Witness to Disaster

Times Online editorial, May 30, 2009

The silence of those who were warned of civilian deaths in Sri Lanka is shameful. They must speak out now to prevent future atrocities

Sri Lanka yesterday faced fresh calls for a war crimes inquiry after reports in The Times that at least 20,000 Tamils were killed, mostly by army shelling, in the closing stages of the civil war. But as Colombo clumsily denounced the reports and the photographic evidence as propaganda, evidence has emerged that not only the United Nations but several Western governments knew of the slaughter weeks ago but kept silent for fear of upsetting the Sri Lankan Government. Such a monstrous collusion in covering up an atrocity must not go unchallenged. If the UN Human Rights Council refuses to investigate what has happened, the West must do so forthwith.

An abashed UN yesterday admitted that the death toll from Sri Lanka's civil war was “unacceptably high”. But spokesmen still refused to confirm the total, compiled from UN sources on the ground. The figures were based on meticulous reports of the daily deaths among the desperate civilian refugees hit by army shells, and the UN rebuffed Sri Lanka's claim that not a single civilian had been killed by shelling. The “well-informed estimates” of casualties, it said, had been passed on to governments and the UN had been “ringing the alarm bells” for a long time.

Those bells were certainly muted. No Western government made public the scale of the killing. Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary-General, flew over the beaches where thousands of bodies are buried in fresh graves. But he has yet to speak out on the slaughter or confirm the authenticity of pictures ludicrously described in Colombo as “fakes”. Has no one learnt the lessons of My Lai or Srebrenica? If diplomats and top UN officials are too timid to denounce atrocities as they take place, what hope is there of preventing future efforts at extermination?

To the charge that the West, and this newspaper, is playing down the atrocities of the Tamil Tigers or belittling Colombo's success in eliminating the terrorist threat, there is a clear retort: nonsense. For years the West and The Times have denounced the suicide bombings, assassinations, recruitment of child soldiers and terrorist violence that were the hallmark of this blinkered and ruthless organisation. The Tigers were proscribed as terrorists across Europe. Their uncompromising commitment to violence and intimidation of their compatriots abroad were denounced. The Sri Lankan Government's success in freeing the country of their ravages is not in question.

But callousness, indifference to civilian casualties, triumphalism and mass internment of civilians have been the price of victory. The Government clearly believed that the war would be more easily won if no one was able to witness the tactics. That temptation appeals to every military commander. And where governments have backed them, as in Chechnya or Gaza, the results have been horrific, the country's name has been stained and the body politic has been damaged by the tolerance of the intolerable.

The casualties of wars deliberately waged out of sight of reporters, doctors and diplomats are not only higher, but they include also the victors. Sri Lanka's determination to exterminate the Tamil Tigers behind a wall of secrecy will have made ostensible military sense, but at the price of deserved obloquy for a debased cause.

Warfare can never be sanitised and civil wars are especially vicious. But countries and governments fighting for their rights must allow as much transparency as possible about their aims and methods. To embed journalists with the armed forces may give only a partial picture, but this tells more of the truth than blanket censorship. Where there has been excess, it must be exposed - if only to give reconciliation a chance. The UN must cry out.

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JANUARY 16, 2009Defeating TerroristsSri Lanka is beating the Tigers through military force, not negotiation.Wall Street Journal AsiaFor all those who argue that there's no military solution for terrorism, we have two words: Sri Lanka.This week, the Sri Lankan army said it had captured the last piece of the northern Jaffna Peninsula, one of the few remaining strongholds of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a terrorist organization that has waged a 26-year civil war that's claimed tens of thousands of lives, including those of a Sri Lankan President and an Indian Prime Minister.That's a huge turnaround from only three years ago, when the Tigers effectively controlled the bulk of the Northern and Eastern Provinces and were perpetrating suicide bombings in the country's capital, Colombo.Credit goes to the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who has made eliminating the Tigers a priority and invested resources to make it happen. Military spending has surged to $1.7 billion for fiscal 2009, roughly 5% of GDP and nearly 20% of the government's budget.The expanded Sri Lankan army is now equipped to employ sophisticated counterinsurgency strategies -- such as a multifront attack and quick raids behind Tiger lines. In 2007, the army won its first significant victory by pacifying the Tamil-Muslim-majority Eastern Province, historically a Tiger stronghold. Local and provincial elections were held there last year. The military offensive will now turn to Mullaittivu, the last district controlled by the Tigers in the Northern Province.This string of victories is a shock to those who thought this conflict, which has political origins, could have only a political solution. The violence started in 1983, ostensibly over Tamil grievances with a Sinhalese-majority government that made Sinhala the country's official language and doled out economic favors to the Sinhalese, who are Buddhist, including preferences for government jobs and schooling. Devolution of power to the provinces has long been floated as the best political fix.But the Tigers always had other ideas. To wit: They wanted the Tamil homeland to be an independent state with the Tigers at its head. Like other terrorist outfits, the Tigers never accepted the legitimacy of any other group to speak on behalf of their supposed constituents. They were unwilling to accept any negotiated settlement that wouldn't entrench their own power.That's why earlier efforts to negotiate away Sri Lanka's terror problem failed. In 1987, then-President Junius Jayewardene offered the Tamils a homeland in the north and east that would have given them wide powers, although not a separate state. In the 1990s, another President, Chandrika
Kumaratunga, offered another devolution plan. The Tigers refused both offers
and the terrorism continued.

In 2002, Norway orchestrated a peace process that resulted in a cease-fire.
This time, the Tigers themselves concocted a proposal for a form of regional
autonomy in Tamil areas, and the government agreed in principle. Then the
Tigers nixed their own deal, betting they could do better with violence
after all. They spent the next four years violating the cease-fire.

Repeated negotiations made a settlement harder to achieve. The Tigers gladly
murdered moderate Tamil leaders open to genuine negotiations with Colombo.
The European Union dithered on declaring the Tigers a terrorist group for
the sake of encouraging the peace process, hindering efforts to cut off
funding and allowing the killing to continue.

Meanwhile, occasional efforts to subdue the Tigers by force failed through
lack of political will or because of outside interference. In 1987, Mr.
Jayewardene gained ground in the north, only to be undermined by Indian
Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who airlifted food to the militants to curry
favor with his country's own Tamil population. Then the Indians changed
tack, and an Indian peacekeeping force managed to quell the Tiger insurgency
for a time between 1987 and 1989. But that operation was derided as a
"quagmire" by some Indian politicians. The force was withdrawn prematurely
in 1990. Another Sri Lankan military effort, begun in 1995, collapsed in
2000 due to insufficient troop numbers and political meddling in military
decision-making.

Mr. Rajapaksa appears to have learned from all this, which is why he has
insisted on military victory before implementing a political solution. It
helps that India has stayed out this time around and other countries -- 
including the EU -- are now tracking and thwarting Tiger financing.

Peace still will not be easy or, despite recent good news, immediate. The
Tigers may still be able to carry out some terror attacks, though they no
longer pose a wide-scale threat. And Colombo faces questions about its
commitment to a permanent political settlement. It has taken some steps,
such as a 1987 constitutional amendment again making Tamil an official
language, and in 2006 it convened an all-party conference to recommend
further pro-devolution constitutional changes. It is dragging its feet on
implementing other constitutional measures that would pave the way for
devolution. But a political settlement is something to discuss after the
Tigers have been subdued.

We recount this history at length to make a simple point: Colombo's military
strategy against Tamil terrorists has worked. Negotiations haven't. That's
an important reminder as Israel faces its own terrorism problem and as the
U.S. works to foster stability and political progress in Iraq. Take note,
Barack Obama.