serial bomb blasts in the Churches in Colombo, Negombo and Batticaloa took away the lives of 253, most of the affected victims are Tamil Christians because it was targeted during the Mass in Tamil Language in the three Churches.

Even though the Sri Lankan Governments Police high ups were well informed in advance by the Indian Intelligence no one took this matter seriously, the Government ignored it perhaps intentionally because it knows the victims are going to be Tamil Christians. Now the President is blaming the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister is blaming the President and the leader of the opposition is blaming both.

Now the police and military are given more powers under Emergency Law, the alien Sinhalese Police and military will do havoc to the Tamils in the North and East and will terrorize the Tamils and may take revenge against the protesters who protested against the military who are occupying their lands. The draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act and newly implemented Emergency Laws, impunity to the Armed forces will give a free hand to terrorise the victimised Tamils who are protesting and agitating for justice and accountability. The arrest of the leader and the secretary to the University Students Union in Jaffna is going to make the situation worse in the North of Sri Lanka.

It is to be noted that the Tamil youths in the North took arms after peaceful talks, non-violent protests, and adding fuel to the fire the Standardization in education Law IN 1971 where Tamils students denied admission to universities. In addition, the burning down of the Jaffna Public Library in 1981, which was one of the most violent examples of ethnic biblioclasm of the 20th century. At that time of its destruction the library was one of the biggest library in Asia containing 97,000 books and rare manuscripts.
The state sponsored pogroms against the Tamils in July 1983 [BLACK JULY] where Tamils were targeted and all over the island and their properties looted and burnt.

The Government of Sri Lanka will definitely delay the implementation of the UNHRC Resolutions citing this as an excuse leaving the victims of war with growing pain and frustration.

The Sri Lankan government’s refusal to negotiate seriously with Tamil leaders or otherwise address legitimate Tamil and Muslim grievances is increasing ethnic tensions and damaging prospects for lasting peace. The administration, led by the United National Party has refused to honour agreements with the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), broken promises to world leaders and not implemented constitutional provisions for minimal devolution of power to Tamil-speaking areas of the north and east. Militarisation and discriminatory economic development in Tamil and Muslim areas are breeding anger and increasing pressure on moderate Tamil leaders.

The de facto military occupation of the Northern Province and biased economic development policies appear designed to undermine Tamils’ ability to claim the north and east as their homeland. For many Tamils, this confirms their long-held belief that it was only the LTTE’s guns that placed their concerns and need for power sharing on the political agenda. In the face of the government’s resistance to a fair and negotiated settlement, TNA leaders have come under increasing pressure from their constituencies to adopt more confrontational language and tactics. Growing demands for the right to self-determination for the Tamil nation and hints that separatist goals have not been permanently abandoned have, in turn, provoked harsh reactions and expressions of distrust from Sinhala leaders.

The Tamil struggle for rights and freedom is likely to succeed only when the broader national struggle for the restoration of democracy and the rule of law, including the de-politicisation of the judiciary and the police.

The Bandaranaike–Chelvanayakam Pact of 1957, and later the Dudley Senanayake–Chelvanayakam Pact of 1965 intended to resolve the festering inter-ethnic disputes between the constituent Peoples of the country through legislation that recognized and preserved the linguistic and cultural identity of the Northern and Eastern Provinces. However, under pressure from an extremist fringe within the Sinhala community, the first of these agreements was abrogated while respective Prime Ministers did not implement the second.

In 1972, a new Constitution that formally sanctioned policies targeting the Tamil speaking people was promulgated. This Constitution entrenched the unitary character of the state, conferred on Buddhism the foremost place in the Republic, and gave constitutional primacy to the Sinhala language. This was enacted without the consent or participation of the Tamil people. The 1972 Constitution also dispensed with the salient minority safeguards found in section 29(2) of the ‘Soulbury Constitution’. In fact, the Privy Council, the apex court until 1971, described the minority safeguards in section 29(2) as representing “the solemn balance of rights between the citizens of Ceylon, the fundamental conditions on which inter se they accepted the Constitution: and these are therefore unalterable under the Constitution.”[Lord Pearce, Bribery Commissioner v. Ranasinghe (1964) 66 NLR 73, at 78].

The repeal of this historic compact, the very basis on which the constituent Peoples of Ceylon accepted the ‘Soulbury Constitution’, which in turn led to independence, heaped scorn on legitimate Tamil aspirations. The 1978 Constitution followed in the footsteps of the 1972 Constitution and entrenched the foremost place given to Buddhism, continued to give primacy to the Sinhala language, and by entrenching the unitary character of the State, excluded the Tamils from the democratic exercise of political power. A disturbing feature of Sri Lanka’s post-independence history was that of organized violence in the form of racial pogroms being periodically unleashed on the Tamil People in 1956, 1958, 1961, 1977, 1981 and 1983. These attacks were a direct response to the articulation of their political aspirations by the Tamil people…The consistent democratic verdicts of the Tamil people since 1956, expressing their political aspiration for substantial self-rule in the Northern and Eastern Provinces, were denied under the above two constitutions. This factor, together with the discriminatory policies pursued under these two constitutions, particularly in education, employment and economic opportunities, the state-aided Sinhala settlements in the Northern and Eastern Provinces and the anti-Tamil racial pogroms gave birth to armed resistance by Tamil youth.

International concern that followed from the massive anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983, led to the Indo-Lanka Accord of 1987 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. While this established Provincial Councils and devolved a measure of legislative power to the Provinces, it fell far short of meaningful power-sharing. Nevertheless, it represented an initial minimal step towards devolution of power to the Provinces. A significant provision of the Indo-Lanka Accord – an international treaty – providing for the merger of the Northern and Eastern Provinces has since been violated for spurious reasons.

Although public officials, members of the judiciary and elected representatives swear or affirm to uphold the Constitution, the Thirteenth Amendment has not been fully implemented. Even the limited provisions relating to the devolution of land and police powers to the Provincial Councils are deliberately violated. Moreover, commitments made both domestically and internationally with regard to a political solution have not been honoured. Similarly, commitments made relating to human rights and accountability have been routinely dishonoured.

A Decade Without Justice for Sri Lanka’s Tamils

May 18 is an important reminder that while the country’s armed conflict may have ended, the search for elusive justice continues.

A Decade Without Justice for Sri Lankaâ€™s Tamils

By Anjali Manivannan-May 17, 2019

While last month’s Easter Sunday bombings and their aftermath refocused international attention on Sri Lanka, there has only been passing mention of the country’s previous history of armed conflict that concluded on May 18, 2009, often with a failure to appreciate the fact that this did not end the ethnic tensions therein. On the tenth anniversary of the cessation of hostilities, members of the international community must understand that delivering accountability for mass atrocities is an essential element of dealing with root causes of conflict.

On May 18, 2009, the Sri Lankan government declared an end to a 26-year-long armed conflict after committing mass atrocities, including allegations of genocide. The atrocities are well-documented, and the military’s intentional shelling of government-designated “No Fire Zones” (NFZs) alone was primarily responsible for killing 70,000–140,000 Tamil civilians, maiming another 25,000–30,000, and displacing at least 300,000.

But for many Tamils in the North-East and diaspora, May 18 this year not only marks the conclusion of the armed struggle for self-determination led by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), but also a decade without justice for crimes that had been committed. Although Tamils had varying views about the LTTE’s tactics, for many, its military defeat represented an end to the hope that Tamils would be free from successive Sinhala-Buddhist nationalistic regimes that had sponsored anti-Tamil pogroms with impunity at various points since independence.

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Since May 18, 2009, the United Nations and states have acknowledged that Sri Lanka’s violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law may amount to war crimes and/or crimes against humanity in a court of law. Despite facts and jurisprudence strongly supporting a legal finding of genocide, however, the same entities have shied away from even using the word “genocide” concerning the atrocities against the Tamil people.

A cursory review of the evidence indicates the Sri Lankan government’s intent to destroy the Tamil people, a protected ethnic and national group. The government had a clear and effective strategy of encouraging Tamil civilians in the Vanni region to relocate to the “No Fire Zones” that were then deliberately shelled by the military. It also purposefully understated the number of Tamil civilians in the Vanni to limit necessary food and medical supplies going into that area and to facilitate the deaths of survivors. Hundreds of Tamil women and girls were raped and sexually mutilated before their execution. Tamil men and women who were detained after crossing into government-controlled areas are still subjected to sexual violence today.

Survivors’ trauma has been exacerbated by an endless wait for a court to validate the harms they suffered by adjudicating that “genocide” occurred. This is particularly insulting in light of the government’s continual rejections of agreed-upon UN Human Rights Council commitments to establish a special court with foreign judges, lawyers, and investigators, in addition to the absence of other paths to justice.

However, a court finding is not necessary to politically recognize genocide. In fact, UN guidance encourages UN actors and states to acknowledge when violations of international law may amount to atrocity crimes, regardless of the existence of legal determinations. An assessment of established risk factors and indicators of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and/or genocide provides guidance on when atrocities may be appropriately deemed “genocide.”

Whenever there is a serious risk of genocide, members of the international community have a responsibility to prevent it and punish the perpetrators. In Sri Lanka, however, the UN withdrew from the warzone around September 2008, thus enabling the genocide. After internally reviewing its inaction in 2012, the UN determined it committed a “systemic failure.” By February 2019, few lessons had been learned and the UN had to revisit its shortsightedness in Sri Lanka in the hopes of understanding how it subsequently ignored signs of Myanmar’s atrocity crimes against the Rohingya. Notably, although some UN actors have recognized the Rohingya genocide, they have maintained their silence on the Tamil genocide.

Given their failures and desire to demonstrate that lessons can be—and have been—learned, the UN owes it to the Tamil people, who were subjected to state-sponsored genocide, to appropriately characterize Sri Lanka’s mass atrocities. It must also explore and open alternative, parallel paths to justice.

In other states with similar levels and cultures of impunity, such as Syria and Myanmar, the UN General Assembly and the UN Human Rights Council respectively established mechanisms to collect, preserve, and analyze evidence for criminal justice purposes. This does not relieve the UN Security Council of the responsibility to refer the situation in Sri Lanka to the International Criminal Court, a still unlikely prospect.Tamil activists are increasingly calling for such alternative, parallel avenues to see justice served for the Tamil people.

As the window for transitional justice narrows, the hopelessness and frustration of Tamil genocide survivors must be prioritized over six years of the government’s false promises. Given Sri Lanka’s utter lack of political will to investigate and prosecute atrocity crimes in accordance with international commitments, members of the international community must promptly act to ensure the punishment of perpetrators and the precise recognition of all atrocity crimes committed against the Tamil people, including genocide.

Anjali Manivannan is the Senior Legal Analyst with People for Equality and Relief in Lanka (PEARL).

Tamils gather at Mullivaikkal to remember genocide 10 years on

190518 Mullivaikkal NH 2.jpg

Tamils across the homeland gathered at the Mullivaikkal memorial today 10 years since the end of the armed conflict to remember the killing of tens of thousands by Sri Lankan armed forces.

18 May 2019

Marking the day as Tamil Genocide Day, families of victims, locals and Tamils from across the North-East lit torches, lay flowers and planted coconut trees in memory of those killed.

The remembrance, just days after Easter Sunday bombings, was palpably tense compared to last years, taking place amid a heightened security presence, with a large number of police officers and military check points registering people entering and leaving the site.

A new check point and increased security were also established at the key gateway from Jaffna district to the Vanni, Elephant Pass. All vehicles travelling through were stopped and passengers searched.

"I wanted to go," said Gowri, a mother of 3 in Kilinochchi told Tamil Guardian. "But I heard the army is taking our names when we enter Mullivaikkal. I'm too scared. They the military] are busy with the Muslims now, but they will come back for us later."

Several Tamil politicians also attended the event, along side religious leaders.

TNA MP Selvam Adaikalanathan

TNPF leader, Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam

Former Northern Province's Chief Minister, C V Wigneswaran

Former Northern Provincial Councillor, Ananthy Sasitharan

As a mark of respect, Tamil shops in Mullaitivu remained shut through the duration of the event.

Anti-Muslim riots and anatomy of the second security failure

by Laksiri Fernando-May 18, 2019, 6:36 pm

Sri Lanka has encountered a second security failure by allowing the unruly violent mobs to attack Muslim mosques and ordinary Muslim citizens particularly in the North Western Province and Gampaha District. This should have been an ‘anticipated backlash’ to the Easter Carnage inflicted by the IS terrorists three weeks before. However neither the law enforcement agencies nor the political authorities have taken necessary precautions in preventing such an eventuality.

As a result, at least one person has been killed, over 20 others severely injured and many families have been displaced. The number of attacked and damaged mosques and houses/shops reported to be nearly 100. The most damaged undoubtedly is the country’s image; and the inter-religious and inter-ethnic relations/harmony of the society.

It appears that still there is no proper coordination between the political authorities and the law enforcement agencies. This is apart from the apparent lack of coordination between various security and law enforcement agencies themselves - the CID, police, armed forces etc.

From First to the Second

It is just within three weeks that the second security failure has taken place.

The first security failure was most horrendous when nine suicide bombers of extremist Islamic organizationsin the country (National Thowheeth Jamath or NTJ etc.), supported and instigated by the Islamic State (IS) and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, were easily allowed to attack three Christian Churches and threeTourist Hotels on the Easter Sunday (4/21), irrespective of relevant authorities having all necessary information.

That was an unprovoked terrorist attack without recent connected incidents.

‘Neglect of security of the ordinary citizens’ does appear to be the main cause for that security failure. Otherwise, the police had made all necessary arrangements to safeguard the security of all political VIPs from the government to the opposition.

Three weeks ago the main targets were the Christian Churches and their congregations. As a result, 258 persons were killed and nearly 500 of innocent people were injured. Out of the dead, there were 41 foreign tourists. It appears that the Christian Churches were particularly targeted on the instructions from the leaders of the Islamic State (IS), as part of their counter offensive to the real or imagined ‘Crusaders’ or as a revenge for the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand.

‘The general failure of security and defence’ of course was another underlying reason as revealed by the failure of the police or the defence authorities to take appropriate action to protect or warn the Tourist Hotels about the terrorist threat. This is irrespective of the primary importance of tourism to the economy of the country. Even without the help of the police the hotels could have thwarted the terrorist attacks or protected their guests, if they were informed.

There are questions whether particularly the general failure of security had emerged as a result of too much of liberalization in the country. The general atmosphere of this neoliberalism undoubtedly allowed the security personnel and the police to relax and consider everything hunky-dory. Then there were other concerns that if they had acted against people of a particular community, whether that could go against them politically under the present government.

Delay in Taking Action

However, what links the first failure to the second fiasco probably is the general degeneration of security arrangements in the country, the prevalent prejudices among particularly the police against minority communities, and still lack of coordination between the police and the military even under the present emergency regulations.

The initial incident this time in Chilaw on 12 May (Sunday morning)was good enough for the police and the security agencies to take firm action, if they wanted, in preventing what happened thereafter in the whole area and beyond in the North Western (Wayamba) Province, by Monday (13 May).

That Sunday was undoubtedly a reminder of what happened especially in Negombo three weeks before on the Easter Sunday. Communities in Negombo and Chilaw are largely connected through religion and family affiliations. The trigger was a Facebook post by a Muslim businessman in Chilaw saying "1 day u will cry,"against a posting by a Sinhala businessman, apparently criticising the Muslim community.

This was taken as a threat by the Sinhala businessman and along with others, the Muslim business premises was surrounded violently. The business competitions, apart from other reasons, have always played a prominent role in communal violence in the country for a long period. The police did intervene. But the intervention undoubtedly was not even. The Muslim businessman was arrested although the posting was a minor or ambiguous threat. Both of the culprits to the Facebook confrontation should have been arrested. But that was not the case for obvious police biases or fear of political victimization.

A police curfew was declared in the Chilaw municipal area immediately in the afternoon which was lifted the following morning. It is alleged that it was during the curfew hours that a mosque and some shops were attacked in the Chilaw town.

Considering the possible eruption of violence in potential other areas like Kurunegala, the curfew should have been imposed in those areas as well. Immediately after the Chilaw incidents, there had been clear movements and rallying of gangs in the Kurunegala town in motor bikesand vans. The army should have been deployed immediately without the incompetent and largely biased police trying to handle the situation themselves.

The Failures

When curfew was imposed in Kurunegala and five other police areas, it was almost early Monday morning. It is alleged that it was during the curfew hours again that most of the mosques and Muslim houses in Kuliyapitiya, Bingiriya, Hettipola and Dummalasuriya were attacked and damaged. Apparently the security was tight in the Kurunegala town, but not in the localities.

When three suspects who were involved or planning attacks were arrested in Kurunegala on Sunday afternoon, the police had come under immense pressure. It is not clear how far those were political. However the culprits were released giving some ease for those who were further intending trouble making and hate attacks. That is what actually happened on Monday.

A single day security lapses are good enough for the organized extremists to overturn a total security situation in a country. This is also what exactly happened on the Easter Sunday.

It was only by Monday evening that island wide curfew was declared and the army was effectively brought into curtail the situation. The island wide curfew was imposed again on Tuesday and Wednesday nights and hopefully the situation is now under control. There is evidence however that the army, like the police, also were lenient on the mobs.

It is reported that nearly 100 culprits have now been arrested including the leader of the Mahason Balakaya Amith Weerasinghe, and the leader of the Sinhale Api (‘We of the Sinhala Land’), Dan Priyasad. These organizations should have been banned a long time ago. Those Sinhala extremist organizations were involved in previous attacks against the Muslim community.

It is also unfortunate that the government took over three weeks to ban those terror related extremist Islamic organizations who were responsible for the Easter Carnage. The relevant gazette was issued only on 13May.Of course there are certain procedures to follow, but the steps should have been quicker. These are some reasons why the people were restless and angry, allowing the extremists to capitalize.

Conclusion

Even if the initial Chilaw incidents were unavoidable, there was no room for the escalation of such events in other areas, if proper security measures were taken promptly. The army should have been called into service immediately. There can be risks if the army is involved continuously, but theimmediate risks may be minimal compared to what can happen without their intervention and the country going into continuous violence and chaos.

The reported incidents of at least one or two army personnel assisting the mobs in Thummodera should be fully investigated and otherwise the projected credibility of the present Army Commander would be diminished/destroyed.

Ensuring ‘security of civilians’and the ‘enforcement of law and order’should be blindfolded irrespective of religion, ethnicity, class, political affiliation or any other distinction. These should be the future goals in recruiting and training of the police and army personnel.

Apart from what I have said about (1) the degeneration of security arrangements under neo-liberalization, (2) the apparent prejudices among the police/army officers against the minority (Tamil, Muslim and Christian) communities, and (3) the general failure of security coordination between the political authorities and the security authorities, there are various other political interpretations given to the events and lapses. Those are not discussed here.

Most alarming however are the accusations and counter-accusations traded against each other by the government and the opposition politicians. Apart from the said accusations, what appears alarming are the unbridled emotions, sensationalism, prejudices, reliance on rumours and expressed hatred. It is apparent that there is something fundamentally wrong with the political culture and psyche of the people and the politicians alike in the country.

Historic Shifts of 2009 and 2019

20 May 2019

The end of the war in May 2009, signalled a historic moment for Sri Lanka. The tragedy of war with tremendous devastation and suffering required considerable reflection about our past. Furthermore, the aftermath of war required collective thinking and action about our future. However, we as a people did little critical reflection about the past and even less thinking about our future. Rather, we succumbed to the narratives and prescriptions of powerful actors, whether it be from nationalist, technocratic or global stages. I address here, the political economic shift soon after the war, and consider the historic juncture at the current moment. How did national and international developments and forces shape Sri Lanka’s trajectory a decade ago, and what can we say about the ongoing crisis and our future?

Conjuncture

Karl Marx, in one of his great works of political analysis, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, wrote the following profound sentences as he watched France consolidate under a repressive regime after the failed revolution of 1848: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

Our history is no different, without a vision for our future, Sri Lanka has repeatedly fallen for dominant ideas from the past. And we often fail to consider the broader circumstances and powerful forces at work in determining our future.

Marxist thinkers, including Antonio Gramsci, have theorised such historic shifts or periods of change with the concept of conjuncture. A conjuncture emerges with the interaction of various social, economic and political forces, and produces a historical shift where a range of powerful national and international actors seek to manoeuvre and consolidate changes that last long periods of time. The economic trajectory changes for example towards or against liberalisation. Political structures are transformed for example towards authoritarian rule or greater democratisation. Even social relations, whether it is people’s assertions of their rights or interactions between communities are influenced. And certain regimes and classes gain from and establish their hegemony during such significant changes to the political economy of countries.

Post-war decade

I argue that the end of the war in May 2009 was such a moment. Nationally a protracted civil war had come to an end, when the economy was facing many difficulties including a balance of payment crisis. Internationally, the fall out of the global economic crisis of 2008 had raised many questions about the neoliberal economic policies that had been pursued during the previous three decades. The manoeuvre of the Rajapaksa regime after the war, riding on the waves of national majoritarian euphoria and international neoliberal reconsolidation, was to address all of Sri Lanka’s problems through a singular solution of authoritarian economic development.

Sri Lanka thus repeated the failures of the previous three decades of neoliberal policies around the world. Financial flows were encouraged and sunk into infrastructure and urban development, tourism they claimed would boom and provide the returns of the investment in hotels and malls not to mention medical tourism and international private educational institutions, an international financial centre was to be build, and even rural livelihoods were to be developed by expanding the financial sector including for microfinance led self-employment schemes. Sadly, after regime change in 2015 these neoliberal policies did not change, rather some of them were accelerated.

Neither the global capitalist class nor the national leadership in Sri Lanka, considered the tremendous problems caused by finance capital with the global economic crisis of 2008. Rather, as Western governments bailed out the financiers and banks, countries like Sri Lanka grovellingly invited them. We failed to consider an alternative political economic trajectory to strengthen the economic lives of our people through investment in our rural economy and self-sufficiency where possible.

As income inequalities rose and the economic problems mounted, new fissures within society were actively or otherwise created along ethnic and religious lines. The state’s response to the Tamil and Muslim minorities was one of militarised repression in the Tamil areas and a blind eye if not subtle support to goon squads attacking Muslims, including their business enterprises.

Crisis and decade ahead

Crises come in different forms and under different circumstances. Even as we mark a decade after the war, the Easter attacks few weeks ago signal perhaps another conjuncture. Tourism is now affected for the next few years, and even a semblance of returns from the large scale investment in urban real estate and infrastructure are unlikely to be seen in the years ahead. Fear combined with the anti-Muslim sentiments have brought back like a nightmare the “war on terror” and “prevention of terrorism” as the solution to all our problems. As a trade war escalates between the USA and China, we are again asked to position our country as pawn in geopolitical game. The impulsive solution is to rely on a strongman leader—an authoritarian regime to control the deteriorating economy and the political disorder.

At this moment of crisis and great flux in the country, the historic circumstances and the positions of our leaders provide little hope. And we often forget how disastrous authoritarian regimes have been in the past. How do we then conjure the vision and energies for an alternative future?

We cannot merely draw on the experience and ideas from the past to move forward. The LTTE is very different from the radical Islamists responsible for the Easter attacks. Tamil politics and aspirations over the decades are very different from the concerns of the Muslim communities. Sinhala Buddhist nationalism is not monolithic and it is constantly morphing to suit the new conditions. Indeed, Sri Lanka in 2019 is in a very different position from 2009 and 1983, even if the historic challenges may be of similar proportions.

If the decade we have just passed has been gruelling for many, particularly the war-torn people, then the decade ahead is pregnant with dangers of repression, particularly for the Islamic communities. Internationally, we are bound to be shaped by the regime that emerges with elections in India, the US-China tensions and the turbulence in the global economy. In Sri Lanka, the cycle of decisive elections are nearing, which will decide who and how we will be ruled; will it be with an iron fist or with democracy.

In these troubling times, we must think, discuss and debate. We do not live as individuals nor in bubbles, rather our lives are shaped by so many social circles and institutions, whether it be our extended families, schools, universities, places of worship, trade unions, community centres etc. If we are resigned to the order of discipline, of law and order, and of security, we merely have to hand that responsibility to the state, the security forces and in time a powerful leader. But if we believe that only the people can address these problems, we must in all those institutions begin asking difficult questions about our collective future.

Ten years on

May 18, 2019

Today marks ten years since the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka, the final stages of which were scene to some of the worst mass atrocities of the 21st century.

The scale and gravity of the crimes that took place in the war’s last days alone can be difficult to comprehend, let alone come to terms with: entire families loaded on to army buses and forcibly disappeared; a twelve-year old child executed in cold blood; the bodies of rebel fighters desecrated.

Yet, shockingly, these events were but a part of a much longer campaign of violence between September 2008 and May 2009 during which hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians were encouraged to gather inside declared humanitarian ‘safe zones’ – before being systematically shelled by government forces and deprived of life-saving humanitarian assistance. It is in this manner, partly aided by the rebel forces’ policy of preventing civilians from leaving the territory under their control, that between 40,000-70,000 (and possibly many more) are credibly estimated to have been killed.

Today, members of the Tamil community, in Sri Lanka and around the world, will gather to remember and mourn the dead. The Sri Lanka Campaign mourns with them, and extends its heartfelt sympathies and solidarity to all of those who continue to bear the pain of 2009 and its aftermath.

For many, it is a pain which the intervening decade has done little to alleviate. Despite multiple UN investigations, a change of government in Colombo, and an internationally supported process to address the past, almost no one has been brought to justice for the egregious human rights violations that took place in the North-East of Sri Lanka ten years ago. It is a record that shames not just the government of Sri Lanka, but the world at large.

The international community failed the civilian victims of the war in 2009. And, in many ways, it fails them still.

Today, it is clear that lending meaningful support to war survivors requires going beyond current approaches, be it through the creation of parallel evidence collection mechanisms, the pursuit of war criminals abroad, or the more principled use of leverage when it comes to bilateral engagement with Sri Lanka. Incidentally, it is the very same set of calls to the international community that could have saved lives in 2009 – for greater scrutiny, further pressure, more willingness to speak out – that are the need of the hour today in the fight for truth and accountability.

This month’s events in Sri Lanka – which have seen violent attacks on Muslims by roving mobs of Sinhala nationalists, the reinstatement to active service of an a alleged death squad leader, and renewed calls to give free reign to Sri Lanka’s security forces – have brought into clear focus what’s at stake. Unless the perpetrators of serious human rights abuses are held to account, and the structures which enable them dismantled or reformed, those very same individuals and institutions will continue to wreak violence on Sri Lanka’s minority communities and risk a return to yet another cycle of grievance-fuelled violence.

To borrow from a powerful recent op-ed by a Sri Lanka Campaign advisor and a renowned Tamil poet:

“Holocaust survivor Primo Levi once said, “It happened; therefore, it can happen again… it can happen everywhere.” So long as impunity and the failure to address the root causes of atrocity crimes continue in Sri Lanka, lasting peace will remain elusive.”

Sri Lanka and the search for justice, ten years on. from Outsider TV on Vimeo.

THE POLITICS OF GRIEF

V. V. Ganeshananthan-28th August 2011

In the case of September 11 2001, communal loss is – comparatively, at least – well understood. Everyone saw or could see those deaths; they were on the news even as they happened; the broadcast was part of their lasting tragedy. Few perceived denial of the deaths as rational. The people who had killed them made sure there was plenty of physical evidence. No one fought the act of mourning and was taken seriously. Not so with what I saw from a great distance eight years later: the deaths of Tamil civilians at the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war.

These deaths require, among other tasks, ongoing announcement and explanation – and because certain authorities have failed to fully acknowledge that the casualties occurred, saying I grieve means stating, repeatedly, I believe that they did. It is a kind of complicated voting. This recitation of the facts means a commitment not only to how definitively these people are gone, but also to hearing it over and over again as I am forced to argue for it. I resent this more than I could ever have thought possible, because in this country of grief, the best kind of shelter is to be understood, to have someone stop next to me and without asking anything, put their umbrella over us both, between us and the rain.

Before we ever came to this place, we heard reports of steady, gray fog – pale, opening clouds – late and sudden violent storms. Rumour had it that some people, surprised to stop here, never left, while others, knowing another destination, were able to find slow but certain passage through. I myself am a wary traveler in this country. I can sense that groups of people move around me, but I am mostly alone: a stranger, feeling strange, on a rain-marked stone road, my umbrella blown inside out.

Grief is a country that looks different to each person entering it, to be sure. How does one find fellowship or shelter in loss? There is a hierarchy here; we measure the validity of grief in specific ways. And so before I talk about how death has touched me, I should say how it has not. I must acknowledge that some will see my grief as presumptuous, while others will find it inadequate: I did not know the people I am mourning, and I was not there. Still, I cannot imagine a road as smooth or a sky as blue as the ones I remember from the time before I came to this place and I cannot wish myself any happier. By any measure of reason, what happened to me was nothing – nothing more than watching and knowing and finally, imagining a terrible thing and how it might have happened. Although I was physically safe, the knowledge of that terrible thing became a shadow over everything I did and saw afterwards in a way I had not previously known was possible. Because the deaths involved were not only private, but also public and political, in their wake I found myself faced for the first time with both the desire for collective mourning and a complete inability to engage with it. All time and space was marked first and foremost by its relation to this disaster.

On the rare occasion that I stand under an umbrella, next to someone who already knows what happened, I feel a relief that I had never known before. This person understands how much I would give not to say this, or for anyone else not to ever have to say a sentence like this: You may never have heard of these deaths before, and you may never hear of them again, but in the spring of 2009, tens of thousands of civilians who were ethnically Tamil, as I am ethnically Tamil, were killed in Sri Lanka, the country where my parents were born and I was not.

What a terrible sentence. Of course, these particular deaths did not happen in a vacuum, but in the context of nearly thirty years of war that cost many lives. Each of these deaths matters; the words of this history must be carefully negotiated, and even then, the ones I choose will fail in one way or another, because they cannot be exhaustive. The cause of the grief is necessarily politicized, and because I am electing some words and not others, from the moment I speak I open myself to attack. By grieving, I also automatically place myself in opposition to those who have denied that these deaths occurred. Some people may revel in my anguish; others will accuse me of inventing it; others still will use it to furnish the houses of their own causes. This grief, then, requires risk.

It also requires truthfulness. To talk about it in the most transparent and honest manner, I must retell not only the version of the story I consider the truest and the worst, but also the versions in which no one died, or in which those who died are unworthy of mourning. My words must reenact and contain not only the deaths and my grief, but also their negation.

The security forces of the Sinhalese-dominated government fought the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam for over a quarter of a century. The latter claimed sole representation of the country’s minority Tamils, and aimed to establish a separate state for them following decades of discrimination by successive Sri Lankan governments. The Tigers’ methods were brutal and included (but indeed, were not limited to) suicide bombings, child conscription, assassinations of elected Tamil officials and other Tamil dissenters, massacres of Sinhalese and Muslim civilians; extortion and coercion of Tamils in Sri Lanka and abroad. As the war escalated, the Sri Lankan government followed the decades of discrimination against its Tamil citizens with harassment, abduction, torture and murder by government-aligned forces, in government-controlled areas. Attacks on journalists, extrajudicial killings and disappearances rose. Criticism of the government was portrayed as support for terrorism, as the Tigers were banned in a number of places, including the US and the EU. They had long been thought undefeatable, but at long last, in the spring of 2009, the walls closed around them.

I had studied and watched this war for as long as I could remember, and still, the scale of the final battle, those last casualties, seemed different from any others. Never before had I seen such a catastrophe coming from so far away. It was avoidable. I spent much of that spring waiting or searching for news. The deaths were not widely broadcast as they happened, or even in their immediate aftermath; they happened on a small strip of beach and went mostly unseen. Press access by that point was severely curtailed, and there was little of the imagery that gets attention in modern war. After more than a quarter-century of fighting, Sri Lankan security forces had cornered the Tigers. With the Tigers: Tamil civilians. Reports from various authorities ranged wildly – 300,000 civilians were trapped between the Tigers and the Sri Lankan Army; 40,000 civilians were trapped; certainly, tens of thousands of civilians were trapped. They counted; they didn’t count; no one had counted them; they were counted incorrectly. The Tigers said the civilians were with them by choice; numerous accounts show otherwise – cadres shot some who tried to escape as security forces bore down, while still others found themselves forced into the Tigers’ desperate ranks. The government, for its part, directed civilians to a no-fire zone, but subsequently shelled the same areas – and denied it. Calls for international intervention or a ceasefire yielded nothing.

And that spring, two Sri Lankan voices dominated the sphere of public conversation about that last battle: the pro-Tiger protestors of the Tamil diaspora, who waved their flags in cities around the world and failed to acknowledge that the rebels were complicit in civilian death, and the government and its supporters, who alleged that any grief for Tamil civilians was only a ploy to stop them from defeating the rebels. I had never felt so much and expressed so little, but what use were emotions? They would have made me prey. I recited facts instead, collecting them as a kind of armour. For weeks, I pored over the news, patching together information to learn as much as I could about what was happening. When the security forces finally defeated the Tigers, tens of thousands of civilians poured out of their prison. But in the days before that, tens of thousands of others surely died, their unseen bodies fallen on the fields of those battles.

Very little in the paragraphs above is uncontested or even complete – part of what makes this so wearying. As I watched what was happening, it seemed to me unbelievable that I could stand knowing about such a large atrocity in such depth. It seemed unbelievable that I had not died from this – that this level of grief was perhaps only a first circle. I, after all, lived in a place that pulsed with life; I had lost no one but myself.

That spring was my last in New York City, where I lived almost next door to Central Park. American analyses of the no-fire zone in Sri Lanka often compared the strip of land where the civilians were to the city’s famous public space; at one point, they were the same size. The park had been my refuge for so long. Now it also seemed unbelievable that for the rest of my life, as a function of where I lived and how the news and war had unfolded, I would talk mostly to people who had no idea what had happened in the no-fire zone. I could walk down Central Park West and into the park itself, and once inside, I would pass people whose faces would show that they did not know. It was a collective loss, but on some level, it was private. My grief, too, had a political dimension; was I mourning because the people lost were Tamil, because they were Sri Lankan, because they were human? Were those all moral reasons to mourn? And how many of those faces in the park contained histories of loss that I would never know?

As the war ended, the government had the opportunity to promote reconciliation among the country’s ethnic communities. There would be no minorities now, they said; everyone was Sri Lankan, and they wanted the Tamil diaspora, too, to help with the rebuilding. But in the two years after that battle, the Sri Lankan government consistently and strongly denied any civilian casualties as a result of their actions, referring to a zero-casualty policy and humanitarian rescue project, and insisting that Tamils who had died were members of the militancy. This victory, they declared, was part of their war on terror, and had been accomplished with admirable cleanliness and little cost.

It is a way of humiliating people, to say that their dead are not dead, to say that people are not even allowed to mourn. There was little room for the legitimate expression of grief during the war, and after it was over, what little was there dwindled. As the government said they were for reconciliation, they moved to shut down the spaces where Tamil civilians and loss could be remembered. Tiger cemeteries were razed, even when families survived who might have wanted to visit the markers. In one instance, Army headquarters were built in the same space. When some Tamil civilians attempted to gather to remember their dead on the anniversary of the war’s end, they had to face down officers of the Sri Lankan Army, as the north and east of the country remains heavily militarized. Indeed, in certain places civilian gatherings now require military approval. Innumerable people looking for a missing loved one filed cases and gave testimony, but many never found who they were looking for.

Pro-Tiger parties, too, used the deaths, making them into a way to move propaganda and implying that the slain civilians had willingly martyred themselves. Many called for investigations of war crimes, but only named the government as alleged perpetrators. Others, noting that much of the Tiger leadership had been killed, wondered how any accounting could be even-handed. The argument could carry on and on – but at what cost for the survivors? We must think of the living, some cautioned: the risks of our mourning were too high. At the same time, I wondered if any civilian had died on that beach with no survivors. Should that death go unlamented, I thought? Who would mourn and remember that person? Between all these arguments, there was little space left for grief – just as there had been little space for the people themselves.

As the years have passed, mounting evidence – various international reports, leaked video, eyewitness accounts – has made more and more public what those of us who followed it closely have known since the spring of 2009: large numbers of Tamil civilians did die while trapped between the government forces and the Tigers. Recently, in the face of increasing international pressure, the Sri Lankan government did finally acknowledge – as a note in a much longer report praising their military and its action – that the war’s end may have come at the expense of some civilian lives. They expressed no sorrow over these losses. Even as military losses are honoured in public ways, the civilians, who were also Sri Lankan citizens, remain unmourned. When the government issued this report, which was designed to counter a panel of experts who recommended to the UN Secretary General that he more thoroughly investigate the end of the war, I searched it for the word ‘regret’ and found nothing. We’re so sorry for your loss, which is our loss too; we wish it hadn’t happened that way; they were our people too. No, they did not say that. They said that it was unavoidable. Later, one official was quoted as saying any civilian casualties were collateral damage.

When I went to sleep the other night, I knew that about halfway around the world from me, the police were digging for the body of a man who had been missing for some time – a Sri Lankan human rights defender. I did not know this man, but I had been following his case. I knew that when I woke up, they would likely have found his body. I was right: by dawn in my time zone, they had discovered what seemed to be his remains. The case stood out because it was so rare for such a disappearance to be solved. Somehow, it was different this time perhaps because key people decided to push to find him – and there he was, his body under a half-built house. Someone had tried to erase him, to build something over his memory without acknowledging that he was there, and it had failed.

I do not want to be defined by disaster. I do not think this would help anyone, and it seems another way of letting disaster win. Still, it is important to me to keep the solidarity I feel not only for the living, but also for the dead, whose deaths were not necessary. So many people around the world must have this: a certain number of graves forming an angry abacus inside them. I may never again enter a large room without knowing how many it holds, and how many times again that number would have to be multiplied before it would equal the number of casualties most often repeated: forty thousand.

My heart still seizes, becomes that calculator, in any sizable space designed to contain a certain number of people. I remember this, and I remember how beautiful the city was that spring. I remember going to a concert and sitting there, noting how many seats were in front of me and how many behind. I had moved to New York many years after its great loss, and even in the stillness of that concert hall, with its soaring ceilings, it stunned me – the life of it. These things would always be true: on any night in New York City, even as an uncounted number of people had died, an uncounted number of people who lived would come to a concert hall to sit together, with strangers, and listen to music. My grief will not destroy me. In some times and places, we are given the space to build our memorials. Perhaps in others, we must learn to become them, even as we go on.

Photo by Photosightfaces