What!! War Crimes Allegations again? Just Before CHOGM. [October 22 2011]

 By Mathias Keittle, Colombo (Researcher on Sri Lanka from Statalendorf)

"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 difficultto 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 once again on war crimes allegations targeting the Sri Lankan leadership as we lead up to CHOGM. The old fuddy-duddy, 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 news papers 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 the conflict.

But they have taken upon themselves to sit in judgment over Sri Lanka’s conduct of the war against the terrorist LTTE relying exclusively on material supplied by other sources, including the rump LTTE which is on 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 journos 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 relating to 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. (It is claimed that he was a judge!) 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 in order 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 cadres in the ABC report. Was she there as a sympathizer 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, H.E. Mr. Ban Ki-moon, the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom, Mr. David Miliband, The Foreign Minister of France, Mr. Bernard Kouchner, The Secretary of State of the USA, Ms. Hilliary Clinton, The Government of India, The Foreign Minister of Australia, Mr. Stephen Smith, et-al, all demanded that the LTTE release these civilians from their custody. These calls were unceremoniously rejected or ignored. 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 longer 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 suffered 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 cease fires 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 Tamil Net, hardly referred to civilian casualties until the final weeks of the war 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 Tamil Tigers.

 Ben Doherty adopts, the count of sad Gordon Weiss on civilian deaths. As to where Gordon the Unwise got this figure remains a mystery but has helped to finance his travels around the world to promote his sagging book. A leaked UN document referred to 7000 dead but this figure was quickly disowned by the UN Under-Secretary-General, Sir John Holmes. Another unhappy 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 cadres 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 8 others!

 The Darusman Panel appointed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations to advice 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 panelists are lawyers. Certainly no self respecting lawyer would have appended his signature to it. 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.

 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), eye witness 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 organizations.

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 organizations 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%, 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 pudgy John Dowd.