The East and West at the UN Human Rights Council: Never the twain shall meet?

“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”
(Rudyard Kipling, Barrack-room ballads, 1892)

Through a fortuitous twist of fate at the end of May I had the opportunity to be a witness to an event of considerable global importance; the Special Session of the UN Human Rights Council on Sri Lanka. The outcome of this meeting has sparked substantial controversy, and has been extensively covered in both local and international press, which I have been following with great interest.

Please permit me at the outset to elaborate upon my personal situation as this may help to explain my position on this subject.

I am a dual citizen of both Sri Lanka and the United Kingdom, a child of Sri Lankan parentage; I was born and raised in England. My traditional Sri Lankan upbringing caused me a certain internal conflict, a situation which was later mirrored in the proceedings and outcome of the Special Session, pitting East against West in what one journalist dubbed – ‘a clash of civilizations’. I could not easily forget the “Western” context in which I had grown up, but neither could I entirely believe the allegations of heinous human rights violations committed by the Sri Lankan government. With my background I consciously endeavoured to try and balance my subjective feelings with an objective regard for the facts and major points presented at the meeting.
I have neither the qualifications nor the experience to justify any assumptions or assertions made herein, but only seek to offer my own opinion on the proceedings, and hope that the veracity borne of an eye-witness account can speak for itself in a discussion of some of the salient points that arose from the meeting.

Now that the military confrontations on Sri Lankan soil have finally and thankfully come to an end, one glance at the headlines of major international newspapers reveals a persistent critical bellicosity towards the Sri Lankan diplomatic ‘victory’. It would thus seem that Sri Lanka’s fight is not over, and Geneva has become the newest frontline of this diplomatic offensive. The opposition is however no longer the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, acknowledged as one of the world’s most dangerous terrorist groups, but a broad coalition of “Western” nations (including the European Union member states, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the USA). There is no doubt that this adversarial position was advocated by some LTTE sympathetic Tamil interventionists. However the danger here is that the general Tamil Diaspora of people with more balanced, moderate views and attitudes are unfairly associated with the more extremist LTTE sympathisers.
Interestingly the non-Western states that rallied to Sri Lanka’s defence share common economic and political interests, which highlight a more nuanced explication of this global division. These nations, typically classed as developing or newly industrialized countries, are almost all members (except Azerbaijan and the Russian Federation) of the G77 and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), through which they enhance their influence and their joint negotiating capacity against the more politically powerful and developed Western states. On a political level, these states share a memory of colonisation by European powers. This became a factor of solidarity with Sri Lanka, on the basis of mutual experience. In this light, the European-led advocacy for an international intervention was construed by the non-Western states as a “neo-colonialist” interference (a term explicitly cited by certain delegations), that was perhaps motivated out of a selfish desire to profit economically and politically by perpetuating instability in the Asian region. Instability weakens a nation’s competitiveness in the world’s trade, influence and investment wars.

Of course this broad patterning of international support and censure had its exceptions, (notably Mexico and Mauritius who backed the convening of the Special Session). However, the East-West division of the Human Rights Council was undeniable, its polarization into Euro-centric and Afro-Asian-Latin American camps (a new term must be coined to describe this new alliance). The convening itself of the Special Session showed the initial solidarity of the European position, but as the meeting unfolded the consensus swung in Sri Lanka’s favour, manifested by the fact that of the 17 members who called for the session, only 12 voted in favour of the European draft resolution, proof that their position weakened under discussion. The pertinent question was, of course, why?

The British and French-led entreaties for independent and impartial investigations in support of the call made by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mrs. Navi Pillay have to be seen against the exigencies of a hot war in its final stages. All wars bring collateral civilian casualties with them. This should not, of course, excuse careless and needless loss of life, but the suggestion that the Sri Lankan government was any the less concerned about the suffering of her own people is a patronizing insult to the nation. Moreover the purpose of this war, it must be remembered, was to liberate innocent people from the clutches of ruthless politically motivated terrorist group that was the LTTE. The government was striving to preserve the dignity of humanity not destroy it, to eradicate once and for all the terror that was the LTTE. Similarly so called ‘well intentioned’ motives to quell the threat of world terrorism justified attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan for instance, by NATO and US led forces which led to thousands of innocents killed as collateral casualties to this day. If the so called ‘war on terror’ provided a legitimate pretext for Coalition forces to continually bomb and kill innocent bystanders in Pakistan and Afghanistan with their bombing runs and drones – it highlights the gross hypocrisy and double standards of many Western governments in trying to indict the Sri Lankan government in their legitimate efforts to rid their country of cowardly terrorists like the LTTE, terrorists whose declared aim was to divide a sovereign nation into parts. The Sri Lankans were after all fighting to protect their nation’s territorial integrity – combating insurrection on their own soil, not in foreign provinces entirely beyond their jurisdiction.

Hypocrisy and conceit tinged with a self proclaimed moral superiority seems to characterize all Western efforts and pronouncements in connection to Sri Lanka’s own ‘war on terror’. Further, a brief retrospective glance confirms this with historical examples of this selective interpretation of the human rights apparatus. As the Sri Lankan Ambassador Dayan Jayatilleka rightly pointed out (in response to renewed calls for an international inquiry into Sri Lanka at the Regular Session of the Human Rights Council), the Nuremberg trials only examined the conduct of the defeated Axis powers, conveniently ignoring the atrocities committed by the victorious Allies. For example, the bombing of Hiroshima by the USA, perhaps the most brutal of the Allied offensives (but deemed necessary to end the war), which killed at least 80,000 people in a single day, and affected thousands more, was never subject to an investigation of the type that is being petitioned for Sri Lanka. Indeed it was only as a result of the enormity of civilian casualties of the Second World War that a consciousness of human rights was sparked. Yet it seems that the fact that the current human rights legislation was initiated by the Western nations, privileges their behavior as beyond reproach. Unfortunately more recent events (of which Ambassador Jayatilleka cited the French wars of decolonization in Indochina and Algeria, and the British armed suppression of the Bloody Sunday uprising in 1972 as examples, to which many more can be added), suggest that this continues to be the case. Why then should the Western powers be exempt from the very mechanisms that they themselves defined? Guantanamo and the ‘Rendition’ flights permitted by many European powers after 9/11 to facilitate torture in various prisons set up by the CIA points to yet more human rights abuses in Occidental endeavours to curb terrorism. Why should they not be accountable for their own crimes? The hypocrisy with which the Western nations set themselves up defies belief. These double standards planted the seed of discord at the special session of the Human Rights Council and occupied much of the discussion instead of the more pressing concerns on the ground.

That said however, the principle of the right to defend a country’s territorial integrity should not absolve a government from its responsibilities towards the welfare of all its people. Indeed there remains much for the government of Sri Lanka to do in this regard to allay the suspicion in the mind of many of the Tamil Diaspora and the wider international community that the national government of Sri Lanka is covertly carrying out an ethnic cleansing exercise in the areas cleared of previous terrorist occupation. The prevention of access to these areas of foreign care agencies and the foreign press only heightens this suspicion. But the refusal of the government to allow “full, unfettered” access to humanitarian and media agencies can be understood to a certain degree, due to the need to root out any last vestiges of the LTTE who may have infiltrated the camps amongst the civilians.

Though concerted and early preparations were made for an expected influx of IDPs in the wake of the conflict, the scale of the human flood that wound its way out of the previously LTTE-held areas was unprecedented, defying the most comprehensive estimates of the government. The consequential overcrowding exceeded the capacity of the under-equipped IDP camps resulting in conditions that are clearly less than satisfactory. Thus the humanitarian relief must be a priority for the government, and would probably be facilitated by the involvement of the ICRC and other international agencies.

In short, this discussion reveals the complexity of the situation, which will undoubtedly continue to raise significant debate. The very purpose of the Human Rights Council is to provide an international forum for dialogue on such issues. That consensus should be indisputable, for there will always be a place and a need for an international body whose scope of interest supersedes that of individual states. It is only in this way that we can strive towards global harmony. All nations, both Eastern and Western should be answerable for their behavior when it contravenes the principles of human rights. The Human Rights Council was established with this aim, and is the right place for discussion of the legitimate concern over events in Sri Lanka (though the convening of a Special Session seemed largely unnecessary with a Regular session scheduled to take place merely a few days later).

However it is regrettable that the polarization of the Council, the division between East and West, has limited its usefulness. The hypocritical nature of the Western states alienated many developing countries leading to a deadlock that poses a significant obstacle to the work of the Council, a situation from which only justice and the capacity for protection of the innocents in conflicts will suffer. For the politicization of the work of the Human Rights Council has an adverse effect on its duty to protect and promote human rights, since it perpetuates international tensions, which in turn may prevent the resolution of domestic ones. As many delegations commented, what Sri Lanka needs now is aid not further attack, and the co-operation of the international community, not its censure. National political agendas should not take precedence over the alleviation of human suffering.

Some may call this opinion naïve, an idealistic aspiration of the young, but surely if we compromise the elementary principles that aim to safeguard the integrity of humankind, we undermine the very foundations of the Human Rights Council itself, and doom civilians to the perpetuation of violence?

Nikini Jayatunga, an undergraduate student at the University of Cambridge, spent a year studying at the University of Geneva.