Sri Lanka gets off lightly

A year after Sri Lanka's Sinhalese nationalist leadership finished off the Tamil Tigers in a bloody showdown that killed unknown thousands of civilians, calls have been renewed for an independent, UN-led international inquiry into allegations that war crimes were committed during the conflict. But rather than be penalised for its actions, the Sri Lankan government appears to be getting off lightly so far — and to have created a model other repressive regimes may follow.

In a report coinciding with the end of the fighting, the International Crisis Group (ICG), a non-partisan NGO, said it had uncovered new credible evidence suggesting that between January and May last year "tens of thousands of Tamil civilian men, women, children and the elderly [were] killed, countless more wounded, and hundreds of thousands deprived of adequate food and medical care, resulting in more deaths".

The report goes on: "The evid-ence also provides reasonable grounds to believe Sri Lankan security forces committed war crimes with top government and military leaders potentially responsible. There is evidence of war crimes committed by the LTTE [the Tigers] and its leaders as well, but most of them were killed and will never face justice.

"An international inquiry into alleged crimes is essential given the absence of political will or capacity for genuine domestic investigations, the need for an accounting to address the grievances that drive conflict in Sri Lanka, and the potential of other governments adopting the Sri Lankan model of counterinsurgency in their own internal conflicts."

Denial

The Sri Lankan government has strongly denied all allegations of wrongdoing during the denouement of the war, and maintains no civilians were killed. Responding in part to international protests, including a critical US State Department report and the threat of punitive EU measures, President Mahinda Rajapaksa appointed an advisory panel of "local experts" to look into war crimes allegations. But the move was widely seen as window dressing, a view reinforced when the panel's secretary, S.M. Samarakoon, complained it lacked legal powers to investigate fully.

In an apparent bid to pre-empt the ICG and another congressionally mandated US report next month, Sri Lanka announced on Monday it would allow another inquiry by a newly formed "lessons learnt and reconciliation commission".

Speaking in London, Louise Arbour, ICG president and a former chief prosecutor of the international tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, held out little hope that the new inquiry would be adequate or impartial. "This is not a substitute for the incapacity of that government to put its own conduct under independent scrutiny," she said. Arbour dismissed out of hand the government's assertion that no civilians had been killed, and said only an independent outside investigation would suffice.

Given the almost total absence of effective international action to curb or punish the Sri Lankan government, either during the conflict or since it ended, Arbour warned that countries facing violent internal opponents such as Israel, Burma, Thailand, Nepal, Pakistan, India, Colombia and the Philippines may be increasingly interested in copying the Sri Lankan "force works" model.

Arbour said the model's "ingredients" were deliberate refusal to differentiate between combatants and noncombatants; a policy of "keeping the world out" by excluding the media, humanitarian organisations, and foreign officials from the combat zone, so no one could bear witness to what happened; going on the attack as rapidly as possible, employing "absolute scorched earth" tactics; then subsequently denying that anything untoward has occurred. By failing to allow an accounting from which reconciliation might flow, Sri Lanka risked renewed conflict in the future, she added.

The ICG report gives one other reason why Sri Lanka's government seems to have got away with it so far: "Sri Lanka co-opted the language of the ‘war on terror' from the Bush administration and took it to its limits by insisting there should be no restraints in its fight against the Tigers. A complex political issue was reduced to a problem of terrorism".

Simon Tisdall is an assistant editor of The Guardian and a foreign affairs columnist.