A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
(Full Story)
Search This Blog
Back to 500BC.
==========================
Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Sunday, July 23, 2017
The invisible violence
Ben Emmerson,
UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism
UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism
The visit of the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and
Counter-Terrorism, Ben Emmerson, was extensively covered in the
mainstream media after a damning end of mission statement delivered in
Colombo. The Special Rapporteur’s full report on his mission to Sri
Lanka will be tabled in Geneva at the next session of the UN Human
Rights Council sittings in March 2018. The statement went into some
detail around on-going torture in Sri Lanka. Emmerson flagged "…
extremely brutal methods of torture, including beatings with sticks, the
use of stress positions, asphyxiation using plastic bags drenched in
kerosene, the pulling out of fingernails, the insertion of needles
beneath the fingernails, the use of various forms of water torture, the
suspension of individuals for several hours by their thumbs, and the
mutilation of genitals’.
The pushback against the UN and the Special Rapporteur in particular,
from influential sections of government and other quarters was expected,
almost immediate and unsurprisingly given more publicity than the
concerns articulated in the original statement. Already forgotten by
those who now vociferously deny and decry these allegations is the
17-page report to the UN’s Committee Against Torture in November 2016,
prepared not by any NGO or arm of the UN, but by Sri Lanka’s own Human
Rights Commission. In case its credentials are also questioned, the
Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka was established by an Act of
Parliament in 1996. This report also clearly flags the systemic use of
torture and notes that ‘common methods…include, undressing the person
and assaulting using the hand, foot, poles, wires, belts and iron bars,
beating with poles on the soles of the feet, denial of water following
beating, forcing the person to do degrading acts, trampling and kicking,
applying chilli juice to eyes, face and genitals, hanging the person by
the hands and rotating/and or beating on the soles of the feet,
crushing the person’s nails and handcuffing the person for hours to a
window or cell bar’.
All this in the land of the Buddha, over two years into the yahapalanaya
government. One would expect as a consequence a thorough domestic
investigation into these allegations, and corrective measures taken to
abolish all inhuman and degrading practices. On the contrary, the
immediate and to date only response from the President to the statement
by Emmerson was to inquire as to how he got access to LTTE detainees.
This is the same President, lest we forget, who was seen in public in
July 2016 as part of a demonstration organized by the Human Rights
Commission of Sri Lanka against all forms of torture on the
International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. Sagala Ratnayaka,
the Minister of Law and Order, was also present on this occasion. Photos
of the demonstration show the President and the Minister sporting caps
with ‘Stop Torture’ emblazoned, in all three languages. The optics then
and the response now reveal a divide between what is overtly supported
and in reality countenanced, between what is politically expedient and
realistically doable given the pressure to maintain the status quo by
the military, and inherently violent deep or dark state architectures.
It is easy to ridicule the President for a response in 2017 that is the
polar opposite of what he stood for, literally, in 2016. But the nature
and spectrum of official responses and reactions suggests that whenever
the yahapalanaya government is held up to the same scrutiny as the
previous government, it employs a tone of false equivocation - flagging
the West and its failings as greater, or flagging the Rajapaksa regime’s
human rights violations as more outrageous. The hypocrisy then isn’t so
much with those who employ a critical gaze on Sri Lanka coming from the
West or the UN, but the inability of the present government to
countenance a degree of scrutiny largely if not wholly brought upon by
the promises made by it to gain political authority and office. What is
never really said, but implicitly suggested is that things like on-going
torture are somehow more acceptable in a political context that is
comparably more accountable and less violent than the previous regime.
The benchmark then is not what is right or should be, but the worst of
what we once were. It is akin to say celebrating a light, passing shower
in a desert - nothing at all has really changed, but the slight
dampness that’s short-lived is somehow projected as something that is
refreshingly different to the norm, and indicative of a more verdant
future.
We thus have a government that is adept at peddling the illusory,
hostage to political and military realities that endure long after the
end of the war, instead of a more principled political will anchored to
accountability. No longer riding a wave of public support and
approaching the twilight phase of its full term in office, the
government’s willingness and ability to foster meaningful reform will
diminish.
So, the window for systemic
reform is over.
What the government has now embraced as its political strategy is akin
to what’s known as A/B testing in website development. Through this
method, two versions of the same website are shown to those who visit.
The visitors aren’t told what version they are looking at or engaging
with. Depending on how effective one design is over the other, judged by
how visitors respond to it, the final version of the site is deployed.
Similarly, the government tells the international community, domestic
constituencies, the sangha, military, the opposition, donors and others
what they want to hear, all in parallel but not in concert. Hence, the
obvious lack of any logical coherence from government on a range of key
issues. Each party responds to what is told to them. This approach works
to keep the patience of the international community from running out,
the sangha at bay, the military happy, the donors interested, the
opposition engaged and the voters distracted. What is engineered is a
way through which though only the basic minimum is done around reform,
it is projected as a great achievement. The general result is tokenism
at its core, just with nice icing on it.
What then and what now?
Progressives embedded in government will want to pressure those
higher-up, even they cannot influence by way of popular demonstrations
in support of the January 2015 mandate. Civil society will be encouraged
to lead the reform agenda, initially championed by government. The
danger here is that through outsourcing, and ironically, the greater the
success at highlighting the initial yahapalanaya promise, the more it
stands the risk of being perceived as an agenda or set of initiatives
alien to government, funded by change-agents perceived to be from the
West, and the usual corrosive rhetoric that follows. The lack of
political will from within government isn’t something that can be
located outside of it, in civil society. Corrective measures are known.
It is the political will that’s missing, or more accurately, the once
pulsating promise of meaningful reform.
This isn’t just academic. The details reproduced above on the kind of
torture detainees and prisoners undergo was deliberate. It forces
readers to confront what is happening today, perhaps even right now,
while you read this column. It is awful. It is violent. It is ugly. And
it is allowed to continue. Even as a card-carrying Theravada Buddhist
country, we seem to have confused and conflated ahi?s? - a cardinal
precept of the dhamma, with hi?s? as an acceptable norm of governance.
This harks back to what Hannah Arendt called the banality of violence.
Torture in Sri Lanka is invisible. To highlight it is the crime, not the
torture itself.
One reason why, so many years after war, we remain steeped in violence.