This month marks the first anniversary of the end of Sri Lanka's long running and seemingly intractable civil war. On May 19, President Mahinda Rajapaksa announced victory for the government over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the death of its elusive leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. Such a juncture after decades of persistent violence was heralded as the dawn of a new era that offered the war-ravaged island a chance at peace.
Yet one year on, Amnesty International reports that more than 80,000 Tamil civilians remain detained in military-run internment camps. Another 11,000 suspected LTTE combatants including more than 500 children, are held by the state in Orwellian-titled rehabilitation centres. For Tamils outside the camps the post-war landscape is not much better.
While open war may have ended, the physical insecurity remains, with a 2010 US State Department Report revealing that the overwhelming victims of human rights violations in Sri Lanka — such as extrajudicial killings and disappearances — are young male Tamils. The militarisation of society has continued with an extended state of emergency and expanded army cantonments throughout the country's north and east.
This virtual garrisoning has been accompanied by a wholesale program of colonisation with Sinhala settlements and Buddhist shrines sprouting across territory recognised as traditional Tamil homelands. It is in this context that the stream of Tamil asylum seekers to Australia continues, marking Sri Lanka as an epicentre of instability in the Asia-Pacific region.
But this was not meant to happen. In the conventional understanding of many policymakers, Sri Lanka should now be on a path to peace defined by reconstruction, development and reconciliation. Such an understanding, however, equates the civil conflict in Sri Lanka to the mere clash of arms. Rather the roots of the conflict are in the ethnocentric nation-building project at work since the country's independence from Britain in 1948. In this project Sri Lanka was and is seen as the preserve of Sinhala hegemony where Tamils and other minorities have a subordinate existence. Hence the apparatus of the state has long been a tool of systematic violence against Tamils.
This violence does not just mean pogroms, disappearances and extra-judicial killings though these have certainly been a hallmark of the state. It also means more structural practices aimed at limiting the collective and individual rights of Tamils. These include colonisation of Tamil regions, marginalisation of the Tamil language, and efforts to limit socio-economic possibilities for Tamils such as discrimination in employment, education and development funds. Moreover Sri Lanka's electoral democracy serves to reinforce this situation. Sinhala-dominated parties have engaged in electoral outbidding as to who can best represent Sinhala interests, usually at the expense of Tamils. Indeed the 2010 parliamentary election result saw victory to the incumbent coalition on a nationalist platform that rejected any form of power-sharing with Tamils.
One year on, greater clarity has emerged about the war's true cost in terms of human suffering. A report critical of both the government and LTTE, released on Monday by the International Crisis Group (ICG), says tens of thousands of Tamils were killed in the war's last throes with government forces shelling designated safe zones with apparent impunity. The report — based on witness testimony, satellite images and other documentary evidence — claims that in the final months the Sri Lankan armed forces intentionally and repeatedly shelled civilians, hospitals and humanitarian operations with the full knowledge of senior government and military officials.
The intentional mass slaughter of an estimated 40,000 Tamil civilians is not an aberration by this particular government, but the logical culmination of ethnocentric politics pursued by the state for decades. As Australian barrister Julian Burnside, QC, has put it, Tamils are fleeing genocide.
Yet as the boat arrivals indicate, the international community, including Australia, has a strategic interest in the restoration of Sri Lanka to norms of liberal governance, a proposition quite distinct from merely ending war. This resolution, as Chris Patten, former European commissioner for external relations, and now co-chairman of the International Crisis Group has argued, "international leverage, correctly applied" portends to be the best chance at political transformation.
One such mechanism would be an independent investigation into war crimes committed by all parties in the final stages of the war. Sri Lanka's recently announced internal commission has been dismissed by Human Rights Watch and other bodies as a deliberate sham. Since Sri Lanka is not a member state of the International Criminal Court (ICC), an ICC investigation requires the referral of the UN Security Council, a doubtful outcome in the short term. Thus a UN-mandated inquiry remains the priority, and countries such as Australia should vigorously pursue investigations.
Open acknowledgment that the Sri Lankan state presently constituted is incompatible with the human and collective rights of all its citizens is the first stage of necessary political reform. In this way a war crimes investigation portends not just to promote justice for the 40,000 victims of Sri Lanka's mass slaughter but act as a bulwark for global human rights in the 21st century.
- By Sam Thampapillai, Australia
(Sam Thampapillai is a researcher at the Sydney Centre for International Law at the University of Sydney. The views expressed are his own.)
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