Sri Lanka's war-fighting seminar The heavy guns stayed silent

Asia Banyan

Jun 3rd 2011, 5:55 by The Economist | COLOMBO 

RIGHTS groups had called it an attempt to whitewash war crimes. Many of the delegates who attended this three-day seminar, conducted by Sri Lanka’s army, were of course hoping for something better than that. Its panels were supposed to help teach the world’s counter-insurgency boffins how Sri Lanka’s army defeated the Tamil Tiger rebels while pursuing a “zero civilian-casualty” policy that supposedly forsook the use of heavy weapons. But few of the truly difficult questions were raised, and in the end none were answered.
The seminar ended on June 2nd, only a day after a UN special investigator at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva showed video of Sri Lanka soldiers in the war’s final days, apparently executing civilians. He called it “trophy footage” and evidence of serious human-rights abuses.
And it doesn’t stop. On June 3rd, on the margins of sessions held by the UN Human Rights Council, Britain’s Channel 4 is set to screen a special one-hour investigation that it says will feature “devastating” new video evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity, committed by both the Sri Lanka government’s forces and by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (the LTTE).
The government’s response to every suggestion that it may be culpable for war crimes has been one of enraged denial. The seminar was like a prolonged exercise of the same. Ground commanders who had led troops in the scrutinised final battle against the rebels in 2009 were fulsome with self-congratulatory speeches claiming that the number of civilians killed by military fire was minimal.
As they would have it, the Tigers launched barrages of artillery and mortar fire at their troops from among civilians cowering in the congested no-fire zones declared by the army. And the army refrained from retaliating in kind.
But when members of the audience  questioned the panellists about how they managed to crush the Tigers without killing civilians—given that the rebels held hundreds of thousands of people hostage, a massive human shield against their rapidly advancing forces—the replies were, at best, unconvincing.
One of the panellists, Major-General Shavendra Silva, who now serves as Sri Lanka’s deputy envoy to the UN in New York, said the army used “position targeting” as well as marksmen and snipers to identify and shoot only rebels and rebel targets.
But the army has long maintained that the Tigers fought in civilian clothes towards the end. So how could the snipers have picked out their men from the innocents? General Silva did not explain. Just when the questioning seemed like it was about to be trained on the subject of civilian casualties, the moderator hastily announced lunch.
The only speaker to address head-on the allegations of human-rights abuses—and the army’s implausible waffling about them—was not a Sri Lankan. David Kilcullen, an Australian consultant on counter-insurgency, said it was difficult to see how the international community could accept the Sri Lankan model without a frank and honest discussion of these allegations of abuse.
Mr Kilcullen offered that Sri Lanka might argue that whatever it took to defeat such an enemy, and so to end the conflict, was morally justifiable in the special circumstances of the final campaign. But even at the end of this seminar’s third day, Sri Lanka was doing nothing of the sort. 
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Gradual erosion of judicial independence in Sri Lanka concerns IBAHRI

The International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI) is concerned about the increasing erosion of judicial independence in Sri Lanka. In a confidential letter, dated 19 May 2011, the IBAHRI outlined its concerns to the Government of Sri Lanka in regard to the 18th Amendment to the Constitution and the proposed 19th Amendment – which limits the term of the Chief Justice to five years and gives the President of Sri Lanka the authority to appoint the Secretary to the Judicial Services Commission.
‘We believe that it is by providing judges with a permanent or long-term mandate that their independence will be maximized, as will public confidence in the judiciary’, said Sternford Moyo, IBAHRI Co-Chair. ‘We do not consider the five years proposed by the 19th Amendment to equate to appropriate security of tenure. Further, we are concerned that the appointment of the Secretary to the Judicial Services Commission, a key judicial institution, will make it vulnerable to political influence, perceived or otherwise’.
The passage of the 18th Amendment through Parliament last year repealed the 17th Amendment that provided for the establishment of a Constitutional Council. This afforded independent supervision over appointments to key public institutions, including the Judicial Services Commission. In place of the Constitutional Council, the 18th Amendment provides for the establishment of a Parliamentary Council, whose members and Chair are appointed by the President, and is responsible for submitting observations to the President when appointing members to the Judicial Services Commission as well as other public institutions.
In conjunction, the 18th Amendment and the proposed 19th Amendment represent a gradual erosion of judicial independence in Sri Lanka.
In 2009, the IBAHRI visited Sri Lanka on a fact-finding mission. In its subsequent report, Justice in Retreat: A Report on the independence of the legal profession and the rule of law in Sri Lanka, the IBAHRI found that the re-establishment of the Constitutional Council provided for in the 17th Amendment would ensure critical independent oversight of the proper functioning of public institutions and resolve several of the constitutional and governance issues facing Sri Lanka at the time. The Report concluded that:
‘The Government’s continuing failure to fully implement the 17th Amendment and re-establish the Constitutional Council has reduced public confidence in its commitment to independent institutions and the rule of law.
‘We consider the 18th Amendment to be far inferior to the 17th Amendment, in terms of the important provision of checks and balances. We are concerned that presidential control over the Parliamentary Council significantly reduces the possibility of independent scrutiny of appointments to public institutions, including the Judicial Services Commission,’ commented Hans Corell, IBAHRI Vice-Chair. ‘As Sri Lanka moves to build a sustainable peace and to maintain public confidence in the fair administration of justice, we invite the Government to send out a clear message that it is committed to ensuring strong and independent institutions. We hope that the Government will consider introducing appropriate safeguards to the 19th Amendment to guarantee judicial independence and that it will revisit the 18th Amendment with the provision for independent oversight as initially envisaged by the 17th Amendment’.

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