Ad Hoc European Criminal Tribunal of Sri Lanka (ECTSL)

By: Rajeev Sreetharan

By 2014 or 2015, the world order’s shift towards multipolarity may open doors to Tamil justice in Europe, the way 9/11’s War on Terror opened a window for Sri Lanka to perpetrate Tamil genocide in the Vanni Region under the pretext of counter-insurgency and collateral damage.

Background

For the moment, the sense of frustrating uncertaintyaround the fate of Tamil justicecontinues to fester beneath the slow, racistdrift of Post-Mullivaikaal Sri Lanka towards the Mahavamsa’s vision of a post-Tamil Northeastern province.While optics ofmultiethnic reconciliation attempt to blur the republic’s descent into draconian rule, the island could not be more divided. And its future could not be more uncertain.

Increasingly irrefutable is the ground reality that Sri Lanka’s domestic political sphere lacks the will and bona fides to support a restorative or retributive accountability measure, and therefore any such measure designed to depend on Sri Lankan institutions will fail. As colonization masquerades as development, armed peace as a permanent solution to the Tamil question, and unchecked Sinhala-Buddhist racism as majoritarian democracy, advocateswho rely on Rajapakse-dependent accountability measures to deliver Tamil justice increasingly risk losing credibility themselves.Thesense of frustration arises from thisdéjà vu of familiar politics, inside and outside post-war Sri Lanka, which validate the subjugation of Tamil human rights by deliberately pavingunworkable paths to diluted accountability through the familiar bottlenecks of Sri Lankan State bureaucracy. It is yesterday’s soup, warmed over, again. Thesense of uncertainty is reducible to twomomentarily unanswerable questions:

1) Will there actually be independent international investigations?
2) Will there be a tribunal?

The answers, when they do materialize,will not be inconsequential, something all stakeholders to Sri Lanka’s post-war settlement are aware of. In fact, the destiny of the unitary State hangs in the balance.

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