By Patsy Robertson
When Commonwealth leaders gather in Colombo on November 15 for their biennial meeting, they will be sending a message to the human rights advocates worldwide who campaigned so strongly against this event. The message is that there is no better way to solve any problem than to sit down and discuss it with close friends and family face-to-face. For the Commonwealth is a family of nations and its ethos is to do what it can to help solve the problems which all nations and peoples face.




Campaign against Colombo
In the campaign against the Colombo Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), the charge was laid by the world’s leading human rights organisations, that by attending leaders were condoning the war atrocities, some said genocide, which they averred had taken place as the decades-long war against terrorism was finally ended in a bloody confrontation between the government and the rebel movement, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

But what the campaigners overlooked was that the Commonwealth is in effect a family of states and peoples who made a decision a half century ago that they wished to maintain contact by meeting regularly to discuss  problems and how they can be alleviated. Below the level of leaders, there are meetings of ministers who have a role to play in the development of their countries –foreign, finance, health, education, women, youth to name a few. Judges and magistrates as well as parliamentarians meet to share their knowledge and expertise of the law – which in the majority of member state, is still based on English Common Law.

The binding ethos of this association of states is that when a member is in trouble, it knows that through the Commonwealth network, the possibility for discreet assistance is at hand.  However, when a member is deemed to have flouted some of the most basic tenets of the association there is a mechanism, the Commonwealth Ministerial Action group (CMAG), to discuss the situation and in extreme cases, agree to the  suspension of membership.  This has happened in a number of cases and it should be noted that the Commonwealth is one of the few – if not the only – international grouping which has the power to suspend or expel a member state.

Suspension or even expulsion, however, does not mean that the Commonwealth turns its back on the country that has erred. There is still a concerted effort made to help ensure that the reason for suspension is tackled – whether it’s a question of mediating between aspirants to power or even assisting with the establishment of institutions to promote the understanding and support for democracy and the rule of law. The skills needed to bring countries back into the fold have been honed in the Commonwealth Secretariat for decades when it first tackled the problem of military regimes in a number of member states.




Bringing ‘healing touch’
So, there really is nothing new or strange about the decision of leaders to stick to their original decision and meet in Colombo. The meeting, though really too short now at two and a half days to enable this diverse collection of leaders to  build up the close relationships which prevailed in earlier years, will still enable them to get to know each other better in this setting than when they attend, say, the UN General Assembly.

Despite the fact that the campaign against the Colombo meeting was led by the Sri Lanka Tamil diaspora in Canada and Britain, with the support of the world’s leading human rights organisations, it does not follow that all Commonwealth leaders have followed the controversy closely.  Based as the campaign was in the developed world, there is a suspicion that not many of these organisations would have sent material directly to all the leaders attending.  

The impression was that they were concerned to keep the Prime Ministers of Britain and Canada away and if that goal was fulfilled, as it has been with the Canadian Prime Minister’s early announcement that he would not attend, then the campaign would be seen to be successful  and the meeting  would be of no consequence.
The fact that there are 53 member states eligible to attend, that it has hardly ever had a full roll-out of  leaders and that the agenda will include matters which they want to discuss among themselves, including some of the big economic, financial and trade issues of the day, counts for nothing to those who have campaigned against it.
The Commonwealth led the world in developing the informal consultations at the Retreat, where leaders meet in private to talk in groups among themselves about the problems they face. As the late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau of Canada told his fellow leaders when they met in Ottawa in 1973,  the value of the CHOGM was  that it provided an invaluable and unique opportunity for them to discuss the problems which  all leaders faced. Even today, when the meeting has become so short, they still appreciate the fact that they meet as comrades who can talk frankly among themselves.

This is not true of other international groupings. There is more to the meeting in Sri Lanka and that is why leaders or their representatives are coming to Sri Lanka, to ask questions, to seek solutions and to bring to an important founding member “its healing touch”.


 (Patsy Robertson was a journalist in Jamaica before she joined the Commonwealth Secretariat at its founding in 1965 and handled its media affairs for the next 28 years, ending as Director of Information. During that time, she was conference spokesperson for a number of CHOGMs)