A futuristic view of US-Lanka ties
As Washington continues to embrace Sri Lanka’s new
government, it’s important to remember that America’s next president is
unlikely to shake up ties
by Taylor Dibbert
Sri Lanka’s President, Maithripala Sirisena, will soon complete his
first year in office and many promises remain unfulfilled. More
recently, we’re now hearing talk about the creation of a special
court to handle alleged wartime abuses and the drafting of a new
constitution.
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President Maithripala
Sirisena with Michele and Barack Obama (dailynews.lk) |
Would expecting genuine progress on either of the aforementioned
fronts be realistic? After all, there remain other, less complicated
aspects of reform that the Sirisena administration has yet to address,
such as the matter of Tamil political prisoners. Given Colombo’s
unwillingness to address some of the more straightforward matters, is it
reasonable to believe that more complex changes are viable at this time?
Regrettably, the United States continues to make platitudinous
remarks about further reform, accountability and reconciliation in Sri
Lanka.
It’s time to think about Washington’s remarks in a different way. Is
the Obama administration willing to do anything substantial if
Sirisena’s reform agenda continues to flounder? Has the United States
already decided that the progress thus far is sufficient? If that
decision hasn’t already been made, what actions could Obama’s team
conceivably take over the next 12 months to further pressure Colombo?
Let’s get real. Under Obama’s watch, the United States played a major
role in pressuring Sri Lanka to respect human dignity and deal with the
past. And, while Mahinda Rajapaksa (the previous president) responded to
international pressure, his regime was always focused on doing the bare
minimum to placate the international community. Now we’ve got Sirisena
and, somewhat incredibly, a coalition government where the country’s two
principal political parties – the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and the
United National Party (UNP) – have entered into a power-sharing
arrangement.
New formula
A few lines of thinking are permeating Washington’s corridors of
power at the moment.
Obama’s team has been promoting Sri Lanka’s new government while
concurrently assessing its own role in a self-congratulatory fashion.
Indeed, it appears that the administration is reliving Myanmar’s
‘democratic opening’ from a few years ago and concomitantly ignoring the
lessons that we can and should learn from Myanmar – starting with the
fact that deeper, lasting reform is always more complicated and
difficult than it at first appears.
The Obama administration will be out of power in about a year’s time.
Even if the Sirisena administration makes more significant strides in
the right direction over the next 12 months – Sri Lanka’s complicated
reform agenda – including transitional justice, will be far from
finished in January 2017. And, frankly, there’s no guarantee that an
incoming US administration – Republican or Democrat –would want to
elevate human rights or accountability in Sri Lanka the way that the
Obama administration did from 2012 –2014.
Aside from Obama’s obvious legacy concerns, Colombo’s political
leadership likely understands that an upcoming transfer of power in
Washington would probably not change the current trajectory of bilateral
ties. Given the way that U.S-Sri Lanka relations have been shifting,
would a Hillary Clinton administration really want to intensify pressure
on Colombo? And most of the leading Republican contenders have little
knowledge of foreign affairs anyway.
Would any of them want to prioritize justice and accountability
vis-a-vis a small island nation in the Indian Ocean? Irrespective of who
wins the White House in 2016, Sri Lanka’s human rights and
accountability issues are unlikely to receive the amount of attention
that the Obama administration has devoted to them – which makes Obama’s
swift resetting of U.S-Sri Lanka ties that much more unfortunate.
-The Diplomat
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