I recently visited the Vanni, the jungle-covered, former Tamil Tiger-controlled area of northern Sri Lanka. In one village, I met a mental health worker who told me that at least one person per village was too terrified to come out of their home after what they had seen during the war. In another village, I met a man and his 16-year-old daughter who are all that left of their family after May 2009 when his wife and their two youngest daughters crawled into a small foxhole in the infamous “No Fire Zone 2” to protect them against artillery bombardment. They were followed by a mortar that “didn’t even leave anything to bury”.
These stories will not surprise anyone who watched Channel 4’s documentary Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields in early June. The film did a superb job of describing the horrors committed by both sides in the first few months of 2009, but told only half the story. Those crimes took place because the government of Sri Lanka stifled dissent in the south and west of the country to such an extent that the unthinkable became acceptable. This was done so, according to a United Nations Panel of Experts, by using “a variety of threats and actions, including the use of white vans to abduct and make people disappear”.
Any who might speak out are subjected to intimidation. One man I visited, working in the south of Sri Lanka on cases of torture and rape, finds his capacity to be vocal limited by the soldiers who regularly find time – at 4am – to bang on the door of his elderly mother’s house.
Since the war ended, the number of reported human rights abuses in Sri Lanka has reduced. In part, this is due to the defeat of the LTTE (Tamil Tigers) – one of the most brutal terrorist groups the world has ever seen. The other reason is that – with a few brave exceptions – the government of Sri Lanka has its critics where it wants them: cowed into silence. The government’s attitude to external critics has been to dismiss them as ignorant Westerners or LTTE sympathisers, or to ask them to leave the past buried for the sake of the present. Yet the government of Sri Lanka is providing the LTTE with cover, by co-opting former Tamil Tiger terrorists into it and by resisting attempts at international investigation.
Never in human history has lasting peace been built on the back of the denial of underlying issues and a wilful forgetting of the very recent past. The Tamil Tigers will not return in their earlier incarnation – at least for some years. But unless the Sir Lankan government can start to meet its people’s need for justice and equality, it has merely bought time, not an absolute victory. What is chilling about post-war Sri Lanka is not just the atrocities the country has just survived, but the atrocities that might still lie in store.
Britain’s attitude to all this has been disappointingly defeatist. Foreign Office minister Alistair Burt professed himself “shocked” by what he saw in Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields. Within days, the British Government had recovered sufficiently from its shock to deport another planeload of asylum seekers to Sri Lanka. Its line is still that no decision on an international inquiry into the war crimes of 2009 should be taken until Sri Lanka’s own internal investigation – the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission – finishes its work. This flawed body has delayed its final report yet again and is now not expected to report until November. The British Government is helping to legitimise a questionable process and limiting its own ability to push for international justice.
The UN Panel of Experts recommended that an appropriate international mechanism be established for investigating war crimes in Sri Lanka. Britain needs to make an unequivocal statement supporting this recommendation and follow it up with real pressure for an international investigation.
This will be problematic. Sri Lanka is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court. Powerful friends in Russia and China have thwarted attempts to use the Security Council to bring Sri Lanka to account, while a coalition of “non-aligned” governments has stymied the Human Rights Council.
But “problematic” and “impossible” are very different things. The British Government is using the delicacies of international diplomacy as an excuse for inaction. Britain could initiate a travel ban on culpable senior members of the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government. It could push for prosecutions in countries that have universal jurisdiction and urge the United States to bring a prosecution against the chief architect of the final stages of the civil war, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, the Sri Lankan president’s brother and a US citizen. Britain could take the lead in protecting witnesses to war crimes or follow Switzerland’s lead and offer an in-country asylum process. But it doesn’t seem interested in doing any of these things.
It is over the issue of asylum that Britain’s failures to take human rights abuses in Sri Lanka seriously are most evident. Britain only stopped deportations to Sri Lanka briefly in 2009 and has been ramping up the number of deportees it sends home in recent weeks. Regardless of their immigration status, Britain still has a responsibility under international law, including the European Convention on Human Rights (now incorporated into British law by the Human Rights Act), not to deport them to a country where they risk torture or other grave human rights abuses.
When Channel 4 aired Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields in early June, the eyes of the British people were opened. Some MPs are slowly waking up.
But in Whitehall and Downing Street, they are still asleep.
Fred Carver is campaign director of the Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice
