Reform and reconciliation in Sri Lanka

Text of the speech by Prof Rajiva Wijesinha, MP at the Australian National University, Canberra held on May 23, 2011.

Continued from yesterday

Prof Rajiva Wijesinha,MP

But, apart from fulfilling these pledges which our ministry managed to advance significantly even during the conflict period, it is also imperative that government puts in place better communication strategies, in particular to convey information to, and respond to the concerns of, those who are not intrinsically supportive of government. Much energy is expended on communicating with those who are appreciative of what is being done, and this is important since no government should neglect those from whom it derives its strength. But it is more important to communicate also with those who have doubts, and in this area government has much to do.

Child soldiers

Distinguished academics, including Australians, who have actually studied the situation on the ground have told us that we have a good story to tell, but we have not told it. After all, where else have nearly all the displaced been resettled so soon? This includes not only the near 300,000 displaced during the last few months of the conflict, but the larger numbers who had previously been displaced, those in the East being largely resettled within a year of displacement, those who had been displaced for upto two decades being also able now to return home if they wish, including the Muslims expelled from the North in 1990 by the LTTE.

The child soldiers who were finally rescued, after years of ineffective efforts to stop this ghastly practice of the LTTE, were given schooling in one of the best schools in Colombo. Orphans have been looked after in established as well as newly constructed institutions, as also by schools that have taken on the challenge successfully - in which regard I should note that support for such schools would always be welcome, along with support to educational institutions in the North that would like to expand the services they provide, to take in more of the Wanni too.

Infrastructure has been developed apace, and the East indeed has been transformed in the last couple of years with communications having opened the way to much more trade. More work in this regard remains to be done in the North but, with the rebuilding of roads and the railway, there will be greater exchange of persons as well as of goods. In this regard support for increasing exchanges between young persons would also be welcome.

Hostile approach

I was pleased that one of the Australian journalists who interviewed me, having begun with what seemed a hostile approach, said at the end that there were many matters which were not known here. In one sense that is understandable, because the media obviously prefers bad news to good, since that is what people are interested in. But I believe it is also our fault that we have not communicated better, not only to the media, but also to all those who want a better Sri Lanka for all our people.

As I said at the beginning, I can understand why so many people left our shores, not only for economic reasons in the seventies, but more worryingly for what I can only describe as the disgusting attacks on Tamils in the early eighties, the burning of the Jaffna Public Library in 1981, the systematic assaults of July 1983. Those have not been repeated, but I can understand that, in the confrontational approach those brutalities engendered, heightened by the refusal of the LTTE to accept in 1987 the compromises that all other Tamil groups subscribed to, tensions continued.

But, now that these have concluded within Sri Lanka, I hope that those abroad, who can remember only the distant past, will not endeavour to revive tensions. The people of Sri Lanka, all over the country, but in particular those in the North, suffered from terrorism, from forced conscription of children, from execution for dissent, from deprivation of services including the food we sent up to them.

UN and ICRC

Though the ICRC recorded its appreciation of the support our Navy extended with regard to evacuation, it should be noted that of the near 14,000 people brought down during the conflict, only 4,500 were wounded. There were a couple of thousands who were sick, while over 7,000 were described by the ICRC as bystanders. If the claims the LTTE made as to injured were accurate, it would seem that they did not send down some of the wounded for medical assistance, but instead sent down their chosen bystanders to safety. It is likely that they were in fact lying about the number of those wounded, which would in turn mean that they had not just exaggerated, but grossly exaggerated, the number of those dead.

But, given the way they treated the people of the Wanni, it is also possible that they deprived them of medical assistance and instead sent down their cadres to the relative safety of the south of Sri Lanka. Such matters need to be carefully considered, with precise attention to the statistics maintained by various agencies, international as well as national. That will help in making clear the generally humane way in which government operated, as is evident from the written appreciations sent by the heads of both the UN and the ICRC.

We need to do this soon, so that those who are genuinely concerned about the Tamil people in Sri Lanka will be able to understand what they went through, and help to recompense them for what they suffered in a militarized situation. But above all we need to make it clear that the participation of all our citizens, including those now settled abroad, will prove invaluable in the reconciliation, the rehabilitation and the rebuilding that we need swiftly to achieve. Concluded