Accountability and a Political Solution: A Response to Ram Manikkalingam

Photo courtesy Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice

by Niran Anketell 

- on 02/14/2016 

In a recent article, Ram Manikkalingam – a member of the Sri Lankan President’s Office for National Unity and Reconciliation (ONUR) – argues that Sri Lanka must not prioritize accountability for mass atrocity crimes until a new constitution addressing Tamil autonomy is formulated, and that international human rights advocates must stop giving precedence to war crimes trials over other forms of reconciliation. Interestingly, Manikkalingam’s advice is targeted at ‘international human rights activists who have little patience for the complex domestic politics’ of Sri Lanka, and not the many champions of devolution and accountability within the country – Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim – who continue to navigate the island’s intricate politics but nevertheless believe that progress on all fronts is necessary and possible. With respect to the demand for accountability at least, Manikkalingam is at risk of mimicking the patronizing error of those he critiques in failing to recognize that the intellectual and moral leadership in respect of the demand for accountability has long shifted from those outside to those who live and work in Sri Lanka.

Manikkalingam’s article touches two recurring debates within Transitional Justice, both of them as old as the discipline itself: first, the peace versus justice debate, and second, the question of sequencing reconciliation related measures. The article suggests that because a political solution is more important than war crimes trials, the sequence in which they are unveiled should privilege a political solution with war crimes trials coming later. In this response to his article, I claim that Manikkalingam’s dichotomization of a political solution to the national question and accountability for atrocity crimes is false, but also that in sequencing reconciliation measures, it is strategically better to establish the legal architecture to try atrocity crimes earlier rather than later.

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