Editorial

Amidst the high drama we saw this week in the august assembly called Parliament, with the minority Government desperately trying to ward off a succession of no-confidence motions, the country was at pains trying to resolve how to commemorate the end of a brutal separatist insurgency this month six years ago.

On May 19, 2009, the Armed Forces of this country, together with the Police and the Civil Defence Forces, militarily defeated a terrorist outfit that was ranked “the most dangerous” in the world by the US State Department. This was a time when there were a host of terrorist organisations vying for that title, including al Qaeda. The victory was no mean achievement on the part of the Sri Lankan security apparatus.

Alas, that accomplishment on the battlefield in the war on terror was viewed, in some quarters, with jaundiced eyes; not merely by the vanquished, but also by nation-states which were alienated by the then Government in Sri Lanka. For this, our country paid a heavy price. A resolution at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) hangs over the head of the new Government now like the proverbial Sword of Damocles.

No doubt the proponents of that resolution in Geneva and their new best friend Government in Colombo are looking for ways and means to defuse the situation, if not the resolution. Backed by the sponsors of the resolution, the UNHRC willingly gave time for the new Government to get its act together and begin an internal investigation into the last days of that military campaign in 2009.

But with a General Election now scheduled for September as the President announced to national newspaper editors on Wednesday, coinciding with the UNHRC sessions the same month, how things will pan out is yet to be seen. The political leadership which steered that military campaign in 2009, now bitter and non-forgiving for its defeat at the January 8 election, is bound to whip up the ‘betrayal of the Motherland’ slogan at the forthcoming elections.

The President, again caught between a rock and a hard place, in appeasing the sponsors of the UNHRC resolution on the one hand and not wanting to be seen as succumbing to a sell-out of the country’s Armed Forces on the other, strained to tell the editors that whatever investigations held wouild be under local laws, and so too, the punishment meted out, if any.

At the height of the agitation for a war crimes tribunal — under international supervision — the head of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) which conducted a post-mortem examination on the entire socio-military aspects of the separatist insurgency told the then President to hold an independent domestic inquiry before matters went beyond the Government’s remit and into the international domain. The LLRC chairman was bluntly told that he didn’t understand “politics”.

Several others, including this newspaper, urged the former Government to begin an inquiry that was certain to spin out for some time, and thereby have the protagonist West on board, but again, the then Government would have none of it. That Government beat the odds fighting against pessimism from many fronts while battling the terrorists, yet, it was unable to heal the wounds of war, attrition and suspicion upon defeating the enemy.

The new Government seems to be in a quandary on how to play this out. The confusion shows. Given the fact that it may fall between two stools, it tried, no doubt with all good intensions, to marry the commemoration of the six years of ending the virtual ‘civil war’ dubbed as Victory Day with a Remembrance Day, the former clearly to salute the Armed Forces and the second as a memorial to all those — including the vanquished, who perished in the three decades old northern separatist insurgency; not just those who died on the banks of the Nandikudal lagoon in those fateful days and nights of May 2009, but all those who died in battle and outside; those who were taken into custody and never seen again, those who were victims of artillery fire when taken as ‘human shields’ in the last days and nights of the final battle; those who were victims of aerial bombardments and in bombings of high-rise buildings in the cities, and those who were hacked to death at night as they slept in remote villages; those who were killed in bomb blasts while commuting in buses and trains, young monks and elderly pilgrims, suspected spies, intelligence officers, journalists, politicians, and so many, many others.

Today, the Northern Province, particularly Jaffna, is a hub of activity. The issues, as was seen this week by the hartal in protest of the rape-murder of a schoolgirl, heinous as it was, are social issues. No one dared hold hartals then against the Security Forces or the Police or the murders of northern politicians and the forced abductions and child-soldiers. As long as these protests are peaceful, the Government must allow the people of the North to vent their frustrations by taking to the streets. Stoning of court houses is not peaceful agitation, but the Government must take cognizance of the fact that those youth remanded are being unwittingly groomed for future radical leadership by the baptism of a jail term.

The North is limping back to a semblance of ‘normalcy’ in the traditional sense. With it come reports from the North of the re-emergence of the hierarchical caste system, which originally triggered an extra parliamentary movement in the North, the drug menace among unemployed youth, student unrest and other social ills.

The North, the East and the villages that bordered these two provinces bore the brunt of the armed conflict since the late 1970s up to 2009. Colombo and many other parts of the island were not immune to the death and destruction that came with the ‘war’. Every nook and corner of this island-nation was soaked with the blood of Sri Lankans.

The war is over. It is now time for reconciliation and to heal the wounds. The country was re-united six years ago. Trains and buses ply between the North and the South linking the once divided country. We can witness on our television sets the turmoil, and the carnage that are taking place right now in Ukraine, Syria in parts of Africa and in West Asia (the Middle East) where civil strife and human suffering are rampant. We, too, had our share of it. We need to count our blessings for what we overcame.

The rifles and the bayonets were held upside-down at the solemn ceremony in memory of the fallen soldiers, 27,000 of them who made the ultimate sacrifice to ensure this country remained a united nation. They did their duty by their Motherland. Now, it is back to the politicians — North and South — not to mess it up again.