Misapplying R2P in Sri Lanka
Jorge Heine
The concept of Responsibility to Protect has triggered resistance in
many countries of the Global South precisely because of its potential
misapplication to situations such as the Sri Lankan one.
Lakshman Kadirgamar, the former Sri Lankan Foreign Minister, was one
of the most incisive legal minds of his generation. A former president
of the Oxford Union, he made significant contributions to the ILO and
the World Intellectual Property Organization, among other entities.
Whoever met him, as I did, could not help but be impressed with his
knowledge of international affairs, his passion for peace in his
homeland, and his razor-sharp intellect.
Terrorism takes its toll
A Tamil, he was proud to serve as Foreign Minister in the Cabinet of
President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, though he knew in so doing
he put his life on the line. And, like so many others of the best and
brightest Sri Lankan Tamils of our time, he paid for it dearly.
He was gunned down one evening in August 2005 in his home in Colombo,
by a sniper using an infra-red-telescope-equipped rifle.
As customary, the LTTE, one of the deadliest and bloodiest terrorist
organizations ever seen, never acknowledged authorship, though it is
widely accepted no one else could have pulled off such a complex,
high-tech task.
As terrorist attacks spread from Baghdad to Bombay to Baluchistan,
and the Afghan war spills into Pakistan, one would think that the end of
the 25-year-old war in Sri Lanka in May 2009 would be widely greeted.
In the South Asian cauldron, where for too long India has been the
only anchor of stability, one war less to contend with is a great
relief.
Moreover, the LTTE, banned in 32 countries, was among the worst
terrorist outfits. Combining moral turpitude with high-tech savvy, it
invented the suicide bomber-vest, pioneered the deployment of female
suicide bombers, excelled in the recruitment of child soldiers, killed
one President at home and a former Prime Minister abroad, and developed
the extortion of the Tamil communities abroad to a high art,
accumulating, according to some estimates, a US$ 300 million to US$ 400
million war chest.
Uniquely, it set up both a Navy and an Air Force, and a specialised
suicide bomber unit, the so-called Black Tigers, whose career high point
was the ‘last meal’ (vegetarian) they had with LTTE supremo Velupillai
Prabhakaran before departing for their final mission.
Bouquets and brickbats
The LTTE’s end should thus be welcomed. Yet, inexplicably, instead of
being praised, President Mahinda Rajapaksa has been criticized in many
western quarters, particularly in Scandinavia and in western Europe.
Even before the war was over, the Government was under pressure to allow
a ceasefire presumably to allow the LTTE high command to escape unharmed
from its last bastion, on a small sliver of land behind the Vanni
region.
As usual, the LTTE used human lives as a shield, and surrounded its
high command with some 275,000 civilians. The LTTE heavy artillery was
set up in the midst of this civilian population.
It was to protect those innocent civilian lives that the Government
would suspend for a few days the ongoing military operations, first on
January 29 and 30 and then on April 13 and 14.
Yet, it found that, on doing so, the flow of civilians out of the
LTTE-controlled area would diminish from the 1,000 or so a day who would
escape regularly, as the Tigers, freed from the need to return fire,
were able to turn their guns on these innocent hostages.
Responding to call
Even so, and responding to the concern of the United Nations,
represented in situ by the U.N. Secretary-General’s chef de cabinet,
Vijay Nambiar, as late as early April, the Government was prepared to
compromise. A preliminary understanding was reached: the U.N. team would
be allowed to go into the LTTE-controlled area, under the auspices of
the World Food Program, to negotiate an end to the conflict, offering
full amnesty for the rank and file of the Tigers, and due process of law
for their leaders.
Civilian influx
This was overtaken by events. On April 20, the Army broke the
security perimeter of the LTTE area, and in 72 hours 105,000 civilians
managed to escape, even under Tiger fire. From there on, things moved
fast. On May 18, it was over. The argument has been made that the
international community, invoking the concept of the Responsibility to
Protect (R2P), should have intervened to stop the fighting earlier,
since “the Government is as responsible as the LTTE for civilian
deaths.”
Others, like my good friend and former Norwegian official, Vidar
Helgesen, have argued that the outcome of the Sri Lankan conflict shows
“conflict resolution the Post-American Way,” one in which the brute use
of force would replace “emerging international norms and architecture
for human security, the responsibility to protect, peace mediation,
peace-building, etc.,” making them “obsolete before they even got
started.”
The resolution of the Sri Lankan conflict would thus fall into the
same category as tragedies such as the Rwandan genocide, the Srebrenica
massacre, and the “killing fields of Cambodia.”
Misapplication of R2P
The first task now, therefore, would be an international
investigation into what happened, and how to allocate responsibility for
eventual war crimes or crimes against humanity between the Government
and the LTTE.
This does little favour both to Sri Lanka and to the very valuable
Canadian initiated concept of R2P, one of the most exciting and
innovative notions in IR and international law today. R2P has triggered
resistance in many countries of the Global South precisely because of
its potential misapplication to situations such as the Sri Lankan one.
The act of balancing
Towards a protective future. Picture by Chaminda Hiththatiya |
In Sri Lanka, what obtained was a straightforward civil war,
initiated by a separatist, terrorist organization, which cost up to
70,000 lives during the quarter century it lasted. During its duration,
Sri Lanka remained a full-fledged democracy: five general elections were
held, and the Government changed hands three times, though the LTTE
killed one President, at least one Foreign Minister, and the Army Chief
barely escaped from another suicide bomber.
Though the war took its toll, press freedom suffered, and human
rights violations were committed on both sides, the most remarkable
thing is how well Sri Lanka’s democratic institutions withstood the
terrorist onslaught.
Parliament had to be moved from its prime location in downtown
Colombo, overlooking the sea, to the suburbs to a building that, like a
medieval fortress, is surrounded by water to protect the country’s
elected representatives from suicide bombers this in a country with such
a peaceful tradition that it did not even have an independence movement:
Britain granted its independence in 1948 almost as an afterthought,
after India’s the year before.
During these 25 years, Sri Lanka called on the international
community for help through a variety of peace-mediation efforts, both
from India and the Scandinavian nations.
All of them were taken advantage of by the LTTE to continue to pursue
its objectives of a separate, independent Tamil Eelam through its policy
of indiscriminate killing of all those it considered stood in its way,
be they Sinhala or Tamil, and thus came to naught. Time and again, as
early as 1987, the LTTE rejected the many offers just short of
independence that were made. Not surprisingly, after some two decades of
this, President Rajapaksa realized that only a military solution could
bring peace to Sri Lanka.
Great successes
One of the great successes of the LTTE was its manipulation of
western public opinion. It masterfully played on the identity politics
prevalent in advanced democracies, and stayed away from targeting
non-Sri Lankans (except, of course, closer to home, Rajiv Gandhi, which
was its undoing). Prabakaran died with a side arm in one hand and a
satellite phone in the other, gambling to the last minute that the
international community would rescue him and his acolytes.
While 64 years after the end of the Second World War, the Allies
continue to celebrate with great fanfare the end of a war that lasted
six years, Europeans now have the nerve to accuse the Government of
engaging in “triumphalism”, this a bare month after ending a war that
lasted 25 years and inflicted great suffering on Sri Lanka.
The main task for the international community today is to help Sri
Lanka in its reconstruction effort in the North and the East, and in
addressing the very legitimate grievances of the Tamil community.
The last thing South Asia needs is a finger-pointing exercise aimed
at questioning the Sri Lankan State’s legitimate right of self-defence
and of using military force to respond to a separatist uprising to
protect its territorial integrity. To confuse this with a genocidal
exercise like that of Rwanda would have made the international lawyer in
Lakshman Kadirgamar cringe.
The end of the Sri Lankan conflict should be seen for what it is: a
victory of one of Asia’s oldest and most established democracies over
one of the great scourges of our time: terrorism.
The writer holds the Chair in Global Governance at the Balsillie
School of International Affairs and is a Distinguished Fellow at the
Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) in Waterloo,
Ontario. He served as Chile’s Ambassador to Sri Lanka from 2004 to 2007.
Courtsey The Hindu |