Leaders of North and South should think afresh - EDITORIAL

Like a ritual, the United Nations Human Rights Council has been issuing reports annually on the human rights situation in Sri Lanka since 2012 while in some years adopting resolutions on the same, expressing displeasure over the commitment of the Sri Lankan government to implement the recommendations of those reports and the resolutions. 

The Sri Lankan government too, like a ritual, has been rejecting the observations of those reports and the resolutions while making halfhearted attempts to implement the recommendations of them. 

The Tamil politicians, on their part, have been rejoicing every year over each of those observations and recommendations, while repeating a set of demands to implement an international mechanism for accountability for human rights violations and war crimes including civilian deaths and enforced disappearances committed during the war between the armed forces and the LTTE, to implement a mechanism to find out the fate of those disappeared during the same war, to release the remaining political prisoners and to release the lands belonging to the Tamil people in the North which have been occupied by the armed forces during the war.

Also, they have been making the same demands with respect to the resolution of the ethnic problem – to merge the Northern and Eastern Provinces and to implement a federal mode of administration in Sri Lanka, instead of the current unitary state. They have been placing these demands in every local and international forum they have been attending for nearly fifty years, since the mid-seventies. 

However, things have moved only by millimeters towards the resolution of the problem during this more than half a century during which lives of two generations in the Northern and Eastern Provinces have been turned upside down. Tens of thousands of people from those provinces perished in the war along with a similar number or little less than that from other provinces. Closely-knit bonds of thousands of families were shattered due to displacements within the country as well as migrations to far-flung corners of the globe. 

For the international community, this matter is not something that prompts them to take drastic measures as the Sri Lankan government is not going to disturb their world order. Many world leaders are concerned about Tamils in Sri Lanka just because there is a considerable number of Tamils in their electorates. 

India has almost given up the Sri Lankan Tamil problem since it no longer threatens its position in the region as it did during the Cold War and Tamil Nadu no longer agitates as it did during the separatist war.  India’s External Affairs Minister Dr. S.Jaishankar the then Indian Foreign Secretary told this by implication to EPRLF leader Suresh Premachandran in February, 2017. He said much water had flowed under the bridge since 1987 when the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord was signed and advised the Tamils in Sri Lanka to use the windows of opportunity that have been opened recently. 

Successive governments since the end of the war have been dragging their feet on the issues raised by the Tamil leaders and the UNHRC, by way of repeatedly appointing commissions and committees. Interestingly, a committee on past commissions and committees was also appointed in January, 2021. After much haggling an Office of Missing Persons (OMP) and an Office of Reparation were established during the Yahapalana Government but they are being accused of functioning at a snail’s pace. Despite so many commissions on missing persons having been appointed for the past three decades, not a single person disappeared in the South or North was located.  

Fifteen years have passed since the end of the war but the much sought-after reconciliation has thus far been elusive and is set to remain a mirage at least for another decade, given how politics in the North as well as the South is being shaped. Leaders of either side of the ethnic divide are concerned about their electorate and not worried about other’s concerns. The annual controversy over the commemorations of people killed in the war is a best case in point.  

This situation is continuing as leaders on either side are not prepared to think afresh. Real reconciliation could only be achieved through a genuine retrospection and a frank commitment to admit the blunders of the past, while respecting the other’s concerns by both sides.