The UNHRC Sri Lanka war crimes investigation may be welcome, but peace and reconciliation requires more 
&nbsp; 
The recently passed UNHRC resolution on Sri Lanka marks a high point in terms of the country’s road towards peace. The US backed UNHRC resolution paves the way for an international investigation into the war crimes allegedly committed by the Sri Lankan government (GOSL) during the final military battles of the war. According to the Office for the Commissioner for Human Rights, the resolution asks that Sri Lanka “conduct an independent investigation into allegations of violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law; and extended the mandates of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism and of the Special Rapporteur on the right to food.”  An important step, yes, and in many ways a loss in terms of political capital for the GOSL, in both national and international terms. 
Those campaigning on the ground for greater attention to be paid to the war crimes allegations can take this event as the first real headway towards justice and accountability, whilst members of the diaspora that have been pushing for the international community to make a ‘real stand’, will see such progress as nothing short of momentous. Indeed, this resolution separates itself from the two that have come before by being definitively stronger in terms of what it asks the GOSL to do. It has also forced many countries to truly show their hand regarding their willingness to push the GOSL on its human rights agenda. The votes, from 47 member countries were 25 in favour, 13 against and eight abstentions. 
One of the abstentions comes from regional power player India, which is home to many Tamil persons, a noteworthy departure from their support of two previous ‘tamer’ decrees issued by the UNHRC.  This, of course, reinforces the strength of the resolution in question. The drive for the GOSL to prove its accountability and transparency in terms of human rights is gathering more impetus. As Navi Pillay, Special UN Rapporteur for Human Rights, suggested when discussing the situation in North Korea, we can now challenge the international community and the GOSL to a true test of action. 
A small problem remains in terms of historical response and also, the power blocs that the Sri Lankan government has managed to consolidate. In the past, the GOSL has always responded to international interventions with anti-imperialistic rhetoric and personal attacks on named officials, claiming that any policy making from outside the country was an extensive act of Western neo-colonialism. The Sri Lankan government also enjoys solid support from the Chinese government, and seemingly, some silent support from Manmohan Singh’s government. These last two points seriously complicate the ability of local civil society groups and the international community to strong-arm the GOSL into conducting a war crimes inquiry, at least in terms of the near future.  What this situation does reinforce is that attention must be paid to those solutions and changes that can be made from below, from within Sri Lankan society itself. 
A war crimes inquiry, thoroughly and independently conducted, may confirm much of the allegations that have been made against the Sri Lankan government and its Armed Forces. At the same time, the process that takes us towards the implementation of the inquiry, and its aftermath will create further cleavages in an already deeply conflicted and divided country. At present, tensions prevail not only in terms of ethnic divisions but also between the different religions that co-exist in Sri Lanka, with significant hostility having been demonstrated between Buddhist fundamental groups and Muslim and Christian communities. The sanctity of non-Buddhist religious practices has been subsumed to a fundamentalist nationalist ethic, so much so that there have been incidents where pork was thrown into a city mosque, or where a tabernacle in a Catholic church was desecrated. The GOSL has also undertaken an extensive militarization and Sinhalisation of the Northern part of the country, imposing a kind of cultural colonisation in these areas. 
During the recent Commonwealth summit, the despair and difficulties still being experienced by minority communities in Sri Lanka was made especially evident, particularly during the visits that British Prime Minister David Cameron made to the North of the country. The situation of women in Sri Lanka’s post-war situation is also grim, with many war widows turning to prostitution in order to finance single parent households. The GOSL also recently branded all Tamil diaspora groups as belonging to ‘terrorist’ factions. Despite these tensions, in a recent speech to the National Unity Conference, President Mahinda Rajapaksa claimed that no minorities exist in the Sri Lankan state, using the image of Sinhala King Dutugemunu to suggest that any racist claims levelled against the government are simply the voices of those who misunderstand or wish to undermine the Government-led post-war reconciliation project. 
It is important to uncover what truly occurred in the last days of the war. Yet, an investigation that focuses so fully on the GOSL itself will alienate those who wish to point out, quite fairly, the role of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in perpetrating certain atrocities. More than this, a constant focus on top-down approaches such as policing action from the international community moves the conversation away from how local groups can work together to heal the divides and conflicts prevailing in Sri Lanka. An inquiry will largely answer only to legal, formalised planes of justice and institutional remedy.  Any movement through transitional justice that has as its end goal in unitive reconciliation, must tackle both crimes made against humanity and also the deep wounds existing in, and being amplified in, the society concerned. 
What is certainly missing in much of the political discourse surrounding the Sri Lankan problem is how and in what ways the country and its extremely divided communities can move towards reconciliation and healing.  Indeed, what we have seen in the post-war years has only been further levels of inter-communal estrangement and aggression. There has been little sustained dialogue as to how healing will occur, or what needs to be in place in terms of formal apologies, witness statements or reparations, actions from religious leaders and so on, before the country can reconcile itself. Without a focus on radical reconciliation, Sri Lanka will not be able to progress from conflict to peace, rendering even a successful war crimes investigation, completely null and void.
<pre>Image from: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/07/world/asia/07lanka.html?pagewanted=all&amp;_r=0</pre>

Sri Lanka: Reconciliation After War

As revealed in his autobiography, Nelson Mandela’s life is that of a fighter, especially in his non-violence 
  
I would not have read Long Walk to Freedom (Abacus: 1995) if it had not been among the many books owned by an interesting older cousin, and in the strange way that younger girls cling on to female role models, I cannibalised her bookshelf. The literature there spanned decades of injustice and oppression, from the Holocaust to the struggles of First Nations, of Dalits, of battered women. And there was also this book by Nelson Mandela. 
When you are reading through the canon of literature that focuses on minority or outsider struggles, what will strike you is the passion, the anger, the bitterness and the determination. What strikes me now, is that Mandela’s voice never lost anger or passion, but it did lose rage and bitterness. It was, truly, revolutionary. 
What Mandela points out in Long Walk is a lesson that Frantz Fanon, in a different context, had already given to us: of how deeply racism had been ingrained into South Africa that even he, as a member of the black elite, was disturbed when he noticed black people in positions of power and importance. He was shocked to realise how normal it had become to be poor and black, so much so that the poverty of his own people ceased to tug at his heart strings, but he was appalled when he saw a white girl begging in the street. 
Long Walk is the account of a man, who, through his observations and his encounter with suffering and oppression, changed from being a young man who favoured armed struggle to a leader who found an even greater, more potent weapon: non-violence. Mandela’s lack of bitterness, and his espousal of non-violence and forgiveness was not passivity, but a formula for a much more incisive and strategic war. A man who will not hit you back is a man you cannot conquer. 
The actor Idris Elba, when asked about his experience playing Nelson Mandela concurs by <a href="http://www.cineplex.com/News/Idris-Elba-takes-on-new-cinematic-challenges-in-Mandela-Long-Walk-to-Freedom.aspx">saying a curious thing</a>. He said his research of footage and speeches led him to notice that the young Mandela was always on the go, restless and energetically motivated. After Mandela’s stint in prison, and as he came to the peak of his leadership of the anti-apartheid struggle, Elba notes that the South African leader’s actions become marked by a remarkable stillness.  It is this stillness, this quiet determination, that should give us pause for thought &#8211; and it is this deep reservoir of distilled revolutionary energy that causes world leaders to praise him and insist that he transcended what we consider to be ‘the political’. 
Did Mandela so easily transcend politics and difference? Mandela’s timeline is an extraordinary one. He was expelled from university in 1940 for his political activism, he joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1943, and in the late ‘50s and ‘60s became what we would approximate to be a guerrilla leader. He collided with the state in an effort to fight growing state oppression and was part of a group of African nationalists who, together with the South African Communist Party, challenged state-led apartheid. The state responded with force, which led the ANC and Mandela to launch an armed struggle. He was then convicted of incitement, and sentenced to five years in prison. In 1964, the charge was raised to sabotage and Mandela then served a sentence that spanned a quarter of a lifetime, free at last in 1990.  After his release, Mandela emerged as a symbol of the fight for equality, and against racial segregation. He led his people by focusing not only on their pain and their suffering, but on the truth of the struggle. <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-22892784">Fergal Keane of the BBC</a> remembers this comment made by Mandela after fighting took place between the ANC and members of the Zulu Ikantha movement: 
&#8220;There are members of the ANC who are killing our people… We must face the truth. Our people are just as involved as other organisations that are committing violence… We cannot climb to freedom on the corpses of innocent people.&#8221; 
Building on this, Archbishop Tutu provides us with the ‘money quote’ for the life of Mandela. It was that Madiba realised that people depend upon other people, and that the first step in the walk to freedom is to look to ourselves. 
David Cameron, who stepped out on Thursday night and spoke of Mandela as an inspiration, worked at the Tory Policy Unit in 1989 and joined an anti-sanctions factfinding mission for pro-apartheid South Africa. Stephen Harper praised Mandela in the House last night, but one of his own MPs, Rob Anders, labelled Mandela as a communist and a terrorist. Barack Obama waxed poetic in his tribute, but Mandela was on the US Terrorist watch list until 2008. The <a href="http://www.juancole.com/2013/12/mandela-supported-apartheid.html">US and Israel opposed Mandela</a> and supported apartheid, and Mandela himself was constantly critical of US foreign policy and supportive of the Cuban revolution. Indian papers hail him as South Africa’s Gandhi, but contemporary India is crippled by gigantic gaps in wealth between rich and poor, and one of the most corrupt administrations in its political history. 
In just the same way that Mandela fought for freedom, he defeated the right – the coloniser. They could not hang him as a terrorist and a troublemaker, so they appropriated him and lauded him with Orders of Canada, Nobel Prizes and Bharat Ratnas. By mythologising him and covering him with honours, the system attempts to dismiss Mandela’s revolutionary potential. It steps out in tribute to him and embraces him into the neo-liberal agenda.  South Africa today is a result of neo-liberal governance partly through compromises made during Mandela’s presidency, such as the project GEAR, but largely because of a struggle that was lost to building a particular kind of democracy. 
Mandela was a fighter. He earned such a legacy. He protested against oppression and the entrenched, repulsive belief of the coloniser’s entitlement. As he is lauded for his non-violence and forgiveness, let us not forget that for him non-violence was a weapon. Let us not forget, as students and protestors around the world are met with aggressive police brutality, that Mandela defended the right to protest. Let us not forget the power of stillness – a distilled anger &#8211; that, in his own words, fought both white domination and black domination.
<pre>Image from: http://brightgreenscotland.org/index.php/2013/12/nelson-mandela-see-the-movement-he-personified-as-well-as-the-great-man/</pre>

Rest in Power, Madiba

Racism against Sri Lankan Muslims has increased significantly and very suddenly, creating a bogeyman out of the Muslims helps to conceal the political bankruptcy of the Sri Lankan government 
&nbsp; 
Purely for the sake of amusement, I encourage you to follow the Twitter account of the<a href="https://twitter.com/BoduBalaSena"> Bodu Bala Sena</a> (BBS).  Claiming to be the revival of ‘real Buddhism’, the BBS will ask you to ‘rise up’ <a href="http://dbsjeyaraj.com/dbsj/archives/16268">against the issuing of Halal Certificates</a>, and inform you that they are enlightening Buddhists of the threats from the ‘dark forces’ of the minority. And just when you think you have them pegged as insufferably extremist, they will retweet a quote from the Dalai Lama espousing the need to have tolerance and love for all beings.  It’s a masterclass in farce, and one wishes they were so easily dismissible.  It is when their rhetoric becomes racist that you will perhaps need to block the BBS. Case in point- just a couple of days ago they responded to a Tweeter by calling him a ‘thambiya’- a terribly crude way of referring to a Muslim person.  Whether Muslim or not, it was difficult not to be appalled. 
Such twittering from the Bodu Bala Sena, and their own campaigns in Sri Lanka to combat the issuing of Halal Certificates, or to ‘drive out’ Muslim and Christian interlopers from the country is unfortunately not isolated to this particular group. A strange tide of racism sweeps over the country, still recovering from 30 years of civil war, and it seems to be pushing us onward to another confrontation between the Sinhalese and another minority group:  Sri Lankan Muslims.  It’s not uncommon nowadays to receive emails warning you of the dangers of purchasing goods made by Muslim manufacturers or for a Facebook status to be attacked simply because you took a stand that didn’t reflect a Sinhalese viewpoint.  Here is the first query that arises:  When did a Sinhalese viewpoint come to mean one that was completely against the idea of anything non-Sinhala and non-Buddhist?  One answer I’ve received is this, “I have no problem with anyone, I just hate terrorism. Colombo is a safe place to live in now, and that’s a fact.” 
Colombo, indeed Sri Lanka, is a safe place to live in if you are Sinhalese, Buddhist and you keep your mouth shut; not simply modifying your dissent, but suppressing it entirely and giving in to the hegemony of the Rajapaksa government and the Buddhist fundamentalism that keeps it afloat. If you are Sinhalese and you disagree with the Government you probably fall into one of  four groups: A) Joiners:  not being able to beat the metaphorical dogs, have joined them, B) Leavers: Terrified and angry, have fled the country to begin new lives or join an irate and polemicised  Sinhala diaspora, C) The Mute: Stay, because they have no other option, but keep their voices silent or D) The Few: Angry and still resisting the regime, but lacking cohesion and plebeian pull.  Dissent against the Government by Sinhalese needs to be more vocal, far reaching and more effective in its organisation. 
Let us inspect this charge that by presenting a view that is anti-Muslim, one is not being intolerant but protecting one’s country against a ‘terrorist’ scourge.  The idea is as absurd suggesting that every Muslim person is a jihadi, and this in turn is also a misrepresentation of jihad itself. If we think of the LTTE, from the standpoint that post-independence Sri Lankan Tamils faced years of discrimination and abuse at the hands of the Sinhala majority, the LTTE stop being terrorists, and become activists resisting an oppressive establishment.  The label of ‘terrorist’ comes later, (<a href="http://groundviews.org/2011/06/22/thoughts-on-a-documentary-we-are-complicit-in-sri-lankas-killing-fields/">as I’ve argued here on Groundviews)</a> as part of the narratives inscribed by the modern.  There too, I argued that the narratives created post-conflict are dangerous and must be interrupted. The racism inherent in the anti-Muslim rhetoric is not an interruption of this, but a rather sinister continuation of the same. Furthermore, it is an inflation of the concept of terrorism. That the LTTE used violent means to make their point is not one I am purporting we ‘get behind’, but can we really play the terrorism card against the LTTE or Muslim people because of this? 
The Rajapaksa administration <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-20308610">wiped out tens of thousands of civilians</a> in their military offensive against the LTTE; <a href="http://www.humanrights.asia/news/ahrc-news/AHRC-ART-054-2012">they kidnap and torture</a> journalists and activists on a frighteningly regular basis; <a href="http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20121207080534402">they license violence against, and detainment of, students</a> engaged in peaceful protest; they allow <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-19680426">for random raids</a>; censorship and surveillance are ubiquitous; <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-21022854">A Chief Justice was impeached for making a stand</a> and the government and its forces function with absolute impunity.  The recent passing of <a href="http://dbsjeyaraj.com/dbsj/archives/16275">the Convention on the Suppression of Terrorist Financing (Amendment</a>) is alarming in its  open ended definition of  what counts as terrorism. It gives the Government carte blanche to detain, harass and abuse citizens at will. Benjamin’s Critique of Violence reminds us of a self-contradictory understanding of violence; that it is neither good nor bad, but ultimately law-making or law-preserving. What we must be aware of are the paralyses in the dominant trends of the narrative. Violence itself justifies violent ends, or what is allowed to be legal/illegal, and as both sides (government and dissenter) share the same axiomatic desires, the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) is as much of a terrorist as the LTTE were, or the Muslims are now being portrayed as.  What makes it sinister is that, under the guise of working for the good of the people and the betterment of Sri Lanka, the GOSL operates as legalised terrorism. 
Why have we not seen any serious dismissal of the Bodu Bala Sena by the Rajapaksa administration?  Why do they allow this spate of anti –Muslim feeling, easily spurred on by the view of Islam that is mainstream globally, to go unchecked? Aside from a rather wry slap-on-the–wrist that involved the <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;ved=0CDQQFjAA&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ceylontoday.lk%2F16-23024-news-detail-bodu-bala-sena-meets-president-mahinda-rajapaksa.html&amp;ei=IasbUc3HOKjK0QWn2ICQCw&amp;usg=AFQjCNEDtnG_pDEAyvfuG2JK8vuTmQj6n">President meeting with the BBS to discuss religious tolerance</a>, there is no concentrated effort to quell this racist feeling. The answer is encapsulated in the missive I received that ‘hated terrorism’.  With the war having ended in 2009, Sri Lanka should be working not only towards reconciliation and rebuilding but should have recognition of what happened during the civil war, and what led up to it. Instead, in this spate of anti-Muslimness, one sees deliberate antagonistic strategy that, prima facie, intends to embroil the Sinhalese and the Muslims in another 30 years of civil war.  The government’s indifference to stop this progress, however, may have little to do with its own feelings toward minority populations or a reflection on the complexity of multiculturalism. The sad thing is that the GoSL may simply not care what the eventual fallout from such racism is. Why is the Rajapaksa administration allowed by the Sinhalese to function in the way that it does? Because they ‘hate terrorism’, and yes, Sinhala fears are, to them, real ones.  By allowing simplistic narratives of the terrorist, the hateful ‘other’ and the interloper to now be cast against the Muslim community, the GOSL is able to keep riding upon the wave of popularity that has allowed them overwhelming support in elections: this is buoyed by the simple face that the Rajapaksas ‘ended’ the LTTE. In order for them to stay in power, and for the violence they wield through the state to remain unchecked, they must constantly allow for the monster to be re-imagined, for the fallacy of the narrative to remain alive.  Even sadder is that the Bodu Bala Sena with its ridiculous extremism is playing, so very willingly, the part of patsy. 
&nbsp;
<pre>Image by Raashid Riza</pre>

Anupama Ranawana