Almost till the day LTTE chief Velupillai Prabhakaran was eliminated, the TNA cherished the label of being a Tiger surrogate or LTTE mouth piece. So it is natural to expect that the TNA will close ranks with Toronto, London and Oslo based vocal diaspora groups in demanding at least ‘justice’ to the families that were at the receiving end of the army and the paramilitary forces. TNA has kept a low profile on the issue.
One of the American cables, that the WikiLeaks has given a fresh currency, was sent last January by the US Ambassador to Sri Lanka, Patricia Butenis. It says that the issue of war crimes was “complicated by the fact that responsibility for many of the alleged crimes rests with the country’s senior civilian and military leaders..
Butenis’s predecessor, Robert Blake, in his October 2006 cable writes about hundreds of abductions and murders of politicians, journalists and others and tells the State Department that the Rajapaksa government and the army were actively involved with paramilitary groups that had carried out these acts. He also records that paramilitary groups resorted to extortions to finance their operations ‘since the government is cash strapped’. .
Ambassador Butenis spoke to the TNA leaders about their views on the war crimes, and according to her cable to Washington, they had downplayed the accountability issue. For them ‘current bread and butter issues’ are more important, she quotes TNP MP Pathmini Sithamparanathan as saying. The message from the TNA camp, therefore, is that it doesn’t want to re-open the old wounds. And that it has no intention of demanding action against those responsible for crimes during the prolonged war, particularly the last phase. Because, the buck for the crimes stops at President Rajapaksa’s door, according to ambassador Patricia Butenis.
‘There are no examples we know of a regime undertaking wholesale investigations of its own troops or senior officials for war crimes while that regime or government remained in power. In Sri Lanka this is further complicated by the fact that responsibility for many of the alleged crimes rests with the country’s senior civilian and military leadership, including President Rajapaksa and his brothers and opposition candidate General Fonseka,’ Butenis wrote in the Jan. 15, 2010, cable.
TNA sees virtue in being with the Rajapaksa brothers, and in bygones be bygones. They have good company in the Nava Sama Samaja Party (NSSP) and United Socialist Party (USP), which, die-hard socialist, Vilani Peiris says (in the wsws.org, Jan 20) have been reduced to the status of secondary political satellites of the Colombo establishment. Both parties also have issued no statement commenting on the Sri Lankan cables.
How seriously concerned is the US with the Sri Lanka war crimes is not germane to the present discussion. Any how the US is not above board in such matters. This is not to ignore the fact Washington has used the War Crimes as a tactical weapon to subdue President Rajapaksa and his brothers whose Beijing tilt has become pronounced in recent months.
There is no denying that President Mahinda Rajapaksa will remain under scrutiny for war crimes for a fairly long, long time. It suits everyone, including Rajapaksa himself. He needs to constantly reinvent himself till the new Colombo dynasty is firmly in place; towards that goal, going by his recent actions, he will not be loath to political polarisation. This is not a cynical view but a fair assessment of Ground Zero.
Rajapaksa is commander in chief of Sri Lanka’s armed forces, and under the international law, military commanders face criminal charges, if they knew, or should have known, of such crimes being committed by their subordinates. So, wherever he may go, the issue will haunt him; like it happened at the Oxford Union late last year, where the organizers cancelled his scheduled ‘due to the sheer scale of the expected protests’, he will continue to find his public engagements disrupted.
Does such disruption serve a purpose? Daring to put that question may be blasphemy but experience shows that at least in the short run these end up as photo ops.
Accountability for any crime is necessary since the democratic world cannot survive without commitment to the rule of law. TNA’s silence and Rajapaksa’s deft handling of geo-political and strategic realities underline the need for a new thinking cap. Not the Ban Ki-moon committees.
