“In George Orwells 1984, the Ministry of Peace dealt with war, and the Ministry of Love with torture. Likewise we witnessed in Sri Lanka how the Peace Secretariat justified excesses carried out in the name of war against terrorism. And the so-called welfare camps are virtual prisons,” Daily Mirror said quoting Mangala Samaraweera's charge against the Sri Lanka in the parliament, adding that about 30 to 40 persons are abducted on a daily basis from IDP camps in the North.

 

“Certain reports indicate that 30 to 40 persons are abducted or disappear on a daily basis from IDP camps,” Samaraweera charged.

 

In response to denial of the Chief Whip Dinesh Gunawardena of the allegations, Samaraweera said, the government must be transparent regarding the IDPs, and “[i]f the government allows Opposition MPs to form a committee and visit the camps then such claims can be verified. The government should act in a transparent manner."

 

Stating that most of the more than 280,000 IDPs had relatives in Sri Lanka who are prepared to look after them, Samaraweera added, “[t]hey are not economic refugees. They have opened 21,000 bank accounts and deposited Rs. 500 million in banks after coming out of LTTE areas. They are government servants, teachers and farmers. All they want is to go home,” the paper said quoting Samaraweera.

 

The MP also charged that the IDPs were being resettled from one camp into another. “The government is denying these people the right to speech, choice, movement and livelihood,” according to the paper.

A Sinhala political party led by hard-line Buddhist monks has called for a United Nations led probe into human rights abuses committed by the United States of America.

The Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU), a constituent of the ruling coalition led by President Mahinda Rajapakse, announced that it is launching a campaign to collect one million signatures to petition United Nations General Secretary Ban Ki Moon to establish a commission to inquire into human rights violations committed by the United States.

"The United States had violated the human rights of the entire world without challenge from anybody. We should expose the US," JHU Legal Advisor and Western Province Minister Udaya Gammanpila told a press conference on Thursday, September 24.

He said that plans are afoot to launch similar campaigns in South Korea, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Cambodia and other countries that also suffered due to the US policies affecting human rights, according to Island newspaper in Sri Lanka.

According to the newspaper, Gammanpila told reporters that US President Barack Obama would face the same fate of former US President Jimmy Carter.

Carter listened to the advice of William Shelly on Iran and lost his position in the first term and if Obama goes on with the allegations of former US Ambassador in Sri Lanka Robert O Blake saying that there were human rights and war related issues in Sri Lanka that needs to be investigated, he too would lose his position, the Island reported as Gammanpila saying.

According to the Island, Gammanpila also said that they were suspicious about the conduct of Opposition leader Ranil Wickremesinghe despite losing elections a record number of times, he still remains the leader.

"Like in several parts in the world, the US comes out with human right issues and sets up a puppet regimes. Similarly, they may be planning to set up a puppet government in Sri Lanka, too, making Wickremesinghe the leader," Island quoted Gammnpila as saying.

JHU Parliamentary Group leader Ven. Athureliya Rathna Thera told reporters there are many moves by the US and some western European countries during the war against the LTTE, to discredit the government.

"This is very clear now, how these countries tried to save Vellupillai Prabhakaran," he said.

What Ranil, Mangala and Mano Ganesan said on 3 September at a Platform for Freedom Press Conference on the IDP issue was fairly widely covered in the print and electronic media, but three other contributors, Siritunga Jayasuriya, Nimalka Fernando and Herman Kumara failed to attract coverage. They were more sharp and interesting, but not being parliamentarians, I guess, less news worthy. I will focus on them to redress this imbalance. But first a Mangala snippet which was both catchy and accurate; he defined the Vanni interns as FDPs (Forcibly Detained Persons) insisting that calling them internally displaced persons (IDPs) was simply not true.

 

First, let me have my say. It is my view that it is the FDP issue that will have more severe repercussions on the relationship between the Tamils and the government and on Sinhala-Tamil relations than the hotly canvassed political package uproar. Astute folks are pretty well reconciled that nothing will happen in the foreseeable future about devolution, thirteen plus, minus or zilch, and home-grown solutions. It’s going to be the same old unitary state and constitution, with or without some superficial tinkering, until and unless something dramatic happens, such as the change to a left government; and that’s not on the cards.

 

But between two and three hundred thousand people of one community, held in indefinite and illegal detention by the hegemonic state of another community, well that’s tertiary stage cancer and its repercussions are going to be far, far more serious than people seem to realise. I give it three more months and if the FDPs are not all released from forcible detention, then the gulf will again widen to distrust similar to the post 1972-Constitution, post Vattukkotai Resolution, or intensifying LTTE periods. The gulf will become unbridgeable again. In a word, it’s the FDPs stupid, not the package that will hinge, or if you prefer unhinge, Tamil consciousness.

 

Siritunga’s take on it: For those who need some background, Siritunga is the leader of the United Socialist Party (USP), a non government left party and as presidential candidate in 2005 he polled 36,000 votes, certainly much more than I expected. I have been closely associated with him politically from 1970 when he was a key leader in the Vama or left tendency in the LSSP which matured into the NSSP in 1977. He parted company with us on the Indo-Lanka Accord and 13th Amendment which he opposed while we (the majority in the NSSP) gave these measures our conditional support. Nevertheless, he and I have remained personal friends. The USP has fraternal ties with international Marxist currents in many countries but I am not aware what its active membership within the country is.

 

As a Sinhalese Marxist he expressed shock at the inadequate response in the South to the fact that such a large number of Tamils could be held in illegal detention for over 100 days. “Imagine the uproar in the country if two to three lakhs of ordinary Sinhalese people had been held behind barbed wire like this”. How much longer is this going to continue he inquired? And this inquiry continued to the heart of the matter. “These people have lived under LTTE Administration for nearly two decades. Of course a large number of them or a family member would have worked in that Administration, many would have associated with the LTTE, and to be perfectly frank, most would have supported or been sympathetic to the LTTE point of view”. This goes to the heart of the government’s conundrum; if the government intends to hold everybody who is or was sympathetic to the LTTE indefinitely, then it will have to hold some hundreds of thousands of people forever. The real problem is not a few thousand ex-cadres, the problem is hundreds of thousands who, come on be sensible about it, must have been pro-LTTE.

 

I think it is inevitable that he comes to the same conclusion as I have done in my third paragraph, but from an inside the camps perspective. I asserted that the FDP issue is destined to be the crucible in which the fires of broad ethno-political conflict will light up again. Siritunga says “If you hold people like this you are operating a farm for breeding the next generation of LTTEers, by whatever name they sprout. Is the government trying to breed another one lakh of terrorists?”

 

Insensitivity and secrecy: Nimalka introduced a women’s and welfare perspective as one would expect from a person of her background. Initially though she made a comment that was news to me. Most of the food, dry rations and other essential needs of the FDPs are provided by UN agencies and NGOs she said.

 

It is not GoSL but these organisations that foot the bill; the work in the camp is done by NGO volunteers and GoSL’s expenses, other than paying for the military, are small. Nimalka’s main grouse however was framed in these questions. “Do mothers have the right to take a fevered child to hospital? Can a woman who is bleeding seek emergency medical help?” The questions are rhetorical, the answers obvious.

 

Why must the military be in control of the camps, why not civilian agencies? Herman Kumara of the Fishermen’s Welfare Association was quite pointed in his repetition of the question on many people’s mind. Why can’t visitors enter the camps? Why are journalists barred? Why are international agencies kept out? Why is it taking the courts so long to make a straightforward order to allow members of parliament to visit the camps? As Mangala added “I can walk into any prison at will and meet any criminal, but I am not allowed to meet these people held in detention for no reason.” The reasons offered for this paranoid secrecy varied from the need to hide human rights violations to calculations relating to the upcoming elections. I think it will be some time before the real reason comes seeping out. 

The Chairman of MAS Holdings, warned of “very challenging times” ahead, with the prospect of GSP Plus concessions being withdrawn by the European Union. 

“This duty-free facility is extremely vital to Sri Lanka as the country benefits significantly from these concessions to remain competitive in markets in the EU” said Mahesh Amalean of MAS holdings, South Asia’s largest manufacturer of intimate apparel. 

If the program is not renewed, Sri Lanka’s garment industry, which sells around $3.47 billion to the EU alone, would be severely hit. Sri Lanka could no longer compete with countries such as Cambodia and Bangladesh, which also suffers concessions under a separate program, said Mr Amalean.

Companies who regularly export goods into the EU, such as Marks & Spencer’s, Next & Tesco could relocate their factories into these countries, if the GSP+ facility is withdrawn.

`The cost of manufacturing in these countries is also far less than in Sri Lanka`, he noted. `If the GSP Plus is withdrawn, they will have a competitive edge in the EU marketplace`.

`All these factors put together will pose a very big challenge to Sri Lanka`, the MAS Holdings boss underlined. `We need to take cognizance of this`.

 This was echoed by the head of the Sri Lanka Apparel Exporters Association, Kumar Mirchandani.

“Price pressure is so high... people move away over a difference of 10 cents,” he said. “We can’t take 10 per cent off our prices — we don’t have those margins.”

 The Sri Lankan Government has promised to pump $150 million into the apparel industry, in order to try and increase exports to countries such as India and China. The European Union however, made up 52% of all Sri Lanka’s garment exports, and 36% of all goods exports, making it an extremely hard market to replace. 

“GSP Plus is crucial... withdrawing it would mean a lot of hardship,” said Mr Mirchandani. 

The situation has become so critical, that even UNP Deputy Leader Karu Jayasuriya pleaded with the both the Sri Lankan Government and EU to allow the concessions to continue. 

“As a responsible opposition, the UNP does not wish to see all our people suffer the consequences of the sins of a few. It is in this spirit that we have appealed to the EU recently to reconsider before withdrawing the trade concessions to Sri Lanka since more than a million of our poorest people will be affected by such an action while the perpetrators of violence who are responsible for our predicament will be largely untouched,” he said. 

He slammed the current government and said they “must realize how serious the consequences of its actions are going to be for the people of this country. Today more than a million, direct and indirect jobs are in jeopardy.” 

“The people of Sri Lanka need to understand that this government has long since perfected the art of propaganda and spin doctoring... What the democratic world is asking of us is the restoration of democratic rights in Sri Lanka.”

Meanwhile, the team of four ministers appointed by President Rajapakse concluded that they had met all conditions laid down by the EU for the concessions to continue. 

“I see no reason for the EU to prevent the GSP+ facility being extended to Sri Lanka for a further period,” commented Deputy Finance Minister Sarath Amunugama, who is part of the team. 

Sri Lanka’s admission into the GSP Plus program has been under review since October 2008, after increasing pressure on the EU to investigate human rights abuses. Since then, investigators have been refused entry into the country and categorically rejected by the Sri Lankan Government. 

The EU is set to vote on the termination of the GSP+ tariff on October 15^th.

In villages in Mannar district, the government’s ‘Northern Reawakening’ programme has not brought promised changes. Homes are still broken; services are non-existent, and freedom of movement still limited by heavy military presence.

 

 The government had promised them homes, land to farm and a life back to normal after years of war, but people who fled villages in northern Sri Lanka’s Mannar district found something quite different when they got home after the fleeing the area in 2007 amid heavy fighting between the Sri Lankan military and Tamil Tigers.

 

Their homes are broken, fields cannot be farmed, and the soldiers are everywhere.

 

There are no basic services and the situation is such that in villages like Kokkupadayan primary school children, all 80 of them, have no chairs or desks to study with.

 

After successfully ending the 30-year old war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the government launched a ‘Northern Reawakening’ programme (Uthuru Wasanthaya).

 

It promised a new life for the residents of one the most war-torn area in the country.

 

Back on 30 April 2009, the first 122 families went home, joined on 9 June by many more, all eager to repopulate the villages of Aripputhurai, Silawaturai, Bandaraweli, Pokkarni and many other small hamlets in the district of Mannar.

 

“We are happy to be home even if our houses are broken. But we have no reason to rejoice even if they say we are free,” a fisherman in Aripputhurai told AsiaNews.

 

“We were told that we would get projects that would support us, projects for reconstruction and development, but they only fixed bridges and roads,’ a villager said.

 

Instead, the authorities are monitoring residents and fishermen are allowed to work only between 6 am and 6 pm.

 

“The 4,000 acres we used to farm before we fled are now under military control,” a farmer said.

 

“We are living in an open prison,” said Fr Seemanpillai Jayabalan, parish priest in Aripputhurai.

 

“People have no hope for development. They have lost their property and many homes are a total write-off.”

 

NGOs are not allowed in the area and “all aid must go through the government’s Rehabilitation Task Force,” the clergyman said.

 

Checkpoints are everywhere, so that human movement is under tight control.

 

“The military say that the LTTE does not constitute any danger anymore,” Father Jayabalan; yet “people cannot freely go the jungle to fetch the wood they need to repair their homes. There is a ban on fires and there are still mines in some areas.”

 

Anyone who needs help to repair a roof or rebuild a wall in his home can only get government handouts.

 

Wood, roof-tiles, plastic sheets and even branches from coconut trees can be obtained only through the Rehabilitation Task Force; no one has the right to get anything any other way.

 

According to local sources, that security forces seized 50 acres belonging to the Church of Holy Mary in Mullikulam in order to build a naval base, another 100 are going to be taken over by the Musali Division to build a police station.

 

Father Jayabalan is troubled by what is happening.

 

“What is purpose of all this, if the authorities do not take care of the people? We are powerless and increasingly concerned about what our brothers and sisters are going through in the camps,” he said.

 

“The heavy rains of November and December will come soon. We have lived in refugee camps and know that no one can survive in places like that.”

Everywhere in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo, posters featuring smiling soldiers holding rocket launchers and machine guns celebrate the recent end to the nation's 26-year civil war.

 

But in the government-run camps that still house more than 250,000 ethnic Tamils displaced by the war's fighting, the mood is far from celebratory.

 

In late August, heavy rains at the largest camp, Manik, flooded tents and led to unsanitary conditions.

 

According to aid worker K Thampu, "The situation was heartbreaking. Tents were flooded and mothers, desperate to keep their children dry during the night, took chairs and tables from school facilities for them to sleep on."

 

Rains also caused toilets to flood, with worms covering large swaths of ground near latrines, says Thampu.

 

At stake, according to local experts, is not only the immediate welfare of camp residents, but chances for long-lasting peace in Sri Lanka.

 

Most of the internally displaced people (IDPs) have been living in the camps since May, when they fled the intense fighting that marked the final battle between government forces and the insurgent group known as the Tamil Tigers.

 

Publicly, the Sri Lankan government has committed to returning IDPs to their homes by November of this year, and several thousand people have been released from camps to live with relatives.

 

But the government under President Mahinda Rajapaksa also maintains that others must remain in camps until the area around their former homes is cleared of mines. At the same time, government representatives are slowly screening camp residents to identify former combatants.

 

Aid workers and local experts agree that the government must move quickly, for several reasons.

 

The most urgent among them is monsoon season, which starts at the end of September and will only exacerbate the already difficult camp conditions.

 

More tents and toilets will flood, increasing the risk of communicable and mosquito-born diseases.

 

"We saw how bad things got after the recent rains, which only lasted 3 or 4 days," says Thampu, who works for the Baltimore-based humanitarian organization Lutheran World Relief.

 

"Imagine how bad they will get once the monsoons are upon us."

 

In addition to the rains, long-standing tensions between Tamils and the Sinhalese-led government remain, even if the armed insurgency has been defeated.

 

Many worry that if the government does not act quickly to return people to their homes, it will lead to new problems in northern Sri Lanka.

 

Thampu says that many teenagers in the camps are already frustrated.

 

"Young people have told me, 'We have no freedom to talk, no protection, no education, no recreation and no employment! Everything looks like hell in our life. What do we have to live for?'"

 

Despite living in a warzone, many teenagers were able to pass the university entrance exams. But now they cannot leave the camps to begin their studies.

 

Thampu adds, "Victory has been declared, but what does that mean for them? It is important to give them a new start in life."

 

According to T Thevathas, another aid worker in Manik Camp, "Peace and security in the north is the most important thing to consider. People have been waiting 30 years for this, but IDPs in the camps feel no security and have no peace of mind despite the government's victory."

 

Thevatas notes that for real advances to be made in the north, it is crucial for Tamils in the camp to feel that the national government is working on their behalf.

 

"At this point," he says, "IDPs have placed all their hopes for return on local governments and the international community."

 

Bernard Jaspers Failer, of the aid organization ZOA Refugee Care, acknowledges that the Sri Lankan government has genuine security concerns.

 

"But," he is quick to add, "those have to be balanced with the fact that the longer people remain in camps, new frustrations are being generated which will have long-term impacts on society."

 

The Sri Lankan government has strictly regulated access to the camps. But those organizations and governmental representatives who have been able to visit have expressed concern over the conditions.

 

Human Rights Watch, the New York-based rights organization, has said that the government "is threatening [IDPs'] health and even their lives by keeping them there during the rainy season floods."

 

U.S. officials have also put pressure on the Sri Lankan government to allow camp residents to return home.

 

In comments made on Aug. 19, Eric Schwartz, assistant secretary for the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration at the State Department, said the "involuntary confinement is especially a source of concern given the recent rains and given the coming of the monsoon season, and it makes it all the more important that release from confinement be an issue that friends of Sri Lanka continue to raise."

 

In an effort to expedite the process, on July 27, the U.S. announced an additional $8 million in aid to assist in the return of IDPs to their homes in northern Sri Lanka.

 

With the monsoon season rapidly approaching, and frustration levels on the rise within the camps, local experts agree that time is a critical factor.

 

For Thampu, it is "a situation where a successful return process would be a giant step towards long-lasting peace. But if these people who were forced from their homes are forced to stay in camps, it could result in increased tensions for the down the road."

 

While the Sri Lankan government has made moves to release some of the most vulnerable individuals, such as the elderly and disabled, aid workers and the U.S. government alike agree that the return process must be accelerated.

 

For the people in the camps, their return home will mark an end to war in Sri Lanka.

 

And, as T Thevathas notes, "It will finally provide relief from the fears they endured during war and continue to feel in the camps today."

 

Bart Beeson is a freelance journalist and campaign organizer focusing on politics and the environment in Latin America. Annalise Romoser is a freelance journalist who oversees Washington, D.C.-based advocacy efforts related to human rights and rural development in Latin America and Africa. 

Yet even in victory the Sri Lankan government seems unable to define peace or outline a political solution to the long-standing cultural and political grievances of the Tamil minority, which makes up 12 percent of the 21.3-million population. A process of national reconciliation anchored in federalism and multiculturalism can succeed only if human-rights abuses by all parties are independently investigated. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has acknowledged that civilian casualties were "unacceptably high," especially as the war built to a bloody crescendo.

 

The continuing air of martial triumph in Sri Lanka, though, is making it difficult to heal the wounds of war through three essential "Rs": relief, recovery and reconciliation. In fact, the military victory bears a distinct family imprint: President Mahinda Rajapaksa was guided by two of his brothers, Gotabaya, the defense secretary who authored the war plan, and Basil, the presidential special adviser who formulated the political strategy. Yet another brother, Chamal, is the ports minister who awarded China a contract to build the billion-dollar Hambantotta port, on Sri Lanka's southeast.

 

In return, Beijing provided Colombo not only the weapon systems that decisively tilted the military balance in its favor, but also the diplomatic cover to prosecute the war in defiance of international calls to cease offensive operations to help stanch rising civilian casualties. Through such support, China has succeeded in extending its strategic reach to a critically located country in India's backyard that sits astride vital sea-lanes of communication in the Indian Ocean region.

 

Sinhalese nationalists now portray Rajapaksa as a modern-day Dutugemunu, a Sinhalese ruler who, according to legend, vanquished an invading Tamil army led by Kind Elara more than 2,000 years ago. But four months after the Tamil Tigers were crushed, it is clear the demands of peace extend far beyond the battlefield. What is needed is a fundamental shift in thegovernment's policies to help create greater interethnic equality, regional autonomy and a reversal of the state-driven militarization of society.

 

But Rajapaksa, despite promising to address the root causes of conflict, has declared: "Federalism is out of the question." How elusive the peace dividend remains can be seen from Colombo's decision to press ahead with a further expansion of the military. Not content with increasing the military's size five-fold since the late 1980s to more than 200,000 troops today, Colombo is raising the strength further to 300,000, in the name of "eternal vigilance." Soon after the May victory, the government, for example, announced a drive to recruit 50,000 new troops to help manage the northern areas captured from the rebels.

 

The Sri Lankan military already has more troops than that of Britain or Israel. The planned further expansion would make the military in tiny Sri Lanka larger than the militaries of major powers like France, Japan and Germany. By citing a continuing danger of guerrilla remnants reviving the insurgency, Rajapaksa, in fact, seems determined to keep a hyper-militarized Sri Lanka on something of a war footing. Yet another issue of concern is the manner the nearly 300,000 Tamil civilians still held by the government in camps where, in the recent words of U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, the "internally displaced persons are effectively detained under conditions of internment."

 

Such detention risks causing more resentment among the Tamils and sowing the seeds of future unrest. The internment was intended to help weed out rebels, many of whom already have been identified and transferred to military sites. Those in the evacuee camps are the victims and survivors of the deadly war. To confine them in the camps against their will is to further victimize and traumatize them.

 

Sri Lanka's interests would be better served through greater transparency. It should grant the U.N., International Red Cross and nongovernmental organizations at home and abroad full and unhindered access to care for and protect the civilians in these camps, allowing those who wish to leave the camps to do so and live with relatives and friends. Otherwise, it seriously risks breeding further resentment.

 

Then there is the issue of thousands of missing people, mostly Tamils. Given that many families are still searching for missing members, the government ought to publish a list of all those it is holding — in evacuee camps, prisons, military sites and other security centers. Even suspected rebels in state custody ought to be identified and not denied access to legal representation.

 

Authorities should disclose the names of those they know to be dead — civilians and insurgents — and the possible circumstances of their death. Also, the way to fill the power vacuum in the Tamil-dominated north is not by dispatching additional army troops in tens of thousands, but by setting up a credible local administration to keep the peace and initiate rehabilitation and reconstruction after more than 25 years of war.

 

Any government move to return to the old policy of settling Sinhalese in Tamil areas is certain to stir up fresh problems. More fundamentally, such have been the costs of victory that Sri Lankan civil society stands badly weakened and civil liberties curtailed. The wartime suppression of a free press and curtailment of fundamental rights continues in peacetime, undermining democratic freedoms and creating a fear psychosis.

 

Public meetings cannot be held without government permission. Sweeping emergency regulations also remain in place, arming the security forces with expansive powers of search, arrest, detention and seizure of property. Individuals can still be held in unacknowledged detention for up to 12 months. For the process of reconciliation to begin in earnest, it is essential the government shed its war-gained powers and accept, as Pillay says, "an independent and credible international investigation . . . to ascertain the occurrence, nature and scale of violations of international human-rights and international humanitarian law" by all parties during the conflict.

 

Pillay has gone on to say: "A new future for the country, the prospect of meaningful reconciliation and lasting peace, where respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms can become a reality for all, hinges upon such an in-depth and comprehensive approach."

 

Unfortunately, Colombo still seeks to hold back the truth. Those who speak up are labeled "traitors" (if they are Sinhalese) or accused of being on the payroll of the Tamil diaspora. Last year, a Sri Lankan minister accused the U.N. undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, John Holmes, of being on the rebels' payroll after Holmes called Sri Lanka one of the world's most dangerous places for aid workers.

 

The media remains muzzled, and a host of journalists have been murdered or imprisoned. Lawyers who dare to take up sensitive cases face threats. Recently, a well-known astrologer who predicted the president's ouster from power was arrested. And this month, the U.N. Children's Fund communications chief was ordered to leave Sri Lanka after he discussed the plight of children caught up in the government's military campaign.

 

Rather than begin a political dialogue on regional autonomy and a more level-playing field for the Tamils in education and government jobs, the government has seen its space get constricted by the post-victory upsurge of Sinhalese chauvinism opposed to the devolution of powers to the minorities.

 

The hardline constituency argues that the Tamils shouldn't get in defeat what they couldn't secure through three decades of unrest and violence. Indeed, such chauvinism seeks to tar federalism as a potential forerunner to secession, although the Tamil insurgency sprang from the state's rejection of decentralization and power-sharing. The looming parliamentary and presidential elections also make devolution difficult, even though the opposition is splintered and Rajapaksa seems set to win a second term.

 

Reversing the militarization of society, ending the control of information as an instrument of state policy and promoting political and ethnic reconciliation are crucial to postconflict peace-building and to furthering the interests of all Sri Lankans — Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims. So also is the need to discard the almost mono-ethnic character of the security forces. Colombo has to stop dragging its feet on implementing the constitution's 13th amendment, which requires the ceding of some powers to the provincial or local level.

 

Sadly, there is little international pressure on Colombo, despite the leverage offered by the Sri Lankan economy's need for external credit. The U.S. can veto any decision of the International Monetary Fund, but it chose to abstain from the recent IMF vote to give Colombo a $2.8 billion loan. In the face of China's stonewalling at the U.N., Ban has been unable to appoint a special envoy on Sri Lanka. A U.N. special envoy can shine an international spotlight to help build pressure on a recalcitrant government. But on Sri Lanka, the best the U.N. has been able to do is to send a political official to Colombo this month for talks.

 

It is thus important for the democratic players, including the United States, the European Union, Japan and Norway — co-chairs of the so-called Friends of Sri Lanka — and India, to coordinate their policies on Sri Lanka. If Rajapaksa continues to shun true reconciliation, these countries should ratchet up pressure on Colombo by lending support to calls for an international investigation into the thousands of civilian deaths in the final weeks of the war.

 

The International Criminal Court has opened an initial inquiry into Sri Lankan rights-abuse cases that could turn into a full-blown investigation. Sri Lanka, however, is not an ICC signatory and thus would have to consent — or be referred by the U.N. Security Council — for the ICC to have jurisdiction over it. As world history attests, peace sought through the suppression and humiliation of an ethnic community proves to be elusive.

 

If Rajapaksa wants to earn a place in history as another Dutugemunu, he has to emulate that ancient king's post-victory action and make honorable peace with the Tamils before there is a recrudescence of violence. It will be a double tragedy for Sri Lanka if making peace proves more difficult than making war.

 

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the independent, privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is on the international advisory council of the Campaign for Peace and Justice in Sri Lanka.

A whole world is duped in what Colombo is machinating in the name of resettlement of IDPs, Tamil circles in Jaffna commented, citing Sri Lanka Navy’s new internment camps around its installations in the island sector of Jaffna.

 

Colombo’s aim is threefold: a human shield of civilians for its occupying forces, prevention of rightful owners reoccupying houses and lands around its military installations and eventually confiscating those lands in strategic areas for its expansion and other demographic conspiracies in the very heart of Tamil homeland, pointed out Tamil circles adding that a paranoid Sri Lankan state can never deliver justice to Tamils.

 

The core truth is that the barbed-wire camps came up because the world powers wanted it. But some powers by not directly taking responsibility and some others like India by sitting on international action continue injustice, Jaffna circles said.

 

The SLN ‘resettled’ nearly 2000 civilians brought from the internment camps of Vavuniya in new internment camps created by using abandoned houses around its naval installations in Kaarainakar and in Kayts, at the end of September.

 

For nearly two decades now, Colombo’s armed forces are occupying vast tracts of potential civilian land along the northern coast of the peninsula in the name of High Security Zone.

 

A so-called ‘development model’ for Jaffna that is now being circulated shows that this tract is not going to be returned to people, but is going to be used for resource exploitation and a new city for the occupiers, with harbour, airport and military installations, as a joint venture of Colombo and New Delhi.

 

Reviving the cement factory in Kaankeasanthurai is the biggest environmental crime that is going to affect hundreds of thousands of civilians, discouraging them from inhabiting the northern part of the peninsula, academic circles in Jaffna said.

 

Meanwhile, the SLA installed landmine blast that seriously injured three recently resettled civilians in the Ariyaalai tract is alleged to be another trick of Colombo to discourage the call for expediting resettlement.

 

Unless the international community takes direct responsibility and removes Colombo’s occupying armed forces, peace and ‘reconciliation’ is a mirage in the island, opined a veteran Tamil politician in Jaffna. 

The young mother was standing by the side of the road, clutching her baby. The baby was dead.

 

Damilvany Gnanakumar watched as she tried to make a decision. Around them, thousands of people were picking their way between bodies strewn across the road, desperate to escape the fighting all around them.

 

"The mother couldn't bring the dead body and she doesn't want to leave it as well. She was standing … holding the baby. She didn't know what to do … At the end, because of the shell bombing and people rushing – there were thousands and thousands of people, they were rushing in and pushing everyone – she just had to leave the baby at the side of the road, she had to leave the body there and come, she had no choice. And I was thinking in my mind 'What have the people done wrong? Why are they going through this, why is the international government not speaking up for them? I'm still asking."

 

Four months later and Gnanakumar is sitting on a cream leather sofa in the living room of the family home in Chingford, Essex, reliving the final days of Sri Lanka's brutal civil war.

 

For most of those four months, the 25-year-old British graduate was imprisoned behind razor wire inside the country's grim internment camps, home to nearly 300,000 people. She was released last week, partly as a result of pressure from this newspaper, and flew back into London on Sunday, September 12.

 

The last time she publicly spoke about the conflict was from the hospital where she was working inside the ever-shrinking war zone in Sri Lanka's north-east. Then, the national army had surrounded the small sliver of land where the remnants of the Tamil Tiger guerrillas held out and where hundreds of thousands of civilians had taken refuge. She had been in despair: a shell had just struck the hospital and dozens were dead. "At the moment, it is like hell," she said then.

 

Gnanakumar was one of a small group of medics treating the wounded and providing a running commentary to the outside world from behind the lines. For months she had managed to stay alive while around her thousands died. At night, she lived in bunkers dug in the sand. During the day, she helped in the makeshift hospitals, dodging the shells and the bullets, tending the wounded and the dying, as the doctors tried to operate with butchers' knives and watered-down anaesthetic.

 

Now her damning account provides a powerful rebuke to the claims of the Sri Lankan president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, that the defeat of the Tamil Tigers was achieved without the spilling of a drop of civilian blood.

 

Born in Jaffna in the Tamil-dominated north of Sri Lanka in 1984, Gnanakumar and her family moved to Britain in 1994. Until 28 February last year, she had not been back. She had just completed a biomedical degree at Greenwich University, but her short-lived marriage was on the rocks and she decided it was time to make a clean break. She left the house, telling no one where she was going.

 

Arriving in the capital, Colombo, she headed for Vanni, the Tamil heartland, to stay with a relative she calls her brother (her real brother is back in the UK, along with her two sisters). There seemed little sign of danger, but by June 2008 fighting was getting worse: the Tamil Tigers, or Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), still thought they would be able to negotiate a ceasefire, as they had done in the past, but the government had other ideas. They were determined to destroy the LTTE once and for all. Gnanakumar decided to stay on to try to help those who were trapped by the advance.

 

Even before the arrival of the government's ground forces, there had been regular air raids by air force Kfir jets. But in early January artillery barrages began, forcing the population to move.

 

That was when the reality of the war hit Gnanakumar for the first time.

 

"It was raining and … you could see everywhere on the road the blood is running with the water and the bodies were left there because there was no-one to identify who was dead and who is alive, the bodies were just laid down on the floor and that's the first time I saw dead bodies and wounded people crying out, shouting."

 

Wherever they stopped, they built a bunker, digging down until they could stand up in the hole, cutting down palm branches and laying them across the top for a roof and packing sandbags on the top and around the sides.

 

As the frontline advanced, trapping as many as 300,000 people inside a shrinking enclave of LTTE-held land, Gnanakumar went to the makeshift government hospital, which had moved into a former primary school, and volunteered to help, dressing wounds and administering first aid.

 

Her laboratory training had not prepared her for anything like this, but she learned as she went along. As the fighting intensified, they were treating as many as 500 people every day in two rooms. "They had a shortage of medicine but they had to somehow save the people. The last two weeks or so there was a shortage of everything."

 

With replacement blood running out, she had to filter what she could from the patients through a cloth before feeding it back into their veins. When the anaesthetics ran short, they diluted them with distilled water. "I watched when there was a six-year-old boy," she said. "They had to take off the leg and also the arm, but they didn't have proper equipment, they just had a knife that the butchers use to cut the meat, and we have to use that to take off his leg and arm. He cried and cried."

 

As the army closed in, it got worse.

 

"People were running and running to get them safe away from the shell bombing, but they couldn't and it came to a point where we thought we are all going to die, there is no way we can be safe anymore here, but we just have to take it. I mean, you can't get out of the shell-bombing. I didn't think that I would be alive and I would be here now. I said OK, I'm going to die, that is the end of it.

 

"One day I was inside the [operating] theatre and the next room was bombed. We had a lot of the treated people left in the room for the doctors to go and monitor and they all died in that shell bomb. And they [the Sri Lankan forces] again bombed the hospital and one of the doctors died in that."

 

Inside the hospital, there was no respite. Gnanakumar cannot forget the day a mother was brought in, injured, clutching her baby.

 

"She had the baby on her lap, the baby is dead and the mother didn't know and the doctor said: 'Don't tell her, because if we tell her now she will start crying out and shouting and … we have to save the mother first.' So we said: 'OK, give the baby to us, we'll look after her you go and get the treatment from the doctor,' and only after she got the treatment we told the truth, that your baby is dead. I can easily say it, but at that moment I was in so much pain, the innocent baby, the mother didn't know the baby was dead, she thought 'my baby is sleeping'.

 

"There were so many incidents. Another time the mother was dead and the baby was still suckling."

 

The fighting was getting closer. They ate what they could find and slept, those who could, in the occasional lulls.

 

"You have to be ready to run, you can't relax and go to sleep, any minute you just have to be ready," she said.

 

Gnanakumar could not take any more. On 13 May the hospital had been hit, killing about 50 people. "The bunker right next to ours had a shell on top of it and there were six people in the same family died and three were wounded.

 

"I saw them … suddenly I start hearing people are crying out and I thought, it has to be somewhere really close … I came out of my tent and I saw blood everywhere and the people – I couldn't even imagine that place, there was blood and then the bodies were into pieces everywhere and my brother said: 'Just pack up and let's get away from this place.'"

 

In the last five days, she says, she believes about 20,000 people died. It is a very high estimate, though the UN has acknowledged the true death toll may never be known. Tamil groups such as the Global Tamil Forum say her account corroborates their own figures drawn from interviews with survivors.

 

Over the course of the three-decade war, it is estimated that up to 100,000 people died. But independent confirmation of the death toll in the final days has been impossible. The Sri Lankan government has barred independent journalists from the war zone to this day, and has expelled UN officials and aid workers.

 

Meanwhile, the survivors of the final assault have been spirited away inside sprawling camps in a militarised zone.

 

It was to those camps, at Menik Farm, that Gnanakumar was taken. Following that last bombing, she joined thousands fleeing towards the government lines. "We start moving and after walking about one hour or so we saw the Sri Lankan army. They were saying: 'Come, you are safe now, food will be provided for you.' There were bodies everywhere, like into pieces. We had to just walk." That was when she saw the mother agonising over what to do with her dead baby. No one had time to bury the bodies, she says. Some pushed them into bunkers and covered them with a little sand. That was the best they could do.

 

That night, they slept in a school, then they were taken by bus to the town of Vavuniya. She called her mother: "I said, Mum, just get me out of here, I just want to get out of this place. And the phone got cut off."

 

The Sri Lankan government has built a series of camps to house the estimated 300,000 people who poured out of the war zone. It claims that it needs to hold the civilians until it can weed out the former Tamil Tiger fighters; its critics, including many UN organisations and independent aid groups, question why, even if that is true, it needs to imprison children and the elderly behind barbed wire, and why it has not more quickly identified the rebels. Despite pledges to start sending the internees back to their homes "at the earliest possible opportunity", the UN says only 2,000 have so far been released.

 

There was no food the first day Gnanakumar arrived, and she had lost contact with the people she had been with. She slept in a tent with strangers.

 

Even after the privations of the war zone, conditions in the camp still came as a shock.

 

"Wherever you go there are big queues, whatever you want you have to queue. The toilets are terrible, I can't describe how disgusting. Flies everywhere, mosquitoes, unhygienic … People had all sorts of illnesses.

 

"People have lost their family members, they are separated from their families … and they are going through depression."

 

Accounts circulated of rapes and murders, of people disappearing. Some people committed suicide: a teacher was found hanging from a tree.

 

Military intelligence officers were roaming the camps, looking for former Tamil Tigers, she said. "It is an open prison, you are free to walk but you are inside a prison, you are not allowed to step out. You can't. There were guards everywhere and checkpoints."

 

A couple of days after she arrived, the British high commission made contact through the UNHCR. An appeal from her parents in the Guardian brought fresh hope and a flurry of activity: she was moved from the overcrowded zone two to zone one, the part of the camp the authorities show to visitors.

 

"I was there when the UN secretary Ban Ki-moon came in … He stayed there for about 10 minutes and just went. Why didn't he go into the camp and talk to the people and spend some time asking them what their problems were? I thought he has a responsibility and people were expecting something from him. They expected much from him and he just spent 10 minutes and that's it."

 

The officials told Gnanakumar she would be staying for a couple of days and would then be released. "And then the 48 hours turned into three days and then it turned into weeks and months and I thought OK, now I understand it is not going to happen." She was interrogated five times – what was she doing there? Why had she been in the hospitals?

 

The call to say she was going home came last week. She was taken to Colombo to meet the president's brother, Basil Rajapaksa.

 

"He said OK, you went through so much in the country and now you are released you can go and join your family and be happy. He wasn't sorry about it." She was then handed over to British officials.

 

She speaks in a matter-of-fact way, rarely betraying emotion. Her hair has been tied back tightly – she had beautiful hair before she left, she says, but lost most of it in the camps. She is not sure what she will do now, maybe something in the field of medicine.

 

"I'm happy and proud of myself that I was able to help the people. I still think it is unreal that I am in the UK … I never thought I would be alive and coming back, even in the camp.

 

"After looking at the people dying and dead bodies everywhere, it is like nothing threatens me any more, it is like I have had the hard time in my life and I think I am prepared to take up whatever happens in life now.

 

"I'm not that old Vany that sits down and cries for little things. I'm stronger now after going through and seeing all that problem. My mind is clear now."

 

The Sri Lankan high commission in London denied Gnanakumar's allegations and called the claim of more than 20,000 civilian deaths "unsubstantiated and fabricated". A spokesman said that at no time did it target "government hospitals or any other civilian infrastructure where the civilians were accommodated".

 

The spokesman said: "The government of Sri Lanka has all reasons to believe that Ms Gnanakumar has gone to Sri Lanka and worked in the conflict area according to the LTTE's agenda, while overstaying her visa."

 

He said the government was "continuously assisting the internally displaced Sri Lankans".

 

As the need for democratic political organisation unfolds afresh, Tamils have to take up the thread directly from the Vaddukkoaddai Resolution.

 

The Thimphu principles and all the other formulas put forward subsequently under the duress of powers, and failed as negotiation models, do not get precedence over the VR as bases for political organization.

 

Mullivaaykkaal was not the real defeat. The defeat comes only when Tamils are made to politically denounce their heart-felt aspirations.

 

The diaspora needs to peruse and correct course of any proposal that stops just at self-determination. In UN charter and in international law it is just an empty phrase that doesn’t protect nations or ethnicities.

 

 

The Vaddukkoaddai Resolution of 1976, calling for independent, sovereign, Tamil Eelam in the North and East of the island of Sri Lanka was a proclamation of all democratic Tamil political parties, including Ceylon Workers Congress, the then united political party of the Upcountry Tamils. The Eelam Tamil voters of the North and East overwhelmingly endorsed it in the 1977 elections. Thus it was a definite democratic mandate of Tamils and so far they didn’t get another chance to democratically tell what is in their heart.

 

The Thimphu principles of 1985 were a diluted version of Vaddukkoaddai Resolution, after truncating independence and sovereignty and stopping just at Tamil nation, homeland and self-determination.

 

The Thimphu principles, diluted to facilitate negotiation with Colombo, were jointly put forward by all the Tamil militant organizations of that time and the TULF. There was no mandate of the people. The most important fact to be noted is that the Indian Establishment that was always keen in nullifying Tamil independence in the island was behind making Tamil militancy then under its influence agreeable to the principles as a minimum platform for negotiation.

 

The Indo-Sri Lanka agreement of 1987 imposed on Tamils touched only the point of homeland, that too temporarily, and it was recently breached by Colombo. There was no credible mandate as the LTTE boycotted and the elections took place under the coercing presence of the Indian military. However, the provincial government elected under it finally felt it necessary to declare independent and sovereign Eelam, before winding up and while the Indian military was present.

 

The Oslo communiqué of 2002 was a further dilution of Vaddukkoaddai in another way, by its adoption of an invented phrase ‘internal self-determination’. Norway and some other powers that later became the Co-Chairs were behind making the LTTE agreeable to experiment negotiation with this dilution. Again there was no mandate of people. LTTE's chief negotiator Anton Balasingham, writing in 2004, questioned the concept of Oslo Declaration and implied the expiry of LTTE's concession on internal self-determination.

 

The ISGA of 2003, which has reference to Vaddukkoaddai but not to Thimphu, was only an interim proposal during the Co-Chair sponsored peace. It was apparently a move of the LTTE to supersede Oslo Communiqué. The mandate it received from Tamils has to be considered limited as the elections took place with the 6th Amendment to the constitution in effect. Its only electoral validity today is that it binds the TNA.

 

Even after considerably diluting the freely mandated aspirations of Vaddukkoaddai Resolution to suit their geopolitical agenda, India and the Co-Chairs miserably failed in making the Sri Lankan state agreeable for experimenting political solutions.

 

Had they succeeded, there would have been a different course of events and they would have had a standing in telling the Tamil mind to consider experimenting within a united Sri Lanka. But they chose the path of brutally abetting or allowing a crushing military defeat and open as well as barbed-wire incarceration of the whole nation of Tamils in the island.

 

Eelam Tamils are now left with the option of politically organising themselves afresh.

 

In the emerging scenario of democratic organisation of Eelam Tamil politics there need to be no place for Thimphu, Oslo or any other – non mandated, experimental, and failed negotiation formulas extended by militancy under duress of powers.

 

If there is democracy then nothing should prevent the democratic stream to get back to what was last mandated by people and what has become the heart-felt need of Eelam Tamils more than ever now, and to begin the political process and negotiation from that point.

 

However, the very forces that have inflicted military defeat on Tamils are now all out to defeat them politically by capturing, hijacking or deviating the democratic politics of Tamils.

 

India and the West compete in subtle ways in this exercise, adopting crude as well as highly sophisticated methods. Preparations, institutional arrangements and recruitments have been done long back by them to face a 'post-defeat' scenario as it was their foregone conclusion to inflict military defeat on Tamil nationalism.

 

The powers have carefully studied the non nation-centred ‘virtue’ of sections of Tamil elite or rather weakness of the Eelam Tamil nationalism, cultivated since colonial times to always orientate their politics in terms of the interests of others - British colonial interests, Colombo-centric interests, Indian interests, Western interests and there was a time when some were orientating it to the interests of Russia and China.

 

The elite politics of Eelam Tamils - except for the rare occasion of Vaddukkoaddai Resolution, and that too is said to be a result of youth pressure - was always hiding its mind fearing for others and was thinking in terms of others.

 

Influenced and discouraged by calculated power machinations, campaigns and Karunanidhis, the murmur heard in some elite circles now is that if a powerful armed struggle has failed, what could be achieved through democratic politics and claiming for what the heart aspires is only bravado.

 

They fail to see that it is more legitimate and more workable in democratic organisation to come out boldly with what you feel righteously deserving, register the claim and then to fight for it or negotiate until acceptable results are achieved.

 

This is possible only when we have the guts to independently evolve our politics firmly by ourselves first and then only to relate it to others. Of course this is not possible when we start looking at ourselves through the eyes of others. This mindset is the biggest impediment to our political organisation.

 

Mu’l’livaaykkaal was not the real defeat. Colombo and the powers know it. Their victory comes only when Tamils are made to politically denounce their heart-felt aspirations. It is in order to achieve this victory much easier, they advice or find agents to advise Tamils to drop their national aspiration, even though democratically registering a national aspiration could in no way be considered an obstacle for negotiation.

 

Powers have created a desperate situation for Eelam Tamils hoping their will power would wither even politically. But one should not fail to see that if not for Tamils, for the sake of their own interests, the powers have to find out solutions very soon in the island. Tamils have to be ready with their own politics to face the situation.

 

In the past, the failure of democratic Tamil politicians in adhering to people’s emotional needs with firmness and their inability to resist undue power interests, paved way for the rise and acceptance of militancy.

 

Tamils should take care that their political organisation now needs to be truly representative of their aspirations and needs to be firm in negotiation if they want to uphold democracy and avoid another rise of militancy. No need to say the powers should respect this reality, as they too share the fear.

 

It is now an acid test for the emerging democratic politics of Eelam Tamil nationalism.

 

The move in the diaspora for transnational government of Tamil Eelam is not only for negotiating the liberation and emancipation of Tamils in the island of Sri Lanka but it is also an alternative government of the diaspora, standing for the global unity, cultural identity, development and global status of the diaspora. The move for this government needs not to bother about anyone in proclaiming the independence and sovereignty of Eelam Tamils in the island and requesting a mandate from the people in the diaspora.

 

Self-determination, as it is understood in contemporary times is a vague term when applied to people or ethnicities. According to UN charter 1(2), self-determination is interpreted as existing only in state-to-state relationship. Legally, it protects only states.

 

“Self-determination does not entail the right to be independent, or even to vote for independence” (Geoffrey Robertson, Penguin 2008, p165).

 

“International law provides no right of secession in the name of self-determination” (Rosalyn Higgins, Peoples and Minorities in International Law, 1995, p33).

 

“At best, the people’s right to self-determination connotes the right of all citizens to participate in the political process, but this gives power to majorities and not to minorities (Robertson, ibid).

 

The diaspora needs to seriously peruse and correct the course of any proposal that stops just at self-determination.

 

The Tamil National Alliance in the island, operating under constraints of Colombo and India, should not on its own, denounce the independence and sovereignty of Eelam Tamils and should not agree for experimenting anything other than a confederation with the right to secede, is an opinion strongly felt in the diaspora.

 

Emerging Tamil politics needs to act with far sight. The present scenario of geopolitics is not going to remain the same. The national aspiration for independence and sovereignty, which is a hard reality for Eelam Tamils today, may also get re-defined. In any future possibility of shared sovereignty, either regionally or globally, the Eelam Tamils should be able to find their niche smoothly without again facing the tragedy they have undergone for ages.

 

It is with sadness most of the Eelam Tamils look at a few Marxists among them, especially of the former ‘Peking Wing’, who denounce separate nationalism for Eelam Tamils. The Marxist Communist Party of India also has adopted a similar line.

 

It is hard to understand that if national liberation of Eelam Tamils oppressed on ethnic grounds and ‘Eelam’ as a political unit is not acceptable to them, in what way the united Sri Lankan nationalism and Sri Lanka as a political unit upheld by them is ideologically justifiable. While viewing Tamil national struggle as serving imperialism, they practically serve the very imperialism by weakening the struggle.

 

Ironically, many Sinhala Marxists see justice and recognise the Tamil national struggle in the island.

 

The Marxists contributed immensely to the social progress of Eelam Tamils in the past. They have a duty in structuring and strengthening the Tamil nation further, through achieving social equality. The democratisation of politics is an atmosphere conducive for them, but they should not deprive Tamils getting their contribution by keeping Tamil national liberation as an untouchable topic, by not participating in it and by not recognising that their goals can be better achieved by accepting Tamil nationalism as a unit to apply their progressive ideas and shaping it at home and in transnational governance. 

If war-scarred Sri Lanka is to re-emerge as a tropical paradise, it has to build enduring peace through genuine inter-ethnic equality and by making the transition from being a unitary State to being a federation that grants local autonomy. Yet even in victory, the Sri Lankan government seems unable to define peace or outline a political solution to the long-standing grievances of the Tamil minority.

 

A process of national reconciliation anchored in federalism and multiculturalism indeed can succeed only if possible war crimes and other human-rights abuses by all parties are independently and credibly investigated.

 

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has acknowledged civilian casualties were 'unacceptably high,' especially as the war built to a bloody crescendo earlier this year. The continuing air of martial triumph in Sri Lanka, though, is making it difficult to heal the wounds of war through three essential 'Rs': Relief, recovery and reconciliation.

 

In fact, the military victory bears a distinct family imprint: President Mahinda Rajapaksa was guided by two of his brothers, Gotabaya, the powerful defence secretary who fashioned the war plan, and Basil, the presidential special adviser who formulated the political strategy. Yet another brother, Chamal, is the ports and civil aviation minister who awarded China a contract to build the billion dollar Hambantotta port, on Sri Lanka's southeast.

 

In return, Beijing provided Colombo not only the weapon systems that decisively titled the military balance in its favour, but also the diplomatic cover to prosecute the war in defiance of international calls to cease offensive operations to help stanch rising civilian casualties.

 

Through such support, China has succeeded in extending its strategic reach to a critically located country in India's backyard that sits astride vital sea-lanes of communication in the Indian Ocean region.

 

India also is culpable for the Sri Lankan bloodbath. Having been outwitted by China, India was compelled to lend critical assistance to Colombo, lest it lose further ground in Sri Lanka.

 

From opening an unlimited line of credit for Sri Lanka to extending naval and intelligence cooperation, India provided war-relevant support in the face of a deteriorating humanitarian situation in that island-nation.

 

Sinhalese nationalists now portray President Rajapaksa as a modern-day incarnation of Dutugemunu, a Sinhalese ruler who, according to legend, vanquished an invading Tamil army led by Kind Elara more than 2,000 years ago. But months after the Tamil Tigers were crushed, it is clear the demands of peace extend far beyond the battlefield.

 

What is needed is a fundamental shift in government's policies to help create greater inter-ethnic equality, regional autonomy and a reversal of the State-driven militarisation of society.

 

But Rajapaksa, despite promising to address the root causes of conflict, has declared: 'Federalism is out of the question.'

 

How elusive the peace dividend remains can be seen from Sri Lanka's decision to press ahead with a further expansion of its military.

 

Not content with increasing the military's size fivefold since the late 1980s to more than 200,000 troops today, Colombo is raising the strength further to 300,000, in the name of 'eternal vigilance.'

 

Soon after the May 2008 victory, the government, for example, announced a drive to recruit 50,000 new troops to help control the northern areas captured from the rebels.

 

The Sri Lankan military already is bigger than that of Britain and Israel. The planned further expansion would make the military in tiny Sri Lanka larger than the militaries of major powers like France, Japan and Germany.

By citing a continuing danger of guerrilla remnants reviving the insurgency, Rajapaksa is determined to keep a hyper-militarised Sri Lanka on something of a war footing.

 

Yet another issue of concern is the manner the government still holds nearly 300,000 civilians in camps where, in the recent words of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, the 'internally displaced persons are effectively detained under conditions of internment.'

 

Such detention risks causing more resentment among the Tamils and sowing the seeds of future unrest. The internment was intended to help weed out rebels, many of whom already have been identified and transferred to military sites.

 

Those in the evacuee camps are the victims and survivors of the deadly war. To confine them in the camps against their will is to further victimise and traumatise them.

 

Sri Lanka's interests would be better served through greater transparency. It should grant the UN, International Red Cross and nongovernmental organisations at home and abroad unfettered access to care for and protect the civilians in these camps, allowing those who wish to leave the camps to stay with relatives and friends.

 

Then there is the issue of thousands of missing people, mostly Tamils. Given that many families are still searching for missing members, the government ought to publish a list of all those it is holding - in evacuee camps, prisons, military sites and other security centres. Even suspected rebels in custody ought to be identified and not denied access to legal representation.

 

Bearing in mind that thousands of civilians were killed just in the final months of the war, the authorities should disclose the names of those they know to be dead - civilians and insurgents - and the possible circumstances of their death.

 

The way to fill the power vacuum in the Tamil-dominated north is not by dispatching additional army troops in tens of thousands, but by setting up a credible local administration to keep the peace and initiate rehabilitation and reconstruction after more than a quarter of a century of war. Yet there is a lurking danger that the government may seek to change demography by returning to its old policy of settling Sinhalese in Tamil areas.

 

More fundamentally, such have been the costs of victory that Sri Lankan civil society stands badly weakened. The wartime suppression of a free press and curtailment of fundamental rights continues in peacetime, undermining democratic freedoms and creating a fear psychosis.

 

Sweeping emergency regulations remain in place, arming the security forces with expansive powers of search, arrest and seizure of property. Public meetings cannot be held without government permission. Individuals can still be held in unacknowledged detention for up to 18 months.

 

For the process of reconciliation and healing to begin in earnest, it is essential the government give up wartime powers and accept, as the UN human rights commissioner has sought, 'an independent and credible international investigation...to ascertain the occurrence, nature and scale of violations of international human rights and international humanitarian law' by all parties during the conflict.

 

According to Ms Pillay, 'A new future for the country, the prospect of meaningful reconciliation and lasting peace, where respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms can become a reality for all, hinges upon such an in-depth and comprehensive approach.'

 

Rather than begin a political dialogue on regional autonomy and a more level playing field for the Tamils in education and government jobs, the government has seen its space get constricted by the post-victory upsurge of Sinhalese chauvinism opposed to the devolution of powers to the minorities.

 

The hard-line constituency argues that the Tamils in defeat shouldn't get what they couldn't secure through three decades of unrest and violence.

 

Indeed, such chauvinism seeks to tar federalism as a potential forerunner to secession, although the Tamil insurgency sprang from the State's rejection of decentralisation and power-sharing. The looming parliamentary and presidential elections also make devolution difficult, even though the Opposition is splintered and Rajapaksa seems set to win a second term.

 

Add to the picture the absence of international pressure, despite the leverage provided by a cash-strapped Sri Lankan economy. The United States enjoys a one-country veto in the International Monetary Fund, yet it chose to abstain from the recent IMF vote approving a desperately needed $2.8 billion loan to Sri Lanka.

 

In the face of China's stonewalling in the UN, Ban Ki-moon has been unable to appoint a UN special envoy on Sri Lanka, let alone order a probe into possible war crimes there. By contrast, the UN carried out a recently concluded investigation into Israel's three-week military offensive in Gaza earlier this year.

 

Today, reversing the militarisation of society, ending the control of information as an instrument of State policy and promoting political and ethnic reconciliation are crucial to post-conflict peace-building and to furthering the interests of all Sri Lankans -- Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims. So also is the need to discard the almost mono-ethnic character of the security forces.

 

Colombo has to stop dragging its feet, as it has done for long, on implementing the Constitution's 13th amendment, which requires the ceding of some powers at the provincial level. But these tasks are unlikely to be addressed without sustained international diplomatic intervention.

 

As world history attests, peace sought to be achieved through the suppression and humiliation of an ethnic community has proven elusive. It will be a double tragedy for Sri Lanka if making peace proves more difficult than making war.

 

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the independent, privately funded Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, is on the international advisory council of the Campaign for Peace and Justice in Sri Lanka.

With the political scene in Tamil Nadu hotting up again over the plight of displaced Tamils in Sri Lanka, the main opposition party, AIADMK, led by Jayalalitha Jayaran threatening to launch a mass agitation over the plight of Tamils in Sri Lanka, DMK and Congress MPs from Tamil Nadu rushed to Delhi to meet the Prime Minister and Congress leader Sonia Gandhi seeking New Delhi’s immediate intervention on the issue.

 

The group of cabinet ministers and MPs from Tamil Nadu urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi to send a team to Sri Lanka where they said the military was 'mistreating' Tamils displaced by the war and interned in camps, IANS news agency reported.

 

"We met the prime minister and the Congress president and appraised them about the plight of Tamil civilians living in refugee camps," said DMK leader and former cabinet minister T.R. Baalu.

 

"We said that the displaced Tamil civilians were being mistreated by the Sri Lankan military officials. We told them that steps should be initiated to rehabilitate the displaced Tamils," Baalu told IANS.

 

India, the delegation, which met Manmohan Singh on Tuesday September 22 demanded New Delhi to send a team of Tamil Nadu MPs to Sri Lanka to study the situation there.

 

The MPs who called on Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi also included Home Minister P. Chidambaram, Communication Minister A. Raja, Textiles Minister Dayanidhi Maran, Shipping Minister G.K. Vasan as well as Kanimozhi, a Rajya Sabha MP and daughter of Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi.

 

Among the others were ministers of state S.S. Palanimanickam, S. Gandhiselvan and S. Jagathrakshakan (all DMK) as well as Congress leader K.V. Thangabalu.

 

The detention in barbed wire camps in Sri Lanka's north of some 300,000 Tamil civilians since they fled Tamil Tigers territory before the military crushed the Tamil Tigers has caused widespread concern.

 

Few Days earlier, On Friday, September 18, Dayanidhi Maran separately called on the prime minister as an emissary of Karunanidhi to "highlight the plight of the displaced Tamils" in the Sri Lankan camps.

 

Karunanidhi wanted Manmohan Singh to "exert diplomatic pressure at appropriate levels" on Colombo to end what he said was "untold suffering" of the displaced Tamils.

 

Baalu alleged that the Sri Lankan government was not allowing the Tamil refugees to return to their native places, which were under the control of the LTTE before it was defeated.

 

"We told the prime minister that Tamils are stranded in the refugee camps. Around 2,000 Tamil civilians who were allowed to move to their native places have not reached there," Baalu said.

 

"We want to know what happened to them."

 

The delegation also urged the prime minister to take immediate steps to stop attacks by the Sri Lanka Navy against Indian fishermen in the sea, Baalu said.

The International Monetary Fund said it raised Sri Lanka’s growth target and is “cautiously positive” on prospects as it reviews the island’s economy for the release of a second payment in its $2.6 billion aid package.

 

But while investors are interested, they have not yet committed, the figures show.

 

The Washington-based lender expects growth of 3.5 percent in 2009, up from a July estimate of 3 percent, as the $41 billion economy is showing signs of “bottoming out,” Brian Aitken, the IMF’s Mission Chief for Sri Lanka, said in the capital Colombo on September 22.

 

“We will assess developments in the next two weeks also and if all goes well will take a decision on seeking approval for the release of the second tranche,” Bloomberg report Aitken as saying.

 

The IMF provided Sri Lanka with $322 million when approving the 20-month package. Aitken said the second payment would likely be worth about $320 million.

 

In return for the IMF loan, Sri Lanka agreed to reduce its budget deficit to 5 percent of gross domestic product by 2011, from 7 percent this year, and maintain flexibility in the exchange rate in order to build foreign reserves to cover 3 1/2 months of imports and bolster the economy.

 

Aitken said Sri Lanka’s deficit target for this year was “ambitious” and would require constraints on expenditure while raising revenue with growth.

 

However, while investor interest in Sri Lanka has grown since May, actual investment has not.

 

Last year, Sri Lanka got $889 million in foreign direct investment, according to official figures. So far this year, the country has only gotten $400 million - well off pace of the government target of $2 billion by the end of 2010.

 

The pillars of Sri Lanka's $40 billion economy - garments, remittances from the Middle East, and tourism - have all been hit by the global downturn. Real estate has also faltered.

 

Sri Lanka's Minister of Investment Promotion, Navin Dissanayake, says Hyatt halted construction on a luxury hotel project in Colombo late last year. The hotel chain declined to comment.

 

"Economic investments that we thought would come are not, for the moment, coming because of the global financial crisis," Dissanayake told The Associated Press during a recent trip to Mumbai to rally investor interest.

 

The government is increasingly looking to Asia to underwrite an economic recovery.

 

"We feel as a small developing country that our investment will be more heavily coming from China and India. Their companies are aggressive and bullish on outbound investment. And we have good political relations," Dissanayake said.

 

He said he's gotten a "very positive" reception in Asia, but so far just one big project has kicked off since May: a $75 million luxury beach resort near the northwestern town of Kalpitiya, to be managed by Thailand's Six Senses hotel group.

 

Mohan Weragoda, chief executive of Inventures Pvt Ltd., an investment advisory firm based in Colombo, said he's working on foreign investment deals worth $250 million with several Asian companies he declined to name because negotiations are ongoing.

 

Last year his firm brought $40 million in foreign investment into Sri Lanka, he said.

 

"The country needs large projects and they wouldn't have come when the war was going on," he said.

 

Milan Zatakia, chief executive of Millennium AeroDynamics Pvt. Ltd., an airport design, operations and logistics firm based in Mumbai, said he hopes to help upgrade and expand Sri Lanka's airports, some of which are in former conflict areas.

 

Zatakia said he's been approached by a half dozen hedge funds, which he declined to name citing confidentiality agreements, who are interested in funding his expansion into Sri Lanka.

 

"There's a crying need for infrastructure in our part of the world and there's money available for it," he said.

Under international pressure as the monsoon looms, the Sri Lanka government is hastily engaged in relocating some of the displaced Tamils being held in militarised internment camps in Vavuniya.

 

However, the inmates are being moved from Vavuniya’s barbed-wire ringed camps to similar overcrowded enclosures without facilities in other districts, sources in Jaffna said.

 

Moreover these camps are also located in low-lying terrain in the path of oncoming floods, NGO workers say.

 

“There is no resettlement. This is like being sent from one prison to another prison," Mavai Senathiraja, a parliamentarian from the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) said.

 

On Friday September 18 the UN's political chief Lynn Pascoe said the government had not lived up to its pledges on resettlement to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in May.

 

"We have not seen the progress we expected from that agreement," he said of a deal between Colombo and Ban in May, just after the government declared the decades-long war was over.

 

Just over one thousand people were brought from Vavuniya camps to Raamavil detention camps in Kachchaai in Thenmaraadchi Friday and these already crowded camps are facing severe shortage of space, NGO officials who visited the camps said.

 

The government appears to be determined to detain the IDPs indefinitely in the camps, civil society sources in Jaffna said.

 

Senathiraja told the Associated Press 6,000 of those promised release last week by the government were from his constituency in northern Jaffna, but only 580 arrived in the area and all of them were immediately sent to another camp, where they continue to be detained.

 

In the eastern districts of Ampara and Trincomalee, many returning refugees were being held in schools that have been turned into makeshift camps, he also said.

 

Despite the government’s removal of people from Vavuniya ostensibly being in response to international concerns over the imminent monsoon, the camps in Thenmaraadchi too are directly at risk of severe flooding.

 

These camps have also been erected in low lying terrain, face the risk heavy flooding and the situation is further worsened by the earthen dams constructed in these areas by Sri Lanka Army (SLA) in the past, NGO workers said.

 

Government officials are actively engaged in identifying persons from Jaffna district among the IDPs detained in Vavuniya camps to be located in Jaffna camps.

 

Though it is said that the existing camps in Jaffna are to be extended there are no signs of extension of camp facilities taking place.

 

Situation in the detainment camps is feared to grow worse as they already lack basic facilities while thousand more are to be herded into these camps, NGO representatives expressed concern.

 

"Clearly, the government is making a lot of effort, but we have some strong concerns -- particularly the 'closed' nature of the camps," UN’s Political chief Pascoe was quoted by AFP as saying after touring camps where Tamil civilians are held in what international human rights groups say are prison-like conditions.

 

"We picked up great frustrations. I was told by many that they just wanted to go home," Pascoe added. "I urged the government to allow people who were screened to be allowed to leave."

 

Meanwhile, though much publicity was made that students from Kilinochchi, Mullaiththeevu districts detained in Vavuniya detention camps will be participating in the Sports Meet organized by Northern Province Education Ministry in Jaffna, only around 20 students held in Raamavil camp in Thenmaraadchi were transported to the event, sources in Jaffna said.

 

Northern Province Governor, G. A. Chandrasiri, Minister Douglas Devananda Ministry of Education Secretary and Education Officials were present in the sports event in Alfred Duraippah Stadium in Jaffna.