Resolution against Sri Lanka at UNHRC: did the US go too far?

Don WIJEWARDANA

In March, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) passed a United States sponsored resolution pressing the Sri Lankan government to investigate alleged human rights violations during the final stages of the war with the terrorist group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in a statement immediately after, “United States and the international community had sent a strong signal that Sri Lanka will only achieve lasting peace through real reconciliation and accountability.”

Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe	UN Secretary General Ban ki Moon	US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

Sri Lanka, which rescued 300,000 hostages held by the LTTE as a human shield, by defeating the terrorist group, has continued to protest at the allegations of human rights violations. Special envoy on human rights, Mahinda Samarasinghe, condemned the resolution as “misconceived, unwarranted and ill-timed”, and potentially harmful to the progress being made within the country.

The LTTE, in its brutal reign of three decades killed an estimated 100,000 and brought ruin to the once resilient economy. Western governments warned President Mahinda Rajapaksa not even attempt to fight the invincible terrorist group, which had mastered the use of female suicide bombers to cause widespread damage. But following a four-year gruelling war the LTTE was defeated in May 2009. It was the first time in recent history that a terrorist group had been so comprehensively beaten by a government. But not a single Western government moved to congratulate Sri Lanka for the unparalleled feat.

LTTE cadres

As one Indian commentator noted ‘If such an outcome were to be secured in Iraq or Afghanistan or even in Pakistan, it would be embraced by the West as an unadulterated and righteous triumph. In Sri Lanka, however, it appears to have provoked, .... a seething and barely concealed outrage... There is a sense, not of a dreaded terrorist organization having been defeated and destroyed, but of collaborators, comrades, and fellows at arms, lost to the enemy.

US position seems ironic since it provided considerable help for the government to defeat the terrorists. US was one of the first countries to ban the LTTE and the FBI described it as the world’s deadliest extremist organization surpassing Al-qaeda or HAMAS. Many Tamils convicted for attempting to buy sophisticated arms and equipment in the US are currently languishing in jails mostly as a result of FBI sting operations.

Following the United States, the European Union and India as well as a number of other countries had proscribed the LTTE. Some of these governments, especially the US and the UK, also provided arms and intelligence to help crush the group.

And with the end of the war Sri Lanka has achieved comprehensive peace. Few countries in the world have been able to restore normalcy with such speed following a long drawn out war. In under three years almost all the 300,000 internally displaced people have returned to their own homes. Even more impressive is that 90 percent of LTTE cadres who had surrendered (10,490 of the 11,700) have been freed and reunited with their families.

Alongside these remarkable achievements tourists who shunned the country for decades have been flocking back. This follows the New York Times and a number of travel magazines identifying Sri Lanka as a top tourist destination after the war. Sri Lankan economy last year recorded the highest ever growth rate of 8.3 percent. Tamils in the Northern province who had been herded around as hostages by the LTTE have at last settled back in their own homes. Economic growth of the Northern region last year was a massive 22 percent. It is clear Sri Lanka, and the Tamils in particular, are working to leave the past behind and move on. In that background it is not surprising that they saw the UNHRC resolution as a hindrance, not a help.

Besides all these, Sri Lanka is a functioning democracy friendly towards the West.

UNHRC session in Geneva. File photo

Why then did the United States sponsor the Human Rights Council resolution against a friendly nation?

Darusman report

The Darusman report to UN Secretary General Ban ki Moon endorsed a figure noting “there is still no reliable figure for civilian deaths, but multiple sources of information indicate that a range of up to 40,000 civilian deaths cannot be ruled out at this stage”.

Darusman committee did not undertake its own research but went by the ‘number of sources that quoted the figure’. In other words it had become a victim (and a promoter) of Goebbels theory that if you keep repeating a lie people will eventually come to believe it.

The manner in which ‘multiple sources for the information’ that formed the basis of the Darusman report were mustered should have alerted the media to their authenticity. By the deadline of December 15, 2010 the response to the committee’s invitation for submissions was so poor that it had to extend it by two weeks.

It was then that the anti-Sri Lankan lobby got into action urging the Tamil Diaspora to make representations to pressure the UN to hold an enquiry against GOSL, even if they hadn’t been directly affected by the conflict and atrocities.

To make it easy, two dozen sample letters to be sent online to the Panel of Experts were presented in three different websites. To make it even easier, to hide their identities, organizers extracted an undertaking from the UN which denied access to material in the Expert Panel’s possession for a period of 20 years. Even after the lapse of the 20-year-ban, the Office of Legal Affairs (OLA) has assured the Committee, that it could give an undertaking to its sources of absolute confidentiality in the subsequent use of information. Sri Lanka has criticized the report based on unsubstantiated, third hand sources with the 20 year embargo which prevents anyone from checking the authenticity of the information.

There is no data even on how many of the complainants were in fact in the warzone during the period. In spite of the contrived nature of the ‘evidence’ the media has latched on to the report as the source of 40,000 deaths. The Darusman report negated its own conclusions by noting later that, “This account should not be taken as proven facts, and any effort to determine specific liabilities would require a higher threshold”. But when its numbers were used by the media such qualifications were conveniently lost in transition.

The British Channel 4 produced a video ‘Sri Lanka killing fields’ to buttress these claims. Sri Lanka continued to object to these claims and produced its own documentary ‘Lies Agreed Upon’ which questioned the authenticity of the Channel 4 presentation. Much of the channel 4 material had been drawn from the LTTE mouthpiece TamilNet that routinely published exaggerations to drum up Western help and sustain Diaspora support.

To be continued

Courtesy: Foreign Policy Journal

The writer is an economist, author and a freelance journalist. [email protected]