Shenali D Waduge

Sri Lanka’s policy makers need to approach the issue of an investigation whether it is international or domestic by taking stock of the legalities and mandates legally in place. No inquiry can be limited to a period omitting the origins and terror unleashed over decades. No inquiry can omit to name and shame all parties that were connected to that terror directly & indirectly just because they are steering the investigation’s mandate and jurisprudence. None of the tribunals held thus far have provided solace or reconfirmed the truth as the sufferers know it and no amount of money can compensate for any loss except the realization that there is a root to the terror that prevails and it is not the counter measures for terrorism that needs to be pursued but the roots that create, cause and fan that terror. Unfortunately these parties are in the driver’s seat of all international investigations!

Questions need to be first answered

• Why should only the last 3 months be investigated ignoring 30 years – how fair is it on the villagers/villagers who were the first victims of LTTE terror and thereafter the scores of civilians who became cannon fodder for LTTE?
• Should investigation not include how armed militancy first started? Who trained, where they were trained, who funded and who supplied the arms & ammunition? Will India allow an investigation to name India as the guilty party? Will the West, Western-funded NGOs/Charities and the Church admit to aligning with the LTTE? Will those in powerful positions wish to have their links disclosed through such an investigation & what will be the repercussions?
• Why have no nations taken action against the LTTE fronts banned since April 2014 all of whom are steering the lobbying for an international investigation against Sri Lanka? Why have no investigations been launched overseas to ascertain the links to LTTE and the flow of legal and illegal cash across nations for the LTTE to purchase arms and carry out propaganda?
• When the LLRC was launched after much pressure by the international community and selected recommendations have been implemented and completed why is there a requirement for another domestic inquiry? The appointment of a Presidential Commision to investigate missing persons was a follow up of the LLRC however to date there are less than 20,000 missing reported 5000 of them being missing soldiers. So if 40,000 had died why have their families not lodged their names with this Commission?
• In reading the newly released US Law of War manual it is baffling to undersand on what grounds the US steered the resolutions against Sri Lanka for the manual’s interpretation easily finds LTTE guilty of keeping civilians and that The party that employs human shields in an attempt to shield military objectives from attack assumes responsibility for their injury, provided that the attacker takes feasible precautions in conducting its attack” Moreover The Defense Department apparently thinks that it may lawfully kill an unlimited number of civilians forced to serve as involuntary human shields in order to achieve even a trivial military advantage. Thankfully, this is not the policy that the GOSL or the Sri Lankan Armed Forces adopted and that is why the conflict closure dragged till May so that close to 300,000 Tamils could be saved and that cost over 2500 soldier deaths.   http://www.lankaweb.com/news/items/2015/08/23/sri-lanka-war-crimes-farce-us-law-of-war-manual-on-human-shields/

Sri Lanka’s politicians are advised to refrain from indulging in petty politics. We need to always be mindful of sticking to the legalities and the mandates and provisions that interference into the affairs of a foreign nation.

1. The Panel of Experts appointed by the UN Secretary General did not have the official endorsement of the UN General Assembly nor the Human Rights Council or the UN Security Council. The 3 member panel was appointed in a personal capacity to inform the UN Secretary General of the last 3 months of the conflict in Sri Lanka.
2. The UN Secretary General had no right to release it to public even as a leak. The POE should not have been even indirectly submitted to the Human Rights Council. The PoE is not an official document. It was never placed officially before the Human Rights Council and tabled and Sri Lanka was never given an opportunity to officially respond to it.
3. However, this PoE document became the basis for the call for international investigations in 2012, 2013 and 2014. Given that 1, 2 is illegal 3 calling for international investigations become illegal. Principally the resolutions authorizing international investigations are illegal. A grave injustice to Sri Lanka has occurred.

Can lobbying and money influence investigations?

A trend has surfaced where lobbying and money has come to influence decisions and decision makers and laws introduced to hide these. The PoE’s ‘witnesses’ are sealed for 20 years. We really don’t know whether they are witnesses even. After 20 years whats the point in knowing the truth!

• PoE report compiled with help of Tamil Diaspora linked to LTTE (refer How Moon Panel gathered war crimes info revealed’ Shamindra Ferdinando, Island 20 April 2012)
• When the OHCHR investigation was launched in August 2014, in November an unrehabilitated LTTE cadre tasked by the TNA to get signatures on blank complaint forms was arrested while he was gathering signatures. Some forms had the same signature multiple times. It was only after this was brought to the attention and given publicity that the OHCHR office revealed they had mechanisms to detect false submissions. Why had they not revealed that false submissions are being sent before the arrest and the discovery that bogus submissions were being sent? How do we know that the OHCHR investigators are building their report based on lies submitted? No investigation has been launched regarding this. The OHCHR has evaded to respond to the possibility that scores of submissions may be nothing but lies. Moreover, the arrested LTTE cadre had revealed that these signatories were informed that they would receive monetary compensation from the UN for their testimony. This means there is a lobby encouraging people to lie promising them they will be rewarded monetarily. (ref Ministry of External Affairs, 5 Nov 2014 media statement). The OHCHR meek response was to accuse the GOSL attempting to ‘obstruct’ the independent investigation (Zeid condemns persistent disinformation designed to discredit UN – 7 Nov 2014). How ridiculous is this statement on account of the evidence shown to them via the arrest and the blank forms as evidence. At no point did the OHCHR head deny the allegation. The said cadre was also seen with USAID official.
• A closer look at statements issued by the UNSG, OHCHR heads Navi Pillay and Prince Zeid it is easy to conclude that their statements infer guilt upon the GOSL before investigations are even over which goes to show that having concluded Sri Lanka as guilty party the effort of the investigators appear to ensure that the frills are filled to seal that guilt. This is a grave injustice to a UN member nation. The credibility of the UN is put on the line.
• The bias of the 3 panelists MARZUKI DARUSMAN, STEVEN RATNER and YASMIN SOOKA chosen by the UNSG is revealed when in 2012 New York Times published an article co-authored by them titled ‘Revisiting Sri Lanka’s Bloody War”. In their 2011 report they concluded ‘credible allegations’ but their article speaks of ‘we found credible evidence”  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/03/opinion/revisiting-sri-lankas-bloody-war.html?_r=0
• Yasmin Sooka is an employee of the EU, she is publishing reports that are funded by think-tanks aligned to West’s regime change. She is in the Advisory Council of the Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice and joined an international petition in March 2014 with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Bishop Joseph Rayappu, R. Sampanthan, CV Wigneswaran and 35 others jointly addressed to the UNHRC to set up a Commission of Inquiry to investigate war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Sri Lanka. She was a guest speaker at the UNSC 1373 banned Global Tamil Forum who even referred to her as a ‘comrade’. http://www.lankaweb.com/news/items/2014/10/27/is-yasmin-sooka-biased-and-prejudiced-against-sri-lanka/
• Many of the others pointing fingers at Sri Lanka beginning with Gordon Weiss the former UN spokesman in Colombo has been caught red-handed for dabbling in numbers of dead to kickstart his writing career. Others like Frances Harrison seem to think they can pluck numbers from the sky and claim people to be dead and write books referring to ‘witnesses’ without being able to actually provide evidence of 40,000 being actually killed. She is also leading a campaign against Sir Desmond de Silva on account of his conclusions which she knows would undermine the bogus ‘genocide’ ‘fictitious dead’ being promoted as part of a well-funded propaganda campaign.

It is in the backdrop of these illegalities and irregularities and bizarre precedents for which a small country such as Sri Lanka has no defense and a handful of leaders are too scared to assert their country’s sovereign rights that we are seeing inconsistencies taking place making a mockery of the entire UN system. When a government is not favourable to Western geopolitical interests it cannot be subject to successive illegal UN resolutions to completely change the drum beat when a regime change installs a government favourable to the West. This reality cannot be ignored in viewing the current stand by US which despite its super power status is just another UN General Assembly member.

What we are not being made to understand is that just because a government favourable to US interests sits in power the US-backed resolutions are ready to compromise with a joint US-SL domestic inquiry which if we are not naïve should be interpreted as an inquiry with Sri Lanka taking instructions from the US to implicate and send to prison all those who stand in the way of US interests.

War Crimes Tribunals

In 2002 the International Criminal Court was created. The court has jurisdiction over a national of a State party or the Security Council can grant jurisdiction. ICC functions when a state is unable” or unwilling” to act itself. Sri Lanka is not a signatory to the ICC.

The Ad hoc tribunals are established by the UN Security Council under its binding powers and have compulsory jurisdiction over primacy

1. International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg following end of World War 2 – Victors justice, crimes of allies completely ignored.
2. Ad hoc Tribunals – 1993 Yugoslavia & 1994 Rwanda (are guilty of being too expensive, too remote and too slow) political manipulations in Yugoslavia tribunal – http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/trials-and-tribulations-politics-justice-icty /
3. States have referred Uganda, Congo and the Central African Republic to the ICC
4. UN Security Council has referred Darfur to the ICC.-  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52442-2005Jan31.html
5. UN & Sierra Leone agree to Special Court to deal with aftermath of war
6. UN & Cambodian authorities have established an extraordinary chambers’ under Cambodian law with international support and assistance to prosecute those responsible for crimes between April 1975 and January 1979 during Pol Pot regime – the court is yet to function fully.
7. Special Panel East Timor – funding difficulties
8. Kosovo War & Ethnic Crimes Court – staffed by international and nationals

Why has the UNSG not called for PoE’s on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and all other nations were hired mercenaries are functioning as ‘rebels’ and Western nations are openly providing training and supply arms to expand their Western powers over Middle East, Africa and now Asia? Why have the war crimes, illegal invasions, occupations and foreign take over of national assets not subject to similar tribunals and investigations? Why is it always non-whites that are being indicted?

On the light of these realities the calls for a domestic inquiry jointly with the assistance of the US becomes another joke. Firstly because the GOSL must give reason as to why the domestic inquiry already in place the LLRC is going to be thrown away to launch another domestic inquiry to please the US. Moreover, we are yet to be given the answers to the legality of the UNSG using his personal report as a foundation for resolutions and most importantly where is the credible evidence that people actually died … at least the skeletons must be around? Just producing fancy reports, funding documentaries to introduced well trained ‘witnesses’ does not equate to 40,000 or 100,000 dead to make Sri Lanka’s armed forces guilty of war crimes and commanding officers guilty of giving orders. None of this fanfare can also erase the fact that physically there are 300,000 Tamil people who were saved as against the 40,000 presumed to have been killed… isn’t that really ironical! If Sri Lanka followed the US Law of War manual even the 300,000 may not be alive!

Shenali D Waduge