Violence in civil war is horrendous and destructive. Most of its victims are civilians. Violence against civilians in such wars serves the tactical purposes of warring parties in inducing civilian compliance, control, subordination as well as deterrence. May 18, 2009 Sri Lanka saw the end of a 26-year-old protracted civil war. This war has taken over 100,000 Sri Lankan lives leaving thousands destitute. It has also left over 400,000 people displaced. Overall, the war has affected the entire population of 20.1 million by severely downplaying the economic growth and development of a country which was once considered as the ‘Best Bet’ (Kelegama, 2006) in post colonial South Asia.
However, during the final phase of the military struggle to end the war, and after, a series of allegations has been levelled against both protagonists, namely the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) for subjecting civilians to a number of atrocities. Now that the war is over and the LTTE leadership has been annihilated, these allegations are mainly directed at the GoSL while the role played by the LTTE in the war has almost become invisible in the international reports and the media. A spate of human rights violations and war crimes allegations culminated by the recent report from the International Crisis Group (ICG) has led the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to hasten an independent inquiry into war crimes in Sri Lanka.
There is no accurate account of the number of civilians killed in the Sinhalese insurgency and the Tamil armed struggle even though many organizations claim various figures. However what can be accounted for is the violence these conflicts have emanated within the country that undermined its prosperity as a nation. During these political conflicts, protagonists sought compliance from the civilians by instigating violence. Crimes came in the form of massacres, individual killings, extra –judicial killings, rape, torture, extortion, child recruitment, forcible eviction from lands and mass displacements. Soon after the Sinhalese insurgency a number of mass grave sites were discovered. The violence that was instigated between 1971 and 2009 in Sri Lanka did not leave any ethnic or religious group unscathed.
Now it appears that a number of human rights organizations and the international media have saddled up to pass a negative prerogative judgment over the actions of the GoSL during the final phase of the war. Moreover it is observed that allegations made, bear very distinct ethnic overtures. Many of these reports reiterate that during the war, crimes were committed against Tamil civilians and not Sri Lankan citizens.
Amidst these accusations, the present day GoSL has been called for by the international community to answer questions about its conduct during the final phase of the war. One may argue that international humanitarian law does not apply to insurgencies such as the Sinhalese youth movement but in war situations. However it does not mean no atrocities were committed against civilians at the time as well. Kalyvas (2005) referring to Tishkov argues that human rights organizations tend to over stress minority rights that in the process they overlook the victimization of the majority. He identifies it as partisan biasness that distorts a clear understanding of violence. The war in Sri Lanka victimized the entire population of the country.
International Humanitarian law which has been drafted under the Geneva Conventions applies to both International armed conflicts (IAC) as well as Non International Armed Conflicts (NIAC). A special protocol (Protocol 2, 8th June 1977) in addition to the Geneva conventions of 1949, reinforcing the protection of victims of non international armed conflicts has been brought forth. This protocol specifically states the terms of its invocation, in order to prevent it from affecting the sovereignty and the legitimacy of a state when addressing internal conflicts that challenges its territorial integrity. These conditions have been stated under two clauses in the article 03 of the protocol;
1. Nothing in this Protocol shall be invoked for the purpose of affecting the sovereignty of a State or the responsibility of the government, by all legitimate means, to maintain or re-establish law and order in the State or to defend the national unity and territorial integrity of the State.
2. Nothing in this Protocol shall be invoked as a justification for intervening, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the armed conflict or in the internal or external affairs of the High Contracting Party in the territory of which that conflict occurs. (ICRC, 2010)
Considering the enormity of the crimes committed by the LTTE over the past 26 years on Sri Lankan soil, and the economic and political down turn it has caused to the country, the present GoSL by the time it took over office had a legitimate right to find means of ending the armed struggle either by peaceful or military means. This legitimate right was reinvigorated when the leader of the LTTE Velupillai Prabhakaran issued an ultimatum to the newly formed government;
‘Our people have lost patience, hope and reached the brink of utter frustration. They are not prepared to tolerate and wait any longer. The new government should come forward soon with a reasonable political framework that will satisfy the political aspirations of the Tamil people,’ the LTTE leader declared. ‘If the new government rejects our urgent appeal, opts for a hard-line position and adopts delaying tactics, we will, next year, in solidarity with our people, intensify our struggle for self-determination, our struggle for national liberation to establish self-government in our own homeland’ (TamilNet,2005).
This ultimatum challenged outright the sovereignty and the unity of the country. However attempts were taken by the GoSL to enter into negotiations with the LTTE soon after, but failed when they declined to lay down their arms and enter into negotiations.
The majority of the Tamil population living in the North under the LTTE control, followed the leadership of the LTTE voluntarily but sometimes by force. This occurred due to several reasons. First, most of the families had members attached to the LTTE. Second, since the LTTE took over control, the people in this region were isolated from the rest of the country and therefore were unable to comprehend the changes that had taken place in Sri Lanka since the 1983 riots. Third due to the past violence they experienced under the hands of the GoSL forces, in terms of attacks and military bombardments, people of this region endorsed the actions of the LTTE thinking that they can protect them from the GoSL forces. In 2003 during the ceasefire, Pongu Thamil celebrations witnessed over 150,000 people gathered in Jaffna to endorse the declaration of self determination and the leadership of the LTTE. (TamilNet, 2003). Analysing civil war violence Kalyvas argues that;
“When the population has the option to join or assist existing rival actors, its reaction to violence must be factored in because it is consequential for the outcome of the conflict” (Kalyvas, 2005).
Here he brings in an example from Vietnam where villagers of Duc Lap in South Vietnam became supportive of the Vietcong because they experienced violence from the Government troops in the past. This factor has also been reemphasised during the War in Afghanistan. It is observed that some civilian groups in Afghanistan consider the presence of NATO troops as a threat to them similar to the Soviet occupation in the 1980s (Reuters, 2009). As a result, civilian support to the Taliban in various areas stands as a barrier to winning the war. The same thing happened in Sri Lanka soon after the ethnic riots in 1983. Tamil civilians lost faith in the GoSL and the LTTE gained momentum as their saviours. The LTTE was able to further strengthen themselves before the civilians with the help of the Tamil Diaspora.
The harsh reality of a civil war is that at times one wouldn’t know how to identify a non-combatant from a combatant and a victim from a victimizer. Sri Lanka experienced numerous suicide attacks in the capital Colombo as well as in other parts of the country over the past 26 years. The suicide bombers that had come to these areas passed through many military checkpoints disguising themselves as civilians and had gone dormant before acquiring their targets. Given these circumstances it would not have been impossible for the LTTE to infiltrate refugee camps. Thus rigorous screening of incoming refugees was carried out by the GoSL forces to prevent infiltrations. Consequently, many human rights organizations as well as the international media started to direct scathing attacks against the GoSL for the situation in the refugee camps and limiting NGO operations.
The ICG report accused the GoSL forces for deliberately attacking civilians, hospitals, and the UN humanitarian efforts during the war. The propensity to make a very accurate attack on a targeted location done from a distance always carries a risk. Very frequently such risks have led to civilian casualties in war. Such mistakes have been made in the past by NATO forces equipped with weapons of much more sophistication and high level of accuracy compared to that of GoSL forces. In a more recent report NATO forces were accused of killing 33 civilians during an air strike (Businessweek, 2010).
. The decisions taken by the GoSL forces at the time of war cannot be considered as a failure to respect human rights of individuals. The war was fought for the betterment of a nation. Rigorous measures had to be taken under a number of constraints and stakes on the table with tactical objectives in mind to counter possible enemy tactics. As such, political analysts and human rights organizations as well as other political NGOs such as the ICG have fundamentally failed to take into account the tactical environment that the final phase of the war took place in Sri Lanka.
Governments in the past both during the colonial and the post colonial eras have used violence against civilians during war. (Carines, 1997). Violence in war inevitably causes civilian casualties.
According to a study conducted by Les Roberts at John Hopkins University, approximately 100,000 civilians, half of them being women and children, were killed during the coalition invasion in 2003 in Iraq (Guardian, 2004). According to a separate report approximately 3000 civilians were killed during the Ariel bombing conducted by NATO forces within a six month period in Afghanistan (Herold, 2002). Human Rights Watch 2008 (Reuters, 2008) reported that both Russian and Georgian troops in conflict, attacked, killed and wounded a number of civilians in towns of Gori and Tskhinvali. A latest wikileak video (Guardian, 2010) showed a deliberate attack on civilians in Iraq by a US military helicopter which killed two reporters from Reuters much to the embarrassment of the US government. A similar video footage of the Israeli attack on the Mavi Marmara freedom ship carrying civilians to Gaza with relief aid has been recently released to the public (Al Jazeera,2010). Thus countless such reports of victimization of civilians in war have been reported in the past and present, while thousands of others go unreported to the public. But the majority are rationalized by respective governments in the North as “collateral damage”. To date the world seemed to have endorsed them without much protest.
Whatever it is called, violence against civilians whether it is in war or not has to be repudiated and condemned. However the actions recorded in the ICG report against the GoSL forces in particular, cannot be equated to ‘war crimes’ witnessed in countries like Liberia, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Bosnia or Myanmar; nor can they be labelled as deliberate attempts to violate human rights of civilians. Thus whether an international inquiry into the final phase of the Sri Lankan civil war is needed is debatable for its validity and rationality.
(The writer is a researcher at the University of Birmingham) |
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