Tamil Justice

An initiative of the Sri Lanka Human Rights Project (Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, The University of Sydney) and Coalition for Justice and Peace in Palestine.

This letter to the editor were written by the conveners of the Sri Lanka Human Rights Project @ Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, The University of Sydney

The Age (13/02) – Show Your Concern

MANY thanks for your editorial (”Sri Lanka’s ripples go far beyond the island”, The Age, 11/2) on the intensifying repression in Sri Lanka. Canberra has restricted itself to tokenistic responses out of a wrong-headed belief that things will ‘’settle down” and an overly narrow conception of Australian interests. Instead, it should join the European Union in backing the call, made by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, for an independent international investigation of war crimes allegations and in withholding trade concessions unless there is improvement in the human rights situation.

Meanwhile, the rest of us have a chance to register stronger concern. The 1970 cancellation of apartheid South Africa’s tour of England showed the strength of sporting boycotts in inducing social change. We urge you not to attend the cricket when the Sri Lankan team visits Australia later this year, write to Cricket Australia asking that the tour be cancelled and unite for human rights when official diplomacy fails.

Jake Lynch, Gobie Rajalingam and Brami Jegan, Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, The University of Sydney, NSW

The Wire – Sri Lankan opposition leader arrested

Produced by Jacinta Patterson

In Sri Lanka, the main opposition leader has been arrested after the government accused him of what it termed ‘military offences’. Sri Lanka held its general election last month – the first since the end of the country’s lengthy civil war. Former military leader General Sarath Fonseca ran an unsuccessful campaign against his former commander-in-chief, President Mahendra Rajapaksa. His arrest came just hours after he told reporters he’d be willing to give evidence about war crimes he alleges took place during the conflict. Featured in this story: Dr Sam Pari, spokesperson for the Australian Tamil Congress; Dr Jake Lynch, director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at Sydney University.

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Associate Professor Jake Lynch is Director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, Convener of the CPACS Sri Lanka Human Rights Project, and is an adviser to the Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice

Transcend Media Service – Peace and Justice

“Peace is not the absence of war”, Martin Luther King told us: “it is the presence of justice”. King’s legacy transmitted itself directly into the mantra of African-American activists, outraged over the beating, by LA police officers, of the black motorist, Rodney King, in 1991: “No justice, no peace”, they chanted. It’s an important answer to a familiar question: what is peace? Of course, another, equally tricky question nestles within it, like matryoshka dolls: what is justice?

A Reverend Mpbambami told the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission a story about two friends, Peter and John, who fell out when Peter stole John’s bicycle. Later, Peter said to John: “Let’s talk about reconciliation”. John’s reply resonates still: “We cannot talk about reconciliation until my bicycle is back”.

It so happens that providing bicycles is the aim of a significant ‘people-to-people’ aid effort, now underway here in Sydney, to bring relief to the Tamil people of Sri Lanka, where they are used for the simple but vital job of transporting fish to market; but in Peter and John’s story, the machine is more important for its symbolic value, of course. It captures the sense of restitution that is a precursor to the willingness to live in peace.

In the Sri Lankan case, an unofficial court, set up in Dublin and conducted by the Milan-based Permanent People’s Tribunal, has just delivered its verdict: the Sri Lanka Government is guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The tribunal also concluded that the charge of genocide warrants further investigations. Eye-witnesses included several escapees from the final week of the Sri Lankan offensive in the Mullaitivu ‘No Fire Zone’, at the end of the civil war in May last year, where more than 20,000 Tamil civilians were allegedly slaughtered by Sri Lanka Army (SLA) using heavy weapons on them.

This chimes not only with evidence provided by outsiders, but also allegations that have been exchanged between candidates in the Sri Lankan election, due to be held shortly. A top aide to President Mahinda Rajapakse disclosed recently that Colombo ordered a halt to the use of heavy weapons only in April, two months after a UN envoy was promised that such armaments would not be used.

Former foreign minister and key opposition leader Mangala Samaraweera seized on the disclosure by the aide, Lalith Weeratunga, who said the use of heavy weapons was eventually stopped as part of a political deal with the Indian government.

The disclosure “indicates that despite claims to the contrary, both to the public of this country and to (the) UN… in February 2009, in fact the government had sanctioned the use of heavy weapons until April, when the Indian general election was in full swing,” Samaraweera said in a statement. More

Associate Professor Jake Lynch is Director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, Convener of the CPACS Sri Lanka Human Rights Project and is an adviser to the Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice.

Israel is using a panoply of legal and administrative measures, backed by the ever-present threat of force, to squeeze out Palestinian families who’ve lived for generations in East Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem Centre for Women is a Palestinian NGO helping and empowering women to access their rights and resist the ethnic cleansing of their communities.

Click here to read article

From Associate Professor Jake Lynch, Director, Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, Chair of Organizing Committee, IPRA conference 2010, Executive Member, Sydney Peace Foundation, Convener of the CPACS Sri Lanka Human Rights Project

The announcement by the Sri Lankan government, that it is closing the internment camps where thousands of Tamils were illegally detained, is testimony to the power of international pressure, from the UN, from governments, civil society and some in the media.

The crisis over the war, the protection of civilians and the human rights of detainees must now become an opportunity to recognise and negotiate over the Tamils’ assertion of their right to self-determination. 

And that must be a signal to sustain and intensify the pressure, not relax it. 

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Crikey: Time to stand up for human rights in Sri Lanka — at last

Jake Lynch, director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (CPACS) at the University of Sydney, 29 October 2009

Sri Lanka Week has shrunk to a long weekend. The trade and investment shindig in Melbourne’s Docklands was scheduled to take place in June, but was called off amid outrage over the Sri Lankan army’s pounding of Tamil areas and UN estimates of 20,000 deaths. It’s back on, from Friday to Sunday, promising visitors “the opportunity to feel and experience the taste of paradise”.

Instead, we should remember 300,000 inmates who are being held against their will in a living hell — the giant internment camp at Menik Farm — in violation of their rights under international and Sri Lankan law. Alarming eyewitness testimony trickles out, of food and clean drinking water in desperately short supply, filthy conditions and — for any who might be tempted to protest to the occasional foreign visitor — the ever-present threat of disappearance.

That’s a fate that has befallen thousands over the years, in Sri Lanka’s dirty war with the Tamil Tiger rebels, which ended just over five months ago. Various commissions of inquiry were set up, only to fail in bringing any of the culprits to justice: a “sham”, in the words of Amnesty International. So the bullies carry on with impunity, and impunity incentivises repetition: we got away with it once, why not do it again? More

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To demonise Sri Lanka boatpeople dodges the issues

UPWARDS of 250,000 Sri Lankan Tamils are being held in appalling conditions in the vast Manik Farm internment camp, deprived of their freedom solely on grounds of race. Speak out about their plight and their lives are at risk as well: they have a well-founded fear of joining the thousands of others who have “disappeared” with utter impunity for the perpetrators.

They may therefore meet the definition of refugees under the 1951 UN convention, to which Australia is a signatory, but their right to apply for asylum, and have their case fairly considered, is not matched by any right of entry. That is why some turn to so-called people smugglers.

If Australia does not like the consequences of this situation, it should intensify pressure on the Sri Lankan authorities to deliver justice, starting with a properly supported process of return to their homes for the Tamil detainees. To whinge about asylum boats and to demonise those who provide them is to dodge the issue.

Jake Lynch
Director, Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Sydney

Jake’s article in New Matilda