Editorial

Last Wednesday was a busy day at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva. Sri Lanka was not on the agenda but figured anyway, seemingly in passing and in a significant new framework. Separately, yet another report on the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories was released the same day.

This time the UN Human Rights High Commissioner’s reference to Sri Lanka was not in the familiar tune of accountability, reconciliation and disappearances, but in a new framework of ‘human rights economy’. He chose to highlight that despite the “improved macroeconomic situation” in Sri Lanka, austerity measures are affecting the poorest and already marginalised groups and that poverty rates have doubled between 2021 and 2023.

As part of its new ‘human rights economy’ focus, it appears Geneva is staking an intrusive claim to monitor and comment even on Sri Lanka’s provision of financial resources for food, health, social protection and poverty alleviation. Decades before the ‘human rights economy’ was articulated in Geneva, Sri Lanka had placed human development at the core of its priorities, resulting in human development indicators not just on par with but even beyond more economically advanced countries.

Debt-distressed developing countries from the Global South with limited fiscal space for social protection measures as a result of the global crisis will now face scrutiny not only from Washington by the IMF but also in Geneva by the UNHRC. Geneva must place its ‘human rights economy’ within the framework of the right to development and related economic, social and cultural rights and not as yet another instrument for intrusive monitoring of the Global South.

In its statement to the Council, the Core Group (including the UK, the USA, and Canada) that is hounding Sri Lanka in Geneva on its human rights record in a deliberately unfriendly gesture chose to legitimise the UN Human Rights Commissioner’s unexpected and controversial ‘report’ issued (by clearly politicised coincidence) on the anniversary of the defeat of the LTTE on May 19.

The same day this week came a UN report on ongoing Israeli war crimes in Occupied Palestine. This was greeted by deafening silence from this very Core Group on the genocide taking place. Nothing showcased better the textbook double standards of the West. What was good for Sri Lanka was not good for Israel.

The UN report, chaired by none other than Navaneethan Pillay, the South African jurist and one-time UN Human Rights High Commissioner, betrayed traces of her own double standards. While slamming Israel for committing crimes against humanity, including the extermination of civilians, the report, however, balanced its findings by saying Hamas and Palestinian groups were also guilty of war crimes.

During her tenure as the UN High Commissioner, she went light on LTTE atrocities in Sri Lanka. The irresistible conclusion that can be drawn from her definitive condemnation of Hamas’ actions on October 7 last year as being war crimes, but the murder of Presidents, Prime Ministers, Foreign Ministers, Tamil politicians, Buddhist monks, and innocent civilians by the LTTE only ‘may’ constitute war crimes, displays, in the least, a lack of judicial integrity.

As if to mock her report, Israeli ‘Defence’ Forces launched a fresh military offensive into another sovereign UN member-state, Lebanon. And that seems like a blind spot for the Core Group on Sri Lanka. It is this sanctimony that Sri Lanka’s governments—present and future—will have to navigate through in this imperfect world.

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Indian warning: Not to cross red lines

Hardly had the ink dried on the Narendra Modi Administration taking oaths on the spacious lawns of India’s Rashtrapathi Bhawan for a third consecutive time, it lost no time in dispatching its Foreign Minister to Sri Lanka to deliver the message that ‘continuity’ is the name of the game and ‘connectivity’ with Sri Lanka remains high on its agenda.

It was this minister who pitched for greater Indian investments in Sri Lanka when this country’s then Finance Minister went to Delhi on bended knee for a loan in December 2021. It was his geopolitical thrust to catch up with early Chinese inroads exerting a disproportionate influence on the Sri Lankan economy during the Mahinda Rajapaksa years.

During his whistle-stop visit on Thursday, Lankan politicians were either too polite, too embarrassed, or too meek to raise the Minister’s recent expedition to win Tamil Nadu votes for his leader by pulling the non-issue of Kachchativu out of the archival woodwork of the South Block in Delhi. Similarly, the continuing issue of illegal fishing by Indian fishermen in the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait, arguably the biggest present-day irritant for Sri Lanka with India, seems to have been mentioned only in passing during the bilateral talks. The local Fisheries Minister, who says he will stop this poaching come hell or high water, was merely an attendee at the courtesy call of the visiting minister on the Prime Minister.

And so, the minister came, met and concurred with the local political elite from across the board (other than the JVP) to ensure that there was a red line to be drawn and not to be crossed regarding Indian projects in the country—elections or no elections in Sri Lanka. That no harm will come to India’s geopolitical interests in Sri Lanka from local politicians hankering after every vote, especially in the North and the plantations in the Central Highlands, seems to have been guaranteed, and genuine opposition to Indian economic expansionism, if any, has to come from professional bodies, civil society and public-spirited citizens.

Just as the visiting minister met with the cross-section of Sri Lankan political leaders without any hindrance, Sri Lankan leaders must also reach out beyond the Central Government in New Delhi to the Chief Ministers of India’s southern and eastern states whose economies are ‘taking off’ for mutually beneficial exchanges.

The ‘connectivity’ with India must not be limited to mega-Indian investments in Sri Lanka that have geopolitical flavouring or merely to export electricity to India. This process must include trade, educational, health, tourism, cultural, religious, and sporting ties. It must be a two-way street. In this ‘Neighbourhood First Policy’, Sri Lanka has to look after its side of the deal and negotiate its benefits and not capitulate as the weaker partner, either due to its own lack of negotiating skill or the lack of political will, or both.