Deja vu - the UTHR(J) Report
 

by Kumar David

The University Teachers for Human Rights - Jaffna (UTHR(J)) is today more a pseudonym than the name of an organisation, though once upon a time such an association did exist.

Its reputation lies in a series of reports on the ethnic war, brought out at regular intervals, providing a balanced coverage of human rights violations by whichever party.

Though quite long, they are always read with care and even those who may not agree with the authors' conservative political stance cannot afford to dismiss the human rights anxieties lightly.

Past reports have been unmerciful in flaying the LTTE and therefore much welcomed and publicised by the powers that be. It will be interesting to see the fate of Special Report No.21, the latest, in the Sinhala media.

The Sunday Observer carried substantial excerpts last week, not omitting censure of appalling GoSL and LTTE misconduct. While not dropping its hard anti-LTTE stance the main onslaught in No.21 is on the government, up to the highest level, the armed forces and the police.

The state machinery is eviscerated for killing civilians, human rights abuses and encouraging mob violence. The nation's political leaders are accused of covering up and incompetence. It is not nice reading if you had hopes that this time round the state was less culpable than the LTTE; it seems that this is not the case.

Is all this true?

It is asserted that the armed forces and police could not have been uninvolved in the anti-Tamil pogroms in Trincomalee, that the state has turned a blind eye to extra-judicial assassination of political rivals, and that the leaders have lost the plot and are floundering.

Is all this true? There is much in the report that claims to be the factual recounting of events. If these accounts are false it is up to the relevant authorities to respond with facts, times and names - the Report certainly does not fight shy of naming police and military officers and government leaders. If such a line by line rebuttal is not issued the charges will stick. Amnesty International has raised substantially similar concerns about subsequent events.

Another set of charges is of a political and interpretative nature. The Report compares the present state of affairs with J. R. Jayewardene's infamy in consorting with genocide in 1983 - the events are not on the same scale, but culpability is not a matter of scale. It seems to this writer that this is excessive; criminal culpability and impotence when faced with military-police insubordination are not of the same genre.

The Report does not accuse leaders of the present government of instigating communal violence in the way that Jayewardene, his party and government did, but it does not put too fine a point upon the difference either. This unbalances the Report in a few places and obscures the actuality that chauvinists are not in command of the government.

One point that the Report makes with telling effectiveness is that the excesses of the establishment play straight into the hands of the LTTE. Rohini Hensman drives home the same message in the Ceylon Daily News of the 17th. If the LTTE wants to convince the Tamils that there is no hope for them in a sovereign Sri Lanka, why that's easy, just out-source the job to the armed forces and the government.

The unitary state formula has already done enough damage and state assisted communal strife will do the rest.

OK, this is dramatised exaggeration by this writer to drive home the point, but what the Report does says is that LTTE cunning such as the Trincomalee bomb and the subsequent state supported carnage complement each other. The tactical gain is to the LTTE in persuading Tamils that they have no hope in Sri Lanka, unitary or federated.

Truly, the fount of vitality and sustenance for the LTTE lies in the South. If the PA, the UNP and successive governments wanted to cut the ground under the LTTE over the last decades they only needed to provide redress to grievances and sanction real autonomy instead of undermining even the 13th Amendment.

You don't need the permission of the LTTE if you want to solve the national question! As Sunil Bastian tartly observes, "Unfortunately the government has not shown any inclination to deal with Tamil grievances with or without the LTTE". (No War, No Peace?)

LTTE deserted, after all

In contrast to the Report, the pronouncements of the EU and the USA place responsibility for the deteriorating situation squarely on the Tigers, not GoSL.

The international climate has turned sharply hostile to the LTTE and from this perspective it would be foolish to start a large scale offensive, though according to some analysts this is its real objective. If this be true, the LTTE will have to wait, hoping that military-police folly will persist and steadily erode international support for the government.

Only time will tell whether today's political leadership has the capacity to overcome insubordination in the forces - Kumaratunga would not have tolerated this degree of insolent disobedience, nor would Premadasa or JR.

The signs are that military collaboration with Karuna's forces will continue and that GoSL does not intend to read the Geneva agreement as an obligation to disarm the group or stop its activities. The consequence is self-evident; the LTTE will strike back and a low to medium intensity war will continue till who knows when.

This writer has repeatedly made the point that the Tamils will not abandon their support for the LTTE, notwithstanding its deplorable record on Tamil democratic rights, so long as its military power is all that stands between them and the excesses of the Sinhala mob and state.

The Tamils know that the South will not so much as stop to give them the time of day, let alone devolution, federalism, or what have you, except for the LTTE's military counterpoise.

The scorn with which the non-violent campaign of the old Federal Party was clobbered is a lurid reminder in contrast.

This is not something peculiar to Sri Lanka or the Sinhalese and Tamils; everywhere in the world the eventual outcome and settlement in ethnic conflict turns on the balance of power. This balance is being tested once again and not for the last time, politically, militarily and in the international arena. Deja vu, and were it not so callous, one could add, sangfroid!