Editorial

It was then the British Channel 4 ‘exposé’, and now it is the Al Jazeera interview that first roasted the Armed Forces and now a former President. In the process the local media also gets blamed for the lack of investigation skills and interviewing prowess for some to whom ‘anything foreign is nothing like it’.

The Channel 4 documentary was debunked for containing fake video clips, but it was taken seriously by the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to crucify those who defeated terrorism through an armed uprising demanding a separate state. Now comes the Batalanda Commission report, dusted from the presidential archives or wherever it was and produced in Parliament, the outcome of the interview. It has become the flavour of the week.

For some time now, the Western nations behind the UNHRC resolutions against Sri Lanka for alleged violations of international human rights law were being asked why they were only concerned about killings and disappearances during the northern separatist insurgency. Why, they have been asked, are they not equally concerned about the disappearances and killings during the southern insurgencies that preceded and later overlapped with the northern insurgency?

Read with the Al Jazeera interview of former President Ranil Wickremesinghe, given that the audience at that show was packed with anti-Sri Lanka, pro-Eelam diaspora elements in the UK, it is reasonable to question if there is a bigger agenda involved in dragging the southern insurgency into the public domain and into the international debate on human rights excesses in Sri Lanka. The Southern insurgency made its recent Geneva appearance in an unsolicited report by the High Commissioner for Human Rights in May 2024, a report strongly rejected by the Wickremesinghe Government.

Also, who gave the questions and the Batalanda dossier that were coincidentally on the laps of the interviewer and a selected foreign panellist of the interviewer?

Initially, the Government thought manna had fallen from the heavens when the interview was aired. A knee-jerk reaction followed. The fallout was too good a chance to miss a political opportunity to pass, to nail any ideas floating around of a return by Wickremesinghe, who had been directing irritating barbs at the ruling party from outside the political ring. The precedent of 2022 was too close to forget. Any thoughts of a comeback had to be nipped in the bud; and neutralised. A local government election was on the horizon, and an emancipated mainstream Opposition needed to be further ground to dust. That is politics.

But in the process, was a can of worms going to be opened, like old wounds, and was the Government opening itself up to be hoist on its own petard?

The Batalanda Commission was a political instrument, and at least one of its commissioners’ political bias was well known to at least the legal fraternity at the time. The legality of the fact-finding report outside the Evidence Ordinance are matters for would-be prosecutors and defence attorneys to thrash out if it comes to that stage. Politically, however, the Government will have to make a call if it wishes to take that route because the report itself is replete with the circumstances that led to a military crackdown on a savage insurgency unleashed by the JVP post-Indo-Lanka Accord and on an anti-Indian imperialism platform.

The JVP shed that image as an armed revolutionary party, and the new crop of leaders wisely rebranded its political and economic ideology to a more people-acceptable social-democratic party. It evolved from its outdated Marxist economic philosophy and is inclined to be IMF-friendly. Its trade name was switched to the NPP, and its trademark to the compass from the bell.

Fast forward to this month in Geneva and London: at the UNHRC in Geneva, the UN High Commissioner’s oral update on Sri Lanka contained, for the first time, an intriguing reference to ‘prior insurgencies’, which “must be thoroughly investigated, justice served to victim, and perpetrators held accountable”.

It is easy to join the dots between this and the pre-arranged resurrection of the Batalanda Commission report by the well-known faces of the global anti-Sri Lankan mafia at the Al Jazeera interview in London.

However, the ruling party’s strategists must be warned: with their loudly proclaimed focus on human rights and accountability based on the ‘B’ report (conveniently timed ahead of local council elections), they are wading dangerously into a largely forgotten past in which they played a brutal role themselves on the subject of human rights. Past lists containing disappearances caused by the JVP are on record with the UN. The cacophony related to ‘past insurgencies’ which now compete daily for print and screen space in Sri Lanka includes testimonies, witnesses and victims who suffered at the hands of the then JVP.

Can it be mere coincidence then that the interpolation of ‘past insurgencies’ at the UNHRC came on the cusp of a JVP electoral victory in Sri Lanka? It was clearly ‘work in progress’ to internationalise the southern insurgencies and not allow a JVP government to escape human rights accountability issues by saying they had nothing to do with the northern insurrection.

Will the Government truly want to revisit that era when its predecessors were engaged in brutal human rights violations themselves that extended to the boycott of presidential elections through violent means? Merely saying “sorry” for the past might not wish its ghosts away.

The Government must remain vigilant that Sri Lanka is a case study of the ‘globalisation’ of domestic politics on the human rights front, feeding the careers of Geneva’s UN officials, the global (i.e. Western) human rights liberals and their local collaborators as well as the various interests of the Sri Lankan diaspora, Tamil and Sinhalese. Most domestic twists and turns of the last decades have been played out in Geneva—its three-decade struggle against terrorism, the recent economic crisis, its so-called human rights dimension, its yet-to-be-defined ‘economic crimes’ and ‘accountability’ for corruption, the Easter Sunday attacks … and now ‘prior insurgencies’.

It was observed in this space earlier this month that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights himself raised the alarm that realpolitik and national interests are taking precedence over agreed norms, values and institutions on human rights ‘built painstakingly over decades’, being dismantled by its very architects.

We asked against this background, who in this glass house world dares to take the lead in throwing stones at human rights and accountability in Sri Lanka?

Let it not be the Government itself. The Batalanda report joining the list in Geneva will surely not augur well for the JVP/NPP. In these undemocratic global parliaments, the JVP-NPP Government does not enjoy a 2/3rds majority to control the outcomes.