இலங்கை சிறப்பு கலப்பின விசாரணை என்பது ஒரு பம்மாத்து வேலையாகத்தான் இருக்கிறது. அறிக்கையின் முழுப்பகுதியை திரும்பவும் வாசித்தபிறகு, புதிய மொந்தையில் பழைய கள் என்ற கதைதான் .
சர்வதேச சுதந்திரமான, நம்பகமான விசாரணை இலங்கையை விட்டு வேறு நாட்டில் விசாரித்தால்தான் நோக்கம் நிறைவேறி, உண்மைகளும் நியாயங்களும் வெளிப்பட்டு நீதி கிடைக்கும்.
சிறப்பு கலப்பின விசாரணை சர்வதேச பங்களிப்பு சிறிதளவு இருந்தாலும் அதன்மூலம் எந்த பயனும் கிட்டாது என்பது அறிக்கையை திரும்ப வாசிப்பதின் மூலம் தெரிய வருகின்றது.
அதுகுறித்தான வெளிவந்த சில பதிவுகள்.
-கே.எஸ்.இராதாகிருஷ்ணன்.
18-09-2015.
1 . Leader of the National Freedom Front (NFF) MP Wimal Weerawansa questioned whether the Sri Lankan people were going to allow a Hybrid Court, a branch of the International Criminal Court, to be established here and allow our the war heroes who brought peace and freedom to the country to be taken to the guillotine.
He expressed these views while addressing a special media conference on Thursday at the NFF head office. He opined further that the report of the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, consisting of 216 pages, dealt with the so-called war crimes that had taken place in the country during 2002-2011, and pointed out that in it serious charges had been levelled against the Sri Lankan security forces.
“Conversely, the only charge it had leveled against the LTTE is the proscription of children for the war, and this charge is directed at Karuna Amman, which hints towards an act of revenge as he left the LTTE and helped the army in their war strategies. Though the charges appear to be leveled at both sides, there seems to be only one side that was being targeted here as Velupillai Prabhakaran and the leaders of the LTTE are no more among the living,” he pointed out.
He also said that serious charges had been directed at our security forces, alleging sexual and gender-based violence, enforced proscription, brutal use of torture and humiliation, the use of heavy artillery against ordinary citizens and obstruction of humanitarian aid from reaching the people who needed it.
Minister Weerawansa questioned as to what the UN Chief aimed to achieve by bringing such serious charges against the Sri Lankan armed forces. His proposal for a Hybrid Court, would contain a majority of foreign Judges and officers assigned with relevant duties. Our own judges would not be able to raise their concerns, and the entire court proceedings would be handled according to their wishes. It was revealed earlier that the functioning of this court would entirely be made with the finances of the UN Human Rights Council, which goes to prove that this would definitely be a branch of an International Criminal Court, despite this court being established in a building based in Sri Lanka, it would be completely under the control of the UNHRC, he warned. -
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2. Sri Lankan war crimes will be laid bare in a harrowing UN report to be published on Wednesday. The Sri Lankan government has already launched its latest charm offensive to convince the world it can deal with these issues, but the international community must stay strong to ensure a proper justice process that wins the confidence of survivors and enables the country to heal.
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Ever since the civil war ended in May 2009, Sri Lanka has invested vast amounts of diplomatic capital in staving off calls for accountability for crimes committed by both sides of the conflict, as well as torture and other abuses afterwards as the country slid into despotism.
For years these efforts succeeded as Sri Lanka painted itself as a leader in the fight against terrorism and a standard bearer for developing countries, defending its sovereignty in the face of “interference” by western governments pushing a human rights agenda. A commonwealth summit hosted by Sri Lanka in November 2013 was a turning point. Brushing off intense pressure for a boycott, the UK prime minister, David Cameron, insisted that he would seize this opportunity to meet victims in Tamil parts of the country and “shine a light on human rights”.
Cameron proved his critics wrong by turning his experience with families of the disappeared into a passionate call for an international inquiry into wartime atrocities and ongoing violations after the conflict ended. In March last year, the UK and US built support among a coalition of states in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere for a resolution of the UN human rights council ordering an international investigation aimed at “avoiding impunity and ensuring accountability”.
Freedom from Torture has seen case materials for eight people tortured in Sri Lanka this year
The UN report, to which Freedom from Torture submitted evidence, is expected to reveal a sickening catalogue of international crimes committed in the war and its aftermath. The UN human rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, has already warned that the inquiry’s findings “are of the most serious nature”.
Freedom from Torture supplied extensive forensic material to the investigators based on almost 150 examinations conducted by our expert doctors. Our report Tainted Peace shows that torture – including rape and extensive burning – has continued to be practised by the Sri Lankan military, police and intelligence services since the end of the conflict and that those at particular risk include Tamils with a real or perceived association with the Tamil Tigers, even at low levels and whether current or historical.
The Sri Lankan government bitterly opposed the UN probe. Investigators were apparently unable to access the country, even after Mahinda Rajapaksa was ousted at presidential elections in January. The new Sri Lankan government, led by President Maithripala Sirisena, concedes that accountability is essential for reconciliation, but echoes the previous regime by insisting this is an internal matter. In theory, a national process is preferable, in keeping with Sri Lanka’s international human rights obligations, but in practice this would prove highly problematic.
A Sri Lankan soldier stands near a tank as it fires a shell at Puthukkudiyirippu in March 2009 Facebook Twitter Pinterest
‘Any process that fails to win the support of survivors, including from the Tamil minority, is doomed to fail before it even begins.’ Photograph: STR New/Reuters
Sri Lanka has a record of flawed domestic accountability processes and the justice sector remains weak after years of debasement in the service of a corrupt elite. While the new leadership has begun to restore press freedom and the rule of law, it has proven unable or unwilling to take on Sri Lanka’s overbloated and lawless security sector. In a painful blow to victims, a senior commander whose division was implicated in serious human rights abuse was recently promoted to army chief of staff.
Freedom from Torture has seen case materials for eight people tortured in Sri Lanka this year, including as recently as June. In most cases the person reports being abducted by plainclothes agents and transferred, often in white vans, to unknown facilities where they were subjected to multiple forms of torture such as beatings, asphyxiation by plastic bags full of petrol fumes tied around the head, burning and sexual violence.
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“Trust us,” said Sri Lanka’s foreign minister, Mangala Samaraweera, to diplomats gathered at the Human Rights Council on Monday. But trust is in short supply from survivors, many of whose families are still subject to harassment and surveillance by the Sri Lanka authorities to this day.
The survivors we work with are adamant that Sri Lanka is incapable of exposing those most responsible for their suffering to a justice process meeting international standards. They are pinning their hopes on the UK, US and other members of the human rights council to follow through on the UN findings and demand an accountability mechanism that includes strong international participation at every stage and level.
Any process that fails to win the support of survivors, including from the Tamil minority, is doomed to fail before it even begins. Instead of aiding the cause of reconciliation it might derail it. As Al Hussein said yesterday, the human rights council “owes it to Sri Lankans – and to its own credibility – to ensure an accountability process that produces results”.
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3. As the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) opens its 30th session in Geneva this week, 62 leading human rights activists have signed an open letter calling on the world body to ensure justice, truth and peace in Sri Lanka, where the unhealed wounds of three decades of war continue to plague the country's 20 million people.
Among the letter's signatories are John Cavanagh, director of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies; Medea Benjamin, cofounder of CODEPINK; Norita Cortiñas, cofounder of Argentina's Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Disappeared); and Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the Oakland Institute.
Six years after the island nation declared an end to its longstanding civil conflict, the statement calls on the UNHRC, and the international community more broadly, not to "fail" the victims of Sri Lanka's war and to "fulfill its duty by establishing an international independent judicial process under UN auspices."
Sri Lanka's human rights record has been front and center in Geneva since May 2009, when the government of then-President Mahinda Rajapaksa defeated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), an armed group that fought for years to carve out a separate state for the minority Tamil community in the north and east of the country.
While his military victories won him massive popular support at home among the majority Sinhala population, the final armed operations in the north (conducted amid a near-total media blackout and virtual humanitarian blockade) earned Rajapaksa a gaping black mark abroad.
The United Nations and powerful Western governments like the United States and the United Kingdom pushed strongly for an international probe into alleged war crimes committed by both the armed forces and the LTTE during the war's last, bloody weeks, where upwards of 40,000 people - mostly civilians - are estimated to have been killed.
Incomplete Investigations
A flurry of investigations and official inquiries followed the war's end, including a March 2011 report by a panel of experts appointed by the UN secretary general, a November 2012 internal review of the UN's actions in Sri Lanka and a resolution adopted at the 25th session of the Human Rights Council on the matter of national reconciliation and accountability.
The refusal of the Rajapaksa regime to cooperate fully with any of these efforts to thoroughly investigate the final stages of the war, or to lift the shroud of secrecy covering its own domestic probe, known as the Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission, prompted the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2014 to set up a completely independent body to evaluate possible war crimes.
The findings of the Office of the High Commissioner's Investigation on Sri Lanka (OISL) were due in March, but the surprise victory of Rajapaksa's former health minister Maithripala Sirisena in a snap presidential election held this past January, which saw the ouster of the longtime strongman, put a spoke in the wheels.
On February 16, just weeks after Sirisena assumed office, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein announced a "one-time only" deferral of his office's report until September 2015, "to allow space for the new Government to show its willingness to cooperate on human rights issues."
In the months following the deferral, the new government has mounted a strong case for a "credible, domestic" mechanism to resolve possible war crimes and prosecute the litany of rights abuses that has reportedly marked the postwar years.
But as the UNHRC reveals the long-awaited and closely guarded findings of the OISL report this week, dozens of organizations and advocates are calling on the UN's apex human rights body not to leave reconciliation solely in government hands.
New Government, Old Rights Abuses
With a new parliament in power as of August 17, and historic changes already underway - including the appointment of a Tamil opposition leader for the first time since 1977 - hopes are running high that national reconciliation after nearly 30 years of war is close at hand.
But as the activists' letter points out, justice for the survivors of war remains at best minimal, and at worst, illusory - with the new government even perpetuating some of the same rights abuses as its predecessor.
Noting the Sirisena administration's "commendable progress confronting corruption and instituting democratic reforms," the September 14 open letter nevertheless highlights such issues as the continuing military occupation of the former war zone - and the army's involvement in business enterprises, farming, tourism and property development - as a major hurdle to true reconciliation.
News reports citing statistics from Sri Lanka's Ministry of Resettlement suggest that while close to 800,000 people displaced by the conflict have since been allowed to return to their homes, an estimated 50,000 people are still living in camps or with host families, since the army is occupying their ancestral lands.
The letter also cites a 2015 UN report that warns of the impacts of militarization in the north and east, such as "an increase in abduction, arbitrary detention, torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence." Experts say the roughly 40,000 to 50,000 war widows living in the former conflict zone are particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse.
Meanwhile, an August 2015 report by the UK-based charity Freedom from Torture revealed that torture continues to be a major concern six years after the war's end, with the army, police and intelligence services (including the Criminal Investigation Department and Terrorism Investigation Department) operating within a culture of impunity.
Based on doctors' forensic reports of 148 torture survivors, the report found evidence of interrogation methods such as beatings, burnings, asphyxiation, suspension and solitary confinement. About 94 percent of the 148 torture survivors were Tamil.
Sri Lanka also has the second-highest number of disappeared people in the world after Iraq, according to the letter, but while tens of thousands of families believe their loved ones to be in government custody - having surrendered to or been captured or arrested by the armed forces since 2009 - official records indicate only 273 political prisoners as of 2015.
A May 2015 study by the Oakland Institute, based on field research in war-affected areas, puts the number of missing persons at anywhere from 70,000 to 140,000.
International Oversight
Unveiled on September 16, the 257-page UN report - compiled by a core team of seven investigators, with input from three judicial experts - "laid bare the horrific level of violations and abuses that occurred in Sri Lanka, including extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, harrowing accounts of torture and sexual violence, recruitment of children and other grave crimes," Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein said in Geneva.
Given these grim realities, Oakland Institute founder Anuradha Mittal told Truthout that leaving justice in the hands of the Sri Lankan government would be akin to the formulation of a "victor's court."
"The OISL inquiry was set up amidst high expectations from victims and survivors that it would facilitate reconciliation. To back off now and hand over the process to the Sri Lankan government, which does not have the confidence of the Tamil people, is to basically mock all prior efforts at truth and justice," she said.
She added that the dozens of eminent citizens who have signed the letter - including former UN officials, diplomats and activists from Nicaragua, Paraguay, Mexico and Bolivia, among others - have no agenda beyond ensuring that systematic massacres of the kind that marked the final days of the war never happen again.
Stressing the US role in the UNHRC and specifically with regards to its softer stance on Sri Lanka's rights record after the regime change earlier this year, she cautioned against allowing geostrategic and geopolitical interests to guide the hand of international law.
"The US was very concerned about the closeness of Sri Lanka's past regime with China. Now, the change of face at the helm without a change in policies is allowing countries like the US to follow their interests, which are really about maritime routes," Mittal told Truthout, adding that states must not prioritize their business interests over a commitment to the human rights of the displaced, the disappeared or the destitute.
For its part, the Sri Lankan government has made many encouraging promises that suggest a willingness to facilitate genuine national reconciliation.
In his remarks to the UNHRC on September 14, Foreign Affairs Minister Mangala Samaraweera pledged to ratify the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance "without delay," invite a series of special rapporteurs to undertake visits to Sri Lanka in 2015 and beyond, and "review and repeal" the highly controversial Prevention of Terrorism Act.
But as the open letter points out, these promises may not ring true for many victims in light of ongoing rights abuses and the government's weak track record of implementing effective commissions of inquiry on mass violations.
In an April 2015 report on Sri Lanka, Pablo de Greiff, the UN special rapporteur on truth and reconciliation noted that "failed, inadequate or uneven implementation of recommendations has been a common feature" of commissions of inquiry, which have resulted in "increased mistrust in the Government's determination to genuinely redress those violations."
Indeed, on September 16, The New York Times quoted Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein as conceding that circumstances in Sri Lanka would "require more than a domestic mechanism," while the report itself advises the creation of a special, hybrid court comprised of local and international judges, prosecutors and lawyers - a recommendation that the present government is likely to resist.
Between calls from activists for an international and independent probe, and assurances from the government that it can manage its own affairs, millions of Tamils in Sri Lanka are stuck in limbo, waiting for news of their missing sons, or biding time until they can return to their own homes and start a new life after the ravages of war.
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