LONDON: When they decided to have a meeting at their party office in the north of the island, the four Sri Lankan MPs probably didn’t expect that it would start raining concrete boulders.
The first thing they knew was a mob of about 60 people surrounded the building. After half an hour of sustained assault, the roof broke and the elected representatives found themselves sheltering in the archways of the doors, as if there was an earthquake. All the while the police looked on, doing nothing. At the end the police caught a few of the attackers but quickly released them, including a man who turned out to be one of their colleagues in civilian clothes.
“This is not the first or second time this has happened,” said one of the MPs, “it happens all the time and this was just a month ago.”
This is the way elected Tamil representatives are treated in a country that claims to on the road to reconciliation and will soon head the Commonwealth. A Tamil newspaper in the north was recently attacked for the 37th time – its printing press set on fire just ten days after its distribution staff had been attacked and its request for police protection turned down. Jaffna University students who tried to protest peacefully last November were arrested and bundled off for forcible ‘rehabilitation’.
In March, grieving mothers and wives of the disappeared were prevented from travelling to the capital to stage a peaceful protest. Catholic priests who signed a letter to the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights detailing abuses have been called for questioning and intimidated.
This is nothing to what some ordinary people have suffered. ABC News in Australia has just broadcast the shocking story of a Tamil man who was raped and tortured just three weeks ago in Sri Lanka. Equally disturbing is the story of a young Tamil woman gang raped for 47 days in custody as recently as last November and the bigger pattern of sexual abuse which Human Rights Watch documented from 75 case histories.
An extraordinary film made secretly inside the country by anonymous social scientists has revealed the extent of continuing sexual abuse of former female combatants by soldiers, with a Tamil woman explaining how she’s routinely taken to the local army camp and forced to have sex with different men.
“There is no will for reconciliation; this is victor’s peace,” commented Paikasothy Saravanamuttu, who runs the Centre for Policy Alternatives in Colombo. “We have descended into a darkness back home” he told the Commonwealth Journalists Association in London recently, explaining that the media in Sri Lanka has to “put up or shut up”.
Lack of rule of law has become a problem for everyone in Sri Lanka, not just Tamils. A disturbing new wave of Islamaphobia championed by extreme Sinhala chauvinist monks has seen Muslim businesses attacked with total impunity and pigs and swear words scrawled on mosque walls. Families in the capital who tried to hold a candlelit vigil to protest the attacks on Muslims found themselves arrested and abused.
Even the country’s top judge hasn’t received justice. The illegal impeachment of Justice Bandaranayake has been condemned by every possible international legal body. At the launch of a recent International Bar Association report, the author, Sadakat Kadri, said the Chief Justice’s legal team were only given 12 hours to study 989 pages of evidence.
Thirty-five hours later her accusers had deliberated and written a 35 page report. Mr Kadri said they had “made up the rules as it went along” and he elaborated on a number of conflicts of interest, including nine cases where the new Chief Justice (a former legal adviser to the government and ex-attorney general), had simply failed to prosecute serious crimes committed against government critics.
It’s perhaps not surprising that Commonwealth lawyers meeting in South Africa last week unanimously passed a resolution calling for Sri Lanka to be suspended from the organisation – rather than run it for the next two years and host its major summit meeting this November.
Nigeria’s former Chief Justice, Justice Muhammad Lawal Uwais, said the case of Sri Lanka is similar to the coup in Fiji, which the Commonwealth did not allow to go ignored.
On Friday a group of Foreign Ministers from the Commonwealth known as the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group, will meet in London chaired by Bangladesh. This group is charged with enforcing human rights and democratic principles and yet strangely they don’t even have Sri Lanka on their official agenda. To its credit Canada will make sure Sri Lanka is raised in the “Other Matters of Interest to Ministers” section and will call for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting to be moved.
Many believe Friday is a turning point for the 54-nation body – a test of the body’s shared values and recent commitment to institutional reform.
If the Ministerial Action Group doesn’t act it will mean the other 53 nations have no problem at all being headed by the only country in the world to have two Chief Justices, not to mention a state accused by two United Nations reports of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Frances Harrison is the author of Still Counting the Dead: Survivors of Sri Lanka’s HIdden War and a former BBC Correspondent in Sri Lanka.
