Rajapaksa appoints yet another commission

The Rajapaksa government has appointed an eight-member Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission “to probe what happened between February 2002 and May 2009 (and) …whether any persons, groups or institutions directly or indirectly were responsible for what happened during the period and to recommend measures to be adopted to prevent the recurrence of such incidents and to promote unity.”, according to media reports from Colombo.

The Commission, approved by the cabinet at its first meeting, would comprise intellectuals representing all communities with a proven track record, according to cabinet spokesman and Media Minister Keheliya Rambukwella.  

The commission will look into the causes of ethnic strife in the 1980s between the majority ethnic group, the Sinhalese, and the minority Tamils in the north, Rambukwella said.
 

“The Commission will be asked to probe the very roots of the longstanding ethnic conflict and the circumstances that led to the 30-year bloody armed struggle that devastated the country,” Rambulwella said.

"The Commission will be asked to recommend a mechanism to pay compensation to all those who were affected by the conflict."

“The main task of the Commission is to recommend ways and means of changing the mind set of the people in a post conflict era,” the Minister further added.

According to Rambukwella the Commission would be given a time frame to complete its findings and for a report to be submitted to President Rajapaksa. At the end of six months, the Commission would recommend "institutional, administrative and legislative measures needed in order to prevent any recurrence of such concerns in the future, and to promote further national unity and reconciliation."

The recommendations are to be taken note of when the government drafts Constitutional reforms that would be tabled in parliament soon.

Whilst the name and the terms of reference sound noble, many remain less than optimistic.

Local and international rights activists have expressed doubts over the effectiveness of a commission established by the Sri Lankan government,  citing several short-lived and failed commissions in the past two decades.

"There has been a big gap between the words and deeds of the government where it concerns issues of human rights, good governance and accountability," Jehan Perera, director of the National Peace Council, an NGO in Colombo, told IRIN.

"There is no reason to believe this is any more serious than the previous commissions set up by this government that have simply perpetuated a culture of impunity," Robert Templer, Asia programme director for the International Crisis Group (ICG), told IRIN from New York.

"Nobody should have any faith that this government is capable of investigating its own actions."

The Brussels-based group on May 17 released a report calling on the UN to launch an international inquiry into alleged war crimes during the last year of the conflict.

According to the report, there were repeated violations of international law by both the Sri Lankan security forces and the LTTE.

Interestingly, the commission being set up by Sri Lanka will not look into any alleged war crimes committed by its forces. The government has always denied killing any civilians during its military onslaught. With no war crimes committed by Sri Lankan forces there is no need for a war crimes investigation.

This stance by Sri Lanka will not be accepted by many and calls for an independent investigation is growing. New evidence by ICG suggests that from January to May 2009 tens of thousands of Tamil civilian men, women, children and the elderly were killed, countless more wounded, and hundreds of thousands deprived of adequate food and medical care, resulting in more deaths.

In the past two decades, various governments in Sri Lanka have set up short-lived commissions that did little to reveal the truth behind human rights abuses, said Ruki Fernando, who heads the Human Rights in Conflict Programme at Law and Society Trust, an NGO in Colombo.

In June 2009, a Commission of Inquiry was disbanded before it could complete its mandate. Various presidents have also ordered that reports from that and other commissions not be released publicly, according to Amnesty International.

However, government spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella declared that  criticism of the latest commission even before it got to work was simply "premature and very unfair".

Although the name of the commission being set up by Sri Lanka sound very similar to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that performed a landmark function in post-Apartheid South Africa and the commission that came into being in Northern Ireland at the cessation of the open warfare there, Rambukwella denied it will be modeled on these commissions of the past or based on advice from foreign countries especially Norway on how Sri Lanka’s ethnic question should be resolved.