After the dust has settled following the UN HRC resolution A/HRC/19/L.2 focused on human rights and accountability in Sri Lanka, we should try to make sense of the different voices, to the greatest extent possible. In addition, we should have a good understanding of what the resolution should progress into, ultimately, with an eye to history for guidance. And for the distractions and sideshow news items, let's look at them and then look past them.
Denial, Anger,...?
The truth hurts sometimes. It hurts me every time when I think of the structural injustice that Tamils in Sri Lanka have faced for more than 60 years (and counting). For a regime that is confident, victorious, and defiant, it is surprising how much effort they make (e.g., canvassing for votes to oppose the UN HRC resolution) and also how little effort they make (e.g., respecting Tamils, reconciling, establishing peace). So it is interesting that they have been so angry. Vis-a-vis issues of their systematic, targeted, wholesale killing of Tamil civilians, war conduct, and treatment non Sinhalese-Buddhists, it's as if Sri Lanka wants to tell the world, "We would have gotten away with it, it weren't for you meddling Westerners!" followed by, "Et tu, India?" The kind of passion exhibited in their fervent denials might make you forget that Sri Lanka's situation bears all the hallmarks of brazen genocide, and its war conduct has served as an example for Egypt and Syria's attempts at cracking down on protesters (while Syria is also following suit in its diplomatic maneuvering at the UN).
Now, the most verbose media on the topic are from Sri Lanka and India. It's not to say that there aren't US policy strategists or opinion pieces with a Western perspective. No one is paying them any heed, currently. The Sri Lankan response is not surprising -- full of anger and no trace of shame, self-reflection, or remorse. The response in the India media is interesting because more voices than expected came out of the woodwork to acknowledge India's foreign policy turn and disagree with it. Some people say Sri Lanka will not listen to India, so there's no use in trying to change it. Some say that China is only a strategic partner for India, not at all a threat, and that India's action is an historic mistake. Others say that the UN resolution will drive Sri Lanka closer to China. All of those arguments involve poor reasoning. The rest of the Indian media seems to understand the overdue moral imperatives, at the least.
The Indian viewpoints that oppose India's support of the UN resolution seem to stem from an ignorance of the last 7 years of change, the last 64 years of Sri Lanka's history, or, put mildly, sheer naiveté. The argument about Sri Lanka being intransigent is basically in favour of the status quo and an abdication of any imperative to act. Such a line of thinking assumes that India has no control over Sri Lanka, contradicting India's incursion in the 80's via the Thimpu Talks, the Indo-Lanka Accord, and the IPKF. It also ignores India's silent directorial role in the 2002 peace talks. India also sent a warning message to the Tigers, when the Tigers were about to recapture Jaffna (the counter-offensive to Agni Kheela) and almost defeat the SL military (a majority of its resources were in Jaffna), that the Tigers should not capture Jaffna "or else". India then airlifted the 40,000 SL soldiers out of Jaffna just in case. Even if India is not as powerful as China, it can still wield a fair bit of power on its own. To think that China is merely an economic partner of Sri Lanka ignores that China taught Sri Lanka how to ignore the West, gives it a lot of money to future enable that, and probably has a hand in the proliferation of internal conflicts in India. It's so odd that one country could fully consider its neighbour a strategic partner when they are amassing troops on their shared border. And to quote the same author from elsewhere, "The Chinese are realists. I doubt they would be keen to stretch themselves in bid to whittle down Indian influence totally." Let me whittle down that statement: "The Chinese are realists. I doubt they would whittle down Indian influence totally." (emphasis mine) I completely agree -- China is sophisticated enough to make squeezing the life out of India subtle enough that India doesn't notice. So why would you trust China so much, or think that a country of China's power isn't already slowly crushing India without you noticing it? This is just further proof that China (and especially the US) are much more advanced at crafting subtle long-term strategy than India, which is just now discovering the need for promoting human rights. Lastly, the UN resolution will not push Sri Lanka closer to China because there's very little space left between China and Sri Lanka for that to be possible. Rather, India's support for the UN HRC might have taken the SL-China closeness into account, which is the real catalyst in the situation. India is only now reacting slowly while China has been proactive for a long while. Without further analyzing the personalities behind the critiques of the UN resolution in the India media, I would like to think that Hanlon's Razor sums it up: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." The real question here is, is ignorance adequate to explain this much misinformation?
Where we should be headed
We can't really ask ourselves what the next steps are without first determining where we want to end up. Right now, utterances from some Indians indicate that "13+" is a valid rallying cry. As it goes, if we press Sri Lanka to re-implement its own 13th Amendment, which merges the Northern and Eastern provinces, and give a little bit more powers (jurisdiction over land and police), then that will be enough to address Tamil grievances. For those of you paying close attention, the previous sentence is not only an explanation of "what", but an explanation of "why not". First of all, this amendment was already passed and implemented (due to the Indo-Lanka Accord), and then recently reneged on in early 2008 despite India's disapproval. That should have one of India's first clues that it had lost sway over Sri Lanka. But it also proves the structural nature of the conflict -- whatever is implemented by the Colombo government can be taken away later by Colombo, whether you like it or not. Tamils would be trustworthy allies, but the Singhalese government in Colombo hasn't been. So autonomy as weak as a stronger wording of the 13th Amendment would be overturned soon enough, and gets us back to where we are now, if not worse. The problem with this solution is that it's almost obvious that India does not want to put forward a solution that grants more powers to Tamils in Sri Lanka than states in India enjoy. Indian federalism is a very weak form of federalism, and the weaker the autonomy, the more likely we are to accomplish nothing in the long-run. The consequences of allowing Colombo to control Tamil Eelam, including Trinco, are ominous. It would be good for Singhalese plundering but bad for regional stability.
For autonomy here to serve as a lasting solution, it has to be substantial enough to stand the test of time. The US model of federalism is weak, too, and probably not much stronger than India's. One model that gets suggested somewhat frequently is that of Québec. Québec is held together by far-sighted strategies of inclusion, to the point of the federal government giving more money to Québec than it receives in taxes. It is unclear what powers Québec has more than any other province, let alone any state in the US. Despite visionary approaches to the Québec situation, there is too much tension between Québec and Canada to think that Sri Lanka has the ability to successfully replicate the same setup for itself. A United Kingdom approach would offer more autonomy to the Northeast than any Indian, American, or Canadian model. The countries within the UK represent themselves independently throughout the world, except they share defense and foreign policy. Given that the SL armed forces have been 99% Singalese for decades, and given that the SL army has, for decades, been intentionally killing only Tamil civilians, that would be a very difficult sharing arrangement. Tamil Eelam is 1/3 of the land, but 2/3 of the coastline. So will Tamils get to be 2/3 of the navy and marines, and 1/3 of the army and air force? Doubtful. Sharing foreign policy would be worse, since Tamils of Eelam would want to be stable, rebuild, and trade with Tamil Nadu. Singhalese have had little compunctions about making and breaking promises as they see fit, so long as they benefit in the short term. If defense and foreign policy are outside the purview of a federal province, then only solutions that are confederal or fully separate would solve the ethnic conflict in a permanent, lasting way.
Implementing such a confederal or separate solution would be a valid concern (e.g., the India-Pakistan partition didn't proceed well at all). However, in situations where a referendum happens after a sufficiently long period of demilitarisation, deescalation, and rebuilding, the outcomes of such referenda are usually palatable even before the verdict is known. The key here would be to have an temporary political administration to coordinate rebuilding efforts with powers of land, police, and taxation, internationally-overseen mechanisms to ensure proper sharing of river and sea resources, and international peacekeeping forces to prevent hostilities, border spats, etc. The powers named above are obviously essential for any such political administration to oversee the rebuilding of the war-ravaged traditional Tamil-speaking lands. Thus, during the interim period of rebuilding, the political administration only needs federal powers in order to bring normalcy to the lives of the Tamil-speaking peoples.
Without giving the aforementioned political powers to Tamils, the self-reinforcing political structure of the Colombo government ensures that devolved powers to Tamils would be reclaimed soon. Reclamation can happen either through a super-majority of cooperating Singhalese, a judiciary that compares laws against an unfair constitution, or a 95% Singhalese police enforcing those laws (with the help of the 99% military, against the common wisdom of a military's proper role). Don't believe me? Let's take a walk through history:
- The 1st prime minister, D.S. Senanayake, disenfranchised 1 million Tamil plantation workers retroactively within Sri Lanka's first year of independence
- The 4th prime minister, S.R.D. Bandaranaike, gained power on the election pledge of "Sinhala Only" in government service. Following through on that promise, Tamils in government jobs lost their jobs in the 3 _days_ of leeway the law allowed. He agreed with the leading Tamil politician, S.J.V. Chelvanayakam, on a plan for mere regional councils. Following pressure from Sinhalese Buddhist monks, he ceremonially tore the agreement up. He was subsequently assassinated by a Buddhist monk who was frustrated at his slowness in promoting Buddhism.
- In less than 1 year after Bandaranaike was assassinated, his wife, Srimavo Bandaranaike, was voted in as the 7th prime minister. She was voted in with a majority, something that eluded all previous prime ministers, but she decided not to implement the regional council plan of her late husband. Instead, she continued her husband's policies of codified favouritism to the Sinhalese language and Buddhism.
- Dudley Senanayake, who was previously the 2nd prime minister for 6 months and the 6th prime minister for 3 months, was voted in as the 8th prime minister. He also signed a pact with S.J.V. Chelvanayakam for regional councils, but Senanayake then didn't implement the agreement. The frustration of Chelvanayakam following more than a decade of no progress for a federal solution led him to sympathize with the idea that Tamils need independence.
- Srimavo got elected as the 9th prime minister, and she replaced the constitution with one of her own. In the process, she changed the name of Ceylon to Sri Lanka (a Sinhalese name), gave the government control over key export industries, and created a weak president.
- J.R. Jayewardene was voted as the 10th prime minister. He changed the constitution again by making the president excessively powerful, and he made himself president at the same time. In response to growing discontentment from Tamils, his response was to pass the 6th amendment outlawing MPs from talking about separation from Sri Lanka. Jayewardene was the one in power when his ministers torched the Jaffna library and orchestrated Black July (1983) that signaled the start of the civil war.
- The daughter of the Bandaranaikes, Chandrika Kumaratunga, was elected as president in 1994 on a platform of peace. Tamils voted en bloc for her. She used that year to reinvigorate the SL military offensive against the Tigers in a manner more coordinated and brutal than anything seen before. The operation had the Orwellian title "War for Peace".
- Despite, or because of, the relentless brutal warfare, the LTTE grew ever-stronger. In 2001, immediately following the height of the LTTE's strength relative to the SL military, it was revealed that SL had bought chemical weapons from Russia. (In 2009, Tamils claimed that the SL forces used chemical bombs and cluster bombs, which are banned under international law, against civilians and Tiger soldiers.)
- During Kumaratunga's second (lame duck) term, Ranil Wickremasinghe, the nephew of J.R. Jayewardene, was elected as prime minister on a mandate to broker peace. Despite the success of the peace process, while Wickremasinghe was visiting the US, Kumaratunga took over the ministries of defense, interior, and media and gave them to herself on the grounds that Wickremasinghe was giving too much power away.
- A long-time communist group, the JVP, adopted a hardline Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist platform in the 2004 national elections, and it thus catapulted from being a marginal influence for a long time to becoming the 3rd largest party in parliament.
- After the tsunami of December 2004, which disproportionately affected Tamil-speaking areas under LTTE control, there was an outpouring of assistance to the affected areas from all over the world. But Kumaratunga prevented desperately-needed aid from reaching affected areas for 6 months because she insisted she needed the time to create a new bureaucracy to distribute the aid. Aid was never distributed to Tamil-speaking areas in the end.
- In 2005, after Kumaratunga's second term was over, Wickremasinghe and Mahinda Rajapakse campaigned for president. The LTTE encouraged and enforced a boycott of the elections (in contrast to their earlier support of Kumaratunga in 1994), and as they put it, the elections were thereby tantamount to a referendum of the Singhalese polity's will. Rajapakse ran as a hardline nationalist Sinhalese Buddhist and was enjoying success in the pre-election polls. Seeing the success, Wickremasinghe started campaigning on a Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist platform, but it was not enough to get elected.
(UPDATE 2013-08-09 What was omitted in the above list: It took 6 months in 2005 that it took for Chandrika to formalise an agreement on a structure that would allow the disbursement of foreign aid money to the tsunami-affected areas, inhabited by Tamil-speaking peoples and controlled by the LTTE. The agreement, called P-TOMS, was accepted by the international community. Those long 6 months it took to formalise such an agreement were the 6 months when the structure was most needed in a timely manner in light of such a sudden disaster. The nationalist JVP was upset with P-TOMS, took it to SL courts, and entirely in the span of 1 month, the case had already made its way to the Supreme Court and was struck down for being unconstitutional. Chandrika wins credit with her international friends for being "reasonable", and the JVP wins credit domestically for being patriotic to Sinhalese Lanka.)
As the history shows, all the leaders of Sri Lanka are Sinhalese, and the more they cater to Sinhalese Buddhists, the more power they gain. This trick has been performed consistently, spanning party lines, generations, and socio-economic ideologies. If you think that Wickremasinghe is the most likely progressive in this bunch, then you should realise that his tempered willingness to play Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist politics has meant that his party colleagues think he is weak, and they call their more nationalist brand of politics "reform". Here's an experiment to try: watch the following interview of Chandrika Kumaratunga in 2001, and see if you can imagine the current Rajapakse cabal saying that in 2009, like in the documentary Sri Lanka's Killing Fields: War Crimes Unpunished. You most likely can. There is nothing in the political equations of the structure of Sri Lanka to make you believe that Tamils can exercise any power or secure their own collective rights. As the last 64 years show, Sri Lanka does not have the leadership or political will to be anything but a situation of an unstable equilibrium. An outcome to one side of the inflection point involves the dominance of the Sinhala polity over Tamils and the entire island. The other outcome on the other side gives Tamils at least confederal-level autonomy to prevent the first outcome.
Distractions?
What I find odd are comments like this one that seem to warn about the possibility of renewed violence, for example, by a new incarnation of the LTTE. Even if power flows through the barrel of a gun, such as Sinhalese police enforcing Sinhalese laws, achieving a lasting, permanent solution still requires an element of political acceptance internationally. It was the only thing that the LTTE couldn't engineer on their own merits. The government has been using the LTTE's name in vain to good effect for the past 3 years in spite of their annihilation. Anything is possible, but I'm extremely inclined to believe that it's not likely. In any case, a lasting solution can only be cemented in a different arena. Next steps may come in an unpredictable manner, but common sense and 64 years of history tell me that there is a very precise, narrow path beyond this morass.
For everyone who urges India to placate Sri Lanka, trust China, and maintain status quo, I want to know who's paying them to say that. But Hanlon's Razor tells me that, instead, I should say: Don't be so silly.
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