Imperative for the community to regenerate itself economically & socially & to identify short term & long term strategies towards achieving dignity!

The Relevance of Human Rights A Lankan Perspective

by Prof. Rajan Hoole
Social Justice and Human Rights

From the earliest days of Left activism in Lanka, there was also a deep consciousness of the class nature of the ‘rule of law’. We could easily lose sight of the fact that a vast number of people from the poorer strata of this country never had access to justice. Consequently most Left critiques, especially from those who aimed at total social transformation, ignored the importance of the human rights struggle.

This changed when J.R. Jayewardene’s regime from 1977 moved to suppress the workers’ struggles in a ruthlessness manner. In facing up to Jayewardene’s increasingly authoritarian rule and the suppression of trade unions, many Left activists advanced democratic and human rights as an important aspect of their struggle for social emancipation.

A number of movements were formed. Among them were the Movement for the Defence of Democratic Rights (MDDR) and the Movement for Inter-Racial Justice and Equality (MIRJE). Among their activities were campaigns for the release of political prisoners, which meant close engagement with the law. Jayewardene’s suppression of workers and Tamils and his cynical dalliance with the JVP, finally making them scapegoats for the 1983 communal violence rendered the existing vacuum explosive. The JVP used the oppression and even ethnically charged rhetoric, to muster rural youths for its “revolution”.

The result was massive bloodletting and unprecedented human rights abuses from 1987 to 1990, once more raising new challenges for human rights communities the world over on dealing with non state forces.

This was an experience that showed how over-determination of ethnicity in political life enthroned a state of permanent impunity to the detriment of social justice and ethnic equality.

Tamils and Human Rights

What happened in Tamil society, in response to this attitude of the South, was a similar frivolous approach of debasing the law and playing with fire. Its campaign against Alfred Duraiyappah as a traitor, for the small prize of capturing the Jaffna parliamentary seat, provided the cue for the rise of the LTTE which began with his assassination.

Murdering ‘traitors’ became a means to cheap popularity for the incipient militant groups. Inspector Gurusamy, who admitted before the Sansoni Commission that he was forced to be party to the radio message that ignited the 1977 riots, was shot dead by militants the following year. He had merely done the work of a servant and was an important witness. Killing him was meaningless and irresponsible.

Thus on the one hand the Government arrogantly made a virtue of acting outside the law. On the other, Tamil nationalists supporting the separatist project insisted that there was no prospect of justice from the Sinhalese state and either supported or turned a blind eye to the killing of police officers. They ridiculed attempts to challenge the State through appeals to the law. Parallel trends in the North and South reinforced one another.

When Jayewardene criticised the TULF’s silence on the killing of policemen, the TULF was cornered. They were being overtaken by the monster they had spawned. In early 1982 the next step in degeneration came when the LTTE killed Sundaram, a key figure in its rival the PLOTE. A few months later the PLOTE murdered two LTTE sympathisers. Not quite knowing this, I called at the house of my friend, the TULF MP for Jaffna, at dusk. He came to the gate a long while later, apologised, spoke of his own fear and said, “The fellows have gone mad.” Seven years later he was killed by the LTTE. The rest is history.

Human Rights acquires an

ambivalent reputation

Our induction into human rights activism came with different individuals, among whom was Dr. Rajani Thiranagama who had been active in diverse ways, coming together at the end of 1986.

Having failed in efforts to mitigate the effects of the LTTE’s refusal to respond to the December 19th 1986 (Chidambaram) proposals and continue the war at enormous cost, it became our lot to experience relief at the coming of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF), and then despair and destruction when the LTTE began an insensate war with the IPKF.

We believed that the only course open to us was to tell the whole truth and face the consequences. We authored the Broken Palmyra, frequently by candle light, after regular interviews with victims.

Our common position born of experience was that it was meaningless to criticise the governments of Sri Lanka or India, without questioning what happened among us and what we did as a people.

When in the middle of 1988, there was a call by a section of academics in the South to form the University Teachers for Human Rights (UTHR), in response to the effects of the JVP insurgency; we found that we had been moving in the same direction.

Several of the academics in the South too felt that they must challenge both the Government and the JVP. We began issuing our reports under the name UTHR (Jaffna). The national UTHR became paralysed after some months when one section tried to push it in a pro-JVP, anti-IPKF direction. Prof. H. Sriyananda who was co-chairman of the UTHR was of a very clear mind that the UTHR should be meticulously impartial in its reporting and continued to be a good friend of ours. Thanks to the political base we had because of the wider involvements of Rajani and some others, we were able to withstand pressures from the combatant parties to manipulate us. Our fundamental standpoint was the people’s interest. From this standpoint we took a strong stand against the politics and methods of the other actors on the scene. Even in exile we remained part of a wider, virtual political community of like minded people on issues, new friends, old friends and those with whom we had earlier differed.

There were other developments which gave human rights an ambivalent reputation. The SLFP in 1988 tried to ride to power on the back of JVP terror. The JVP, after leading it up the garden path, dropped the SLFP rudely and then targeted its members.

JVP terror forced all political parties to rely on state protection and many cooperated with state terror. When some SLFP politicians took up human rights, mainly targeting the UNP government, it degenerated into a game of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. That too was a logical consequence of Sinhalese chauvinism. The human rights slogan became a weapon against the UNP and aided Chandrika Kumaratunge’s election as president. Not surprisingly her Commissions of Inquiry into violence during the JVP era were seen as a dishonest and partisan endeavour and evoked widespread cynicism about human rights itself. The guilt was all over. The result did much harm in making peace without human rights seem acceptable, even if illusory.

In this context, while the West-initiated, Norway-facilitated peace process had many flaws from the start, there was reluctance on the part of civil society activists to criticise it. Since the process would temporarily stop the war; they hoped the LTTE might in the meantime be tamed through pure appeasement. This meant turning a blind eye to political killings by the LTTE and enhanced conscription of children, using the access provided by the peace process. Neither had they, after many years of encounters with the LTTE, done their home work.

Those who knew the LTTE better were clear that the peace process was doomed and would give discredited Sinhalese chauvinist politics a new lease of life. This is where we are today.

Ironically, it is the chums of one time human rights champion Mahinda Rajapaksa, who in his time lobbied all the well known human rights organisations in the West, who should take up cudgels against local human rights advocates as agents of the West. These advocates, though threatened regularly by the President’s cronies, have spoken out boldly, but without going for where it really hurts. There has been a spate of human rights violations since the public execution of the five students in Trincomalee on 2nd January 2006. There were the horrendous killings in Vankalai and Allaipiddy. But local groups made almost no impact. Little is on record about the host of terrible violations by the Government and the LTTE during the recent war.

Challenges Ahead

We presently have two contestants for the presidential election. Both have appalling records and hold out no hope of improving the state of human rights or taking meaningful action against past violations. Going by the past record, the tendency in civil society would be to throw principles to the wind and opt for patently ill-fated pragmatism, where they would have no influence over what follows.

The end of the war provides an opportunity for removing ethnic over-determination from our political life and to redirect our energies towards the imperative of reforming the state and revamping its institutions, providing appropriate political and constitutional arrangements to remove conflicts that have dogged us. It however looks as if this opportunity will be missed, leading to manifold challenges before the human rights community. In the South, human rights activism is failing to build broader movements and is hoping for a change of the government in power as a lever to promote human rights. This course has repeatedly failed.

The Tamil community has been through a very destructive phase lasting the best part of three decades and is in a state of paralysis. When the politics of the South shows no prospect of changing course, the Tamils as a people need to do a serious reappraisal. They cannot go on blaming Sinhalese politics, because the community’s future is at stake. It is imperative for the community to regenerate itself economically and socially and to identify short term and long term strategies towards achieving dignity.

This must go hand in hand with convincing the Sinhalese masses that their well being is intertwined with respecting the rights of minorities and the inviolability of their political and cultural space.

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