An island in the slipstream amidst milestones, memories, manifestoes

Defending, sidelining, covering up human rights abuses has been a national pastime of sorts – for a plethora of reasons spanning the gamut from an exaggerated sense of patriotism overriding regional, global and universal values and norms; to paid hands determined to win some ideas in propaganda wars. Defining one’s guilt or innocence or a more nuanced reality of any side in an armed conflict – state, non-state, rebel, insurrectionist or other – is a process that must be pluralistic, inclusive, transcendent, transitional and transformational. (But between the idea and the reality, falls the shadow)

The milestone visit this week of the UN HR chief to our sunny isle brought with it a barrelful of mixed emotions. That it took nine years to have United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Dr. Volker Türk show up personally in our sunny-rainy island, 16 years after our protracted civil war ended, speaks volumes for the priorities and processes of international interventionism in sovereign nations’ internal affairs, and how it is perceived. 

As well as state resistance from Sri Lanka as formal push-back, there were diasporic elements pulling the agenda of transitional justice forward that set the stage for these delays and counter-thrusts. There are many modalities to skin the tiger, and time spent procrastinating is one of these instrumentalities. Be that as it may, the visit happened and our island in the stream can consider itself back in the mainstream of internationalism again: only under a ‘progressive’ regime?

This week’s media barrage meanwhile, on the matters raised by the tour and its anticipated consequences, encompassed a spectrum of positions taken, defended and advocated. 

These ran the range inter alia from a stance asserting that no genocide as alleged was conducted in the north in the last stages of the war, through a plea for all the people concerned to move forward as the best possible option all things considered, to choices facing electorates torn between accountability for past deeds and autonomy on the path ahead and if government is up to the task of meaningful national reconciliation. 

The representative milieu of a singular newspaper (this one) in which these opinions were expressed – the truth be told, a city (not quite yet a nation) talking to itself – might be forgiven for feeling (A) amused, (B) bemused or (C) confused.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Dr. Volker Türk

Other ABCs: advocating, believing, challenging

(A) Advocating that Sri Lanka “must move beyond triumphalism and bitterness”, former Cabinet Minister and one-time High Commissioner to India Milinda Moragoda makes many pertinent points in his Daily FT article of Tuesday, 24 June.

Noting that the end of the nearly three-decades-long war cost tens of thousands of lives, displaced entire communities and left deep scars on the national psyche, he observes that while “for many Sri Lankans the end of the LTTE marks the return of peace”, “for others, it revives unresolved grief”.

Be that as it may – and acknowledging that “trust remains fractured” and “some diaspora voices and political actors remain locked in the past” – Moragoda affirms that for our nation, “genuine”, “inclusive” and “forward-looking” reconciliation is the only viable path.

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM: “Memory matters – but so does imagination. This is a moment for introspection, for shedding inherited resentments, and for building a national vision that transcends ethnicity and history. Revenge is not the answer; nor is retribution.”

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: Remembering right is as important as the right to remember. Of course, remembrance runs the gauntlet of state, societal and inter-communal prerogatives – because ‘one person’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist’ and no doubt ‘war heroes’ abound on both or all sides. There is also too much subjectivity as to what constitutes ‘right remembrance’ to permit it to be policed by state actors with any degree of objectivity or fairness. Permitting a kaleidoscope of such remembrances – both ‘north’ and ‘south’ – to proceed un-policed and open to the ministrations of deep-state-sanctioned or instigated thugs is perhaps too risky by law and order standards. 

Yet, precisely such permission – sans prohibition of commemorations except for an insistence that a peaceful ethos be maintained always in a militarised milieu – may be the only means going forward. Still, emotions run raw on ‘those days’... and short of dismantling the deep state (and their henchmen or goons), which have over the years proven inimical to admitting subaltern voices to speak, the state has its work cut out for it – short of a spontaneous agreement to permit ‘both/and’ commemorations to take place simultaneously. Also, if any regime can bridge the ethnic divide, it is a secular state not overtly bowing the knee to state religiosity or fundamentalist philosophies masquerading as due procedure. One means this government!   

(B) Believing that in the last stages of our 26-year war, no atrocities were perpetrated by Sri Lanka’s much-maligned security forces, Pradip Jayewardene argues passionately in this newspaper on Wednesday, 26 June for the position that “genocide did not happen; and no government, human rights agency or international NGO has accused the Sri Lankan government of genocide”. 

Citing an extract from the Darusman Report which claimed that (as many as) “40,000 civilians may have died at [sic] the last days of the war,” he maintains in an opinion piece titled ‘Did we commit genocide in the Vanni?’ that “this statement is in no way conclusive; it has been extracted and quoted repeatedly, giving it a Goebellian [sic] legitimacy”.

The former Colombo Municipal Council member, erstwhile Consul-General of Sri Lanka in Germany and grandson of ex-president the late J. R. Jayewardene is at pains in a painstakingly researched article to set the record straight on those devastatingly reverberant closing days of our long-beleaguered country’s protracted conflict, critiquing Goebbelsian statistics with the truth.

He concludes: (no one has) “accused the Sri Lankan government of genocide – it is only members of the Tamil diaspora, LTTE front organisations and politicians of their adopted homes that have raised the genocide cry”. 

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM: “Defending, reporting, investigating human rights today is a multi-million-dollar global industry – with a host of international government organisations, NGOs, media companies, academics, reporters and many others making a good living from it.”

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: Defending, sidelining, covering up human rights abuses has been a national pastime of sorts – for a plethora of reasons spanning the gamut from an exaggerated sense of patriotism overriding regional, global and universal values and norms; to paid hands determined to win some ideas in propaganda wars. Defining one’s guilt or innocence or a more nuanced reality of any side in an armed conflict – state, non-state, rebel, insurrectionist or other – is a process that must be pluralistic, inclusive, transcendent, transitional and transformational.  

(But between the idea and the reality, falls the shadow.)

(C) Challenging the ability of the incumbent administration to address the hoary chestnut of national reconciliation, Dayan Jayatilleka argues in a column published in this newspaper of Thursday, 5 June that “the AKD-JVP-NPP has not understood the location of the problem – it is situated in the domain of politics”, adding that “the JVP-NPP outlook combines superficial comprehension with deep delusion”.

He traduces the governing powers of the day by asseverating that “to the extent that the JVP-NPP recognises even fleetingly the political character of the question, its answer has been simplistic: ‘the Tamil people must politically support us and the politics of the problem automatically resolves itself’.”

Jayatilleka – a former Vice President of the UN Human Rights Council – explains why the so-called ‘Tamil question’ is primarily a political question: the demographic formation of an island containing a constitutive contradiction of three uneven yet combined geopolitical realities...

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM: (1) An overwhelming majority belong to one ethno-linguistic community. (2) An ethnic minority forms a majority in a geographically identifiable, roughly contiguous area. (3) That area lies adjacent to an ethnic kin-state (Tamil Nadu) in the proximately neighbouring subcontinent. “These different demographic realities generate different political dynamics which require management within a single political structure, a single sovereign state, embracing the island’s natural borders.”

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE While the ‘problem’ or ‘question’ might be defined as being primarily political, to do so exclusively would be to neglect the auxiliary – and arguably, equally pertinent – dimensions of the socioeconomic and geo-locational. 

(1) A large segment of the north remains chronically underdeveloped, unoccupied and under-represented in successive governments’ growth agendas. 

(2) An invisible north-south divide can be drawn along poverty and social indicator lines that cut across and in-between any demonstrable ethnic divide. 

(3) The Sri Lankan psyche is mentally and emotionally ‘federal’ already – with the island being bifurcated along the lines of semiautonomous fault lines (city/town, wealthy/indigent, littoral/hinterland). Such dichotomous socioeconomic ground realities necessitate a holistic, an incisive, and much vaunted inclusive/pluralistic approach to growth, development and progress – over and above the ‘centrist vs. devolved’ paradigms previously pursued, yet still retaining the united/unitary ethos. A tall order...

More ABCs: application, best-case, championing

In these admittedly limited slices of thinking above, and attendant logic and reasoning as well as emotions and feelings, it is evident that the issue at hand is multidimensional: political, socio-economic and military-industrial to say nothing of ethno-linguistic/cultural and inter-communal.

In such a milieu, even a reformist and progressive approach as one may expect the NPP Govt to take could easily come a cropper if not managed adroitly.

But it would appear that the Government of Sri Lanka is pursuing an open and nuanced approach at present. Whatever its pre-2024 election manifestoes may have meant or aspired to, for the nonce the path of prudent internationalism appears to be a win-win for the state and its newfound regional mango-friend India.

And it remains to be seen if, as with the JVP-NPP regime’s pragmatic adoption of the IMF programme as a necessary condition for survival, it would swallow the bitter post-Bretton-Woods pill whole, transitional justice and all.

The acid tests are already being prepped. Türk wants the GOSL to apply a moratorium on the use of the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) and a complete repealing of the insidious Online Safety Act (Act). There is a breathless hush as everyone waits to see what government will do. 

After all, the international community is only asking Sri Lanka to honour promises it made as far back as 2017 as regards the first and further demonstrate its goodwill with regard to the second. It is not a hard ask for a regime that needs to re-establish its bona fides as being ‘promising’.

Time will tell how far back into the past the JVP-led NPP administration would be willing to go to bring up the bodies again. On the one hand, its colourful past may pre-empt the full monty of transitional justice from taking effect in this its (still raw or hard) first term. And on the other, between placating pseudo-patriotic nationalism which still runs deep and offering its erstwhile nemesis – the nation’s security forces – as a scapegoat on the altar of its present concerns may take a strange new twist and turn. 

(Editor-at-large of LMD | reconciliation, remembering right & the right to remember.)