Blunted ToolTamil Guardian Editorial, 24 May 2008
"The main point for Tamils to bear
in mind is this: the world’s powerful states have no more commitment to
sovereignty than to human rights. Sri Lanka’s territorial integrity is
no more important to them than Tamils’ freedom. It’s just more useful
at this point. And as the British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston
put, ‘we have no permanent friends and we have no permanent enemies. We
have permanent interests’. It is no different for any other state in
today’s world..."
[See also
Call for Exclusion of Sri Lanka from UN Human Rights Council, 16 May
2008 and
Comment by
tamilnation.org,
16 May 2008
"The
recognition by 3 Nobel Prize Winners of Sri Lanka's horrendous human
rights record is welcome. Said that,
the
'dirty war against the LTTE using
torture on prisoners suspected of having links with the LTTE and the
perpetration of
hundreds of enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions'
that Nobel Laureate Adolfo Perez Esquivel
speaks about,
was very much the harsh reality even when
Sri Lanka was first elected to the Human Rights Council in May 2006.
The record of extra judicial killings and
rapes during the immediately preceding six months
from November 2005 to May 2006 is proof enough of that reality. What
has changed since May 2006 is not President Rajapakse's horrendous human
rights record but his increasingly open foreign policy tilt towards
China/Iran. "
more ]
That Sri Lanka this week failed to garner enough votes at
the United Nations to get on to the Human Rights Council will bring cheer to
many, including a coalition of international human rights groups and the
three Nobel laureates who had publicly called for Colombo’s bid to be
rejected. However, this moment is neither some sort of watershed in the
Sinhala state’s fortunes nor of any consequence to the ongoing suffering of
the Tamil people. In short, whether Sri Lanka is on the council or not, is
largely an irrelevancy.
To begin with, it beggars belief that Sri Lanka could even be a credible
candidate, given the brazen confidence with which the Sinhala military and
its paramilitary allies murder, ‘disappear’, torture and, as news reports
are beginning to acknowledge, rape - assuming, of course, that the HRC is
taken seriously as site of human rights protection in the first place.
Remember that Sri Lanka has actually been on the council for the past two
years. Whilst the concept of ‘human rights’ has for almost two decades been
promoted by powerful Western states and their associated institutions and
organization as supposedly a key principle of modern governance, in practice
it has proven remarkably brittle. Not because human rights are still
violated, but because both Western states and their developing world
favorites have been able to do so without real consequence.
Thus, rather than some sort of ‘universal’ principle, the concept of ‘human
rights’ has, in actuality, served mainly as a tool for the West-led
international community to (re)order the world to their preference. This is
not to say that human rights, in themselves, are not of moral value. As a
people who have endured sixty years of oppression, including thirty years of
militarized violence by the Sinhala state, the Tamils
have long documented
and protested their suffering in the language of human rights. Our
problem, rather, is the manifest hypocrisy of the West which has, whilst
lecturing us solemnly on the overarching morality of human rights,
steadfastly backed the state that brutalizes us.
This hypocrisy has become glaring in the past three years, as the
Sinhala-supremacist regime of President Mahinda Rajapakse has enjoyed every
practical assistance it requires from the West. This assistance has
admittedly been rendered amid much admonishment. But harsh words won’t hurt
a state like Sri Lanka. No matter how brazen Sri Lanka’s abuses against the
Tamils are, concrete steps against the Sinhala state will not be
forthcoming: the recent assurance by the EU – which in particular makes much
about ‘human rights’ - to extend its trade concessions for three more years
is a case in point.
Moreover, what is interesting about this week’s tussle over Sri Lanka the UN
is the polarization between various state groupings. For example, whilst Sri
Lanka was passionately opposed by Western human rights groups and some
states, the Sinhala regime was actively supported by China, India and,
according to some reports, Japan. Clearly, this is not to say these states
either have no respect for ‘human rights’ nor that they believe Sri Lanka
was actually qualified to be on the council. Rather, what we are seeing is
interest-driven international politics at play. Indeed, amid such
polarization amongst powerful states – not in the overarching sense of the
West and the Soviet Union, but on selected issues – the term ‘international
community’ is increasingly losing its coherence.
We argued recently that, two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union,
the emergence of new poles (with their own interests and values) has raised
serious challenges to the US-led West's interests, as well as the
ideological values it has promoted in the service of those interests. We
also argued the Sinhala state is making a deliberate shift to the East and
away from the West and that the logic behind this realignment is that
Sinhala majoritarianism will inevitably always remain in tension with West’s
vision of global liberalism.
Sri Lanka has long been on the frontline of the West’s efforts to expand
this liberal order. The Norwegian-led peace process was the most ambitious
effort yet to do this. The West mistakenly believed the UNP-led government
of Ranil Wickremsinghe was a partner in the project. In reality, whilst the
UNP regime was prepared to go along with the Western project (of which
Japan, one of the Co-Chairs alongside the US, EU and Norway, was a reticent
member), and shared the project’s free-market logic the UNP had no more
commitment to liberal political values than the SLFP. Rather, both Sinhala
parties are committed to Sinhala majoritarianism and communalism. This has
been demonstrated by the lurch towards the Sinhala right the UNP has
attempted in the past three years (the Sinhala voters, however, trust the
SLFP more than the UNP to safeguard their privileged position).
These dynamics are also at play in the Eastern Province, where, following
the laughably unabashed rigging of the Provincial Council elections on May
10, Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan, alias Pillayan, the leader of the
Army-backed paramilitary group, the TMVP, has been appointed Chief Minister.
It was clear that the Western states were clearly hoping for the UNP would
win the elections, prompting the Sinhala ultra-nationalist Champika
Ranawake, Sri Lanka's Environment minister, to mockingly declare the UPFA’s
election victory as a defeat for the 'West-backed Eelamists.'
The point here is that repeated insistence by powerful states, especially
the United States, that Sri Lanka is not a strategic concern in no way
diminishes their active involvement in the micro-dynamics of the island’s
politics and conflict. From the very outset, in the early eighties, of the
armed resistance phase of the Tamil liberation struggle, countries such as
the United States and India, for example, have sought to pursue their
interests through such localized involvement.
What this means for the Tamils is that their grievances only matter when
taking these up serves the geopolitical and geo-economic interests of
powerful states. The long-running efforts by the wider Tamil liberation
movement to ‘internationalize’ the Tamil cause has therefore not been merely
to seek sympathy abroad, but to make it clear that it is not the Tamil
demand for independence that makes Sri Lanka a zone of instability and
disruption in the international order, but, rather it is the ferocity of the
Sinhala state’s efforts to maintain its chauvinistic domination of our
people.
The main point for Tamils to bear in mind is this: the world’s powerful
states have no more commitment to sovereignty than to human rights. Sri
Lanka’s territorial integrity is no more important to them than Tamils’
freedom. It’s just more useful at this point. And as the British Prime
Minister Lord Palmerston put, ‘we have no permanent friends and we have no
permanent enemies. We have permanent interests’. It is no different for any
other state in today’s world.
It is in this context the LTTE leader, Vellupillai Pirapaharan, observed in
1993: “Every country in this world advances its own interests. It is
economic and trade interests that determine the order of the present world,
not the moral law of justice nor the rights of people. International
relations and diplomacy between countries are determined by such interests.
Therefore we cannot expect an immediate recognition of the moral legitimacy
of our cause by the international community. ... In reality, the success of
our struggle depends on us, not on the world. Our success depends on our own
efforts, on our own strength, on our own determination..."
A Time of Change
The pointedly symbolic visit to Sri Lanka, in between those
to Pakistan and India, by the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has
inevitably sparked considerable analysis as to the implications for
politics, broadly defined, in the island, the region and indeed,
internationally. In the recent past Iran, long in the background of Sri
Lanka's dynamics, has come into the limelight as forcibly as has China.
Conversely, under President Mahinda Rajapakse, the Sinhala state is making a
deliberate shift to the East and away from the West. Such realignments are,
of course, never absolute. Contemporary international relations are
characterized by schizophrenia whereby the modern state engages in both
competition and cooperation with both ally and enemy. Nonetheless, there are
specific logics inherent to the Sri Lankan state's ongoing transition. In
short, the long-term interests of the Sinhala-nationalist project at the
heart of the post-independence Sri Lankan state are incompatible with
Western ambitions of global liberalism and are better served in the company
of states committed to non-interference in each others' 'internal affairs'.
The Tamil struggle against state oppression became an armed conflict during
the Cold War and was promptly caught up in it. Sri Lanka's swing to the West
under President Junius Jayawardene earned the Tamil militants both Western
condemnation as 'terrorists' and India's active support against the Sinhala
state. The armed struggle continued after the Cold War ended and global
liberalism - i.e. the spread of liberal democracy and market economics -
became a project pursued with evangelical zeal by powerful Western states.
In this context, the Tamil armed struggle was never going to be anything but
'terrorism', no matter what horrors the Sri Lankan state visited on the
Tamil people. Indeed, the latter was excused precisely because it was
inflicted in the cause of 'fighting terrorism'.
The point here is that whether international actors supported or opposed the
Tamil liberation struggle had less to do with what Tamils did or said than
with whether their struggle and its outcome served the relevant external
actor's interests or not. This is still the case. For many years, the Tamils
were solemnly lectured on liberal values by leading Western actors - even as
they unabashedly backed the Sinhala state's oppression. This hypocrisy has
been naked in the past decade the West repeatedly went to war all over the
world in the pursuit of its own geopolitical and geo-economic interests. The
legitimating rhetoric was those of human rights, freedom, even peace. But
the interests being pursued were all too often clearly visible through the
veil of liberalism.
Under President Rajapakse, the Sinhala state's ethnomajoritarian ethos has
became overt and overarching. Which is why the state can abuse human rights,
crush media freedoms and roll back the liberal order's hard fought gains in
the island and yet retain the enthusiastic support of the majority of
Sinhalese. At the same time, the emergence of new poles (with their own
interests and values) has raised serious challenges to the West's interests
as well as the ideological values it has promoted in the service of those
interests. With Western states ideologically and institutionally committed
to engineering a specific configuration of liberal democracy (consider what
happens when non-Westerners use democratic means to endorse leaders and
actors the West doesn't like) and free market economics, the Sinhala state
knows it can never be at peace within a liberal order.
Irrespective of whether the state defeats the Tamil Tigers or not, Sinhala
majoritarianism (and its attendant consequences of ethnic and religious
marginalization of Tamils and, of late, Muslims) will inevitably remain in
tension with the liberal order. Sinhala hegemony needs external partners
unconcerned by these consequences. The logics of aid conditionalities
(political or economic), notions such as 'responsibility to protect',
'power-sharing', solutions 'acceptable to all communities' etc. will simply
not do. Which is why we argue that Sri Lanka's turn to China, Iran and other
like-minded states - in the sense of non-interference in 'internal affairs'
- is decisive. There will be relations with the West but, as many of them
are already lamenting, the global liberalists will have less and less
leverage.
None of this is new to the West, its challengers, the Sinhala state or the
Tamil liberation project's leadership. Realpolitik has always been the order
of things. It's just more overt now. This is not to predict that things are
going to be either better or worse for the Tamil liberation struggle, but to
argue that both new opportunities and new challenges will come our way.
