Tharaka vs. the Mangala doctrine

At the budget debate, State Minister for Regional Cooperation Tharaka Balasuriya launched a scathing attack on former Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera who lost his battle with COVID-19 three months ago. Balasuriya, widely perceived as a member of the more ‘progressive’ wing of the ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna, claimed that Samaraweera had entered into international agreements without the knowledge and consent of former President Maithripala Sirisena and his cabinet of ministers.

Minister Balasuriya was referring to the Sri Lankan Government decision to co-sponsor Resolution 30/1 at the UN Human Rights Council in 2015. As foreign minister at the time, Samaraweera championed that decision and those knowledgeable about the inner workings of the Yahapalanaya administration will concede he had the full knowledge and blessing of both President Sirisena and then Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. The decision to co-sponsor the resolution allowed Sri Lanka to take ownership and leadership in an international effort in Geneva and beyond, now spanning 12 years, to achieve reconciliation and justice for human rights violations during the island’s 26-year civil war.

The narrative regarding the much-maligned Resolution 30/1 adopted by the Council in 2015 was built and propagated by those now in power. The Joint Opposition which became the SLPP claimed that Resolution 30/1 was inimical to Sri Lanka. Therefore, the Yahapalanaya Government had committed treason by co-sponsoring the draft and agreeing to the roadmap for justice and reconciliation. The Yahapalanaya administration, woefully deficient as it was in communications strategy, failed to combat the Rajapaksa-led Opposition narrative by making the case that HRC 30/1 allowed Sri Lanka to lead the process domestically on post-war reconciliation and reckoning.

In truth, co-sponsorship marked a shift in how the Human Rights Council engaged with Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka lost vote after vote at the Human Rights Council from 2012-2014, and the situation was hurtling towards a Special Commission of Inquiry on war crimes committed in the island. Samaraweera’s diplomatic efforts pulled the situation back from the brink, with firm commitments to address rights violations and deal with Sri Lanka’s difficult past. After two years in the job, State Minister Balasuriya has learned nothing about how the wheels of international justice turn, and the herculean effort former Minister Mangala Samaraweera made to ensure those wheels turned collaboratively, rather than in an adversarial way against Sri Lanka. Samaraweera presented a blueprint for Transitional Justice in Sri Lanka, including a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an Office of Missing Persons, an Office for Reparations, and a special prosecutor to bring perpetrators of human rights abuses to justice. 

The Government blueprint was accepted by the Council and Sri Lanka was to be given the ‘time and space’ to make good on these promises. During its tenure, the Yahapalanaya administration managed to set up two out of four mechanisms promised to the Council – the OMP and the Office of Reparations. Ironically, both institutions were established amidst thunderous protest from the Rajapaksa-led Opposition, which in Government has retained both offices in a nominal way and showcase them internationally as evidence of a domestic reconciliation process taking shape. Minister Balasuriya’s Government led by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa thumped their chest and withdrew triumphantly from the commitments undertaken by the Government of Sri Lanka in Resolution 30/1 of 2015. The move played well with its hawkish base in Sri Lanka, but the victory turned pyrrhic very quickly.

In exchange for its chest-thumping withdrawal from 30/1, the Gotabaya Rajapaksa administration received UNHRC Resolution 46/1 in March 2021, adopted by a majority of 22 votes at the Council. With the adoption of Resolution 46/1, the train is leaving the station on international justice, and Sri Lanka is not onboard. The March 2021 Resolution mandated the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to establish an international mechanism to “collect, consolidate, analyse and preserve information and evidence and to develop possible strategies for future accountability processes.”

The OHCHR’s Sri Lanka mechanism has been taking shape over the past several months and will eventually lend evidence gathered on war time atrocities and human rights violations to courts in foreign countries that have the right to invoke international jurisdiction. In other words, the groundwork has already been laid to prosecute Sri Lankan perpetrators – including military personnel – in foreign courts. This then is the legacy of State Minister Balasuriya and his masters. They have opened Sri Lanka to international scrutiny in multiple fronts and the country is currently under threat of losing preferential trade opportunities re-established in 2017 under Samaraweera. They are far from qualified to be questioning Minister Samaraweera’s bona fides. It would serve the novice minister Balasuriya well to grasp instead the depth of the former minister’s vision, about where Sri Lanka could go if it would only adhere to the rules-based international order.