Connivance in massacre
By Seema Sengupta
KOLKATA ― As gruesome British TV network footage of scandalous despotism perpetrated by the Sri Lankan military during the civil war outraged many including dignitaries like David Miliband and Bernard Kouchner, India’s ambivalence virtually stares us in the face.
The fresh uproar might have compelled New Delhi to offer a friendly admonishment after a brief flip-flop, in reality the Indian establishment is going the whole hog to protect the Rajapakse brothers from any international retribution.
Ironically, the raging homegrown rebellions spreading across the length and breadth of India acts as a potent disincentive for the world’s largest democracy to veto every proposal of pursuing and prosecuting regimes engaged in violating human rights and dignity. That precisely is the reason why Shiv Shankar Menon, the Indian national security advisor categorically asserts New Delhi’s aversion to the targeting of individual nation states by international agencies.
This journalist has reason to believe that Manmohan Singh’s government has employed discreet diplomatic maneuvering at the highest level in the United Nations to broker a negotiated exit route for President Rajapakse. The effective unofficial gag on members of a U.N. panel of experts on accountability is the measure of success that the hidden parleys has so far achieved.
“Unfortunately I am not allowed at this point to speak to the press,” laments a member on being approached for an observation on widening the ambit of accountability to include nations involved in selling arms to the Sri Lankan military. Some countries went on prodding the Sri Lankan government to escalate its assault despite possessing credible intelligence on rights violations and collateral damage.
Sadly, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s rejection of the panel’s recommendation for a criminal investigation speaks volume of the international agency’s acquiescence in the pogrom that Colombo’s forces indulged in Sri Lanka’s Tamil hinterland. Despite the jurisdictional compulsion, this statement amounts to condoning the ghastly atrocities.
In fact Gordon Weiss, the U.N.’s former spokesman in Sri Lanka is highly critical of his ex-employer’s role and has documented in a recently released book the murderous nature of the Sri Lankan government’s approach that spared not even the innocent. The decision to withdraw from the Tamil administrative areas of the war zone actually aided the Rajapakse regime’s intention to remove independent witnesses, believes Weiss.
Perhaps the secretary general is loath to let the frightening facts of the use of cluster bombs on a civilian population explode publicly especially when his chief of staff is mentioned in a murky incident involving the killing of surrendered rebels. Sources in the Tamil community revealed that the Sri Lankan forces showed no hesitation in using fuel air mixture weapons with banned chemical warheads indiscriminately.
Such a serious allegation demands an impartial investigation, opines Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, executive director at the Center for Policy Alternatives. He also favors an enquiry into the conduct of nations arming Sri Lanka, provided there is prima facie evidence of the gross misconduct being a deliberate one with full knowledge of the violations. India on her part would stop short of antagonizing Colombo at this juncture.
New Delhi maintained a strong and intrusive security tie with the island nation whereby Indian intelligence operatives were allowed access to detained rebels for interrogation in exchange for definite tip-offs. It is therefore natural for the Indian administration to side with President Rajapakse in a determined bid to prevent the surfacing of evidence of Indian involvement in war excesses.
India played a significant role in the negotiated surrender of LTTE’s chief fundraiser and procurer of arms Selvarasa Kumaran Patmanathan and preliminary detention of its slain supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran during the last leg of the civil war. New Delhi fears that such disclosures might be used by some nations to scuttle its U.N. Security Council permanent membership aspiration.
Indian foreign office mandarins would therefore continue pretending to be surprised by the grisly realities exposed by the U.N. report in spite of being aware of the ground realities. Credible reports from northern Sri Lanka suggests that militarization of the region continues to be at the level that was prevalent during the conflict along with heightened intrusive surveillance.
The post conflict re-distribution and positioning of troops have been done with an eye to keep up the psychological pressure on the population. The U.N. report has created space to nudge the Rajapakse regime toward a political settlement of the conflict and address the accountability issue adequately, says Saravanamuttu.
With the wounds of the civil war exacerbating day by day, India must call up the courage to take a righteous position while acknowledging that the Earth is indeed better off without the Tamil Tigers.
Seema Sengupta is a journalist based in Kolkata, India. She can be reached at sengupta.seema@gmail.com. The views expressed in the above article are the author’s own and do not reflect the editorial policy of The Korea Times.