Last week Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post (SCMP) published an editorial entitled the ‘UN should not ignore [the] Sri Lankan conflict’ (August 8, 2006). The editorial wondered as to why despite the levels of violence in the Sri Lankan conflict being equal to, or worse when compared to Lebanon and other theatres of conflict, the attention shown by the United Nations or any other international forum is almost nil.
The essential moral and political issues involved in such a lack of expressed concern are allowing a massive carnage, displacement of people and other gross abuses of human rights to occur without challenge. In the absence of such a challenge the potential exists for even greater violence and anarchy.
The question is not one about who should take the blame for the present state of killings, losses and the bewilderment caused to the populations of the North and East as well as the people of the whole country. The crux of the matter is rather who can, and who should, stop it.
When it comes to the stopping of what is now called a “war” there is a complete absence of any agency that seems to be willing or capable of doing it. The government blames the LTTE for wanting the war and the LTTE on the other hand blames the government. There is nobody that the people can turn to that has the capacity to stand between the combatants and bring any forceful messages of peace, as are usually found in other conflicts. A call for peace is seen by the antagonists as acts of treachery in favour of one party or another.
This aspect of the absence of a peaceful solution is not new in the Sri Lankan conflict. In fact, ever since the mid 70s when the conflict intensified with a former president’s order to a military commander to “stop the northern insurgency within three months”, a fight to the finish psychology was entrenched in all the parties to the conflict, and this psychology has become much more deeply entrenched as time has gone by. Within this context even a ceasefire is seen as an opportunity for a period of intense preparation by both sides for a more violent stage of the war at any time in the future.
The result of all this is massive loss of life, generally estimated to be over 60,000 people and hundreds of thousands of families who have become displaced over the previous decades. In intensified periods of conflict, as we have at the moment, these numbers increase enormously. Short periods of “peace” are not stable enough for such displaced persons to settle down again.
While the theatre of “war” is the North and the East the entire country has been deeply transformed by this conflict. All law enforcement agencies have collapsed throughout the country making it one of the most dangerous lands to live in, or to invest in. Throughout the country the Sri Lankan police have proven to be an internally degenerated institution that the people have lost their confidence in. Assassinations have become something quite normal and threats of assassination are used in every form of social transaction making rationalized arrangements of living almost impossible. The symbol of all this is bullet riddled bodies scattered about over various places, treated without any form of respect as deserving of a human being.
However, expressions of the horrors of the war mean nothing in the Sri Lankan context. It does not provoke outrage locally or internationally. Instead what seems to have emerged is a sense of helplessness and hopelessness expressed both locally and internationally.
It is from this point of view that the following conclusion in the SCMP’s editorial mentioned above is relevant.
“Given the complexities, there is only one hope: the UN. By adopting a step-by-step approach calling for adherence to the ceasefire, appointing a special envoy and then working towards mediation and, if needs be, foreign peacekeepers the nation has a glimmer of hope for peace. Without it, Sri Lanka’s slide into anarchy will continue.”
