Can human rights be protected without violating human rights?
H. L. D. Mahindapala
No state engaged in fighting wars of terror can escape accusations of
violations of human rights. This is a universal fact common to all
nations engaged in combating terrorism.
Thoppigala: Democracy restored in the East |
The degree of violations may vary from time to time, place to place
and nation to nation. But the common thread that runs through all states
is the unavoidable incidents that violate human rights "mostly as
collateral damage in the war against terrorism, or in the war against
violence coming from outside the democratic framework.
Therefore, selective condemnation of one state and not the other
makes a mockery of human rights. It places vulnerable and fragile
democracies at a total disadvantage over the ruthless powers of
terrorist groups operating outside the pale of international
humanitarian law.
Morality
On issues of morality involved in states combating terrorist groups
the latter is at an advantage because they are not restrained by laws,
accountability, public opinion, democratic norms or any other civilised
consideration because their strength is in going against these
fundamentals to force democratic societies to surrender to their
intransigent demands.
As a result serious issues arise. For instance, when a democratically
elected state is under siege by war criminals, ethnic cleansers,
abductors of children, terrorists and enemies of human rights in general
can this state abandon its moral, legal and political obligation to
defend itself and its people using all necessary force, in land, air and
sea, that may or may not entail violations of human rights in its
defensive actions?
Is there a future for human rights if this democratically elected
state surrenders to the mindless violence of the enemies of human
rights? In other words, can human rights be protected without violating
human rights?
Human rights cannot be protected by waving slogans or programmes of
human rights alone. In times when human rights are under siege by the
enemies of human rights it is the engagement of the counter-forces of
the democratic state that can eventually restore and protect human
rights.
Democracy
If that were not the case then Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, Jehan
Perera and Kumar Rupasinghe could have won all the human rights with
their seminars and paper mantras leaving Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka, the
Army Commander in the shade.
But the ground realities in the East, where restoration of democracy
and the return to relative normalcy have triumphantly opened up new
paths to peace and stability, point unmistakably to the fact that the
Army Commander has contributed more than all the peace-mudalalis put
together.
In fact it can be asserted, without fear of contradiction, that it is
the sole contributions of the soldiers who fought all the way to the
peak of Thoppigala that saved the rights of the people to express their
free will at the last elections.
Idealism
Accordingly, the available evidence leads to the ineluctable
conclusion that violence of the state even if it leads to a certain
degree of the violations of human rights must necessarily be applied in
varying degrees, depending on the needs of the security situation, as a
primary condition for the restoration and preservation of human rights.
This may sound Machiavellian. But the stark truth in politics always
sounds Machiavellian because this much-maligned political guru was a
realist who avoided inapplicable theories like the plague.
Machiavelli never dealt with the 'ought' of politics. He was never
into idealism, or utopianism, or fanciful theories that go to make
never-never lands. He was focused, with his feet firmly fixed on the
ground, on the here and now and the power play that goes to either make
or break the grip on power.
Gaining power and retaining power that has been gained at any cost to
protect the Prince was his primary objective.
The identical Machiavellian principle applies in the modern context
to protect human rights. If democratic societies believe fervently that
human rights are worth protecting then it must be won at all costs even
at the cost of violating the human rights of the enemies of human rights
and may be innocent bystanders who are bound to be the unintended
victims of the war against the enemies of human rights.
Good and evil
Besides, it won't be long before the enemies of human rights will arm
themselves with weapons of mass destruction. This alone makes it
imperative that the democratic state will be compelled to use matching
force preferably preemptive strikes to avoid mass scale violations of
human rights.
It must be admitted that there have been times, and there will be
many more times to come, when human rights can be protected only by
violating some of the sacred tenets of human rights. It has been done in
the past and it will be done in the future too.
There has never been a time when morality and higher principles
including human rights have been won without violating morality and
higher principles including human rights.
This is primarily because in the eternal battle between 'good' and
evil the choice has always been not in choosing between good or evil but
choosing between evil and the lesser evil. Whether we like it or not,
the prevailing human conditions compels us to go for the lesser evil
because pure good, however desirable, is never attainable.
The moral dilemma is in weighing one set of human rights against
another. Those who go overboard holding human rights as an inviolable
sacred tenet under all circumstances are burying their heads in the
sand. They should reflect soberly on the lessons handed down from the
past and consider whether they have a magic formula to escape the
enemies of human rights.
Challenges
The Huns are always waiting at the gates of civilisation to destroy
its noble achievements. Hitler is dead; but reincarnations of Hitler
will never die. They will appear again and again like the Hydra-headed
monster in manifestations more violent and horripilating than ever
experienced before.
This poses a serious question for human rights activists: if another
Hitler captures power in any part of the globe and threatens the
civilised world will the so-called international community (meaning:
America and the European powers) fold their hands and take refuge under
the UN Charter or will they go for total obliteration, to use the
colourful phrase of Hillary Clinton?
Human rights are fated to face the challenges posed by the enemies of
human rights. Violent men of different persuasions haunt all societies.
And when violent men, operating outside civilised norms of a legally
elected democratic State, attack the fundamental bases and precepts of
human rights how should the state react to protect its values against
the dehumanising force that threaten their cherished way of life? Or, in
other words, can they defend human rights only with the spirit and
charters of human rights without any accompanying violence?
Since violence is the ultimate form of power available to protect
life, limb, property and values has the democratic state the right to
refrain from using violence on the grounds that state violence will lead
to violations of human rights?
Barbarism
The conventional argument is that it is the duty of the democratic
state to defend liberal values but without descending to the level of
the barbarism of the enemies of human rights. No one can cavil with the
nobility of that thought. But what is the reality?
Has the state any other option than to arm itself with the matching
power to combat those violators of human rights if the definition of the
state amounts to be the ultimate guarantor and protector of human
rights? If it acquires matching or superior power how can it avoid
violations of human rights in prosecuting a war? Will the use of force,
on a higher or lower scale, devalue the worth of the state/societies
fighting to protect human rights? The argument jumps at this point from
accepting unintentional 'collateral damage' to rejecting intentional
acts of violence that may be considered excessive.
It is at this point that the lines get blurred and heavily
controversial. Is the systematic and intentional firebombing of Dresden
a war crime? Is the mass murder that occurred in the bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki a crime against humanity?
If so why weren't the leaders who gave the orders to obliterate
Dresden, Nagasaki and Hiroshima tried by the Nuremberg Court? What's the
difference between hundreds of thousands killed in concentration camps
by the Nazis and the equal number killed from air by the allies? It is
true that the Nazis killed by inhuman techniques applied on land and the
Allies by dropping bombs from air. But the victims in both instances
were all human beings.
So why wasn't Churchill and Truman tried and sentenced? Doesn't this
make human rights a naked instrument in the hands of the powerful and
the winners? Are the Germans and the Japanese guilty because they lost
and are the Allies not guilty because they won and there was no force
standing by to accuse or punish them?
Controversial
This leads to the Machiavellian principle inherent in defending human
rights: human rights facing challenges from enemies of human rights must
necessarily defend its values with violence even if that violence leads
to temporary violations of human rights. The greater good of serving the
larger interests of human rights of all is worth the violations of the
human rights of a limited group of terrorists or enemies of human
rights.
Disarming, dismantling and, if necessary, destroying the enemies of
human rights operating outside the democratically elected state is a
necessary condition for the greater good of peace, stability and
preservation of the cherished values of humanity.
The first right to restore human rights should be given to the
democratically elected State. This has been recognised in the recent R2P
doctrine adopted by the UN in 2005. Military intervention is the last
recourse available to international or national forces engaged in
restoring lost human rights.
The moment force is mobilised the anti-terrorist forces must be
prepared to accept a certain degree of violations of human rights.
However careful or concerned the intentions of these forces may be to
avoid violations of human rights, there is no way that the
counter-terrorist forces can avoid, with the best will in the world,
violations of human rights in confrontations with the ruthless and
reckless enemies of human rights.
Violence
In this situation the options are limited. The fundamental issue is
one of drawing boundaries to limit the degree of acceptable violence.
Going by historical experience it may go in the Churchillian or the
Trumanesque direction of flattening the enemy as they did in Dresden and
Hiroshima. Or it may be confined to the Sri Lankan experience of giving
optimum care for the civilians while applying maximum force against the
fascist violence of a man-man regime.
The Sri Lankan experience is unique in that it is the only known
anti-terror campaign in which the civilians behind the enemy lines are
provided free education, free health services, social welfare, pension
rights of ex-government servants, subsidised food and other essential
goods by the State.
Lankan citizens
The State provides care to those behind the enemy lines because it
considers them to be citizens of the Sri Lankan State. It doesn't
consider all Tamils to be the enemies of the democratically elected
state. The state also believes that it has a duty to bring back those
citizens into the democratic mainstream and open up opportunities for
them to act within civilised norms abandoning brutal violence to achieve
elusive political goals.
So the transgressions of a democratically elected State in violating
human rights to protect the long term interest of human rights are not
inimical per se to the preservation of human rights. The Sri Lankan
experience headed by President Mahinda Rajapaksa has demonstrated beyond
doubt the possibilities of combating terrorism and brutal regimes with
the minimum of the violations of human rights and maximum gains for
democracy which is the path to the protection of human rights.
The military operation to restore human rights began in the East when
the Tiger terrorists blocked the supply of water in Mavil Aru to the
Muslim and Sinhala communities living downstream. To deny water is one
of the most dehumanising violations of human rights. Lt. Gen. Sarath
Fonseka, the Army Commander, led the Forces to liberate the entire
Eastern coast starting from Mavil Aru until it ended in the peak of
Thoppigala.
Transformation
This opened up space for his Commander-in-Chief, President Mahinda
Rajapaksa, to restore democracy in the most dramatic fashion. He
recruited Pillaiyan, into the democratic mainstream and transformed him
into a leader of all communities 'Tamils, Muslims and Sinhalese' in the
Eastern Province.
By any standards this is a remarkable achievement. Compare this, for
instance, with the deal struck by Ranil Wickremesinghe with Velupillai
Prabhakaran. Wickremesinghe handed over the East to Prabhakaran to run
it as part of his one-man regime in which the people's right to exercise
their democratic rights were never guaranteed.
The Ceasefire Agreement legitimised and enforced only the illegal
power of Prabhakaran's war criminals to carry arms and suppress the last
vestiges of the easterners' right to live with dignity. The people's
right to elect their representatives was replaced by the will of
Prabhakaran to persecute and destroy the best in the east.
In fact, one of the biggest fears of the East was that Wickremesinghe
would come to power again and sign another shady deal with Prabhakaran
and sell their birth rights to the Pol Pot of the Vanni. In the last
election he paid dearly for the bogus peace promised in the CFA when the
Easterners rejected him as an unreliable guardian of their fundamental
rights to live in peace harmony. They accept that Sri Lanka is not a
five-star democracy.
All Sri Lankans will agree with that. Nor will they accept Pillayian
as the ideal democrat. But they prefer the flawed democracy of President
Mahinda Rajapaksa to no democracy at all which is what Wickremesinghe
offered when he signed the discredited and dysfunctional deal with
Prabhakaran.
However, what should never be forgotten is that democracy and
freedoms were not won in the East by chanting the mantras of human
rights in seminar circuits and newspaper columns by highly paid
kattadiyas hired by the West. No. It was won not because the defence
correspondents in various newspapers exposed the military losses and
failures.
The anonymous foot soldiers had not even heard of them. Nor did their
columns make any difference to them. Wars, in short, were not won or
lost by what is printed in the defence columns but by the blood, sweat
and tears of the columns of foot soldiers who had fought to restore
dignity to the lives of our peoples in the east.
There is a moral to this story: the NGOs and the media pundits are
virtually irrelevant to the restoration of democracy and the winning of
human rights. In the last analysis, it was the brave soldiers who fought
and won the lost rights of the easterners.
The time has come, therefore, to confine all the peace-mudalalis to
their barracks "perhaps even tie them to their chairs" and release the
soldiers to fight with all the force at their command to protect peace,
stability and human rights, including those who are sniping at them from
behind. |