Ulterior motives behind allegations against Sri Lanka?
by Mathias KEITTLE
As the CHOGM approaches, the Australian media has gone in to
overdrive to pin war crimes allegations on Sri Lanka and its leadership.
Steven Harper of Canada and others dependent on expatriate Tamil vote
banks have discarded even a semblance of impartiality in their
enthusiasm to pander to domestic pressure groups. The fact that Sri
Lanka alone succeeded in defeating a ruthless terrorist group and usher
in peace to a country long suffering from terrorism appears to have been
too difficult to digest for those with a condescending colonial mind
set.
The Australian media, led by the usual suspects Sarah Dongal and Ben
Doherty, has begun a feeding frenzy again on war crimes allegations
targeting the Sri Lankan leadership as we lead up to CHOGM. John Dowd,
(remember the tailor in “Are You Being Served”?) has joined the
bandwagon.
The ABC, SBS, The Sydney Morning Herald. The Age and other newspapers
have been used as ready vehicles to purvey their views. It is
interesting that a quick search of official records show that none of
them has been to Sri Lanka during or after the conclusion of terrorism.
But they have taken upon themselves to sit in judgement over Sri Lanka’s
conduct against the terrorist LTTE relying exclusively on material
supplied by other sources, including the rump LTTE, which is on a
propaganda overdrive in Australia.
The explanations painstakingly provided by the Government or the
readily visible evidence on the ground are totally ignored. The motives
of these two remain suspect because of their almost exclusive focus on
Sri Lanka, in a world where allegations of violations of international
humanitarian standards and human rights law are made against many
countries and their military personnel on a regular basis, including
Australian forces in Afghanistan, American forces in Afghanistan and
Iraq, Canadian forces in Afghanistan, NATO bombers in Libya and many
others. No interviews with teary Australian volunteer health workers
have been played on the ABC on allegations relating to Afghanistan.
Let us start with the question of command responsibility for breaches
of international human rights standards and the commission of war
crimes. The legal principles relating to these areas have been refined
over the years but seemed to have escaped John Dowd.
Retaliatory action
The legitimate security forces of a State are entitled, under the
law, to undertake retaliatory action against an enemy force, including
terrorist groups, in the defence of the State or themselves. This
principle is not overtaken simply because the enemy attacks from behind
concentrations of civilians or from protected premises, such as
hospitals. The only qualification in such a circumstance is that the
legitimate forces are required to use proportionate and reasonable force
to subdue the enemy. Casualties can occur among civilians in such
situations and these cannot amount to war crimes.
As we read in the newspapers almost on a weekly basis, American and
NATO actions along the border of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Libya result
in significant civilian casualties and these are explained away as
collateral damage.
The killings of unarmed Qaddafi, Bin Laden, Awlaki or his 17-year-old
son have hardly raised an eyebrow among these holier than thou advocates
of international humanitarian standards. Unfortunately, Sarah Dongle and
Ben Doherty attempt to blur the background facts and highlight only the
possibility of large-scale civilian casualties. There is absolutely no
evidence that hospitals or schools were deliberately targeted by the Sri
Lankan Security Forces. The doctors who worked in the medical facilities
in the North have denied that the Government forces targeted these
facilities.
The teary and cute Meena Krishnamoorthy tried hard to suggest
otherwise. But let us pause for a second and ask as to what her smiling
face was doing among uniformed LTTE cadre in the ABC report. Was she
there as a sympathiser of the terrorists, an active collaborator or
simply as an innocent volunteer health worker? Now that her champions
have lost,does she have a burning motive for peddling the rump LTTE
line, ably abetted by Sarah Dongle?
It is also a fact that the LTTE, as it retreated from one village to
another, and from one town to another, herded with it a large number of
civilians who amounted to almost 300,000 towards the end of the
conflict. These civilians were not running away from the Government
forces, but were taken by the LTTE against their will as a human shield.
Sarah Dongle and Ben Doherty have never chosen to highlight the fact,
that the Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon, the
Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom David Miliband, the Foreign
Minister of France, Bernard Kouchner, the Secretary of State of the USA
Hillary Clinton, the Government of India, the Foreign Minister of
Australia Stephen Smith, et-al, all demanded that the LTTE release these
civilians from their custody. These calls were unceremoniously rejected
or ignored.
Trapped civilians
The civilians would not have been trapped between the opposing forces
had these calls been heeded in time by the LTTE, including by the
leadership which include some whose names are mentioned in plaints
compiled by the John Dowd’s Commission of Jurists and other individuals.
Furthermore, when the Security Forces broke through the LTTE defences
in the last weeks of the conflict, the civilians streamed out in their
thousands into Government held territory despite machine gun fire from
and suicide bombings by the LTTE. Over 100,000 escaped in April 2009 and
a much larger number in May 2009. This exodus is recorded for posterity
by Al Jazeera and was aired live by them. It is a lesson that many
military forces around the world learned in conflicts that firing on
civilians only increases the potential for more hatred and volunteers
for the rebels. The Americans and the NATO forces learnt this lesson
through bitter years of struggle in Afghanistan and Iraq. Military
operations that were intended to be concluded in months, if not a short
year or two, have consequently become stretched out and have dragged on
for over an exhausting decade.
To assume that the Sri Lankan military did not learn this basic
lesson from those who failed to heed the lesson is a very simplistic
conclusion. Sri Lanka did heed this lesson. That is why it adopted a
zero civilian casualty policy from the inception of the military
operations in the East and in the North and that is also why it
designated no fire zones with clearly demarcated escape routes.
The Government-proclaimed ceasefires to enable the civilians to
escape were used by the LTTE to regroup. No civilians were allowed to
escape by them. In the final few weeks, the Government specifically
forbade its military to use heavy weaponry as the civilians were being
forced by the LTTE into a land area getting ever smaller.
The Sri Lankan Security Forces were held up as a model by the ICRC
which trained them on human rights principles. It is unrealistic and
mischievous to suggest that such a force lost its sense of discipline
when victory was within grasp. The Al Jazeera footage simply does not
support such a conclusion. Today, the rump LTTE which is hell-bent on
exacting vengeance for its defeat is drumming up allegations of civilian
casualties and war crimes. It is also to be noted that the LTTE’s own
propaganda arm, the TamilNet, hardly referred to civilian casualties
until the final weeks by which time it was becoming clear that the LTTE
would be crushed. The motive for this upsurge in the allegations is not
too obscure.
The rump LTTE and its supporters collected huge sums of money through
willing or coerced contributors among the expatriate Tamil community in
Western countries and with the collapse of the LTTE and their “boys” in
the jungle, they have seen their massive investment, in money and
emotion, dissolve into nothingness. The urge to even scores appears to
be paramount.
Exaggerated and fictional allegations about thousands killed or
otherwise harmed unquestioningly parroted by Sarah Dongle and Ben
Doherty seem to have sprouted without any in-depth analysis and reflect
the views advanced by the rump LTTE.One could even begin to ask
questions about what motivates journalists of this nature. Is it also
possible that war crimes allegations pinned onto those who caused their
dream to collapse, would at least create sufficient harassment to liven
the days of those overseas Tamils who supported the Tigers?
Ben Doherty adopts, the count of Gordon Weiss on civilian deaths. As
to where Weiss got this figure remains a mystery but has helped to
finance his travels around the world to promote his book. A leaked UN
document referred to 7,000 dead, but this figure was quickly disowned by
the UN Under-Secretary-General, Sir John Holmes.
Public opinion
Another journo in London, Jeremy Page, came up with a figure of
20,000. (He had been expelled from Sri Lanka.) No one has, to date,
found the graves of the thousands allegedly killed. No one reliable has
met the relatives of these dead. The Government has statistically
established (see the video, “Lies Agreed Upon”) that it was impossible
for 40,000 civilians to have been killed.
The photos published in the Government media of some of the dead
wearing jeans or sarongs do not make them civilians, as observed by the
then French Ambassador to Sri Lanka. Most LTTE cadre fought in jeans or
sarongs from the time of their confrontation with the Indian Peace
Keeping Force in the late 80s.
The suggestion by Sarah Dongle that a boat carrying refugees was
shelled by a naval craft just does not stand scrutiny but is useful to
influence public opinion. There is a minimum distance that needs to be
maintained between the shelling weapon and the target. It is highly
unlikely that the shouts of “Aiya, Aiya”, allegedly made by one of
Doherty’s characters, would have carried across this distance, even if
the story were true. That character also miraculously survived a shell
that hit her flimsy craft which apparently killed eight others! The
Darusman Panel appointed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations
to advise him appears to be a ready source of information for this bunch
of Sri Lanka bashers. (This is not a UN Report.)
The content of the Panel Report has been disputed by the Sri Lankan
authorities, the London Times and other writers. The Panel was not
appointed by an organ of the United Nations, and it had been given a
very limited mandate by the Secretary-General, which it ignored as it
went on a frolic of its own, way beyond the limits of its mandate.
The content, in places, is an embarrassment to those who wrote the
report, considering that all three panellists are lawyers. In the
circumstances, for any reputable journalist or any other authority to
rely on it as a reliable source would make them suspect in the public
eye. The suggestion that the Government deliberately shelled food
convoys or deprived people of food must come as a surprise to the
Coordinating Committee for Humanitarian Affairs, which met weekly since
2005 to monitor food supplies to the North and whose members included
the Ambassadors of the US, EU, Japan and Norway and the ICRC.
The ICRC must surely be scratching their heads in confusion as they
worked closely with the Government and UN agencies to get the food to
the civilians. The Government actually trucked food and medical supplies
to the trapped civilians almost till the end of the conflict. Blue
sarongs gifted by the Indian Government for civilian use were found
being used by LTTE combatants.
Cursory manner
Similarly, the tenacity with which Amnesty International, Human
Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group seem to pursue Sri Lanka
with single-minded determination, also seems to suggest an obsession
which is not based on good faith. In a world where not mere allegations,
but photographic evidence, (vide the killing of Qaddafi), eyewitness
testimony and other reliable sources of evidence exist, suggesting much
more serious infractions of international humanitarian law in wars
raging in the wider region, to single mindedly pursuing Sri Lanka,
suggests that something more than the search for justice is motivating
these organisations.
Is it possible that the cursory manner in which Sri Lankan
authorities dismissed the efforts of David Miliband and Bernard Kouchner
to broker a ceasefire towards the end of the conflict is behind all
these? The connections that these gentlemen have with the organisations
concerned is well known. The ready willingness with which they tend to
dismiss the domestic mechanism established by Sri Lanka, the Lessons
Learnt and Reconciliation Commission, to address the range of
allegations seems to confirm this view.
Again, relying on accepted legal principles, I would like to suggest
that the primary responsibility for dealing with any infractions of
global standards rests with the country where such infractions are
alleged to have occurred. In other words, it is Sri Lanka’s
responsibility to deal with these allegations in the first instance.
Sri Lanka has begun to discharge that responsibility by establishing
the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission. To pile pressure on
Sri Lanka without giving it the space to deal with these allegations
suggests a motive that is not acceptable in the modern world. To suggest
that an international panel would be better equipped to deal with these
allegations is clearly a condescending, colonial and arrogant approach
which should be dismissed out of hand by those who are more comfortable
with contemporary standards of thinking. The approach adopted by the
Government of Sri Lanka has received wide support within the country. A
Gallup Poll in September 2011 indicated an approval rating in excess of
83 percent, an unprecedented approval rating for the President and his
Government. Sri Lankans recall that those who admitted guilt to
procuring explosives and detonators used to blow up the Central Bank
building in Colombo killing over 1,400, received only the lightest of
sentences, some suspended, from a Melbourne judge. This curious approach
perhaps should receive more attention from the likes of John Dowd.
The writer is a Researcher on Sri Lanka from Statalendorf, Germany. |