Sri Lanka, many shades of accountability

VIDURA 29 October 2012

A long-awaited review on the conduct of United Nations agencies during the last stages of the war in Sri Lanka is stull unpublished, and its terms of reference are shrouded in secrecy. There are further questions over its authorship and process. All this raises questions over how seriously Ban Ki-moon and his colleagues take this important matter, says a Sri Lankan observer who writes under the pen-name Vidura.

n the last stages of Sri Lanka's war in 2010, tens of thousands of civilians were killed in the north of the country. No one has to date been held to account for these deaths. Many people have discussed the question of the accountability of the government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) and demanded action, while the UN secretary-general’s panel of experts (PoE) recommended that the government undertake independent and credible investigations.

While little has changed in the government’s position on the issue, "accountability" remains a problem for it, leading Sri Lanka's president, Mahinda Rajapakse, and his colleagues to retreat from their earlier claims of "zero casualties" and other such denials. The government was compelled to appoint a "lessons learned" commission and military-inquiry panels. These are not enough: war-crimes and crimes against humanity are a serious matter, and they appear unlikely to leave the agenda of the international community any time soon. Even more importantly, they will remain an issue in the country, for both killed and killers are Sri Lankans, and both the memories and the evidence are hard to extinguish.

But another entity, whose acts and omissions contributed to the deaths of thousands of civilians (and the internment of hundreds of thousands), also needs to held to account. Since the closing stages of the war the conduct of the United Nations in Sri Lanka has been under scrutiny for failing to live up to its protection mandate and to ensure that humanitarian principles (of which it was the custodian) were upheld. For many of the people affected by the war, the UN became at best an irrelevant actor and at worst complicit during a crucial time when they were at their most vulnerable - be it in the war-zone when they were held as human shields by the guerrillas of the LTTE, or being fired upon by the Sri Lankan armed forces, or subsequently when they were being processed through various checkpoints without witness and incarcerated in Menik Farm's "welfare" centres.

The United Nations and its various bodies, which were set up precisely to prevent such atrocities, failed in their mandate to protect these civilians. They let politics, negligence, vested interests and plain incompetence block what should have been their priority: protecting the lives of children, women and men in Sri Lanka. The weight of evidence implicating the UN compelled the panel of experts (PoE) to recommend to the secretary-general that he should "conduct a comprehensive review of actions by the United Nations system during the war in Sri Lanka and the aftermath, regarding the implementation of its humanitarian and protection mandates".

It is interesting to recall how the responses to the PoE's recommendations evolved. The government of Sri Lanka appointed a commission, conducted hearings and produced a coherent report. These had serious shortcomings, including some fatal flaws with regard to probing accountability. Both the process and the report's content were criticised by Sri Lanka's political parties and civil society, as well as international organisations such as the International Crisis Group, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and several others. Even the governments of the United States and India made their views known.

The "Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission" (LLRC) at its inception was criticised for lacking independence and impartiality. It was said to be composed of individuals with serious conflict of interest whom the government handpicked for the job. Its mandate was limited and at best was ambiguous about accountability. The hearings were compromised by the militarised context and the absence of an adequate witness-protection mechanism. Above all it was accused, rightly so, of being a time-buying/wasting exercise by a president who had no interest in an independent investigation. Clearly, the Sri Lankan government should have done better.

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