By Rohana R. Wasala

Speaking at the 60th Session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland, on September 8, 2025, Sri Lanka’s Minister of Foreign affairs, Foreign Employment and Tourism, Vijitha Herath, made an unequivocal pledge on behalf of his country, ‘to advance the rights and well-being of all Sri Lankans through our own domestic processes’, thereby rejecting any kind of external intervention or mechanism in investigating alleged human rights violations; all patriotic Sri Lankans must have heaved a sigh of relief, before applauding him. 

This was because, in the lead up to the Geneva session, there were growing fears among concerned citizens of Sri Lanka that the government they elected was going to give in to undue UN coercion  and betray the military and political leaders who saved the country from terrorism sixteen years ago. The menacing, prejudiced behaviour of visiting UN Human Rights Commissioner Volker Turk towards the end of June did nothing to allay these fears. Vijitha Herath concluded his detailed statement with the following words:

The Government is fully cognizant of the responsibility that accompanies the unprecedented mandate it has received from the people, and is committed to fulfilling their aspirations of a just, fair and prosperous society. We sincerely believe that external action will only serve to create divisions, thereby jeopardising the genuine and tangible national processes that have already been set in motion.  The Government is opposed to any external mechanism imposed on us such as the Sri Lanka Accountability Project.

Therefore, Mr. President, my earnest submission to members of this Council, its observers and all stakeholders is to collaboratively join hands with the government, to deepen our mutual understanding and extend your support to Sri Lanka. Our genuine and sincere approach, which is visible, needs to be reciprocated with deeper understanding and noticeable appreciation. We urge that all of you assist us in seizing this historic opportunity to advance the rights and well-being of all Sri Lankans through our own domestic processes.”

But his agreement with the OHCHR on the appointment of a so-called ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ must be reconsidered, because it will be incompatible with the independent stance he’s expressed. Herath’s aides have done a professional job making his speech shipshape. It contained a fairly satisfactory response to Volker Turk’s mostly platitudinal remarks introducing his OHCHR report. Turk touched on some key areas that his report set out to address including ‘delivering accountability, fundamental legal and institutional reforms and eliminating the discrimination and division that have poisoned politics for generations’ (an unsubstantiable allegation). 

A highlight of evidence of ‘the continued suffering of human rights violations and abuses’ that he claimed he witnessed was a mass grave site at Chemmani, but social and political activist of Jaffna Arun Siddharth (a Tamil) pointed out several times that this was a traditional burial place where bodies belonging to ordinary dead residents of the place, and those killed by the LTTE and some by the army in clashes were interred. This gives an idea about the seriousness of the UNHRC boss’s evidential proof of such allegations. 

But he said, at the end of his remarks: I encourage Sri Lanka to seek international assistance with the exhumation of mass graves and other investigations”. What bunkum!

He concluded ‘Together the international community can support Sri Lankans to escape from the twin threats posed by persistent impunity and deep inequality’. I think Turk got a satisfactory answer from Herath. 

But this is not going to be the end of our problems with the UN. Perhaps, a backward look is in place at this point.

In an X post uploaded on June 1, 2025, Volker Turk wrote:

For many, the freedom to be yourself and follow your heart is woven into daily life and goes unnoticed.

For others, it’s been hard-won-with courage day after day

#Pride celebrates how far we’ve come and moves us forward to a world where everyone can live with dignity, equality and pride.

There is nothing more human than who we are and who we love.

He must have realised by now that, as far as Sri Lanka is concerned, this is the least of its problems. 

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk of Austrian nationality, a lawyer by profession,  was on a three-day visit to Sri Lanka from June 23 to 26, 2025. If my memory is correct, he is the fourth UN Human Rights chief to visit the island since the end (in May 2009) of the armed Tamil separatist rebellion. The then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, South Korean citizen, Ban Ki-Moon, who had earlier been serving his country as a civil servant and a diplomat, rushed to Sri Lanka immediately after the crushing of the three decades long separatist terrorism by the Sri Lankan armed forces, for a two-day visit on May 22 and 23, 2009; his indecent haste was a sign that the UN did not welcome the defeat of separatist terrorism. His apparent bias was an early sign of the poisoning of general UN opinion about Sri Lanka’s successful response to the Tamil separatist terror campaign through both disinformation and misinformation by the so-called diaspora Tamil separatist lobbyists. 

The same anti-Sri Lanka (to be more precise, anti-Sinhala Buddhist majority of Sri Lanka) bias was more pronounced in the second UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit Sri Lanka, Navanethem Pillay. Her visit was from August 25 to 31, 2013. The South African jurist of Indian Tamil origin, popularly known as Navi Pillay, visited the island nation at the invitation of the then incumbent president Mahinda Rajapaksa who, in the first flush of victory, was confidently enjoying the undisputed approval and popularity that he had earned  among all Sri Lankans by eliminating mindless LTTE terrorist violence, irrespective of their different ethnicities, religious identities, and political loyalties. Rajapaksa decided to invite the influential UN official (Navi Pillay) to visit Sri Lanka, most probably because he believed that she, coming from Hindu Tamil origins, would be especially empathetic to the culturally kindred Sinhalese Buddhist majority and the Tamil Hindu largest minority of Sri Lanka  to appreciate the truth that the domestic conflict was really between the legitimate government of Sri Lanka and a group of rebels who were resorting to armed violence in order to carve out a separate state within its territory, but NOT between the Sinhalese and Tamil ethnic communities. Demographically, the Sinhalese are the majority, nevertheless a global minority whereas the Tamils are a minority within Sri Lanka but belong to a global majority. This is a truth that was hidden by a thick veil of anti-Sri Lanka false propaganda disseminated by the defeated Tamil separatist rump. 

The following year (2014) saw what could be called the UN-led selective witch-hunt, based on unsubstantiated war crimes allegations, against the hierarchy of the Sri Lankan security forces that brought an end to nearly three decades of armed Tamil separatist violence on May 19, 2009. (Incidentally, Australian media reported June 29, 2025 that Navanethem Pillay, aged 83, had been selected for the Sydney Peace Prize for her contributions to accountability and human rights and that she would be felicitated in Australia in November this year (2025). 

The third UN High Commissioner to visit Sri Lanka after the military victory over terrorism in 2009 was Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, a Jordanian diplomat, who came in February 2016, just over a year after the nationally uncalled for, foreign engineered regime change of 2015. According to the spokesman for the Federation of National Organizations, Dr Wasantha Bandara, the Yahapalana government installed through foreign intervention passed seven laws that pushed forward the unilateral UN war crimes allegations process against some selected war winning Sri Lankan military leaders. For that diabolical scheme to be complete, only two more parliamentary bills remain to be passed, as Dr Bandara points out: a bill for establishing a Truth Commission, and an Independent Prosecutor’s Office. The current JVP/NPP administration is required to pass those two final laws.     

Among the top UN panjandrums who visited Sri Lanka during the past sixteen years, Turk easily takes the cake for the most outrageously undiplomatic conduct towards a member country of the United Nations. 

In 2009, we were all hopeful that after the elimination of separatist terrorism, a prosperous and peaceful country would emerge. Instead, Sri Lanka began to face increasing destabilisation schemes launched against it  by meddlesome  geo-political grand strategists (especially US and India working in collusion) apparently under the aegis of the UN, which was created after the end of World War II to stop threats to international peace and security, not to meddle in the domestic security concerns of small vulnerable nations like ours. Superpowers try to get involved in the internal affairs of Sri Lanka in order to promote their own national interests in their home countries and to pursue their economic and military agendas in the geopolitically sensitive Indo-Pacific region where the island is located. 

These attempts have markedly intensified over the years since 2009. America and India find a common enemy in China. They want to contain the rising Chinese influence in the region. Sri Lanka seems to be caught up in the crossfire between China on the one side and America and India on the other. The Tamil diaspora benefits from the vote bank politics exploited by unscrupulous local politicians of those international community  countries. They persecute Sri Lanka  by raising non-existent  issues, such as alleged human rights violations by the Sri Lanka Army during the last phase of its war on terror, domestic communal divisions or instances of religious disharmony. They pretended that the war was fought between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils, whereas the truth was that the legitimate government army fought against a bunch of separatist  terrorists who massacred members of all communities in the name of their macabre goal of creating a separate state on Sri Lankan soil, while the ordinary Sinhalese and Tamil civilians lived together in accustomed peace, along with members of other ethnic communities everywhere in the country, such as Muslims and Burghers.

There was no alienation between the Sinhalese and the Tamils, to put it differently, between the Sinhala speaking community and the Tamil speaking community, which includes Muslims as well as Tamils. But the powers that be conjured up the chimera of ‘reconciliation’ to justify their meddling in Sri Lanka’s internal affairs. At the end of ‘reconciliation’, we have a politically, economically and socially destabilised country, which is a far cry from where, according to Michael Naseby (Sri Lanka: Paradise Lost Paradise Regained, page 167), 

‘PEACE’ was achieved on 18th May 2009 when the Tamil Tigers were finally defeated and nearly 300,000 human shield hostages were rescued into government hands and looked after. Peace is the overwhelming need of the country and the first priority mentioned in a recent poll. There have been no bombings since May 2010 (sic) (still the position at the time of writing in 2018). People of all ethnic groups travel the length and breadth of the country by day or night without fear.” 

Post-Geneva, let’s restore the reconciliation that we achieved on our own in 2009 with sparing external help, and that the international wreckers of our peace set out to destroy soon after.