Editorial

The ‘Geneva Circus’ gets underway next week for another show.

The UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has been the happy Sri Lanka bashing ground overtly for the West and covertly for some others. Sri Lanka continues to be on the rack over allegations of war crimes during the last stages of the military assault on the LTTE. Thirteen years after the liquidation of the terrorist group on the banks of the Nandikadal lagoon, Geneva lives on.

Over the years, the goalposts keep shifting. From alleged violations of international human rights laws and war crimes to allegations of post-war governance crimes.

No credit is given for squashing a fascist terror-based group that killed its own people, Presidents, Prime Ministers and Ministers it opposed, butchered innocent villagers, student monks, men at prayer at mosques, and forcibly recruited child soldiers.

As the post-conflict peace dividend kicked in, electricity was restored in the North while broken roads and railway tracks were repaired, and connectivity between the North and South resumed. The Core-Group led by the UK, and now back again by the US, has seen different connectivity between the North and the South.

The recent ‘Aragalaya’ has been that link. It has left open many unanswered questions. Was all the funding purely voluntary? The vigorous backing — Ukraine style, by the Western ambassadors based in Colombo betrayed their motives.

Local ‘human rights defenders’ joined the party of the Western alliance to critique the Government for trying to prevent anarchy. The security forces fell between two stools — one group blaming them for inaction against a violent mob of protestors, the other accusing them of being too belligerent on peaceful protestors. Political parties elbowed out from the epi-centre of the protests at Colombo’s main promenade later hung on to the footboard of the Aragalaya bus lest they get further isolated from the masses.

The use of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) against the protestors gave a handle to the main Opposition party, trade unions and lawyers supporting the anti-Establishment struggle calling for the intervention of international human rights bodies. The usual tormentors like the Tamil Diaspora and the LTTE rump, and the Western Core Group can take a well-earned break now. The ongoing dogfight that militates against any national consensus on accountability will keep the country in the UNHRC dock for the long haul. No diplomatic strategy in Geneva can overcome this national consensus deficit.

On the eve of the 51st session of the UNHRC starting tomorrow, the Council’s Asia-Pacific region head arrived in Colombo to collect material to formulate new paragraphs for yet another crusade against Sri Lanka on accountability — some relating to the Government’s reaction to the ‘Aragalaya’, some to the use of the PTA and even economic issues.

New ground rules are being introduced at the UNHRC such as “accountability for the economic crisis”. This new direction targets winning the affection of the southern polity to rally against the State, and thereby overcome the hurdle the Core Group had in having their support. The triumphalism displayed in the south soon after the defeat of the LTTE has been wiped off the slate through the North-South combined ‘Aragalaya’ and the victorious war heroes of yesteryear have been turned into monsters to be driven away into oblivion.

The nascent Government seems to want to take the route of appeasement with the UNHRC, the Western Core Group and the Tamil Diaspora, a strategy previously adopted from 2015-2019. That period saw a heavily criticised consensual resolution in Geneva that however put the brakes on trumped up fears of ‘electric chairs’ for those who gave the political leadership to crush the LTTE. It purchased time for the Government to put in place a domestic mechanism for reconciliation, but it was branded a ‘sell-out’ by those who followed to public office in late 2019. With ‘megaphone diplomacy’ airing a patriotic chest-thumping line, that policy came a cropper with a renewed hardline by the UNHRC by a majority vote against the country.

The Government has launched a second attempt and another conciliatory campaign to win over the hostile Tamil Diaspora by delisting some of them as terrorist groups for their links with the LTTE remnants. They have been invited to invest in a future united Sri Lanka. The reaction has been mixed from abroad, some welcoming it, some cynical.

The cynics will be the ones exposed. Now as voters in the western world, they justify their existence lobbying political leaders, but are slow to put their money where their mouth is in their former ‘homeland’.

The latest UNHRC report calls for relaunching a ‘national dialogue’. One can only hope that this dialogue will lead to a national consensus on credible domestic accountability. The ongoing crisis Sri Lanka is facing right now, political and economic, may see a rainbow in providing a ‘window’ for just that. The prolonged absence of a deliverable domestic consensus on reconciliation and accountability has resulted in international intervention. Regrettably, the last such opportunity over ten years ago was squandered away by the then Government and the then Opposition when nothing much was done to implement the widely accepted LLRC (Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission) report. As a result, the issue migrated abroad again.

Rather than announce ad hoc measures to ‘get over’ each UNHRC session, the onus is always on the Government to make a genuine effort at consensus building, not polarity building, to navigate the existing complexities through a domestic mechanism. Diplomacy by itself cannot make miracles in the face of political and governance failures.

Otherwise, the UNHRC will continue to harangue for ‘remote-control transitional justice’, and the imposition of universal jurisdiction against Sri Lankan individuals, with threats of sanctions like withdrawing GSP plus duty concessions. And the country will remain a ‘basket case’ in the eyes of the Western world at least – with activists in the North and in the South now on the same page.