Sri Lanka Peace Chief writes
to the Economist
Secretariat for Coordinating
the Peace Process (SCOPP)
20th May 2008
The Editor
The Economist
Dear Sir
I read with much sadness your article of May 10th about Sri Lanka entitled
'The War Dividend'. It is not like the Economist to engage in one-sided
reporting but, as on the last occasion on which I took issue with you,
with regard to flawed reporting about military action in the North of
Sri Lanka, I fear that your reporter has been misinformed. On that occasion,
if you recall, he cited the Sri Lankan Monitoring Mission, and investigation
revealed that its spokesman may have misled him while denying this to
the Head of the Mission. The result was that the spokesman was removed
from his position, and over the next six months relations between the
SLMM and the government continued smooth and productive.
I do not know whether this article was written by the same reporter,
but if so perhaps he should get in touch with government spokesmen too
before he pronounces. Certainly there are distinct inaccuracies in his
presentation, some of which seem to play into the hands of the Sri Lankan
opposition, others into the hands of terrorists. For instance he claims
that 'The government will even pick the east's chief minister, either
Mr Chandrakanthan or a defector from the SLMC, M. L.A. Hisbullah. Before
the poll, it promised the job to both.'
The reason the government will choose the Chief Minister is that they
both contested through the government party. It did not promise the
post of Chief Minister to both, it promised it to one or the other,
depending on which one secured more preferences. That commitment was
widely publicized beforehand, and was fulfilled inasmuch as Mr Chandrakanthan
secured more preferences than Mr Hisbullah.
Sadly there were attempts after the election to reduce the question
to one of ethnic groupings. This problem had arisen beforehand because
the major opposition party, the UNP, had no significant Tamil politicians
on its lists, but had an agreement with the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress
that its leader should be Chief Minister if their alliance won. This
introduced a
communal element into the electoral campaign, ie Muslims being told
that they had to vote for the UNP alliance so as to stop a Tamil Chief
Minister.
Fortunately a substantial number of Muslims were more sensible than
to fall for this line, perhaps because the LTTE issued a directive that
the government was to be defeated. The idea of a Muslim Chief Minister
owing his election to terrorists doubtless contributed to Muslims supporting
Mr Hisbullah, who incidentally hails from the East unlike the UNP candidate
for Chief Minister, Mr Hisbullah's erstwhile leader Mr Hakeem. This
may help to explain what you found curious, that 'in an election marked
by widening ethnic and communal tensions, the TMVP's candidates won
in several areas dominated by Sinhalese and Muslims.' That ridiculous
statement ignores that there were no TMVP candidates, since all candidates,
Tamil and Muslim and Sinhala, stood on the government slate, and that
candidates chosen on preferential votes in the three districts were
perfectly in congruence with predictable patterns of voting. Your failure
in this context to note that the UNP slate won in Trincomalee District,
from which Mr Hakeem was contesting, would seem culpable, were it not
that selective reporting is often based as much on ignorance as policy.
Unfortunately, given the efforts of the UNP to divide the East on ethnic
rather than political considerations, the choice of a Chief Minister
became an issue, and even within the government there were pressures
to renege on the commitment on the grounds that there were more Muslims
than Tamils amongst the government's elected MPCs. The government resisted
these pressures, which was vital since had it not done so the UNP would
doubtless have combined with the LTTE to declare that the Tamils had
been betrayed. Had your reporter then fallen for that line, it would
have been claimed that international condemnation justified continuing
terrorism. That, in effect, is what such flawed reporting leads to.
Your sentence 'Defying international condemnation of its brutal methods,
and a 2002 ceasefire that was officially scrapped in January, Mr Rajapakse's
United People's Freedom Alliance (UPFA) promised to bring development
and devolution to the "liberated" places' is a classic example
of the smuggling in of falsehoods. What are the brutal methods that
were condemned? What is the international condemnation that was defied?
What constituted the defiance? How can a ceasefire be defied? Why should
the word 'liberated' be in inverted commas, but not 'Defying',
'international', and 'brutal'?
If you are talking of the liberation of the East, there was no brutality,
indeed there were no allegations of brutality except with regard to
one incident in which civilians were killed, following retaliatory fire
which fell on a refugee centre. That was the only justification presented
in a lengthy emotive Human Rights Watch Report for its allegation that
there had been indiscriminate attacks on civilians. However, immediately
after the incident the government pointed out that its fire had been
based on mortar locating radar, and the HRW report gave details of armed
LTTE cadres moving around the camp and of bunkers having been dug there.
Certainly when terrorists use human shields governments should hold
fire,
but in this instance the Sri Lankan army had no idea this was happening,
and assumed they were firing at mortars located through radar.
Significantly I have not seen in similar reports by you on such incidents
elsewhere adjectives such as brutal, along with assertions of international
condemnation, presumably because unless condemnation comes from particular
Western agencies it is not deemed international.
In other respects the campaign in the East was a model, with the employment
of tactics that ensured LTTE fighters could flee the area so that there
was limited loss of life even of combatants. That is what makes operations
in the North more difficult, but the Sri Lankan government will face
such challenges since it believes that minimizing suffering for civilians
is a paramount obligation. Had your correspondent bothered to study
records of for instance airstrikes (170 over the last 18 months with
even allegations of civilian deaths being confined to 6), he would not
have engaged in simplifications that can only play into the hands of
terrorists. And you fail to note that, even having tied one hand behind
its back, the government has liberated significant areas of the Mannar
District, including the Madhu Church precinct, in which the LTTE had
stockpiled weapons.
Though they were spoiling for a fight, in which they could claim that
the sanctuary had been violated, careful surrounding of the area while
leaving a line for retreat ensured that the LTTE withdrew, after which
the area was handed back to the Church.
Elsewhere you claim that the government informally reignited the civil
war, 'partly in response to terrorist attacks by the Tigers'. Is your
reporter not aware that, between 2002 when the Ceasefire Agreement was
signed, and 2007 when the SLMM had to stop issuing formal rulings, the
Tigers were ruled as having violated the CFA nearly 4000 times, the
government just 351 times? Under the CFA the government was entitled
to engage in defensive action, and this is what it started to do in
August 2006 after two massive attacks, in the East and the North respectively,
nearly led to the loss of Trincomalee and Jaffna. Before that, following
the election of this government, the LTTE had so egregiously violated
the CFA that the SLMM, in January 2006, issued a report that questioned
whether, given repeated violations of the CFA by the LTTE, it existed
any longer. Instead of giving credit to the government for its restraint
however, and its success in getting the LTTE back to negotiations (only
to find them withdrawing with hardly any notice), you and others with
short memories continue to blame the government, which has manifested
a restraint seen nowhere else in the world in dealings with terrorism.
Then, in common with a few select Western funded agencies, you imply
that the TMVP is still a vicious militant group and that it is responsible
for the human rights violations of which the government is accused.
In fact the TMVP does not function in the North, where a few former
militant groups, which entered the democratic process in 1987 with the
Indo-Lankan Accord, found themselves decimated after the CFA when the
then government disarmed them. Those groups came back with a vengeance
in 2006 when the Tigers began to be weakened, and the government was
not able to restore the rule of law expeditiously. Had you looked at
the statistics however you would have noted that in 2007 the number
of allegations of human rights violations declined considerably. The
melodramatic HRW report for instance, giving details of 97 disappearances,
records 96 that are over twelve months old, and just one in June 2007.
The situation has improved, and the government is committed, in part
through rapid restoration of empowerment through a democratic process,
to restoring the rule of law as expeditiously as possible.
It is also strange that, even though this government has held an election
for a Provincial Council in the East and appointed a Tamil Chief Minister,
even though it has established a Task Force for the Northern Province
headed by a Tamil Minister, you assert that 'Unsurprisingly, many Tamils
think the government is trying to subjugate them, not win them over.'
The LTTE clearly does not agree with you because, as your own article
shows, it has done its best to disrupt this process. What you did not
mention, doubtless because it happened after you had gone to press,
is that the Legal Advisor to the head of the Northern Task Force was
killed on May 13th, when she had gone to Jaffna to visit her sick mother.
He himself has escaped several assassination attempts, the most recent
a suicide bomb carried by a disabled woman who tried to see him in his
Ministry. A lesser man would have given up, or tried to work with the
LTTE, as other Tamil moderates did, but that is the road to totalitarianism.
This government will not betray the moderate Tamils, and it is heartening
that, after years of believing that the LTTE were the sole representatives
of the Tamils, the Norwegian facilitators have now begun to talk to
Tamil moderates, whom they had had to ignore until a year ago. Unfortunately,
or should one say unsurprisingly, all this is ignored by
the human rights groups you talk to, and the diplomats you cite, who
happen - coincidentally or unsurprisingly or unfortunately - to fund
those particular groups. It is they who have propagated the idea of
brutality on the part of a government, CPA for instance having set up
a media outlet that refers to 'the President and his coterie of murderous
brutes', with funding it claims comes from Canadian and Australian development
aid (Australia has denied this). In such a context it is very strange
to find public and strident assertions that media freedom is under threat
in Sri Lanka.
Finally, the best comment on the government's attempts to restore pluralistic
democracy come I think from the attempts of some of these so-called
human rights activists to stop the Eastern local government elections
that were held in March. They wrote then that 'Though weapons
are currently only visible in Batticaloa in the hands of the military,
there is a deep, widely held conviction that armed groups have not permanently
disarmed….An observer could be forgiven for thinking that the holding
of elections every few months might actually mitigate human
rights violations in the east'. Despite this they demanded that the
elections be stopped forthwith.
The government did not give in to this preposterous demand, and it
will not give in to further demands by unelected, unaccountable forces
to stop the progress of democratic pluralism. The situation may not
be perfect, but it is much better than it used to be when the LTTE held
sway. Whilst Sri Lanka welcomes criticism with regard to facts, and
assistance to improve a difficult situation, it will be not swayed by
crude criticism based on unwarranted preconceptions. We are prepared
to engage in discussion anytime with anyone, and it is a pity that the
Economist should continue so selective in its sources, so determined
in its denigration of a state dealing more successfully with terrorism,
with displacement, with reintegration of former militants, more successfully
than many others.
Yours sincerely
Prof Rajiva Wijesinha
Secretary General
Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process
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