Is Sri Lanka's bloody ethnic conflict and dismal human rights record an issue for international corporations and multinationals doing business in the country? Business leaders and rights activists are divided on this.
The economy, despite the conflict, is recording an average growth of over five percent per annum. Last year it was 6.2 percent, a figure which the World Bank commended last week. In fact, the Bank is putting together a higher four-year funding programme totalling 900 million dollars starting from June 2008, up from around 700 million dollars in the previous 2005-2008 Country Assistance Strategy (CAS). The Bank’s board is meeting on Jun. 5 to approve the new CAS.
"Yes, certainly people are concerned about the violence in Sri Lanka and the human rights situation, and big corporations are not investing. But Sri Lanka has a small domestic market for them to invest in and their concentration currently is on the global crisis of high food and fuel prices, which is seen touching 150 dollars per barrel in coming months," said Mahendra Amarasuriya, a local business leader who is currently chairman of Lions International, the global charity driven by big business.
Amarasuriya, who heads Sri Lanka's most profitable private bank, Commercial Bank, says that despite concerns Sri Lanka continues to draw investments from Asian Tigers like Malaysia and Korea. Malaysia was Sri Lanka's biggest foreign investor in 2007, the third year running, ousting countries like Britain and Japan. Neighbouring India is also a major investor in Sri Lanka.
Human rights activists see different. They point to the country’s inability to retain its seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council, at last week's poll, as a negative trend that could affect trade and one that is likely to affect Sri Lanka's chances of continuing to benefit from European duty free concessions.
Sri Lanka is the only South Asian nation to enjoy generalised system of preferences (GSP+) duty free trade concessions from the European Community. The three-year scheme that covers 7,200 items, including garments, ends in December 2008 and is up for renewal.
The EC says retaining GSP+ depends on how well the Sri Lankan government is seen implementing 27 international conventions on human rights, labour rights and environmental standards.
But Julian Wilson, EU ambassador in Colombo, has criticised newspaper reports on the continuation of GSP+ being linked to human rights abuses as 'rubbish'. The ‘Daily Mirror’ newspaper recently quoted him as saying at a function on the issue of GSP+ that "I will only say that a lot of melodramatic rubbish has been written about the renewal of GSP+ in the local press. The truth is simple if somewhat banal--the EU wants Sri Lanka to receive GSP+ again for the coming three years," he said.
Yet respected activists like Jehan Perera, director at the local National Peace Council, says despite these public statements the EU is ‘’very, very’’ concerned about the human rights situation and has privately expressed this.
"There is a great deal of disappointment being expressed over the lack of implementation of the conventions. EU officials say Sri Lanka has all the institutions in place but no political will to implement them (conventions)," said.
Perera says Sri Lanka's loss at the U.N. Human Rights Council vote will give added strength to the EU to hold the government accountable for the growing number of human rights abuses when Sri Lanka's application for a continuation of the trade concessions is made this year. Garments, Sri Lanka's biggest commodity export, are the biggest beneficiary of the concessions. The industry, workers and trade unions fear up to 200,000 workers and their dependants would be affected if these concessions are lost.
Sri Lanka's human rights record is appalling, with intimidation of the media being amongst the worst forms of abuse. Last week, Keith Noyahr, defence columnist and associate editor of the English-language ‘Nation’ newspaper, a weekly, was abducted by an unidentified group near his Colombo home and brutally assaulted.
Newspapers, rights groups and colleagues of Noyahr had recently criticised the army commander in a column and that may have been the provocation of the assault, the latest in a string of attacks on the media. Another journalist, Jayaprakash Sittampalam Tissainayagam, has been held in custody at a military detention centre in Colombo since Mar. 7 without being charged.
Authorities say the journalist, who runs a media website and is a former IPS writer, is being held on suspicion of involvement with Tamil separatist militants.
Amnesty International says at least 10 media workers have been unlawfully killed in Sri Lanka since the beginning of 2006, while others have been arbitrarily detained, tortured and allegedly disappeared while in the custody of security forces.
According to New York-based Human Rights Watch, at least 1,500 people have "disappeared" between 2006 and 2007. Most were minority Tamils living in the conflict-ridden north and east where Tamil Tigers are battling government troops in a campaign to seek equal rights for the minority Tamil community. Right groups say the situation has worsened after a five-year-old ceasefire between the Tamil Tigers and the government collapsed last year.
Last week, six candidates competed for Asian seats on the 47-member U.N. Human Rights council. Japan secured 155 votes, South Korea 139, Pakistan 114, and Bahrain 142 while Sri Lanka lost its seat, securing only 101 votes.
A massive campaign mounted by the Sri Lankan government met ran into an equally imposing counter-campaign by international human rights groups to dissuade countries from voting for Sri Lanka. "The Human Rights Council vote should be a wakeup call for the Sri Lankan government," Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, was quoted as saying in a press release.
"We are in serious danger of losing the EU GSP+," says Anton Marcus, general secretary of the Free Trade Zones and General Services Employees Union, which, together with garment manufacturers, are trying to persuade the government to implement U.N. conventions on associations for workers and collective bargaining.
But despite such concerns, institutions like the Bank and the Asian Development Bank (AsDB) continue to provide assistance to Sri Lanka and increase the quantum of aid.
Last month, AsDB said it was releasing a 300 million dollar loan to Sri Lanka for a port project, approved as far back as February 2007. AsDB officials said the delay was owing to concerns over governance and tender procedures which have now been sorted out. WB South Asia vice-president Praful Patel told reporters on Friday in Colombo that Sri Lanka has made a request for emergency food aid from the Bank-led Global Food Crisis Response Fund to tackle the food crisis sweeping the world.
He said Sri Lanka would be in line to receive up to 100 million dollars from this fund, and in the course of his briefing praised government efforts to reduce poverty rates by seven percent to 15.2 percent of the population in 2006-2007.
Peace activist Perera agrees that there are countries and institutions that still support Sri Lanka financially despite the record of human rights abuses. He says the U.S. and Europe have reduced funding because Sri Lanka is a middle-income country and there is more focus is on Africa. "Yet if there is peace the doors would open for more funding,’’ said Perera – aview shared by the Bank’s s Patel. "There is a lot more donors can do (in development funding) if there is peace and the space opens on the political economy side," Patel says.
Perera says it is difficult to measure human rights abuses and the level of impunity. "It's not like any science. How do you measure rights and freedom? For example, at the recent eastern provincial elections, there were fewer killings than at previous polls but the level of intimidation of voters was the worst on record."
Last year, the Sri Lankan military had wrested the eastern province from the grip of Tamil militants after abrogating a Norwegian-brokered peace accord.
