NPC eclipsed by TNA dogma - Editorial

The resolution that was adopted in the Northern Provincial Council calling for an international investigation into the alleged violations of human rights and international humanitarian law during the last lap of the war has triggered a debate in the South over its legality. But what matters most is not the legality of it, but the shadow it has already cast over the much needed and much talked about reconciliation among the various communities in the country.

The resolution may be legally valid so long as it is just an expression of opinion and unless the Council did not reach out to the UNHRC or any other member of the international community to sell it or it did not espouse in one way or the other the concept of secession, like the famous resolution adopted by Vardharaja Perumal’s North East Provincial Council in 1990. But it has already reached the people of the South with a grim message, that would have further vindicated the suspicion in the minds of many of them on the NPC in particular and on Tamil politicians in general.

The Council seems to have mixed its priorities up with those of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), the political party that runs the council. However, even the TNA had been evasive in this matter on an earlier occasion. The party was planning to go to Geneva in order to canvass for one of the two resolutions on Sri Lanka that was moved by the US at the UNHRC, but rightly abstained from doing so at the eleventh hour citing the ground situation, in other words due to the fear that it might have some sort of bearing on the reconciliation process.

There is a popular argument that the accountability is an inevitable ingredient in the reconciliation recipe, which is generally logical and thereby acceptable. But it is contentious that the accountability extracted through a coercive process such as an international investigation would serve the purpose, since the process itself would need a long time during which many harrowing incidents would be revisited.  

On the other hand, going by the attitudes of the apologists of the so-called international investigation on violations of human rights in Sri Lanka, it is apparently not going to be a probe into the atrocities allegedly committed by both protagonists of the armed conflict in Sri Lanka, in spite of their hollow claims that both sides violated human rights and international humanitarian law. Nor would it cover the incidents took place before the years 2008 and 2009, during which a large number of civilians were killed on buses, trains and in many villages by the LTTE.

Not a single foreign leader or diplomat or official of the UN bodies, including the UNHRC has so far approached any Tamil civilians in the Wanni to be acquainted as to who or what compelled the civilians in the Wanni to be entrapped in a small and ever shrinking land area in Mullaitivu in the years between 2007 and mid- 2009. Nor has such a foreign dignitary ever reportedly questioned a Tamil civilian as to whether the LTTE used the entrapped people as human shields. Nor have these aspects been addressed by the NPC resolution either, apart from its movers’ attempt to include the terms such as “genocide” which is highly contentious in the Sri Lankan context. Even Chief Minister C.V.Wigneswaran had expressed his reservations on this term.

Hence a lopsided investigation by the government or by an international tribunal would not bring in reconciliation. The support by the NPC for such a lopsided international probe would also be a disservice to it. Government’s failure to address the issue candidly would not justify the NPC’s action.