The day before, the day after

18 March 2012 06:30 pm

The past month and more has witnessed the Sri Lankan delegation going out on a high-pitched campaign for the support of individual member-countries all across the vote. With the run-up to the vote already here, there is little left in the Sri Lankan armour to launch a surprise pincer, as in May 2009, or recreate the magic of the 2010 session. In 2009, as may be recalled, some of the proposers of the EU-sponsored resolution ultimately did not vote for their own resolution.

As the sponsor of the resolution, the US is yet to be seen as entering the campaign-mode. Washington is often seen as being thorough in such matters. Having initiated the move without direct provocation, it remains to be seen if President Barack Obama would entertain any self-defeating reversal in an election year. A few telephone calls from the highest levels of US leadership to counterparts in voting member-nations at the UNHRC is a possibility that the Sri Lankan delegation in Geneva should be prepared for.
The US draft, as presented to the UNHRC, has hidden the sting of internationalisation of the Sri Lankan issue in a few amended words and phrases. Washington wants the largest possible acceptance of the resolution among the member-nations. Translated, it can mean greater consensus -- of lack of confidence in the toothy first draft gathering the numbers. The question is where from there will the US go and which way will it turn from here, between now and the vote. Sri Lanka in principle is opposed to the internationalisation part in any form. Post-war, the Government has consistently maintained that a solution to the ethnic issue would have to be found through domestic processes. Fair enough, considering that past efforts involving facilitation of all kinds by friendly nations from near and afar had failed to resolve the issue to anyone’s satisfaction.
Whatever the result of the Geneva vote, the Sri Lankan State would have to spread out its stocks on the domestic process. Including friends, nations of the world are tired of Colombo’s commitments to means and methods to a political solution. Promises in this regard have remained as promises, nothing more.
Post-vote, nations that had voted for Sri Lanka this time would want to know what their vote had meant to resolving the ethnic issue. Their future support for Sri Lanka on this issue or others at UNHRC or in other global forums will be conditioned by what Colombo does back home, the day after. They would not want to feel cheated, like many others in the past.
In the first round, supporters and opponents of the US resolution at the UNHRC would want Sri Lanka deliver on its purported promises flowing from the LLRC report. The latter is a creature of Colombo’s initiative, or counter-initiative to the Darussman set-up of the UN chief.
Voting members at Geneva differ only on the ‘technical assistance’ from the international body that the draft proposes, and not necessarily to the need for resolving the ethnic issue or their perceived expectations flowing from the LLRC Report. Their perceptions need not be the same as what Colombo would perceive of them on a later date.
Differences in such perceptions are behind the international community (read, even the West, exclusively) holding Sri Lanka ‘accountable’ on the question of a post-war political solution. Colombo should have avoided being seen as a slippery customer. It can play on the ‘Cold War’ sentiments of either side of the imaginary divide of those days continuing to come to its rescue.There is lack of understanding of the ground realities in Sri Lanka in the comity of nations. It has cut either way and continue to do so for some more time. At some point, people on either side of the emerging international divide will begin asking questions. Neither of the stake-holders back home have any satisfactory answers, if nations began asking specific questions.
Such questions need not be about what they had done, or not done in the past -- ‘accountability’ as the world understands. The US draft is silent about the non-State actor in this regard, but when questions begin to be asked, it would be more about the future than about the past. Here, the initiative rests with the State, and it has to move out of the PSC process, quick and fast, which the international community believes is only the latest in a series, and not meant to be an end in itself.