Tamil Justice

New York Times -Sri Lanka’s Choice, and the World’s Responsibility

By CHRIS PATTEN

Pity the poor Sri Lankan voter. As presidential elections loom on Jan. 26, the public is faced with a choice between two candidates who openly accuse each other of war crimes.

The current exchange of charges and counter-charges between retired Gen. Sarath Fonseka and President Mahinda Rajapaksa must be particularly confusing to those Sri Lankans who consider both to be war heroes rather than war criminals. Many from the ethnic Sinhalese majority feel that, regardless of the human costs in the last months of the long-running civil war that ended last year, both leaders deserve credit for finally finishing off the terrorist Tamil Tiger rebels.

With the Sinhalese nationalist vote thus split, the two candidates are focusing their energies on winning the votes of the country’s minority ethnic Tamils — which is surely one of the stranger political ironies of early 2010. After all, both General Fonseka and Mr. Rajapaksa executed the 30-year conflict to its bloody conclusion at the expense of huge numbers of Tamil civilian casualties. More

International Crisis Group - Testimony by Andrew Stroehlein, International Crisis Group’s Communications Director, to the European Parliament Subcommittee on Human Rights, 1 October 2009.

Thank you, Madam Chair, for offering Crisis Group the opportunity to present our assessment of the situation in Sri Lanka today.

Since the end of the war and the defeat of the terrorist Tamil Tigers, the government of Sri Lanka has been imprisoning without charge over a quarter of a million ethnic Tamils displaced by the conflict. The state has locked them in internment camps in the north of the country. The camps are surrounded by barbed wire, and as an incident just this past weekend in Vavuniya demonstrates, the Sri Lankan army will shoot at anyone who tries to escape.

Such restrictions on freedom in the absence of due process are a violation of both national and international law.

Conditions in the camps are poor and deteriorating. They are overcrowded, with medical facilities, access to clean water and sanitation all woefully inadequate. These conditions are expected to worsen dramatically with the onset of monsoon season. The military is preventing humanitarian organisations, including the UN and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), from undertaking effective monitoring and protection in the camps.

The government has made numerous promises to release those held in the main camps, but these are little more than attempts to deliberately mislead the international community. Very little has come of any of Colombo’s pledges. The worst kind of duplicity was seen just a few weeks ago, when the government announced it had released 10,000 displaced persons. In fact, we know at least 3,300 people had been moved from an internment camp to another detention facility. (UNHCR press release, 29 September 2009)

Here are the numbers as we understand them today (as of 15 September, UNHCR with government figures). Of the estimated 289,000 internally displaced Tamils at the end of the war, some 10,000 are held in detention centres on suspicion of having links to the Tamil Tigers, about 5,000 have managed to buy their way out of the camps by paying off the right people, and only 6,000 have been resettled. Those in the main camps in the north number about 264,000.

The ICRC has not been able to visit the main camps in the north since July, and they have never been able to visit those in detention facilities who are accused of working with or for the Tigers.

Click here to read full testimony

INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP – NEW REPORT
Sri Lanka: Politicised Courts, Compromised Rights

“The Sri Lankan government must reform the country’s judicial system urgently if the military defeat of the Tamil Tigers is to lead to a lasting peace.”
http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=6186&l=1

The Australian : Tamil refugees forced into sex rackets
CONDITIONS for about 300,000 refugees forcibly detained in camps across Sri Lanka remain dire, with reports of a prostitution racket run by officials in a remote camp.
Aid workers told The Australian yesterday officials at the internally displaced people’s camp in Pulmoddai, a remote northeast region, are running the prostitution ring using women kept in the camp.
Read more here.

International Crisis Group : Sri Lanka: After the War
“Sri Lankan judiciary is not working in a fair and impartial way that secures justice and human rights for everyone regardless of ethnicity. This risks undermining the government’s recent military victory over the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam). A durable national reconciliation process is only possible if human and constitutional rights are fully restored.”
Read more here.

Asian Human Rights Commission : SRI LANKA: Registers on entry and leaving of internally displaced persons needs to be created urgently to prevent forced disappearances
Every day 20 to 30 young persons are taken away and their whereabouts are unknown, a leading human rights organisation in Sri Lanka, INFORM, reported this week. The source of information is the testimonies of the relatives of the IDPs who have visited the camps. There are severe restrictions on civil society organisations and the media visiting the camps.
Read more here.

BBC : Lawyers put Sri Lanka in the dock
The Sri Lankan government and its legal profession must do more to strengthen the rule of law, according to a panel of international lawyers.
After a fact finding mission earlier this year, the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI) expressed serious concern over the threats to the justice system, legal profession and the state of media in Sri Lanka.
It concluded that “attacks against human rights lawyers form part of a pattern of intimidation routinely directed against members of civil society, NGOs and journalists who are perceived to be critical of the government or its policies”.
Read more here.

“Day of Reckoning in Sri Lanka”, Robert Templer in Foreign Policy, 20 April 2009, Foreign Policy
A mass slaughter of civilians will take place Tuesday at noon. And everyone knows it.

Much of the international community knows what is happening and what is at stake. Nongovernmental organizations, including the International Crisis Group, have been sounding the alarm bells since last fall. Since then, more and more hard proof of unacceptable civilian suffering and war crimes have emerged, including the satellite images of the crowded tent camps seen here, video of dead children, and interviews with exhausted ICRC doctors. Nonetheless, the U.N. and influential governments have been slow to act and have allowed a bad situation to grow much worse.

Similar paralysis and foot dragging by multinational institutions and powerful countries produced Rwanda and Srebrenica. Barack Obama’s administration has said it is committed to the principals of international law and humanitarian protection. Sri Lanka is the perfect opportunity for the new U.S. president to show that this is not empty rhetoric.