After the UNHRC Resolution Vote: Don’t Hold Your Breath for Truth, Justice or Reconciliation
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Photo courtesy JDS/Guy Calaf, Agence France-Presse
By the time this article is published, the votes on the hotly-contested UN Human Rights Council resolution on Sri Lanka will have been cast and counted. I am writing this as the debate over the resolutions is taking place in Geneva, and I find myself wondering if the outcome will be meaningful for the lives of hundreds of thousands of victims of our 30 year war. Don’t get me wrong – I recognise the significance of the UNHRC resolution in terms of its moral and political symbolism, and that it may have profound implications for the Sri Lankan state’s position within the field of geopolitics and international relations. I know that it will very likely impact the course of Sri Lanka’s national politics – even if I can’t anticipate the precise consequences. Whilst I’d like to hope that the outcome of the UNHRC vote could lead to the harm and hurts of decades of violence being addressed in a meaningful and effective way, something inside me tells me not to kid myself. Not wanting to to be heretical, I simply cannot bring myself to have much faith that the UNHRC resolution vote, regardless of the outcome, will make much difference to the lives of people who have been deeply marked by the conflict.
Much of the debate around the current showdown in Geneva has claimed that what is at stake is Truth, Justice and Reconciliation. Over the past months, I have become increasingly sceptical that a process of international reckoning anchored in Geneva or a process of national reckoning such as the Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission process are capable of delivering – even under the best conditions and with sincere efforts – what is desired from them in terms of this holy trinity. I feel that these are blunt, bureaucratic instruments that are unlikely to produce the sort of truth, justice or reconciliation that is needed by those who are most entitled to it – the thousands upon thousands of us who have suffered direct losses and harm from the war. And they probably cannot really deliver it for the rest of us either. Instead, I have come to believe that the path to a better kind of peace requires a different sort of approach – one that is deeply personal even as it must engage with the experiences of others. It is probably something that requires honest and difficult processes for each of us.
Truth
In the past year, public debate about the facts of what happened during the final months of the war has been dominated by commentary on the details of (and even more often on the ‘vested interests’ ascribed to) the Report of the Expert Panel to the UN Secretary General, the subsequent report of the GoSL Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission’s report, and two high-profile documentaries from Channel 4 in the UK.
I chose not to watch Channel 4′s first ‘Killing Fields’ documentary when it came out in 2011. I had been inside Menik Farm at the end of the war, and talked with people who survived the ordeal of the final months of warfare. I had been with the relatives of those who did not escape the violence. What I saw and heard was enough for a lifetime. But what I learned was also messy, complex and inchoate. The stories were fragmented; they occasionally contradicted each other and were sometime silent on the most difficult events; and of course they changed in small but important ways as time passed. These stories defied compilation, summarising, reduction, and in some cases even communication. Still, by coming to know the people who told them, I came to hold inside me a mosaic of undeniable visceral truths about what took place in the hell into which over over 300,000 people had been cast. I doubted that Channel 4 could reveal to me new horrors that I had not already felt. The subsequent detailed debates in the media and in my social circles about the content and authenticity of the ‘Killing Fields’ documentary rendered my refusal to watch somewhat irrelevant – but seemed to confirm my judgement.
I was, however, struck by two things. The first obvious issue was how the public discourse shifted so quickly from consideration of what had happened in the Vanni to a debate on the provenance of the footage – the images were shocking, but were they real? The second was a more serious observation – that the controversy about the legitimacy of the documentary produced in the UK had completely eclipsed the reality that within several hours journey from anywhere in Sri Lanka you could actually meet thousands of people who had been through the events depicted, who had witnessed atrocities, who could vouch for losses they had experienced personally and were still suffering the effects of.
The two subsequent reports by the panel of UN experts and the commissioners of the LLRC suffered from a similar displacement of the voices of the people at the heart of the matter. The latter did see rare instances where some recognisable human experience broke through the procedural and political strictures imposed on the Commission. Many of the people who took the risk of testifying before the LLRC did so out of a need for their truths to be told, heard and recorded. The approach to testimony, in this case was quite inadequate for this purpose, as survivors were rarely able to speak on their own terms and were subsequently usually rendered in the report as mere ciphers, rather than as sentient beings.
In Sri Lanka today, our access to the truths of the final stages of the war need not depend so much on the verdicts of forensic experts examining photographs and video or on the credibility of well-referenced reports, as on our will to travel up the A9 to make contact with those who lived through that period. On this small island, it wouldn’t be too hard to find a friend of a friend to make an introduction. In social terms, Sri Lanka is still a village where we are never separated by more than a step or two from people with a first-hand perspective on how the war was really waged. Truly hearing what people have to say (or don’t say) may be more the challenge – but overcoming this barrier is also a matter of will, patience and heart.
A retired friend of mine in Colombo, having viewed the government’s alternative version of the Channel 4 ‘Killing Fields’ documentary asked me if I really thought that the army could have treated people ‘like that’. It was hard to imagine, he said, that they could have behaved like such beasts. I had gently to remind him that from where we were standing talking on his balcony we could see the spots where the tortured bodies of suspected JVP members had been burned and hung from a lamppost during the terror of 1989. He nodded slowly. The truth of what the armed forces (and armed insurgents) were capable of was already available to him as a Sri Lankan who had lived through an insurrection in his own town. It was just not very easy or pleasant to admit it to himself.
We ought to know better than to uncritically accept the half-truths and justifications purveyed by propagandists. Thirty years of war should have made us attuned to detecting disinformation, and an even longer history of violence by state forces and insurgents should have made us acutely aware of the systematic cruelty and criminal acts of which both are capable. Whilst those of us who have lived in or near the theatre of war have countless recent examples to caution us, those who are more detached need only to remember the extra-judicial tactics widely abused by the Sri Lankan state during the last JVP insurrection, the LTTE’s forced evacuation of the population of Jaffna to cover its retreat in the mid 1990s, the routine concealment of government atrocities whether in Suriyakanda or Sathurukondan, and the LTTE’s massacres of Muslims or its brutal methods for dealing with competitors and dissenters within the Tamil community. Even those of us too young to remember should be able to recognise the opportunistic and rather transparent methods used by both sides to discredit the few independent accounts of the conflict – allege bias, suggest conspiracy, label as imperialism, claim financial impropriety, question competence, undermine credibility and attack personally when under criticism – and should refuse to be distracted from the moral issues that really matter.
The unpleasant truths of what transpired during the final stages of the war – and indeed in the thirty years that preceded that – are not outside our grasp. In fact, you might say that we already have some of that knowledge within us, and need only allow ourselves to recognise it.
Justice and Reconciliation
The question of what to do with the truth is more complex and difficult. On the one hand, those of us who have suffered (and those of us who support survivors) have a desire to see perpetrators of violence punished or held accountable. Yet, our thirty year war was more than a series of individual acts of murder, damage and destruction. The violence was not just cyclical, but also structural. Even as we abhor and condemn the cruelty of individuals who tortured, maimed, oppressed and killed – we have to acknowledge that they often did so within the context of terrible personal histories, forced enlistment, draconian chains of command, powerful ideologies of persecution, realities of repression and militarisation, and actual existential threats. This is not to absolve individuals of responsibility, but rather to place their actions in perspective.
Perhaps most important to note is that the perpetrators of violence also carried out their terrible acts with the tacit or explicit support of millions of ‘civilians’. It’s not a stretch to say that there is blood on all of our hands – from at least some point in the history of our long conflict. We all bear some degree of responsibility for the commission of atrocities, even in our failure to oppose them in deed or thought. All of us have probably paid taxes that bought bombs and bullets that killed people. Most of us have voted for, endorsed or simply accepted leaders who bear direct responsibility for violence and loss. Many of us have turned a blind eye to ethnic prejudice and even harboured it within ourselves. Others of us have justified unlawful killings as a ‘necessary evil’, rationalised collateral damage as ‘unavoidable’ or rejoiced (perhaps secretly) at the deaths of hate figures. Still more of us have denied, minimised or ignored the suffering of tens of thousands who have been displaced, dispossessed or discriminated against. Each of us has sustained the war machine in some way – I know that I have. Whether or not we chose to acknowledge this at the time, it is not a defence now simply to say that we did not know. All these acts are not equivalent under the law, but they have all contributed to enabling the harm inflicted on others. In moral terms, do they not belong to the same plane of violence? If so, who amongst us is then to cast the first stone? Is it enough to charge only those of us who pulled the triggers or those of us who ordered the bombers? What do we about the rest of us?
Perhaps our approach to justice should not only be about holding others to account, but also judging ourselves. If we wish for others to atone for their sins and omissions, then so must we. Answering the question of how we can each do this is not easy, and is likely to be very personal.
In my own journey, I am trying to do this by seeking ways of responding to the circumstances of those whom the conflict has left in pain or in serious hardship. I’m learning that this is far easier said than done. People do not want sympathy or pity, nor I am equipped to help them get them what they really need – information about missing family members, replacement of lost livestock and decades worth of accumulated capital, decent work that will remove the necessity for parents to work in the Middle East, better health services for disabled children, help adapting to life after military service, the freedom to return to their own land and a hundred other difficult and important things. Many people also want to be heard and have their losses acknowledged publicly. This last part is something that I am able to help with, facilitated by friends and acquaintances – to be present, too listen to stories, to witness respectfully, to share with friends and occasionally to write about issues that matter to them. This is only a start and itself does not mean much, but I hope that it might form a basis for real relationships that may allow me to play some useful role in the future.
It feels far too early and presumptuous to talk about reconciliation. It seems to me that the desire and means for overcoming anger, animosity and mistrust must come from within each of us as individuals, rather than be transacted at the level of community leaders or national figures (who of course, could set a good example). The experience of being with people who have suffered enormous losses has made me realise that reconciliation is not a destination, but rather a deeply personal ongoing process of transcending and managing painful histories. When I look at those women and men whom I admire deeply for their attempts to put aside their own hurts to relate to those of others – none of them talk explicitly about reconciliation. They just get on with the work of recognising and connecting with the humanity in others, even those whom they have many reasons to dislike or even hate.
I feel that that we cannot afford to hold our collective breath and hope that the wrongs of the past will be resolved by war crimes tribunals, independent panels or government commissions – any more than we can wish the consequences of our violent history to simply fade from memory. Regardless of the outcome and consequences of the vote on the resolution at the UNHRC in Geneva, acknowledging truth and enabling justice are processes that we ourselves must take responsibility for individually. It may only be through this that we might be personally or collectively graced by reconciliation or real peace.
This is a plea for ‘truth and reconciliation’ south africa style. Trouble is much of Sri Lankan media still considers the 2009 massacre a ‘hostage rescue’. Sri Lanka is in quite an Orwellian state and ‘truth’ is at best a punchline to a joke.
Further, the Sri Lankan civil war isn’t some random cacophony of violence. Major acts had orders. The massacre of 600 policemen in the East was ordered by a current govt minister. The rape, torture and massacres of sinhala youth in the 80s and more recently tamils was ordered and allowed to carry on. There were even stories coming out of the camps which the authorities tacitly allowed and subsequently ignored.
Where there are orders and impunity prevails, there should be accountability – otherwise the next time the govt needs to put down a protest movement the same disgusting tools will be put to use.
Regrettably, preventative justice is necessary for Sri Lankans and the other peoples of the world.
agree with almost everything you said. would love to meet you, would love your help, be happy to help you, work with you… How do I get in contact with you?
We, the Sinhalese need to do some soul searching, after all this shame is self-inflicted… Rajapaksa Government lied to me and to all Sri Lankans !!
I did, stupidly, voted for Rajapaksa. I trusted him.
Why Rajapaksa killed so many innocent people to achieve this hollow victory ? What for ?
I did not sign up for this !! Not in my name !!
On many of my travels abroad, Tamils would shun me upon finding out that I’m Sinhalese. Now many Indians avoid me and some are calling me a Child Killer. I did not kill anyone. Sri Lanka Government did. But the blame is on All Sri Lankans…
Dear Ananda,
At an age when life only seems to getting bleaker and bleaker as the days pass by, and the past – even the good bits of it – appears grim owing to what one has seen and been through, I should say that a sentiment like yours provides some hope PROVIDED it can translate into political action.
Else, I can only see hard times for both Sri Lankans and the Tamils.
I do hope your generation atleast does not get blinded by the unjust ideology that led to massacre and emigration of mine.
Dear Ananda
“Why Rajapaksa killed so many innocent people to achieve this hollow victory ? What for ?”
To end a war where innocent people were being used by diaspora-funded LTTE as human shields and child soldiers?
Dear Wijayapala,
“To end a war where innocent people were being used by diaspora-funded LTTE as human shields and child soldiers?”
Do you still believe that MR won the war by killing 8,000 civilians (GOSL estimation) just to save the Tamil civilians being used as human shields and child soldiers? All evidences point to MR won the war to consolidate his power and dynasty building. I know you will support MR as he is the only entity that promotes a unitary state with absolute Sinhala Buddhist hegemony. You will accept this in order to maintain the unitary status of the nation while your so called educating the Sinhala is in progress!
How about if the real death toll amounts to 40,000 +, would you still stand by your above statement? Have you ever wondered as to what had happened to the bodies of the 8,000 that MR has accepted perished?
Dear Burning_Issue
“All evidences point to MR won the war to consolidate his power and dynasty building.”
So you are saying that all the previous leaders had failed to end the war because they were not interested in consolidating power?????
“I know you will support MR as he is the only entity that promotes a unitary state with absolute Sinhala Buddhist hegemony. You will accept this in order to maintain the unitary status of the nation while your so called educating the Sinhala is in progress!”
Why would I want to educate Sinhala people if I support “absolute Sinhala Buddhist hegemony”?????
Dear Wijayapala,
I asked you questions and you answered with counter questions! Please answer the following:
1. Do you still believe that MR won the war by killing 8,000 civilians (GOSL estimation) just to save the Tamil civilians being used as human shields and child soldiers?
2. How about if the real death toll amounts to 40,000 +, would you still stand by your above statement?
3. Have you ever wondered as to what had happened to the bodies of the 8,000 that MR has accepted perished?
“So you are saying that all the previous leaders had failed to end the war because they were not interested in consolidating power?????”
Well; as you know that MR was an outsider and alien in terms of the ruling class of Sri Lanka; hence he needed to build a dynasty in same the mould as the Banda family. The previous leaders surely wanted to consolidate power but they had other means of doing it. They were not unscrupulous like the MR regime. They would not have set up no-fire zones and fired on them; they would not have knowingly fired on the hospitals; they would have massacred most of the surrendering LTTE personnel!
“Why would I want to educate Sinhala people if I support “absolute Sinhala Buddhist hegemony”?????”
Well I gather that your utmost priority is for Sri Lanka to remain a unitary state; MR offers that at a cost, that you can live with though you do not approve of. Land grapping, military siege, armed militias, social and law & order decline you can live with for time being until the Sinhala society is educated! This is what I gather as to what you are about. If I have misconstrued, I take back what I said, but I cannot fathom any other way!
Aruna,
May I suggest you try to translate this into Sinhala and try to get it into the newspapers!
This is a very balanced and rational contribution. Yes, it deserves thorough dissemination in the Sinhala newspapers
Very well expressed. I have talked to the survivors and been part of teams that help them since mid 2010. Getting the article translated in Tamil and Sinhalese, and published in dailies that most of them read may touch those who need to understand what you wrote. They may think about it at least for a few days. A few may spread the word and even a few may act.
Interesting article, but there are points I disagree with this author as seen by one of his paragraph’s which I have qouted below.
While it is conceivable that war crimes took place to varying degrees by the SL Armed Forces in the final phases of the war, I seriously doubt the scale and scope of these allegations as there is simply no comparison between Eelam War 4 and the two JVP Uprisings and the way they were fought.
No one can doubt that the SL Government at the time resorted to brutal measures to suppress the JVP and killed thousands of their fighters to defeat them. But in the 1980s, international humanitarian law and formal rules of engagement in warfare had not penetrated the military. It had very limited rules of engagement and no doctrine that took into account humanitarian considerations in combat. There was also almost no international media coverage, or what was covered was minimal, unlike in Eelam War 4, which had global publicity.
By the mid-1990s onwards, during Chandrika’s reign, the military had been gradually subjected to humanitarian law and human rights and this resulted in the creation of a directorate within the Army especially to adddress this matter. A major development without a doubt. In the military operations of Eelam War 3 there was much greater focus on humanitarian considerations, law and rules of engagement than ever before.
As time passsed, the military in Eelam War 4 was much more discliplined and was an efficient organisation, quite different to the way it was led and the way in which it operated against the JVP. While there is limited evidence that the military killed Tamil ‘civilians’deliberately, in wanton acts of homicide, there is more evidence that points to its fire discipline in combat and the fact the line troops took great risks to help save large numbers of Tamil civilians who were caught in the crossfire.
The author’s critique also does not take into consideration LTTE tactics, the use of human shields and the use of civialians for military purposes, which massively raised the stakes and complicated the nature of the fighting and even slowed the military advance. This tactic ensured that civilians would be caught in the crossfire throughout the last 5 months of the war on a scale not probably seen since either Vietnam or the Second World War. It is interesting that the final No Fire Zone operation took four weeks to capture a territory only 13 kilometres long and about 3 or 4 wide. I reckon the author, who is well intentioned, should consider reexamining his argument on this point and try to understand the key factual turning points in the SL military’s culture which was different from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. But it is a good article and I enjoyed reading it.
“A retired friend of mine in Colombo, having viewed the government’s alternative version of the Channel 4 ‘Killing Fields’ documentary asked me if I really thought that the army could have treated people ‘like that’. It was hard to imagine, he said, that they could have behaved like such beasts. I had gently to remind him that from where we were standing talking on his balcony we could see the spots where the tortured bodies of suspected JVP members had been burned and hung from a lamppost during the terror of 1989. He nodded slowly. The truth of what the armed forces (and armed insurgents) were capable of was already available to him as a Sri Lankan who had lived through an insurrection in his own town.”
Thank you all for the thoughtful and encouraing comments on this article. My writings are often more to work out what I think or feel than truly directed to communicating with others – so it always feels a welcome surprise to receive considered feedback. Apologies also that I’m not very good at replying in forums such as this.
Marty, I agree with you that I haven’t addressed the shifts in the tactices, forms and intensity of violence used by the parties to the conflict over the duration of 30 years – nor the specifics of the insurgent and counter-insurgent violence of the late 1980s. I’m not really equipped to do that sort of analysis. Nor, if I am to be honest with you, am I sure that this is something that makes much sense to me. You may disagree – but to me, the question of reckoning whose tactics were less humane than the other; whose cause or approach was more righteous or justified, seems to lead us inevitably into a sort of downward spiral of argument that is often impossible to resolve. Even in the case of people who were held as human shields, they do not all seem to agree whom they hate more or feel more betrayed by – those who shot at them when they tried to escape or those whose shells/rockets came down on them. Amongst the ranks of both the former members of the LTTE and the SL armed forces there are likely to be similar divergent feelings of justification or responsibility/guilt in relation to civillians who died or were maimed as a result of their side’s or their own actions. When I look at the effects of deaths and serious injury, even those of combatants – whose own histories themselves are often marked with great pain – these are so devastating that they seem to be the only thing that’s truly real or important. At the level of the individual life lost, to those left behind the issue of whether a death was by the rules or not doesn’t seem to make much difference. Faced with suffering that is still evident in some families even 20 years after a loss, political ideology, nations, homelands, security all seem pretty poor justification for what they’ve been put through. I just can’t get past that – and I feel we all bear some degree of resposibility for this, whether we like it or not..
Dear Burning_Issue
“I asked you questions and you answered with counter questions!”
That is because your questions were either loaded or did not make sense. See below:
“1. Do you still believe that MR won the war by killing 8,000 civilians (GOSL estimation) just to save the Tamil civilians being used as human shields and child soldiers?”
Loaded question: your question assumes that every single civilian was killed by the SLA and that the LTTE did not kill a single person. Is that what you believe?
“2. How about if the real death toll amounts to 40,000 +, would you still stand by your above statement?”
Which statement?
“3. Have you ever wondered as to what had happened to the bodies of the 8,000 that MR has accepted perished?”
I assume they were buried or more likely cremated. Do you know what had happened to the bodies?
“The previous leaders surely wanted to consolidate power but they had other means of doing it.”
And as a result, the war dragged on without end, with people continuing to get killed and other people such as yourself remaining silent about it. Do you wish the war would have never ended? What was MR supposed to do?
“Well I gather that your utmost priority is for Sri Lanka to remain a unitary state;”
Actually my utmost priority is for everyone to become trilingual and for the ethnic identities to disappear. I don’t see how that is possible with a devolved system that emphasises differences rather than similarities.
“MR offers that at a cost, that you can live with though you do not approve of.”
That is not true. MR has not repealed the 13th Amendment and so he is not offering anything.
“Land grapping, military siege, armed militias, social and law & order decline you can live with for time being until the Sinhala society is educated!”
First I would recommend reading the following article by Dr Rajasingham Narendran:
http://dbsjeyaraj.com/dbsj/archives/5101
Second I would point out that social/law and order decline is the result of MR/GR, not the unitary state.
Dear Aruna,
This is a profound article and one that really resonates with me. In January of 2012 myself and 4 others from Australia and Chennai, India travelled to Jaffna to undertake some playback theatre training with a small group of young people. I am not sure if you have heard of playback theatre but perhaps you might like to look it up. It is basically a form of improvisational theatre in which audience members are invited to share stories which the actors then perform back to them. As such the form has cathartic properties that help individuals and groups process their stories either personal or collective. Playback is practiced widely across more than 50 countries and has a strong and robust network / community of international practitioners.
The team heading to Jaffna was part of 4 teams working across Sri Lanka, 3 other trainings took place in Colombo, Unawatuna and Hatton. At the end of a week in which these four groups worked simultaneously but separately, all four came together in Kandy for the first ever Sri Lankan national playback gathering where they started to share stories with one another.
It was an ambitious thing to do and of course many experiences of the war were spoken about and shared. Young people from completely different backgrounds in Sri Lanka came to know and understand something of one another when previously they didn’t. Not everything ran smoothly, and I particularly remember one story that left everyone in shock and not knowing what to do or say. However, it was a beginning and it was the type of beginning that you articulate so clearly in your article.
I am not sure what else to say here but I wanted to draw your attention to playback theatre as a form and also to the Theatre of Friendship project as there are plans to develop it further over the coming 5 years. If you would like to talk to me more about it then please get in touch. I have worked in Sri Lanka as an arts practitioner on 3 different occasions, once for 6 months after the Tsunami in 2005 and then again in 2007 and 2012, as such I am developing an ongoing relationship with the country that I am looking to continue in the future. The people I met in Jaffna, Kandy and Colombo were so beautiful and the youth themselves particularly willing to engage in the process of peace and understanding that I am committed to facilitating this in any way I can. I am now undertaking a playback theatre performance in London that will be a fundraising event for the Jaffna group that I met in January. I will be using some of the things you say here in my opening talk on the night.
Yours
Emma
Emma, thank you very much for writing and also sharing details of your work. The work sounds very meaningful, and reminds me of a similar process about a decade ago (revolving around Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed approaches) that brought together people from different parts of Sri Lanka (and of different political persuasions) to engage with one another. It was often challenging and not always successful, but also resulted in some remarkably important friendships and shifts in perspective. I wish you and the groups you work with well, and hope to hear more about the process as it goes forward. Thanks again. TA