Tamil Genocide, Ostriches and the “Sri Lanka Option”

That European and North American states are hypocritical in their designation of “good” and “evil” is hardly a revelation. Yet, there are some examples that strike upon the mind so strongly as to make one reflect how truly shameful Western states can be.

To go back a decade, between 1998 and 1999 the Serbian army fought a full-scale war against the Kosovan (sometimes referred to as “ethnic Albanian”) independence movement’s military wing, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). With the break up of Yugoslavia, ostensibly on ethnic grounds, the KLAseized its opportunity to fight for independence, transforming in to a fully-fledged guerrilla army. The war saw Serbia fight against the KLA’s bid for independence only for NATO to intervene on behalf of the latter.

The outcome of NATO’s intervention was victory for the independence movement, the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic and a war crimes tribunal charging the leadership of Serbia with war crimes.

There was near universal condemnation of Serbia by Western powers and no sparing of the resources required to ensure “justice” prevailed. At the very least it had shown that “humanitarian” intervention – in both military and legal terms – was possible with political will.

Several thousand kilometres away and 10 years after that precedent had been set, the Sri Lankan Civil War was coming to an end.

Sri Lanka has long witnessed brutal state repression against the Tamil minority, and against anyone who appears to sympathise. Since the end of the civil war between the Sri Lankan state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (the LTTE or Tamil Tigers) in 2009, a variety of international organisations have been pushing for investigations into allegations of human rights abuses and war crimes, most recently with the International Crisis Group’s report War Crimes in Sri Lanka.

Over the last few days, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have both reiterated their demands for UN investigations into the abuses, citing a range of evidence including witness testimony (including by Sri Lankan military personnel), photographs and video footage.

Just yesterday (18th May), the UK’s Channel 4 News reported their investigation into claims made by a senior Sri Lankan commander that their soldiers were ordered to “kill everybody”.

The final battles between the Sri Lankan Army and the Tigers in the north of the country, saw hundreds of thousands of Tamils – fighters and civilians – hemmed in between the sea and the advancing Sri Lankan army backed with weapons from anyone willing to supply them.

The final moments brought the scale of what had become genocide into stark relief. Whilst it is notoriously difficult to report freely in Sri Lanka, reasonable estimates claim that around 20,000 civilians were killed in those last weeks, with hundreds of thousands ending up in concentration camps. Of those detained in the camps, some 1,400 were dying each week after the war was over. These figures tower over the number of Kosovans killed by the Serbian military.

One might suspect, then, that the UN (as opposed to Nato) would have sent soldiers, jet fighters and warships and would have sought a resolution to prevent such war crimes and genocide occurring. However, the Kosovo model (nor the Iraq method) was not, and appears still not to be, an option.

One key reason for the lack of international action was China. Never one for “humanitarian intervention”, the Chinese state was too busy profiting from the situation to have any concern for human rights violations. Oil and infrastructural projects were the rewards for the Chinese ostrich. Without China on side in the Security Council, even if other states had the will, there was little chance of passing a resolution without the Chinese.

Another problem was the Sri Lankan government’s strategic use of President Bush’s “war on terror” discourse to justify its actions. How could the most “liberal” of Western states object to Sri Lankan state actions when the US and the UK had invaded Afghanistan and Iraq on the basis of a “war on terror”. Sri Lanka claimed it was just doing the same – weeding out “terrorists” by any means necessary.

In a clever use of Bush’s discourse, the Sri Lankan state had sought to adopt his terms, referring to the civil war as a “Terrorists’ War Against Sri Lanka“. This was no longer an ethnic-political conflict over power and self determination, but it was part of the global “war on terror”.

Indeed whilst the Sri Lankan government had gone some way to drawing attention to similarities between the LTTE and Islamic terrorists, they were surpassed by some of the wackier “journalists” around. For instance, Dominic Whiteman, writing in his own Westminster Review, asserted, ‘Now evidence is emerging which portrays the LTTE as individuals who are so unhinged that they have agreed to ditch their “freedom fighter” pretext forever and are now at one with the craven Islamist perpetrators of 911 and 7/7′, tying the LTTE to that one-size-fits-all excuse for anything, Al Qaeda.

The LTTE was hardly a savoury organisation. Its reputation for ruthlessness was deserved no less than any other guerrilla group or standing army for that matter. Its recruitment of child soldiers, pioneering use of suicide bombings and targeting of economic and religious targets alongside military ones may all be investigated as war crimes. Yet its rationale for independence was certainly no less than the KLA’s.

Whilst it is never comfortable to compare suffering, the intensity of the Sri Lankan state’s response to this “national liberation movement” was far more severe and wide-ranging than that suffered by Kosovans. For example, NATO intervention in Kosovo was immediately precipitated by the “Račak incident”, in which 45 Kosovans were killed by Serbian soldiers. If this massacre (or the one in Halabja, Iraq, that was so frequently cited as a justification for the invasion of Iraq) was sufficient to warrant coordinated international action, then what of the tens of thousands of Tamils killed in the Sri Lankan Civil War?

Whatever the reasons for non-intervention to prevent this genocide in the past, the evidence is there now, today, to initiate investigations against the current Sri Lankan government. Yet investigative interest seems to lie only with NGOs at the moment. Whilst there is little chance of hypocritical Western states doing anything to call for investigation, it is important to maintain pressure to ensure what Channel 4 journalist, Jonathan Miller, calls “The Sri Lanka Option” does not become the new legal framework for warfare.