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Full text of the Eighth Neelan Tiruchelvam Memorial Lecture delivered by Gareth Evans, President, International Crisis Group, at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES) , Colombo, on July 29th 2007

I

Today more than ever, on this eighth anniversary of his assassination, Sri Lankans and those in the wider international community need to remember and be re-inspired by Neelan Tiruchelvam’s life and achievements. While we can no longer benefit directly from his remarkable intelligence and learning, his boundless energy, his political commitment, and his optimism, we do still have his spirit living among us in the ideas and institutions he gave us, and in the example he set for us of an engaged intellectual and a principled politician.

Neelan was an extraordinary institution builder. The best known of those he helped found are our host institution tonight, the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES), so ably and imaginatively now led by Dr Rama Mani, and the Law and Society Trust (LST) – both of which continue to make their intellectual and political mark not only in Sri Lanka and South Asia, but across the globe. Beyond that Neelan played an important role in creating the Official Languages Commission, the Human Rights Task Force and later the Human Rights Commission, as well of course as his own distinguished law firm, Tiruchelvam Associates, now led by his wife Sithie. His ability to build and maintain institutions was the product not only of good ideas and hard work but also of his ability to inspire others – particularly young people – to see, believe in, and work for otherwise hidden possibilities.

Of course the institutions he believed above all worth building were effective, decent states – protecting the rights and interests of all their peoples, with conflicts and disputes being resolved through law, democratic process and effective government structures, not violence. Probably best known internationally as a brilliant constitutional lawyer, Neelan was closely involved in constitution-making processes in Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, and Nepal, but above all he will be remembered as a central architect of the then Sri Lankan government’s ground breaking constitutional proposals of the mid and late 1990s, which while unhappily never ratified, continue to inspire hope that a consensus on a just constitutional and political settlement is, in fact, within reach should only the political will be there.

Neelan knew that political will is never waiting in a cupboard to be found: it has to be nurtured and generated, campaigned for persistently and relentlessly. He was an impressive scholar – with academic interests and writings spanning a remarkable range of topics from South Asian culture and ethnicity, to gender, political theory and of course constitutional law. But he refused to limit himself to mere scholarship, believing the obvious risks and challenges of politics were necessary for the ideas he believed in to be brought to life, to be made real in people’s lives. And it was his willingness to engage in electoral politics as a member of the TULF and his work in parliament and through other government mechanisms that ultimately, tragically for him, his family and all of us, cost him his life.

There is one other celebrated aspect of Neelan Tiruchelvam’s life and character that is directly relevant to my main topic tonight, and that is his cosmopolitanism. Neelan’s sense of community and attachment went beyond ethnicity, beyond religion, beyond nation, and beyond region. He didn’t ignore or reject any of those particular attachments in the name of an empty universality, but rather attempted to connect them all in a more vibrant, integrated, and just whole. He argued that developing states not only had something to learn from the richer, developed states but also something to teach them, arguing for instance, that the individualist discourse of human rights born in the West “needs to be enriched by explicit reference to the religious and cultural traditions of South Asia.” And he argued strongly, too, that it was only if Western states themselves actively tried to live up to their own professed principles, and applied them in evenhanded ways, that their concern with human rights in non-Western countries could begin to be taken seriously.

Approaching issues in this integrated way, confident of the contributions his own country and culture and region could make to wider international discourse, led Neelan to have no fear of international involvement designed to assist countries like his own extricate themselves from particular crises, or cycles of violence and counter-violence in which they seemed to be trapped. What mattered was whether that involvement was not only effective, but principled and consistent.

II

This leads directly into my subject tonight: the limits of state sovereignty, and the proper role of the international community in responding to catastrophic human rights violations – genocide and other mass killing, large scale ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity – occurring within the boundaries of a single country. There is a widespread concern that involvement of countries in the affairs of others, and in particular the involvement of developed countries in the internal affairs of developing ones, has not always been principled or consistent in the past. It is an article of faith around a good deal of the global South that Article 2 (7) of the UN Charter is to be read as an all-embracing prohibition when it says that “Nothing should authorise intervention in matters essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any State”.

It is understandable that sovereignty should be a very sensitive subject indeed with the many states who gained their independence during the decolonisation era – states in all cases proud of their new identity, in many cases conscious of their fragility, and generally inclined to see the non-intervention norm as one of their few defences against threats and pressures from more powerful international actors seeking to promote their own economic and political interests.

But the trouble with this approach, like anything taken to extremes, is that it has had a terrible downside, one which came to a head in the 1990s in the international response to the series of conscience-shocking man-made catastrophes that erupted in the Balkans and Central Africa – most horribly the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, followed by the almost unbelievable default in Srebrenica just a year later. Over and again, when situations seemed to cry out for some response, the international community reacted erratically, incompletely, counter-productively or not at all. And when killing and ethnic cleansing started all over again in Kosovo in 1999, and the international community did in fact intervene militarily as it probably should have, it did so without the authority of the Security Council in the face of a threatened veto by Russia, raising anxious questions about the integrity of the whole international security system.

The great debate throughout the 1990s was about the competing claims of intervention and state sovereignty. One side of the argument was the concept, coined by Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Medicines Sans Frontier and now France’s Foreign Minister, of ‘droit d’ingerence’ – the ‘right to intervene’, or, more fully, the ‘right of humanitarian intervention’. But while, from many perspectives this was a noble and effective rallying cry – with a particular resonance in the global North – around the rest of the world it enraged as many as it inspired. On the other side, equally vehemently claims, mostly coming from the global South, were made about the primacy and continued resonance of the concept of national sovereignty. Battle lines were drawn, trenches were dug, and verbal missiles flew: the debate was intense and very bitter, and the1990s finished with it utterly unresolved in the UN or anywhere else.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan at one stage made his own effort to resolve the conceptual impasse at the heart of this debate by arguing that national sovereignty had to be weighed and balanced in these cases against individual sovereignty, as recognised in the international human rights instruments. But this fell on deaf ears, being seen not so much as resolving the dilemma of intervention but restating it. In his report to the General Assembly in 2000, the Secretary-General brought the issue to a very public head, saying in language that was both moving and agitated, and which resonates to this day: If humanitarian intervention is indeed an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Sebrenica, to gross and systematic violations of human rights?

The task of meeting this challenge fell, in the event, to International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), sponsored by the Canadian Government, which I had the privilege of co-chairing, along with the Algerian diplomat and veteran UN Africa adviser Mohamed Sahnoun. We presented our report, entitled The Responsibility to Protect, at the end of 2001. The Commission made what are generally now acknowledged to be two critical conceptual contributions to resolving this increasingly ugly and sterile debate.

The first was to invent a new way of talking about ‘humanitarian intervention’. We sought to turn the whole weary – and increasingly ugly – debate about the ‘right to intervene’ on its head, and to recharacterise it not as an argument about the ‘right’ of states to anything, but rather about their ‘responsibility’ – one to protect people at grave risk: the relevant perspective, we argued, was not that of prospective interveners but those needing support. The searchlight was swung back where it should always be: on the need to protect communities from mass killing and ethnic cleansing, women from systematic rape and children from starvation. We very much had in mind the power of new ideas, or old ideas newly expressed, to actually change the behaviour of key policy actors. And a model we very much had in mind in this respect was the Brundtland Commission, which a few years earlier had introduced the concept of ’sustainable development’ to bridge the huge gap which then existed between developers and environmentalists. With a new script, the actors have to change their lines, and think afresh about what the real issues in the play actually are.

The second big conceptual contribution of the Commission, linked with the first, was to insist upon a new way of talking about sovereignty itself: we argued, building on an earlier formulation by Francis Deng (the Sudanese scholar and diplomat now named by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon as his Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities) that its essence should now be seen not as ‘control’, as in the centuries old Westphalian tradition, but, again, as ‘responsibility’. The starting point is that any state has the primary responsibility to protect the individuals within it. But that is not the finishing point: where the state fails in that responsibility, through either incapacity or ill-will, a secondary responsibility to protect falls on the wider international community. That, in a nutshell, is the core of the responsibility to protect idea, or ‘R2P’as we are all now calling it for short

After laying these foundations, the Commission spelled out what the responsibility to protect should mean in practice. Certainly it means reacting effectively in situations where genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity are currently occurring or imminent. But it also means preventing situations, not yet at that conscience-shocking stage but capable of reaching it, from so deteriorating. And it means rebuilding societies shattered by such catastrophes to ensure they do not recur.

The action required by R2P is overwhelmingly, preventive: building state capacity, remedying grievances and ensuring the rule of law. But if prevention fails, R2P requires whatever measures – economic, political, diplomatic, legal, security, or in the last resort military – become necessary to stop mass atrocity crimes occurring.

As to who should in practice bear the responsibility in question, for individual states, R2P means in the first instance the responsibility to protect their own citizens from such crimes, and to help other states build their capacity to do so. For international organizations, including the United Nations, R2P means the responsibility to warn, to generate effective preventive strategies, and when necessary to mobilize effective reaction. For civil society groups, R2P means the responsibility to force the attention of policymakers on what needs to be done, by whom and when.

It is one thing to develop a concept like the responsibility to protect, but quite another to get any policy maker to take any notice of it. The most interesting thing about the Responsibility to Protect report is the way its central theme has continued to gain traction internationally, even though it was almost suffocated at birth by being published in December 2001, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and by the massive international preoccupation with terrorism, rather than internal human rights catastrophes, which then began.

In just five short years, a remarkably brief time in the history of ideas, the responsibility to protect concept evolved from a gleam in an international commission’s eye, to what now has the pedigree to be described as a broadly accepted international norm, and one with the potential to evolve further into a rule of customary international law

The concept was first seriously embraced in the doctrine of the newly emerging African Union, and over the next two to three years it won quite a constituency among academic commentators and international lawyers. But the big step forward came with the UN 60th Anniversary World Summit in September 2005, which followed a major preparatory effort involving the report of the 2004 High Level Panel on new security threats (of which I was, rather conveniently, a member) which fed in turn into a major report by the Secretary-General himself. Both these reports emphatically embraced the responsibility to protect concept, and the Summit Outcome Document, unanimously agreed by the more than 150 heads of state and government present and meeting as the UN General Assembly, unambiguously picked up their core recommendations.

A further important conceptual development has occurred since the September 2005 Summit: the adoption by the Security Council in April last year of a thematic resolution on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict which contains, in an operative paragraph, an express reaffirmation of the World Summit conclusions relating to the responsibility to protect. And we have now begun to see that resolution in turn now being invoked in subsequent specific situations, as with Resolution 1706 of 31 August 2006 on Darfur. A General Assembly resolution may be helpful, as the World Summit’s unquestionably was, in identifying relevant principles, but the Security Council is the institution that matters when it comes to executive action. And at least a toehold there has now been carved.

But, for those of us who believe in R2P, this is just about where the good news ends. We are deluding ourselves if think the battle is won, in the sense that when the next R2P situation comes along, involving large-scale killing, or ethnic cleansing, or other crimes against humanity, or all of the above, within a sovereign state’s borders – as surely some such situation will, some time, some where, and maybe sooner than we think – there really will be a shared, instinctive, reflex global response. A response not only of horror that something which we have all said should happen ‘never again’ is in fact happening again. But a response which makes something happen – mobilizing effective international action to actually stop the threat.

As someone who has been speaking and writing on this subject around the world for several years now, I have been well aware that the consensus reached at the World Summit was based on fairly fragile foundations. In 2005, a fierce rearguard action was fought, almost to the last, by a small group of developing countries, joined by Russia, who basically refused to concede any kind of limitation on the full and untrammelled exercise of state sovereignty, however irresponsible that exercise might be. What carried the day in the end was not so much consistent support from the EU and U.S. – support which after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not particularly helpful, it has to be acknowledged, when it came to meeting these familiar sovereignty concerns. The support that mattered, rather, was persistent advocacy by sub-Saharan African countries, led by South Africa; a clear – and historically quite significant – embrace of limited-sovereignty principles by the key Latin American countries; and some very effective last minute personal diplomacy with major wavering-country leaders, including India in particular, by Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin.

In my travels since 2005, I have become fairly accustomed to hearing suggestions from the representatives of a number of countries, not least in Asia – and not excluding diplomats from Sri Lanka – that while they had not been prepared to break consensus and oppose R2P language outright in 2005, they had been less than pleased to see its inclusion in the World Summit Outcome Document. R2P, I have been told more often than I like to recall, is simply another name for humanitarian intervention, providing a means for powerful countries, and in particular the West, to intervene in the internal affairs of smaller countries. But I have to say that, even having been immunized to this extent, I was more than a little taken back when the head of the Crisis Group office in New York reported to me a conversation two weeks ago, in which the head of mission of a major country in the Arab-Islamic world said to him: ‘The concept of the responsibility to protect does not exist except in the minds of Western imperialists’.

What has gone wrong here? Why is there so much continuing resistance to a principle which has seemed to so many others to be an important breakthrough, capable of resolving an age old debate in a practical and principled way? Is there anything that we of a cosmopolitan mindset – to pick up my earlier reference to Neelan Tiruchelvam’s extraordinarily decent, civilized and balanced approach to these kinds of issues – can possibly do to get this debate back on the rails and generate the kind of response that this haunting issue of preventing genocide and mass atrocity crimes demands?

I think what we need to do is address and clearly answer four big misunderstandings about R2P that exist to some extent everywhere, but are particularly prevalent in the global South.

Misunderstanding One. The first is that R2P is only about military intervention, that it is ’simply another name for humanitarian intervention’. This is absolutely not the case, and that cannot be said too often. R2P is above all about taking effective preventive action – recognizing those situations that are capable of deteriorating into mass killing, ethnic cleansing or other large-scale crimes against humanity, and bringing to bear every appropriate preventive response: political, diplomatic, legal and economic. The responsibility to prevent is very much that of the state itself, quite apart from that of the international community. And when it comes to the international community, a very big part of its preventive response should be to help countries to help themselves. Paragraph 138 of the World Summit Outcome Document makes that very clear:

Each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This responsibility entails the prevention of such crimes, including their incitement, through appropriate and necessary means. The international community should as appropriate encourage and help States to exercise that responsibility

So does Paragraph 139 of the document, in which the world’s leaders said, again unanimously:

We also intend to commit ourselves, as necessary and appropriate, to helping States build capacity to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and to assisting those which are under stress before crises and conflicts break out.

Of course there will be situations when prevention fails, and reaction becomes necessary. But reaction does not have to mean military reaction: it can involve political and diplomatic economic and legal pressure, all measures which can themselves each cross the spectrum from persuasive to intrusive, and from less to more coercive – something which is true of military capability as well. As the ICISS Commission insisted, ‘the exercise of the responsibility to both prevent and react should always involve less intrusive and coercive measures being considered before more coercive and intrusive ones are applied’. Coercive military action is not excluded as a last resort option in extreme cases, when it is the only possible way – as nobody doubts was the case in Rwanda or Srebrenica, for example – to stop large scale killing and other atrocity crimes. But it is an absolute travesty of the R2P principle to say that it is about military force and nothing else.

Misunderstanding Two. The second misunderstanding, at the opposite end of the spectrum, is that R2P is about the protection of everyone from everything. I remember first thinking that this might become something of a problem when a distinguished international statesman, who had been much involved in the intervention versus sovereignty debate in the 1990s, asked me a few months ago whether I agreed that the international community had a ‘responsibility to protect’ the Inuit people of the Arctic Circle from the consequences of global warming! Of course, linguistically, one can argue that there is indeed a responsibility to protect of some kind in this case – and in the case of HIV/AIDS, or the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and much more besides. But ‘human security’ is much more appropriate umbrella language to use in these cases than ‘R2P’.

To use the R2P concept in any of these ways is to dilute to the point of uselessness its role as a mobiliser of instinctive, universal action in cases of conscience shocking killing, ethnic cleansing and other such crimes against humanity: the whole point of embracing R2P language is that it is capable of generating an effective, consensual response in extreme, conscience shocking cases, in a way that ‘right to intervene’ language was not.

The trouble is, of course, that if you stretch the R2P concept to embrace what might be described as the whole ‘human security’ agenda, you immediately raise the hackles of those who see it as the thin end of a totally interventionist wedge – as giving an open invitation for the countries of the North to engage to their hearts content in the missions civilisatrices that so understandably raise the hackles of those in the South who experienced it all before.

That trouble is compounded when it is remembered that coercive military intervention, while absolutely not at the heart of the R2P concept – as I have just been saying – is nonetheless a reactive response that cannot be excluded in really extreme cases. So any understanding of R2P as a very broad-based doctrine, which would open up at least the possibility of military action in a whole variety of policy contexts, is bound to give the concept a bad name.

The short point, which cannot be repeated too often, is that R2P is not about protecting everybody from everything. It’s about protecting men, women and children from large-scale killing, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity – either occurring now, or imminently feared likely to occur, or readily capable of so occurring if a situation deteriorates through want of effective preventive action.

Misunderstanding Three. The third misunderstanding, and it’s really a subset of the second, is the notion that R2P is about responding to conflict and human rights abuses generally. The problem here is not so much R2P being stretched to deal with all the world’s ills – from HIV/AIDS to climate change – but being too indiscriminately applied to a narrower group of those ills. But as much as people need protection from the horror and misery of any violent conflict, and from the ugliness of tyrannical human rights abuse, ‘R2P situations’ have to be more narrowly defined.

If they are perceived as extending across the full range of human rights violations by governments against their own people, or all kinds of internal conflict situations, it will be difficult to build and sustain any kind of consensus for action: we will find ourselves rapidly back in the area of North governments worrying about how to justify foreign entanglements where no vital national interests seem to be immediately involved, and South governments being concerned about their sovereignty being at risk of interventionary over-reach.

To say it again, ‘R2P situations’ must be seen only as those actually or potentially involving large-scale killing, ethnic cleansing or other similar mass atrocity crimes – situations where these crimes are either occurring or appear to be imminent, or which are capable of deteriorating to this extent in the absence of preventive action – and which should engage the attention of the international community simply because of their particularly conscience-shocking character.

Looked at in this way, for example, Iraq at the time of the coalition invasion in 2003 was not an R2P situation, because although there were clearly major human rights violations continuing to occur (which justified international concern and response, for example by way of censure and economic sanctions), and although mass atrocity crimes had clearly occurred in the past (against the Kurds in the late 1980s and the southern Shiites in the early 1990s) such crimes were neither actually occurring nor apprehended when the coalition invaded the country in early 2003. By contrast, it would be proper to characterise the situation in Iraq now, in July 2007, as an R2P one, because there is every reason to fear – particularly in the context of a precipitate withdrawal of foreign forces from the centre of the country – that the present situation, bad as it is, will rapidly deteriorate into massive outbreak of communal and sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing beyond the capacity of the Iraqi government to control, and from which it would be unconscionable for the wider world to stand aloof.

Burundi since the early 90s is a good example of what can properly be described as an ‘R2P situation’, although nobody has really badged it as such. It is one, moreover, which has not at any stage involved coercive military action – just a lot of hard, grinding preventive action to ensure that the worst which everyone feared did not in fact happen. The situation there was certainly capable of deteriorating into the kind of large scale genocidal violence that wracked neighbouring Rwanda, and it arguably only the intense engagement of many international actors – including among others Nelson Mandela with his mediation, South Africa with its troop presence, the International Crisis Group with our analysis and advocacy, and the new Peacebuilding Commission with its making of Burundi its first case – that has prevented that occurring.

Misunderstanding Four. The last big misunderstanding is that R2P justifies coercive military intervention in every case where large-scale loss of life, or large-scale ethnic cleansing, is occurring or apprehended. What needs to be understood much more clearly than it has been is that not just one criterion but multiple criteria must be satisfied if coercive, non-consensual military force is to be deployed within another country’s sovereign territory: it is not just a matter of saying that if a threshold of seriousness is crossed, then it’s time for the invasion to start.

As the ICISS Commission said in its 2001 report, and the High Level Panel in its report to the UN before the 2005 World Summit, and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in his pre-Summit report, and as every serious supporter of R2P has made abundantly clear, military intervention for human protection purposes is a desperately serious, exceptional and extraordinary measure, which has to be judged by not just one but a whole series of prudential criteria.

The first of those criteria is the seriousness of the threat to people which is occurring or apprehended: this would need to involve large scale loss of life or ethnic cleansing to prima facie justify something as extreme as military action. But there are another four criteria, all more or less equally important, which also have to be satisfied: the motivation or primary purpose of the proposed military action (whether it was primarily to halt or avert the threat in question, or had some other main objective); last resort, viz. whether there were reasonably available peaceful alternatives; the proportionality of the response; and, not least, the balance of consequences – whether overall more good than harm would be done by a military invasion.

Even if one stretched the threshold criterion, as to seriousness of human rights threat, to its absolute limit in the case of Iraq in 2003, it doesn’t take much analysis – even looking just at what we knew then, not now – to generate grave doubts as to whether the balance of consequences of an invasion could possibly be positive.

One of the many disappointments of the World Summit is that although guidelines for the use of force of just this kind were argued for in all the reports I have mentioned, in the hope that this would lead to their adoption by the Security Council, they were not adopted by the Summit – caught in a diplomatic pincer movement between the US, who wanted no such restrictions to affect any decision to use force, and some in the South who, I think very misguidedly, argued that to adopt guidelines purporting to limit the force would in fact, by recognizing its legitimacy in at least some cases, on the contrary encourage it.

Of course no prudential criteria of this kind, even if agreed as guidelines by the Security Council, will ever end argument on how they should be applied in particular instances, for example Darfur right now. But it is hard to believe they would not be more helpful than the present totally ad hoc system in focusing attention on the relevant issues, revealing weaknesses in argument, and generally encouraging consensus.

While answers are readily available to all the misunderstandings I have described, and others as well, there is no doubt that a considerable effort of analysis and advocacy will be necessary to keep the flame of R2P alive, and to create a global environment in the 21st century, like no other before it, where we can be confident that the Holocausts and Cambodias and Rwandas and Bosnias of the past, and the Darfurs of the present, and maybe the Iraqs of the near future, really will happen never again.

One of the efforts in which I and Crisis Group and a number of other major global NGOs have recently been involved, and in which I hope wonderful institutions like ICES will become involved shortly, is putting together a project to fund and establish a new ‘Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect’, based in New York, but with a strong North-South character and outreach, to work on just these issues – to be a resource base and catalyst for ongoing activity worldwide by NGOs, like-minded governments and international organizations. Although there will be some in this country and this region who will certainly differ, I hope there will not be too many in this audience who would think this whole effort misguided.

It has taken the world an insanely long time, centuries in fact, to come to terms conceptually with the idea that state sovereignty is not a license to kill – that there is something fundamentally and intolerably wrong about states murdering or forcibly displacing large numbers of their own citizens, or standing by when others do so. Now that we have at last won recognition of that in this new century, with the unanimous acceptance of the principle of the responsibility to protect by the world’s assembled heads of state and government in 2005, it seems to me – and I hope to all of you here – that it would be a tragedy now for there to be any backsliding. I don’t think there will be, but it’s going to take a lot of effort and energy from men and women of goodwill all round the world to ensure not only that R2P continues to be accepted in principle, but is effectively operational in practice.

III

This leads me to ask finally – as I guess a number of you in this audience will have already been asking yourselves, and are about to ask me – what has all this to with Sri Lanka, here and now? Is this horrible, apparently intractable conflict – that took Neelan Tiruchelvam’s life, and has taken the lives of so many scores of thousands of others – properly described as an R2P situation? And if so, what follows from that? Whose responsibility is it to do what?

Since the resumption of hostilities last summer, both the government and the LTTE have been careful to keep their military actions, and their terror and counter-insurgency operations, within certain limits. While more than 4,500 have been killed over the last 20 months, and both government and LTTE forces have repeatedly violated international humanitarian law, the recent violence has not crossed the boundary into mass atrocity or obvious genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, or crimes against humanity. The violence has been contained just this side of full-scale disaster and internationally-recognized catastrophe.

We know, nonetheless, that for those who directly experience the war it is brutal and devastating. Hundreds of thousands – three hundred on UNHCR’s figures, two hundred on the government’s – have survived the Tiger shelling and bombing, or the government’s aerial attacks and multi-barrel rocket launchers, only to face months of constant displacement – in jungles, in camps, or in the overcrowded houses of family or friends.

And we know, from recent history as well as informed analysis of present political dynamics, that there are plenty of reasons to fear that things can get much worse, especially if the war turns from the east to the north, as it appears may already be happening. Recent Sri Lankan history offers all-too-many examples of large-scale atrocities, mass-graves, serious war crimes, and ethnic cleansing. And there are disturbing signs that the restraint on both sides – such as it has been – could be eroding. The rhetoric and threats from both sides are increasingly dire and suggest the next round of fighting could well be extreme even by Sri Lanka’s standards.

Should the war move into the LTTE-controlled areas in the north, it is likely to be much more fierce than the recent fighting in the east, and the impact on civilians is almost certain to be devastating. As the war grows more vicious, it could well spill over into areas outside the north – perhaps through deliberate attacks on civilians designed to provoke excessive, and politically damaging, replies from the other side. Such attacks and the communal tensions they are sure to increase, could well lead to the further erosion of the remaining elements of the rule of law.

All this makes it hard to argue that Sri Lanka is anything but an R2P situation. It may not be one where large scale atrocity crimes – Cambodia-style, Rwanda-style, Srebrenica-style, Kosovo-style – are occurring right now, or immediately about to occur, but it is certainly a situation which is capable of deteriorating to that extent. So it is an R2P situation which demands preventive action, by the Sri Lankan government itself, but with the help and support of the wider international community, to ensure that further deterioration does not occur.

So what would an effective preventive strategy, featuring cooperation between the Sri Lankan government and the international community, actually look like? This is not the occasion for me to offer any kind of comprehensive analysis or prescriptions, covering all the necessary issues in all the necessary detail: we in Crisis Group have only been here on the ground for a year, and we are still feeling our way. And I have been talking to you, I suspect, quite long enough already. But let me try to sketch just in outline what in our judgement the main elements of that strategy – legal, military and political – should involve.

First, as to the legal element. Recognizing that the government’s primary responsibility, like that of any state, is to protect all its citizens, it must take steps to ensure that all its citizens are accorded the equal protection of the laws. The record in this respect leaves a great deal of room for improvement. As Crisis Group has documented in our most recent report on Sri Lanka, there have been hundreds of abductions, disappearances, and killings, both by the Tigers and by security forces that are part of or linked to the government. These have taken place with virtually complete impunity. To date there has been only a single indictment announced for an identifiable human rights violation committed by government personnel.

The priority need is effective prosecutions. This means disciplining those members of the police and security forces who are known to have intimidated witnesses; setting up an effective witness protection program, with active assistance from other governments concerned with supporting Sri Lanka’s justice system; providing an adequate and independent budget to the Presidential Commission of Inquiry headed by Justice Udalagama; and making full use of the resources of the International Independent Group of Eminent Persons rather than challenging its legitimacy and trying to limit its mandate.

In a recent letter to members of the US Congress, Sri Lanka’s ambassador to the United States has rejected the need for United Nations help in monitoring the human rights situation, while calling rather for technical assistance to strengthen the government’s policing and judicial capacities. But these should not be either-or options. As the recent experience in Nepal shows, UN human rights monitoring can play an important role in supporting and developing the state’s capacities to protect its citizen’s rights. The Sri Lankan government should not see UN monitoring as punitive, or invasive. Instead, it’s designed to help government authorities do their job better, in part by increasing the confidence of witnesses.

Secondly, as to the military element. The government’s sovereign responsibility is not to put its own citizens at undue risk. For this reason, the government must resist the temptation to continue its military campaign into the areas of the Northern Province held by the LTTE. Here, too, the international friends of Sri Lanka have a role to play.

Sri Lanka’s conflict presents a particularly difficult situation for would-be peacemakers in part because of the very real difficulty of containing and taming the LTTE. Given the deliberately provocative manner in which the Tigers attacked government forces in late 2005 and early 2006, and given their past willingness to target civilians and the brutal nature of their rule in north, the government clearly has legitimate security concerns to which it must respond. Sri Lanka’s international supporters can assist the government’s legitimate need to defend itself and protect its people by strengthening the global crackdown on Tigers fundraising, arms procurement and coercive control of the Tamil diaspora outside Sri Lanka.

Various foreign states bear some of the responsibility for allowing the Tigers to build up their power over the years, in part on the misguided belief that they were a legitimate national liberation movement. It’s time to make amends for that by making it harder for them to wage war and to carry out terror attacks – by better enforcing existing restrictions on the LTTE’s ability to raise money, buy weapons and propagate its message of violence.

All that said, and done, the probability remains, on all available historical and analytical evidence that it is highly unlikely that the Tigers can be defeated militarily. Some argue, however, that while the outright defeat of the Tigers may be out of reach, weakening them militarily would help persuade them to negotiate seriously. It is true that some means must be found to force the Tigers to start negotiating in a serious way, after repeated refusals to do so over the years. But attempting to regain control of the territory they control in the Wanni does not seem to be the way to do this. Even assuming the Tigers can be significantly weakened, the past thirty years teaches us that this is not likely to encourage them to negotiate: the more probable LTTE response in these circumstances is retreat to unconventional warfare, and possible attacks designed to provoke government or Sinhalese attacks on Tamil civilians.

Thirdly, as to the political element. The government’s responsibility is to seriously seek an ultimate political settlement that is responsive to such justice as there is in the Tamil cause. If it can work at all, the “fight now in order to negotiate later” strategy will work only if the government is ready with a package of political and constitutional reforms that appeal to non-separatist Tamils and non-LTTE Tamil parties, and were at least capable of discussion by the LTTE itself.

In the end, the only pressure to which the Tigers are likely to respond is political pressure. This will have to be a combination of domestic pressure – based on the two major political parties finally coming to some consensus on constitutional reforms that address Tamil grievances – and international pressure that limits the Tigers’ ability to raise funds to wage war and maintain their grip on the north. International pressure on the Tigers without corresponding political moves by the government will be ineffective and perhaps even counter-productive, to the extent that it served to further isolate the Tigers and push them into extremism, and drive more moderate Tamils into their arms. At the very least, then, until the government comes up with a constitutional offer that at least non-separatist Tamil leaders can take seriously, there should be no international support for offensive operations in the north.

The All-Party Conference, headed by Minister Tissa Vitharana, provides a ready-made process through which the SLFP and parties both within and out of government can come to terms on such an offer. The majority and minority reports of the expert committee offer excellent starting points for a final consensus. The government needs to do everything it can to encourage the APRC process, beginning with a clear public statement that the SLFP is not wedded to its own particular proposal to the APRC and will not veto a consensus plan that offers more extensive devolution at the provincial level. Meanwhile, the opposition parties – in particular the UNP – need to become active and enthusiastic members of the process, willing to assist in the development of a meaningful proposal that could form the basic of a lasting settlement.

IV

I hope it will be apparent from what I have said about the R2P principle, including how it might be applied to the present traumatic situation here in Sri Lanka, that this is a complex, multi-dimensional concept, which is genuinely aimed at helping countries find their way, with international support, through apparently intractable internal situation – and that it is simply grotesque to describe it as a tool of Western imperialists.

I don’t think Neelan Tiruchelvam, were he alive today, would have any difficulty in grasping this. His loyalties weren’t to any closed, static version of state or nation or community. He understood very well what were the limits of state sovereignty, and the nature of sovereign state responsibilities. His central intellectual and political struggle was to help reinvent Sri Lankan politics beyond competing and defensive nationalisms, whether Tamil or Sinhalese, and his perspective in this was that of a genuine cosmopolitan, alive to the possibilities of what such a polity could contribute to the wider world, and to what the wider international community, provided it acted in a principled and consistent way, could contribute to peace and stability and development within this country.

Neelan’s belief in the power of words and of ideas, his devotion to pluralism and democracy, his active defence of human rights and the rule of law, and his tireless work towards a peaceful, negotiated binding of his country’s agonizingly self-inflicted wounds, made him not only a great Sri Lankan, but a great international citizen – whose memory we celebrate on this day. His beliefs and principles, and his capacity to translate them into action, have never been more sorely needed, both here in Sri Lanka and in the wider global community.

by Izeth Hussain

“It is not what he wants to know.
It is what he wants not to know
It is not what they say
It is what they do not say – James Fenton – from A German Requiem.

Since the preparation of my article about Abductions of Muslims and rise of neo-Nazism , there have been several important developments in the matter of the abductions of Muslim businessmen. There was notably the spectacular speech by the UNP Parliamentarian Lakshman Seneviratne, which led to the quick arrests of former Wing Commander Gajanayake and others.

It does not seem necessary to go into details about the developments that have been taking place because it is now generally acknowledged that abductions of Muslim businessmen for money have indeed been taking place on a very appreciable scale. It is believed that around 300 Muslims, consisting of businessmen and their families, have fled to Malaysia in consequence.

The celerity with which the arrests took place after the Seneviratne speech suggests strongly that some of the authorities knew quite well what was going on. A reasonable surmise is that the abductors had the backing of powerful personages and groups functioning within the structure of the State.

They should be identified as neo-Nazi racists who could come to pose a threat to the Government and to the democratic system, as I alerted in my last article. In this article I will focus exclusively on the racist aspects of the abductions.

It is not expected that the abductors will really be brought to book. The reason is that the victims of the abductors – notably pusillanimous Muslim businessmen – will fail to press their charges because they know that the powerful backers of the abductors still remain powerful.

They could therefore be expected to prefer an outcome that simply allows them to go on making money, ignoring what happened in the past. Such an outcome seems possible because the abductions have ceased. All’s well that ends well.

What is the explanation for what looks like an unexpectedly happy outcome? I want to suggest that it lies in what might be called a strategy of positive action as distinct from what might be called a strategy of accommodation, after which I want to suggest why it is important to approach our so-called ethnic problems in terms of a paradigm of racism.

We were given a striking illustration of the strategy of accommodation by Muslim MPs on the Government side. They held that only two abductions of Muslim businessmen had been recorded, and that stories about other abductions had to be discounted as UNP propagandist bunkum. It might seem unbelievable, but such was their position.

I learnt about the abductions for the first time about two months earlier from a Muslim businessman who said that the Muslim politicians and the Government were totally indifferent to what was going on, and the Muslim businessmen did not know where to turn.

I offered to write an article on the subject provided I were given some detailed and reliable information, and I could see to it that my informant would not be compromised in any way. He did not avail of that offer. Obviously by that time the Muslim businessmen were in a state of pervasive funk.

In advanced old age I am becoming feebler and therefore I have a reclusive life-style. But even so I became aware months ago of the abductions that were going on galore. It is impossible to believe that our Muslim politicians – a hyper-active breed like all politicians – were so ill-informed that they could take seriously only two cases of Muslim abductions. They resorted to lying, bare-faced lying. But they were guilty – if they were guilty at all – only of white lies, lies that were uttered in conformity with the strategy of accommodation.

The first principle of that strategy is that our Muslims should not say or do anything that might upset the Sinhalese political bosses. Muslim grievances and problems should be brought to the notice of those bosses, who may or may not sort them out. That strategy may have made sense when the main function of the Muslim politician was to serve the interests of a small Muslim business elite, but over the decades it has come to seem a colossal failure. That is shown by the fact that the Muslim politicians could do nothing to stop the abductions.

The efficacy of the strategy of positive action was very clearly shown by what happened thereafter. Lakshman Seneviratne`s speech in Parliament, an open confrontation against the Government unlike the strategy of accommodation, named names fearlessly and went into fulsome details about the abductions.

The Government riposted by bringing a no-confidence motion against him, but took action showing that his charges were taken seriously. The arrests quickly followed, and the abductions have ceased. I know nothing about Seneviratne. Like many other politicians nowadays he may well be an unprincipled scoundrel, but his name should be writ in gold in the annals of the Sri Lankan Muslims.

In the case of these abductions at least the strategy of positive action has been spectacularly successful, while that of accommodation has been a total failure. But all the same, we can expect the Muslim politicians in our two main parties, the SLFP and the UNP, to continue with the largely ineffective strategy of accommodation.

Unlike those politicians the SLMC leader, Rauf Hakeem, has been admirably outspoken about the abductions in more than one newspaper interview. That fact suggests that it is in the interest of our two main parties, both of which in my view are Sinhala supremacist parties, to keep the Muslim politicians marginalized. Consequently, those politicians are not so much representatives of the Muslims as representatives of those parties to the Muslims.

However, it is not just a question of the Sinhalese politicians wanting to marginalize the Muslim ones. I believe that the latter themselves would prefer to have a marginalized role, under which they can continue with the strategy of accommodation even though it has proved to be largely ineffective in securing present-day Muslim interests, as shown very clearly over the problem of abductions.

Why this should be so is a very important question, requiring complex answers that cannot be fully addressed in this article. Here I will mention just a couple of points that have to be borne in mind.

One is that while Islamic civilization at its most vibrant has been outward-looking and ecumenical, such as notably that of the Abbasid Empire, during its decadent phases Islamic civilization has bred societies that are inward-looking, with a pronounced tendency towards a mollusc-like withdrawal into a shell.

In accordance with that tendency the Sri Lankan Muslims have been the least disposed to interact with other ethnic groups. The strategy of accommodation can be seen as part of that withdrawal syndrome. The other point I have in mind is that while Islamic societies can show much solidarity in the religious realm, they can be terribly divided in some ways.

Jane Russell’s exceptionally well-researched book Communal Politics under the Donoughmore Constitution contained the following sentence,” In fact, the Muslims had always shown a tendency to greater political fissipiration than any other communal group in Ceylon.” The consciousness of serious internal divisions can be expected to lead to a sense of exceptional vulnerability.

I will now provide a concrete illustration of that sense of exceptional vulnerability. In an earlier article about Nation-building and Cricket, I referred to the fact that most Muslims have a strong perception of anti-Muslim discrimination in selections to the national team.

I argued that the case was not proven, but I advised that the Cricket authorities should be vigilant about possible anti-Muslim racist bias in the selections.

In the course of a telephone discussion of that article, a Muslim friend of mine made the point that anti-Muslim “racist bias” may not exist among the Cricket authorities, but my reference to it could lead to its formation among them.

I suspect that his view will be shared by many Muslims, who will probably go further and hold that anything other than a strategy of accommodation will be counter-productive to Muslim interests. But I believe that Cricket officials who form an anti-Muslim “racist bias” because I have adverted to its possibility in an article must have a rather odd mindset, and they must certainly be miniscule in number.

My friend is giving them too much importance, almost certainly because he has a strong sense of the exceptional vulnerability of the Muslims.

It should help to look at this problem in terms of a paradigm of racism. Most Western countries have to face the problem of racism, and all such countries have anti-racist movements.

A fundamental belief of such movements is that most people are not inveterately racist, and that by countering racism it should be possible to give fair and equal treatment to all ethnic groups. By and large that belief is proving to be correct, a striking illustration of which point is provided by the US.

It had one of the most racist of all dominant groups in history, which was understandable because that group had behind it genocide against the Red Indians and the exercise of slavery over millions of blacks. The anti-racist movement really got going there in the `fifties, when segregation in transport and education became big issues. Today a credible black Presidential candidate is shaping up.

The anti-racist strategies followed in the US could also be very instructive for the Sri Lankan Muslims. There are two emblematic figures for my purpose here, the first of whom is Booker T. Washington and the other is W.E.B. du Bois. The first, an emancipated slave, rose high through native ability and hard work, and became leader of the American blacks. He thought that the American blacks would come through like him – through education and hard work – because the American ideology of democratic liberalism would gradually dispose of American racism.

He did notice that in the Reconstruction period following on the emancipation of the slaves American racism became even worse than before, but he thought of that as a passing phenomenon. He continued to advocate a policy of what he called “accommodation”. His main argument was that a policy of confrontation would be disastrous for the blacks as they were in a minority.

Du Bois also rose very high through native ability and hard work, but he came to disagree with Washington that the problem of the blacks could be solved by other blacks emulating them, and he also disagreed about the self-correcting mechanism in American racism.

He advocated struggle against racism, and it was his line that came to prevail in the US under the leadership of people like Martin Luther King, and indeed practically everywhere else in the West. It was his line of positive action against racism, not the strategy of accommodation, which has made it possible for a credible black Presidential candidate to arise.

The lesson to be drawn from the above by Sri Lankan Muslims should be clear enough. The abductions took place over a period of weeks and months, some of the victims fled abroad with their families, while those who remained kept mum in accordance with the strategy of accommodation.

The Muslim politicians, who are supposedly the representatives of the Muslim people, gave the impression of being fast asleep, also in accordance with that same strategy.

The abductions continued. But an opposition Parliamentarian challenged the Government on the abductions, which ceased abruptly. The efficacy of the strategy of positive action was strikingly demonstrated.

By Kalyananda Godage

At a time when the country needs the best of efforts to counter the huge propaganda campaign mounted against her, we appear to be going out of our way to make enemies of our friends, particularly the powerful countries, whose friendship we do most badly need in this war against the LTTE.

We need the big powers of the modern world for the following reasons: We need their support and understanding to rein in the Tamil Diaspora which it is reported, help the LTTE to the tune of US$ 300 Million. No terrorist group in the world other than perhaps the Al Queada and the Hamas enjoys greater support. The Tamil Diaspora have entrenched themselves in the countries of the west and having secured citizenship influence politicians and political parties. We also need the West for it is in those markets that we sell our tea and garments. The West is not only where the markets exist but also the source of capital and technology besides, of course, the influence they wield in the affairs of the world. We should also not forget from where those ‘high-spending’ tourists come to this country. We certainly need them more than they need us; we must face the fact that this country has become worthless among countries of the international community. The influence we wield is near zero. If this situation is not bad enough we appear to be unnecessarily antagonizing India as well, something that we can ill afford to do.

We need to take note of the fact of India’s foreign policy shift. Her relationship with the US has been consolidated by a new defence relationship. The nuclear cooperation deal heralded the shift. In recent days, the nuclear-powered US Aircraft carrier Nimitz docked into the Chennai harbour. Such a symbol of US military power in Indian waters would have been unthinkable a few years ago. This is indicative of a strategic alliance between the two countries. Under-Secretary Burns described the relationship as a ‘Global partnership’! The Indo-US relationship has undergone a sea change and we need to take account of this.

We do need to enter into a new Treaty of Peace Friendship and Cooperation with India, since the world has changed dramatically from what it was in 1987 to replace the Indo Lanka Agreement, which after twenty years, non-performance being the order of the day, is now passé.

The perception of many knowledgeable people in this country is that our attitude towards the West has not been helpful and needs to be changed in our own interest. Why do we say ‘in our own interest’? Besides the imperative need to cultivate those relations because of the fact that markets for our products are in the West, in recent weeks we have seen the crack down on LTTE leaders and their operations from the US, through Europe to Australia. This must be appreciated by the government. The LTTE is being penalized globally and the resultant weakening of the LTTE in the ‘west’ has, in no small measure, helped the government with its war against the outfit here at home. Let us for a moment pause to think of what the consequences would have been, had the LTTE been able to secure ‘Surface to Air’ missiles. The US has charged five including a leader of the LTTE in the US in this regard. In another operation, the authorities tracked suspects from Baltimore on the east coast to the South Pacific (Guam) and arrested six of them for attempting to export arms to the Tigers. The US authorities have also arrested Karunakaran the chief of LTTE operations in the US. Arrests in France and elsewhere have been equally significant, for they have caused irreparable damage to the LTTE and its efforts to prosecute the war in Sri Lanka. The government should show its appreciation of these efforts and reach out to the west and convince them that it is not seeking a mere military solution to a political problem. The government must without any further delay come up with a package of credible constitutional proposals. If the proposals are fair and just the International community and India will, without doubt, help us to end this insurgency and proceed on the path of development.

The thrust of our diplomacy in terms of our national interests should, doubtlessly, be directed at winning over the western countries, their close friends and India. Let us pause to see how we have performed or what we have achieved in recent times. Most recently, we have learned through the medium of the press that the Foreign Secretary had, during his visit to Pakistan, India’s bete noire, referred to Indian National Security Advisor Narayanan’s statement that we should obtain our arms requirements only from India. This statement has been mauled in the local press and even if it has been mentioned, as would be expected, there was no reason to mention it to a reporter, who carried it on the front page in the form of a headline story, only to anger the NSA and the Indian establishment. This report which has not been denied indicates that our Foreign Secretary, though he has an impressive academic record and a PhD has yet much to learn on the art of diplomacy. His learning should not be at the expense of the country. We do need to also cultivate the closest of relations with Pakistan, China and Japan, of course, for they are the major powers in Asia, but we should not embarrass or antagonize any other country in the process.

What is the state of our relations with the West? A senior Minister has threatened to have the German Ambassador declared Persona Non Grata. This approach is counter-productive. There was no need for this ‘public berating’. If there was a problem, then the approach should be solved, as the President has repeatedly stated in another context: “There is no problem that cannot be solved through discussion or negotiation”. In this type of situation, there is an institutionalized process that should be resorted to. The Ambassador should have been summoned to the Foreign Ministry and questioned but not publicly threatened.

This public statement, in the first instance, would have angered not only the Ambassador but more importantly his government, which, if the Minister does not know it, is along with France, the engine of the 27 Member European Union. Germany it is reported, currently holds the Presidency of the EU and action against the German Ambassador would be construed also as an act against the EU, which is our largest trading partner, with whom we are said to have a Cooperation Agreement and which has afforded us special accommodations such as ‘GSP Plus’ to make our garments competitive in the world market and significant humanitarian aid. Any action against any EU diplomat will not be without adverse consequences for us. Senior Ministers should speak with greater caution for the impact of their statements could adversely affect the whole country. I have reason to believe that the Minister would not wish such repercussions for the country.

Senior Ministers and officials would do well to mind their speech and not speak their minds as regards matters ‘international’. The Foreign Minister himself directed his officials not to make any statements on Sri Lanka’s ethnic issue without prior approval. This directive came about within hours of the Foreign Secretary giving an interview to the Asia service of the BBC. Kohana had expressed his views on the British Parliament debating the Sri Lanka issue. The news report in The Island stated that ‘even the President had been perturbed by the comments’. The Minister had quite rightly made the point that the government should speak with one voice. It does appear that there is no rapport between the Foreign Minister and the Foreign Secretary. This is more than unfortunate for the country! It does appear that there are too many speaking on international affairs, confusing the world in the process. It is time the President stamped his ’signature’ in the country’s interest.

The President should have in his Secretariat someone of the calibre of Ambassador Dhanapala to monitor for him the international scene, for it is imperative that our foreign relations remain fully plugged into the international scene. The President should also establish a Cabinet Sub Committee on foreign relations, which would have all Ministers concerned with economic relations, Tourism and Foreign Investment and the Minister of Foreign Affairs. He should preside in his capacity as Minister of Defence.

The President surely understands the importance of interacting with other states–more particularly the power centres of the world. The image of the country overseas needs to be improved and the President has his work cut out in this regard. He should work out a strategy with a team of professionals in various fields including PR and marketing experts in addition to retired professional diplomats with experience on the management of international relations. Incidentally, what are those so-called ‘Advisors on Foreign Affairs’ paid by the state doing? Are they mere puppets enjoying the perks of their designations? The challenge the country faces must be addressed holistically and by a competent team not by a few individuals acting independently.

There certainly does not appear to be a professional approach to the management of our foreign relations. A case in point is the matter of the sentence of death passed on a young woman, still in her teens, who has been sentenced to be decapitated in Saudi Arabia. It hasn’t occurred to the Foreign Ministry to seek the assistance of the closest friend of Saudi Arabia, the US, in this regard. The Suadis would never turn down a request from the US. The newspapers today report of yet another amazing ‘disjoint’, the report quotes the Foreign Secretary as having stated that a number of countries have made pledges to develop the East. But foreign missions in Colombo have stated to the particular newspaper that they were unaware of any such pledges. The Finance Ministry has also stated that it is unaware of such pledges! (Is there a ‘problem’ here between the Secretaries concerned?) Are officials acting in the manner of politicians? This is not the time for amateurs in diplomacy, however qualified in other fields, to be entrusted without oversight arrangements, the management of the country’s international relations. Our national interests are matters that are much too important to be left to amateurs in diplomacy, be they politicians or officials.

By Prof. Michael Roberts

Sri Lanka today is a fractured polity and has been so for some time. This is a trite saying: everyone knows this. But in order to comprehend the process that brought about this tragic situation, one has to (a) understand the concept “nation,” (b) the power of nationalism, (c) the force of populism fostered by democratic institutions, (c) the deadly combination within the island of a specific demographic mix distributed in space in a peculiar manner and (d) the disastrous impact of a Westminster model of government elected under a scheme favouring candidates first-past – the -post.

Add to this a powerful historical interpretation deriving from Sinhala traditions retailed in dynamic process, through multiple modes of cultural transmission (oral, iconic and literary) and reworked in Orientalist mode during the modern era to encourage both Sinhalese and non-Sinhalese to conceive of Ceylon’s (Sri Lanka) past as basically a story of the Sinhalese, so that many Sinhalese insidiously spoke of “Ceylonese” in the sense “Sinhalese” with part subsuming whole (cf. how, till recently, “English” meant “British”). RESULT: a deadly ‘molotov cocktail’ that has, from the 1920s, hindered pragmatic political accommodation of the type that came into play in Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, Britain and the Baltic states in recent centuries

The most recent manifestation of this recurrent process has been unveiled by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) led by Mahinda Rajapakse when they presented a measly set of devolution proposals on 1 May 2007 that focused on devolution at a district level, rather than the provincial tier; and remained adamant in their attachment to “an unitary state.” Even moderate Tamils aligned with the governing party, such as Douglas Devananda, consider this a joke.

As Sumanasiri Liyanage sums up the scheme, “the SLFP proposals … have demonstrated … conclusively that the SLFP have not traveled forward in time but far back. Its ‘fresh approach’ to a ‘complex problem’ … is in essence nothing more than the proposals of the Bandaranaike -Chelvanayakam Pact of 1958, almost five decades ago! [To quote Marx, it seems that] history in Sri Lanka often repeats itself — the first time as a tragedy and the second time as a farce. The SLFP proposals are totally disproportionate to the questions at hand.” In brief, the scheme is a pus vedilla, or dud shell, that leaves the island in the explosive form it has assumed for the past three decades.

Sihaladvipa, Ceilao, Ceylon or Sri Lanka, as the island has variously been called at different times, has always had diverse bodies of people, “communities” bearing labels that are reproduced subjectively, relationally and dynamically. Some groups, such as the Colombo Chetties, Burghers and Malays in recent times, are tiny in number, others have been quite substantial. The term Sihaladvipa embodied a notion of overarching ideational sovereignty, that is, what can be called a form of “tributary overlordship” understood in pre-modern Asian vocabulary informed by the mandala concept, that which Tambiah has called a “galactic polity.”

In an era informed by the intellectual currents of the Enlightenment and the principles of the French Revolution, the island people quickly imbibed the currents of liberalism and nationalism that were sweeping Europe. Nationalism meant an emphasis on the principle of self – determination and the democratic idea of popular sovereignty. Thus, from this point onwards, “nation” was usually distinct from “tribe,” with the latter downgraded to “primitive” status.

Hereafter, the privileged, prestigious concept of “nation” implied a claim for political rights. Thus understood, a nation was, first and foremost, a state of mind. Following Seton – Watson, but modifying him ever so slightly, one could say that Nation XY exists when an articulate and powerful section of XY – note, a majority is not a requisite – says that XY is a nation.

In this sense the Ceylonese nation emerged for the first time in 1850 when the periodical Young Ceylon was launched by a small coterie of English – educated young men. It was sustained by the emerging multi – ethnic, indigenous middle class in the course of the next 100 years.

The first momentous challenge to White superiority occurred, prophetically, on the cricket field when the best Ceylonese XI took on the best locally – resident Europeans in a “Test” [of excellence] in June, 1887. Constitutional demands proper in the language of representation and liberalism commenced in 1906/07 and continuous badgering of the Colonial Office and its Governors eventually secured a transfer of power in 1948, with the final steps being actually delayed by a parallel process in India – for the jewel in the British crown was a greater issue in geo-political terms.

But from the late nineteenth century there was also a parallel and partially overlapping current of Sinhala nationalism expressed by generations of Sinhalese (both Buddhist and Christian) who were more deeply rooted in Sinhala – speak but not without English capability. The leading edge in the agitation, however, was in the hands of the Westernized elite activists. E

ventually, to cut the story short, they reaped the rewards when Ceylon as an institutional nation came into being on 4th February 1948. D. S. Senanayake became the first PM of this trans – ethnic, pluralist Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) nation.
Significantly, though, the SL Tamil spokesmen invariably referred to themselves as a “community.”

It was not till 1949 that S.J.V. Chelvanayakam and other leaders, guided indirectly by Stalin’s Marxism and the National Question, vested their people with the badge “nation.” Thus, Tamil communitarianism became nationalism proper only in 1949. The SL Tamils, nevertheless, were Ceylonese through and through. So, Tamil nationalism was a sectional identity nestling as an entity within the broader aggregate known as Ceylonese.

Here again cricket is a touchstone: Tamils nourished in the primate city of Colombo were among its leading cricketers and cricket administrators, while the Colombo Oval, the home of the Tamil Union, was initially the island’s official cricket arena for international matches. When Ceylon contested teams from the Madras Cricket Association for the Gopalan Trophy annually from the early 1950s, the SL Tamils cheered the Ceylonese to a man.

The ethnic differentiations within the category “Ceylonese,” of course, were not sustained only by political competition. Their foundational sources were (a) sets of cultural practices that, amidst commonalities, implanted difference in both explicit and taken – for – granted ways and (b) widespread practices of endogamous marriage among the Sinhalese, Tamils and Moors that were in turn based on the propensity for Sinhalese and Tamil people to marry within their own caste – with the caste identities nestling differentially within each ethnic grouping.

Given such profound sociological foundations, the context of political competition from the 1947 general elections onwards served to widen the split in a disastrous, indeed tragic manner. This is where the factors stressed at the outset of my essay kicked in – literally kicked in: the geo-politics of demographic distribution, the first-past – the – post electoral system under a Westminster form of constitution, the populist currents encouraged by the democratic principle and entrenched strands of historical interpretation which encouraged the Sinhalese majoritarian part (69 % in 1948, but eventually expanding as Indian Tamils shifted, or were shifted, back home) to subsume the Ceylonese whole in ways that implanted hegemonic, indigenist and chauvinist tendencies.

Taken together and in brief, these factors — assisted, paradoxically, by socialist forces attacking the privileges commanded by the Westernized elites’ — enabled Sinhala (cum Buddhist) forces to surge to power through the ballot in 1956 under a coalition provided by SWRD Bandaranaike and the SLFP. The key catch-cry was the slogan “Sinhala Only” which demanded the displacement of English by the Sinhala vernacular as the language of administration and in the process placed the Tamil vernacular in a secondary position.

This transformation was quickly carried out and since then the growing power of a bureaucracy staffed by personnel attached to the principles of the “1956 ideology,” with its thread of Sinhala chauvinism, has squeezed the Tamils of Sri Lanka further. In the result, Tamil sectional nationalism became a separatist nationalism demanding the division of the Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) state.

The spiralling process of conflict can be interpreted as a typical outcome of democratic politics in a cultural context oriented towards revenge and feud. But what is as infuriating as puzzling is the continuous failure of Sinhalese at the apex of power to learn from the past and to effect pragmatic compromises that will save the tenuous unity of the Sri Lankan polity.

Central to this failure is the refusal to countenance the existence of a Tamil nation as a state of mind and legitimate political force. This denial and its blindness as regards the leading force of Tamil nationalism since 1986, the LTTE, as nothing other than terrorists, an epithet that is partly justified, but which, as epithet, obscures accommodation.

As I journeyed recently in a trishaw in Colombo, the driver (a key occupational category at the heart of urban, streetwise perceptions) told me that there was no ethnic problem. There was, he said, only a terrorist problem. It was a flat assertion that did not brook debate. It expressed a quarter truth rendered into whole truth and nothing but the truth, a shibboleth that has been expounded in recent years by many Sinhala politicians and intellectuals.

Most of them are products of the 1956 overturn and its concomitant ideology. Among these beneficiaries are the Rajapaksa brothers at the apex of the present government and Wiswa Warnapala, one of the architects of the recent farcical SLFP proposals.

As widespread shibboleth the trishaw man’s statement represents, one element in a corpus of thought among Sinhalese that is a major obstacle to pragmatic compromise. Yes, there are Tamil dissidents in Lanka and elsewhere who do not side with the LTTE and a few who even hate them.

It may be good realpolitik to drive a wedge between such Tamils and the LTTE. But these Tamils are caught in a sandwich situation between the proverbial rock and hard place.

Those living in Sinhala majority regions are only too aware of the prejudices around them and the force of the 1956 mind-set, while having to put up with difficulties posed by the regular security checks (necessary as the latter are). Thus I return to my starting point: a mind-set nourished on a specific historical understanding and solidified in power by a legitimizing democratic process in 1956.

This mind-set has buried itself in a cave – I shall call it Citadel Colombo. Over the past fifty years this ‘cavish,’ inbred nativism has generated another adamantine nationalism that is now bunkered down in its very own caves in Mullaitivu.

The two are embroiled in a deadly embrace of war, feeding off each other. Between the two of them, Citadel Colombo and Bunker Mullaitivu, the Sri Lankan nation has been split asunder. Confederative Sri Lankan nationalism is dying.

By J.S. Tissanayagam

During the entirety of the of the military’s campaign to clear the East of the LTTE, a refrain on the lips of President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his supporters was that the area was being liberated from the clutches of a murderous, fascist organisation. The campaign, spanning about one year, was concluded officially – and symbolically – with the capture of Toppigala, and resulted in immense losses in both lives and property.

However, unlike in the past, this time the government insisted on the expeditious resettlement of displaced populations. We now know why: forthcoming elections make it imperative that populations are resettled so that the ethnic balance in sensitive areas is not upset, and IDP camps do not become havens for political canvassing, or rebel recruitment.

The IDPs, already traumatised by months of war, were forced to resettle in their villages despite un-cleared landmines, poor infrastructure, no prospects of livelihood and, most of all, fear of fresh clashes between the combatants.

The government was, however, categorical that protection for resettling populations would be provided by the state. Holding operations in western Batticaloa (Paduwankarai) was handed over to the special task force (STF) and the army. But unfortunately, the military seems to believe that the way the area is pacified is not through hearts and minds operations (whatever drawbacks such operations might have) but through brutal repression.

Though the government has allegedly insulated the world outside from the occurrences in western Batticaloa by imposing a news blackout except what its spin doctors turn out on, on-going resettlement and development programmes, there are persistent reports of murder, abduction and alleged rape.

At Pattipalai in July, there were reports that Koneswary (44), mother of three children attempted to commit suicide because she was asked to report to an army camp. The need had arisen because one of her children is reportedly a member of the LTTE. After a quarrel, her neighbours had complained to the army about her son. Rather than meet the army, Koneswary tried to poison herself.

Another incident was recorded by the Asian Human Rights Commission: “The AHRC has received information about the gruesome stabbing of a 27-year-old woman (Balasundaram Thavamani) allegedly by army personnel or members of the Special Task Force (STF) in Paduwankarai, Batticaloa. Accordingly, on July 7, several personnel in military uniform had come to the house she was staying and shouted her name. When she failed to respond they stormed inside, and escorted her out. There, they had brutally stabbed her about 12 times in the presence of her mother. The victim succumbed to her injuries shortly” (AHRC 13/Jul/2007).

Aid workers also say there are incidents of rape, but the public is yet to make an official complaint. There are two principal reasons for this: fears of reprisal and the age-old barrier that has successfully concealed many depredations on women – shame and family honour.

According to reports, the modus operandi of the perpetrators is to note the homes where comely women are resident. After nightfall they approach the house and throw stones at it. When curious or defiant occupants open the door, they are overpowered. The perpetrators are usually in shorts, t-shirts and rubber slippers and unarmed.

The environment contributes to this state of affairs too. Most houses are over 100 metres apart, separated by paddy fields or scrub. The distance not only stifles screams of the victims, but provides ready cover for illicit deeds. Furthermore, where IDP returnees live in temporary shelters, the makeshift nature of the structures makes it easy for anyone to enter unannounced on the pretext of conducting search operations.

Such incidents and the fear they breed have compelled changes in lifestyle and practices in the area. In many cases, families go to their homes at daytime but gather in one place at night, where the women sleep together in the hope that numbers will provide security.

Insecurity has forced men too to make changes. With means of livelihood scarce, men folk in Paduwankarai had revived the traditional practice of working as agricultural labourers in Polonnaruwa. This, however, entails many days’ absence from home, which is an invitation to criminals. Therefore, the practice has come to a standstill. Men now sleep in groups, mostly in the open, to be at hand if there is an emergency.

With the security situation deteriorating in the less-populous interior of the Pattipalai and Vavunatheevu divisions, some people moved to Kokkaddicholai or Ambalanthurai, which are more densely populated and thereby deemed safer. But that too is not an avenue that is always open. Earlier this month, Manikappodi Sivalingam, a fisherman, was abducted at Kachchaikodi Swamimalai. Fearing a repetition, a group of people from the village had tried to flee to safer areas. But they were accosted by government forces on the way and turned back.

While fear and shame are primary obstacles preventing the public from complaining about these incidents, the absence of civil society groups is a major hindrance too. If local and international NGOs or women’s organisations were active in the area, they could be a conduit for information and a source of advice to the hapless public. However, with the government denying access to NGOs this is impossible.

Similarly, whereas the Sri Lanka Human Rights Commission has a branch in Batticaloa town, there is no instrument by which complaints could be channelled to it from rural Paduwankarai.

Another check on the abusive behaviour taking place in the area could be the political party of the Karuna Group – the TMVP – if it chooses to do so. In the past when there were similar complaints, the TMVP managed to bring them to the notice of senior military officials.

After the government allegedly engineered a split between Pillaiyan and Karuna, the latter has been successfully defanged and more dependent on the security forces for protection than ever. With the forthcoming local elections for which it would need the security forces’ support, the TMVP is prepared to turn a blind eye to people’s complaints, though the party will have to go to the victims for votes.

A definition of insurgency is the competition between the state and rival political group/s for the control of population. And the most effective form of control is to win the allegiance of the population, which is best obtained by providing protection. If indeed the counterinsurgency war waged in the East to wrest control of the Tamil population from the Tigers, the government is doing very little to win the people’s allegiance to sustain it.

[Courtesy: The Sunday Times.lk]

General A.S. Kalkat, PVSM, SYSM, AVSM, VSM was the Commander of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) from January 1988 till its withdrawal in March 1990. Prior to this assignment, he was attending a fellowship at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), London.

General Kalkat became the first officer ever, to be awarded the Sarvottam Yudh Seva Medal (SYSM), the highest award for command and leadership in War and Conflict.

He, subsequently, went on to raise his Army’s Training and Doctrine Command; he retired in January 1994 as Army Commander, Southern Command

By Keith Noyahr

Q: General Amarjit Kalkat, what were the principal reasons for the peace keeping operation to turn into a military operation?

A: The IPKF was, initially, deployed to prevent clashes between the militant Tamil groups and the Sri Lankan Forces and to provide security to the Tamil population in the Northern and Eastern Provinces. They were also required to collect arms which the Tamil parties at the Thimpu Meeting had agreed to surrender. The LTTE did not hand over their weapons and thereafter, attacked the IPKF on October 7, 1987, inflicting casualties, which led to operations against them.

Q: Under your command, you forced the LTTE out of the Jaffna peninsula, the Tigers’ heartland. Where were the other sectors from which the Tigers were defeated by the IPKF?

A: The LTTE was not only forced out of the Jaffna peninsula, they were systematically cleared out of all the habited areas of the Northern and Eastern Provinces. Clearing them from the Jaffna, Vadamarachchi, Kilinochchi, Mulativu and Vavuniya Districts was the difficult task, comparatively less difficult in the Mannar District and much easier in the Trincomalee, Batticaloa and Amparai Districts. They were ultimately marginalized, militarily, in the entire Northern and Eastern Provinces, culminating in their final defeat in August 1988, in the Battle of Nitikai Kulam (Operation Checkmate I), after which, they dispersed into the Wanni jungles in small groups and ceased to be an effective fighting force. We were, thereafter, able to successfully hold the Provincial elections in Oct 1988, without the LTTE being able to interfere (Operation Checkmate II), resulting in the merger of the Northern and Eastern Provinces, which marginalized the LTTE politically. This was followed by the Presidential and Parliamentary elections and soon thereafter, the LTTE started making secret overtures to the new Sri Lankan Government.

Q: However, the IPKF, in its first six months (1987), suffered an ignominious defeat at the hands of the LTTE, before you assumed command. Do you feel it was more of a political and diplomatic blunder, as the forces were inadequately prepared for transition to a military operation?

A: This question pre-dates my assumption as the IPKF Commander, hence, I have no comment.

Q: Then army chief, late General K. Sunderji and then Indian High Commissioner to Colombo, late J.N. Dixit were accused by Major General Harkirat Singh, then IPKF commander, of blundering the whole military operation. Were you provided with the necessary wherewithal such as tanks and artillery and air and naval support to defeat the LTTE?

A: Initially, the IPKF was caught unprepared for the type of conflict that it got drawn into. However, soon after, the Indian Government took remedial measures and I had all the requisite forces. Hence, the result achieved, aforementioned in response to an earlier question.

Q: When vice chief of army staff (SF) General Rodriguez visited Jaffna in October 1987, he spoke of hard options, but General Harkirat Singh warned that this would lead to a long haul and fighting for the next 10 to 20 years. In hindsight, he was spot on; the war continues.

A: This question again pre-dates my assumption of duties.

Q: Do you feel that the LTTE staged the boat suicide, to force hostilities on the IPKF and take it on unawares? In 1991 and 1995 too, peace talks ended abruptly. Was it the same with the Accord?

A: Possible, particularly, if they were looking for an excuse to renege on their commitment to hand over their weapons and join the political process.

Q: In fairness to the LTTE, it is said that the Indo-Lanka Peace Accord itself, was thrust upon the organization, as well as the Sri Lankan government, without proper negotiations. What is your honest view for its failure?

A: The importance and sanctity of the Indo-Lanka Accord 1987 is a ‘core’ issue often underplayed. It is an Accord between two sovereign States, India and Sri Lanka. It was passed by the parliaments of both signatory countries and a copy placed on record with the UN, while the US Congress passed a resolution welcoming it. It could not be consigned to the dustbin or wished away. The Accord addressed the aspirations and legitimate rights of the Tamil people and also reiterated India’s commitment to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Sri Lanka. Therefore, thrusting it on anyone did not arise; it is a separate matter that the domestic political and security environment in Sri Lanka, with a resurgent JVP, suited the Government of Sri Lanka to go in for the Accord. The Accord did not fail; one party to the Accord reneged on its commitment. After successful military operations by the IPKF against the LTTE, the critical political aspect of the Accord, involving the devolution of power to the newly elected government of the North-Eastern Province, was not implemented and instead, the new administration in Colombo, embarked on sabotaging it. It also started negotiations with the LTTE; initially, clandestine and later, openly.

Q: And were there any other reasons, such as the lack of political will of late President Ranasinghe Premadasa?

A: President Premadasa had made no secret of his aversion to the Accord; to scuttle the Accord, he had to ensure that the newly born elected provincial government of the NE Province did not succeed. For the LTTE, the writing was on the wall, after the installation of a democratically elected Tamil provincial government, therefore, both President Premadasa and the LTTE made common cause, neither of them wanted the NE Provincial Government to take firm roots, for which, they had to get the IPKF out of their way. Of course, each intended to double cross the other at the opportune time; President Premadasa felt that his Forces could take on a weakened LTTE, while the LTTE felt that once the IPKF was out of their way, they could take on the Sri Lankan Forces; in the event, both tried and paid a heavy price. Unfortunately, the biggest sufferers have been the innocent Tamil and Sinhala population and the Sri Lankan economy.

Q: You have previously observed that by October 1989, there was collaboration between the LTTE and the Premadasa Government, possibly to oust the IPKF. Could you be more specific and how did you, as the IPKF chief, respond?

A: I have covered part of this question in response to a previous question of yours. Arms, ammunition and explosives were supplied to the LTTE by Sri Lankan government agencies, as also safe havens provided to LTTE cadres just outside the provincial boundary of the North Eastern Province, where the IPKF could not operate. I raised it at the JOC, with the Defence Secretary and GOC JOC. They denied, with a promise to investigate; much more has been written and talked about this in Sri Lanka. I did not want to take matters to a head for the sake of future harmonious Indo-Sri Lanka relations and also, my Forces were quite capable of dealing with it, if required.

Q: The LTTE inveigled Premadasa to have the IPKF out. The V.P. Singh government pledged to withdraw the Indian troops. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, M. Karunanidhi, as a mark of protest, failed to welcome the Indian soldiers. Petty politics on all sides, led to the humiliation of your soldiers. Your views please.

A: This is more a political than a military question. The welcome to the IPKF at Chennai, was attended by the Governor of Tamil Nadu and India’s Minister of State for Defence. In New Delhi, the next day, the IPKF was welcomed by the Prime Minister. What matters most to a soldier is respect and support of the people. On their return to India, the soldiers, sailors and airmen were honoured and lauded by the people of India, for their sense of duty and for their sacrifices, and they still do.

Q: Do you think the IPKF, if it was allowed to continue, could have defeated the LTTE and ensured democracy and representation by Tamil parties in the North and East?

A: The LTTE had been militarily and politically marginalized until its rebirth facilitated by President Premadasa. A democratically elected provincial government of the NE Province was in place. It had representation from other political parties, including the UNP and Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC). Continued IPKF presence would of course have ensured that the LTTE, with or without other help, could not destroy the Provincial Government. However, for this government to take firm roots, political dispensation (devolution of power) from Colombo was necessary, which, regrettably, was not forthcoming. Only the Government of Sri Lanka could give the political dispensation to its people, not the IPKF or, any outside power; a point most analysts tend to overlook.

Q: Recently, Sri Lanka Defence spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella said that the forces took over Thoppigala which even the Indian army could not take. What is the significance of Thoppigala in the war?

A: Thoppigala, a large forest area adjacent to the North Central Province, had no habitation and the LTTE cadres often ran into it when the IPKF was operating northwest of Batticaloa. The neighbouring population being Sinhala, the LTTE could derive no sustenance or support, and used the huge forest as a hideout. The IPKF combed it frequently and if it came across any ‘LTTE Base’ it would have been destroyed. It was not occupied by the IPKF as it had no military significance and it made no sense to occupy a huge jungle, unnecessarily committing a large number of troops. As far as the IPKF was concerned, after Operation Checkmate, its writ ran throughout the length and breadth of the North Eastern Province. However, it is very likely that after the Karuna split, LTTE cadres may have established a base there to operate from, in which case, the Sri Lankan Army operation is commendable.

Q: Top Indian advisors to then Premier Rajiv Gandhi, still maintain that the LTTE is not a liberation organization but a terrorist one, and not the sole representatives of the Tamil people. What is your view, after the LTTE has survived for two long decades?

A: We must clearly distinguish between the Tamil people of Sri Lanka, for whose welfare India has an abiding concern and the LTTE, which is a militant organization banned in India, USA, Canada and recently the European Union. Incidentally, before the advent of al Qaeda, the LTTE was on the US list of Most Dangerous Terrorist Organizations. After the IPKF de-inducted from Sri Lanka, the Tamil population had no security, if you leave the population at the mercy of an AK.47 culture militant organization, with which the government also, occasionally, hobnobs, you consign the population to a choice between survival and the deep blue sea.

[Courtesy: The Nation.lk]