Living and Working in the Context of Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka was able to contribute little in the way of good or promising news this month, so it was no surprise that Sri Lanka was one of eight countries listed by International Crisis Group as having “deteriorated” in April.1 Almost every day brought one more alarming tragedy or another sad story to those with an eye or ear to the news coming from the island. Escalating battles in the North between the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are said to be the worst fighting with the most numbers of casualties the country has seen in at least 18 months. While both sides are said to routinely minimize their own losses and elevate the losses of their opponent, it is clear that the numbers of dead and wounded are high. By month’s end government forces suffered a major military setback at Muhamalai, where the LTTE appeared to have been prepared or forewarned of the army’s advance. For the price of gaining about 500 meters of territory, there was substantial loss of life, with hospitals inundated, appeals made for blood donations, and the media denied access. The government forces, however, continue to speak confidently that the “scourge of terrorism” will be wiped out before year’s end.
Among the dead this month were two prominent figures who were assassinated in separate incidents. The first Sunday morning of the month, an explosion took place just as the popular Minister of Highways, Jeyaraj Fernandopulle, was flagging the start of a marathon race in the western district of Gampaha. .At least 11 other people were killed and many others injured in the suicide bomb attack. Two Sundays later, a Roman Catholic priest and Tamil human rights activist returning from church in the Wanni was killed by a roadside bomb in LTTE-controlled area. The Tamil Tigers say Reverend M. Karunaratnam died when a deep penetration unit of government soldiers detonated the device as he was returning from Sunday services. The military denied any involvement, blaming the rebels instead for the blast as it had occurred in an area under their control. Fr. Kili, as he was known, was director of NESOHR, the Northeast Secretariat on Human Rights, headquartered in Kilinochchi. Both deaths were widely mourned on different sides of the country. While NESOHR is not without its critics and is seen as sympathetic to the LTTE cause, it does monitor the human rights situation in the north and east and produces a detailed monthly report of violations. For April they reported 34 civilians killed; 21 disappeared; 28 injured; 131 arrested; and 7 seeking protection from Jaffna Human Rights Committee. The report further claims that the majority of the violations fell within government-controlled areas.
Indiscriminate violence was also visited on civilians near Colombo as they were making their way home on the last Friday of the month when a bus bomb was detonated during rush hour, killing more than 20 on the spot and injuring scores more. It was the worst civilian attack since the terrible 16 January bus bomb in the southeast in Buttala, where civilians who escaped the initial blast were then killed by gunfire as they were trying to escape the burning wreckage.
The lead-up to the first-ever Eastern Provincial Council Elections, as a separate political unit, dominated the latter part of April, as parties geared up for May 10th elections. NPSL has again assisted PAFFREL by providing international presence in the accompaniment of its local election monitors to observe the pre-election process. The government is building on its claimed success two months earlier when local government elections were held relatively peacefully in Batticaloa district, one of the three districts comprising the Eastern province. In the absence of other major opposition parties in that election process, the TMVP swept those elections, despite widespread condemnation that the government had allowed a still-armed group to contest.2 The provincial elections now consolidate the government’s move made in 2006, following a Supreme Court decision that de-linked the Eastern Province from the North, to wield a further blow to Tamil nationalist claims that the merged Provinces constituted a longed-for Tamil homeland. Although substantial areas of the Eastern Province had been under LTTE control, by mid 2007 the government had driven out the LTTE from all areas that it had taken control over.
With Colonel Karuna still in detention in the UK on false travel documents and his ultimate legal fate still unknown, his chief lieutenant and the party’s candidate for Chief Minister of the Eastern Province, Pilliyan, is now keen to present the TMVP strictly as a political party subscribing to democratic principles and the rule of law. He claims to have reduced his military cadres to half and to have removed all arms to jungle camps or restricted armed cadre to their compounds in more populated areas. To bolster their claim of democratic and political transformation the group publicly released a total of 39 under-aged children in April. (See below for more information on child soldiers).
In relation to two high profile human rights cases, the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), issued this month a Special Report titled, “Unfinished Business of the Five Students and ACF Cases– A Time to call the Bluff.” The report contains serious allegations of rights abuses and cover-up against the State in regard to two widely reported Trincomalee cases well-known to NPSL: the case of five secondary school students murdered in Trinco Town in January 2006, and the massacre of 17 local humanitarian workers of Action Contre le Faim (AcF) murdered in their office compound in Mutur in August of the same year. The report claims: “In a state that has deliberately truncated itself to a Sinhalese State, the Police have been increasingly used as its criminal arm…It is not without great pain that we appeal to the outside world for justice [as] today the criminality of the very institutions that are meant to deliver justice has thrown huge barriers against justice and the people are helpless.” Other on-going investigations have not yet ruled who was responsible for these killings.
One mechanism set up by President Rajapakse to look into these and 15 other gross human rights violations since 2005, the Presidential Commission of Inquiry, suffered itself a setback this month when the international observers group invited to monitor their proceedings, the IIGEP (International Independent Group of Eminent Persons) removed themselves from the process altogether and prepared to leave the country. IIGEP claimed in their departing statement that the government lacked the political will to pursue the cases brought before it, that IIGEP’s recommendations were ignored, and that the investigation process of the Commission of Inquiry lacked credibility and transparency and did not conform to international norms and standards. They blamed the Government for a lack of vigor in investigating cases where the conduct of its own forces has been called into question.
Influenced by IIGEP’s decision to leave, the Paris-based Action Contre La Faim (AcF) then also announced its withdrawal from Sri Lanka. In a strongly-worded statement they said the slaughter of its staff that happened in eastern Mutur during the height of a battle between the government security forces and the LTTE could not be considered only as “collateral damage.” In their statement, they said: “The team had been specifically and deliberately targeted and their death had been carried out in execution style with gun shots to their head. Everything was consciously and brutally planned. The victims were kneeling, unarmed and defenceless. The culprits of this massacre are the ones who were carrying the arms. We can assert that this massacre is a war crime in violation of the Geneva Conventions.” AcF said that the presence of IIGEP was an essential condition for the credibility of the Commission of Inquiry and they had now no faith in the process.
The GoSL came under internal criticism as well, with Civil Monitoring Commission Convenor and Parliamentarian Mano Ganesan charging that it was learnt that seven Tamils who were abducted in Colombo and suburbs by unidentified gangs in civilian attire that came in white vans during the last three weeks were allegedly under the custody of the TID (Terrorist Investigation Division) and CID (Criminal Investigation Division). Recognizing that law enforcement has the right to arrest people on suspicion, Ganesan claimed such tactics as these, however, on the part of government authorities was “totally unacceptable and unethical.” When contacted by media, the Government’s Defence Spokesman, Minister Keheliya Rambukwella, maintained that when a country was fighting terrorism, one could not always stick to ethics, all the time.
Internationally, a Conservative party in Canada called on its government to impose sanctions on Sri Lanka in response to the deteriorating human rights record. The report, written by a group of Ontario lawyers and Canadians of Sri Lankan origin, says the rule of law is collapsing, with rising government-backed killings and abductions. It urges Ottawa to consider economic and diplomatic sanctions on Sri Lanka, and suggests tying foreign aid contributions to improvements in human rights conditions.
U.S. Ambassador Robert Blake, in a speech in Colombo titled "Maintaining the Balance of Peace Building and Economic Growth,” asserts that there must be a parallel political strategy to address the underlying grievances that have given rise to the Sri Lankan conflict. “Only by articulating and carrying out a vision for how power can be shared among Sri Lanka’s communities will Sri Lanka be able to show the Tamil, Muslim and other minority communities that they have a place of respect on this island, and that they have a role in a united Sri Lanka where they can control much of their own affairs in local regions where they predominate.” The U.S. Ambassador has taken many opportunities to argue that a purely military solution to the conflict will not work, and that more is needed to provide a positive vision of the future for the minority Tamils and Muslims within Sri Lanka.
International reactions also came in the form on yet another damaging report, this one from Watchlist on Children & Armed Conflict, titled “No Safety, No Escape: Children and the Escalating Armed Conflict in Sri Lanka.”3 The report describes the “untold suffering” of Sri Lankan children and civilians, and surveys the human rights violations allegedly committed by the Government, the LTTE, and other armed groups, such as the TMVP/Karuna faction. The report urgently calls for an independent human rights monitoring system to assess the constant fear and insecurity being visited upon civilians throughout the country. The report cites UNICEF statistics which document 6,248 cases of child recruitment by the LTTE from January 2002 to December 2007; and 453 cases by TMVP/Karuna faction, with alleged complicity by the GoSL, from April 2004-December 2007.4 Since UNICEF can only rely on voluntary reporting, it is widely believed that the actual numbers are much higher. The report also makes a number of practical recommendations targeting responsible and accountable actors, including the Government and all parties to the conflict, the UN Security Council, the humanitarian community and donor countries, and key trading partners. On 24 April the Secretary-General of the Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process refuted the majority of the claims in the report, while agreeing there are areas that could be improved, calling it a “predictable aspect of the silly season, when Sri Lanka’s human rights record gets attacked in preparation for review (in May) in Geneva.”5
Concerns also emanated from South Asia in an article out of India by Col. R. Hariharan, retired Military Intelligence specialist on South Asia. He names three hazardous political developments currently impacting Sri Lanka. The first, as noted above, the legitimisation of the TMVP as a political party without disarming it and anointing it as a partner of the ruling United Peoples Freedom Alliance (UPFA). The second he calls a “potential powder keg” of growing alienation among Muslims in the east in the emerging provincial political dispensation, which he describes as the politicisation of extremism.” And third, he mentions the global threat of small arms proliferation as also affecting Sri Lanka, as seen in a growing host of crimes–smuggling, corruption of government officials, human traffic, and illicit arms and drug traffic. He claims Sri Lanka makes a sizeable contribution to the regional stockpile of unaccounted small arms that are floating in the sub continent and that illicit weapons from the North and East are contributing to street crime in the south of the country.
And finally by month’s end, the World Food Program announced the growing threat of hunger in Sri Lanka (as well as other parts of the world) due to the global food crisis. Calling the food crisis “the silent tsunami,” a London summit at the end of April noted that rising food prices often force older children in poor families out of school for lack of funds, as sending children out to earn money is often a ready response to family hunger. Sri Lankans on average spend 37.6 percent of their monthly expenditure on food, according to the latest Census and Statistics Department data, with vulnerable families spending as much as 70 percent.6 Humanitarian agencies in Sri Lanka are preparing for the fallout as increasing food prices and shortages put vulnerable populations at risk of malnutrition and leave many families no longer able to afford essentials such as medical care and school tuition.
The Work of the Teams
At the end of April, NPSL had a total of 55 international and national peace workers and support staff in five field sites in four Districts providing international presence, accompaniment, monitoring, emergency response, confidence-building, nonviolent engagement, facilitation and network support, and advocacy. None of this work would be possible without the national staff and the world-wide network of administrative and fund-raising support provided by hundreds of NP staff, volunteers, governing council members, member organizations, and individual, organizational, and agency donors.
The Colombo Response Team (CRT)
Our small CRT was made smaller this month due to Provincial Council election observation needs in the East, with one of the two international field staff redeployed for monitoring work in Batticaloa and Ampara Districts the second half of the month. The CRT coordinator and field officer did six accompaniments both within Colombo and in support of vulnerable people from the east. A human rights defender was also accompanied to Jaffna by the Programme Manager, building on relationships facilitated by NP to connect human rights actors in the South with grassroots human rights workers in Jaffna. Issues of the Human Rights Commission in Jaffna were highlighted. Advocacy efforts continued at the national level, both for individuals suffering from human rights violations and security fears, and with national level bodies. The Canadian High Commission was met with for advocacy for one vulnerable family case, and linkages were made for on-going support needs of the family to other service providers. An audience was had with the Italian Ambassador to share NP’s mandate and exchange views on the prevailing political and military situation. The ambassador offered support in the future, especially for Italian nationals should any of them need assistance at any time.
As follow-up to the successful capacity-building workshop for human rights defenders in March, reports from the four young defenders from Jaffna who completed two-week internships in Colombo were submitted to the partnering agencies. One of the agencies has requested that the program be continued and that an additional intern be identified for June. CRT is continuing to plan for identifying and facilitating Colombo training resources to meet requests coming from the Valaichchenai team in support of local partners there. Efforts to improve IDP advocacy at the national level are also under review. The Programme Coordinator of CRT has also been involved in the IT needs of the organization and is serving on an internal committee to assist in the set up and infrastructure development for an NPSL server through which sensitive documentation can be securely stored and shared within the organization.
The Jaffna District Team
Travel to and from the Jaffna peninsula continues to be an involved and unpredictable process, with flights being delayed or cancelled at a moment’s notice. Only in the third week of the month was a third FTM finally able to be deployed to Jaffna, having been shifted from Batti Team at the beginning of the month in order to reinforce the team in Jaffna. This reinforcement follows the departure of two FTMs from Jaffna at the end of their contracts in March. The new Head of Field Office (HFO), re-deployed from Trinco Team, also faced repeated delays in the approval process for a Jaffna work permit and was also stuck in Colombo. (He was finally able to travel at end of first week of May). In the meantime, the Programme Manager was able to travel to Jaffna for a two-week field visit there to work with the newly-configured team.
The security situation in the north disrupted some of the team’s movements in April, and shelling limited access to some areas and interrupted scheduled visits. There was an increase in activity near the Forward Defense Line (FDL), which peaked on 23 April. The Army Commander announced that the SLA will engage a ‘large-scale front’ in the north soon. LTTE are also making some incursions from their side of the FDL. The team continues to do a thorough security assessment when going to various sites, as there is a risk that they could be caught within shelling range if military maneuvers suddenly shift. Contact is made with the UN radio facilities prior to going to the field. The team secures a monthly curfew pass and the national staff has government security clearance to carry on their activities.
The team was able to visit some of the very vulnerable communities in the district, including Allaipiddy, where there was a resettlement exercise on 21 April. On the visit to Allaipiddy, where NP has a history of support, the team was told that their presence provides a feeling of security and ‘sense of normalcy’ in an otherwise tense and insecure situation. Advocacy and linkages were requested on pressing needs of housing and sanitation.
More visits to provide international presence were made to the Jaffna prison and to rehabilitation centers in Allaipiddy, Chavakacheri, and in Jaffna town. Such visits provide an opportunity for people who have ‘surrendered’ to the government because of threats to their security an opportunity to share on-going concerns and needs, and allows for the monitoring of the conditions under which they are living. NP works in close collaboration with UNICEF and UNHCR in monitoring activities. The team was not able to meet this month with the head of the Navy but was able to meet his second in command. Such regular contact with military stakeholders is important for the team’s acceptance in the area and for their security.
The team regularly checks on the local staff of international organizations that do not have on-going international staff available; this month they supported three such organizations. Continuing to deepen the impact of the human rights defenders workshop in March that NP facilitated in Colombo, one FTM provided presence for a follow-up human rights workshop in Jaffna this month. Jaffna team also is a regular participant in the INGO coordination meetings and the Protection Working Group.
The Trincomalee District Team
The Trinco team consisted of only four internationals for most of the month, with our newest FTM joining the team towards the end of the month to assist with the election monitoring activities. (Optimum strength of the Trinco team is 7, as the team still maintains an office in Mutur and serves the southern part of the District). Military action at the Forward Defense Line in the north has impact on Trinco district as well, as it adds a level of instability to the border areas and tends to increase the number of Security Force search operations and round-ups, including in Trinco Town and surrounding areas. Heightened security also means more checkpoints, and this month the team had to negotiate more than 10 between the NP office and their residences.
Due to the spotlight on the district because of the Provincial Elections, the overall atmosphere in the area gave the appearance of improvement as shops were open later, and there were more civilians visiting beaches and youth on playing fields. Despite such appearances of normalcy, however, there are many reports of voter harassment and threats regarding voting preferences, including of local INGO staff. Abductions and numbers of missing persons were said by many to be increasing, but whether it was for ransom or into armed groups, or related to the elections remained unclear. The focus on the elections for most government actors and others diverted attention away from ongoing activities and community issues. As happened in the Batti District local elections, the involvement in the Provincial Council election monitoring process does facilitate the ability of NP teams to meet with and engage many stakeholders and to access areas that we are otherwise limited in reaching. The team met police and security forces at many levels, government agents at all levels, including 5 GS’s and the GA, political party representatives, and others in civil society.
The Trinco team recorded eight individual protection cases this month, related to extortion, threats or abductions; four being new ones, and the rest stemming from on-going relationship with the families of the murdered AcF workers. The team also was asked to engage on a case of Sri Lankan girl now imprisoned in Saudi Arabia. The overall view is that people are not reporting violations as there is little trust in national institutions and mechanisms, especially as the main armed group is supported by and in alliance with the Government. Five IDP camps were visited and the situation monitored for resettlement, which was observed not to be properly prepared. In one case 165 families were forced to stay in a school as no temporary shelters had been provided. A Rural Development Organization, led by a monk as its president, also discussed with NP IDP security issues in their area, including lack of shelter. Identified needs were coordinated with UNHCR and ICRC, along with other meetings with these agencies related to on-going human security issues for civilians of killings, abductions and disappearances.
Several accompaniments were handled this month. One was of a local NGO partner doing community awareness programs in a vulnerable area who sought NP support to travel with them to and from the area so they felt safe carrying out their program. Another accompaniment was of a Buddhist monk in fear of armed group activity in area where he was meeting. Groundwork was also laid with a Hindu kovil leader regarding planning for an intended meeting with a Muslim mosque in Kinniya after the elections. A joint issue with UNHCR is land issues between Sinhalese and Muslims in the south of the district, a potential flashpoint for violence.
Positive feedback from the previous month’s capacity-building workshop of Peace Committees facilitated by NP, with funds from the Niwano Foundation in Japan, continued to be received. Six of the PC’s have begun focusing on creating a common platform for joint and collection action, as well as others talking about the need for a district-wide network that NP could help catalyze.
The Trinco team also attended ten Child Protection meetings of various district actors, including UNICEF, Save the Children and others. A district child protection initiative is planning a July awareness campaign on child abuse. The team also participated in a district meeting with UNICEF to assess our 2007 partnership and to look ahead to 2008. The Trinco team also has a lot of reporting requirements dictated by the government at the district level. Reports go regularly to the GA, the Inspector General of Police and various Divisional Secretaries.
The Batticaloa District Teams (Batti Town and Valaichchenai)
In Batticaloa District the teams also balanced towards the end of the month their on-going work with election monitoring support for PAFFREL, with three international staff for most of the month in Batti town and two in Valaichchenai. Since PAFFREL has no office in Batti District, election reports come to the NP offices. As the month progressed, the situation became more tense and there were incidents of election-related violence particularly in Muslim constituencies. For the most part, party politicking took the form of door to door canvassing as opposed to the traditional large rallies. In the postal voting period the voting response was reported quite high. As in Trinco, many government actors and stakeholders were met with in relation to the elections and police and military presence was heightened. These meetings included the Minister of Education for the East, various police officials, the Senior Superintendent of Police for the Special Task Force, and key political parties.
Field work for the teams was sometimes affected by heavy rains but much work was accomplished. The Batti team received six new protection cases and 8 follow-up visits; with 8 accompaniments handled within the district, and one outside the district. Follow-up visits were also made to 11 families to assess their current protection concerns and to help link them to needed services and resources, including to other agencies and the Human Rights Commission for follow-up. Such referrals unfortunately do not often result in tangible results for the families, as several of the cases this month involve abductions of family members for which no news has been received, despite the involvement of other agencies, the Human Rights Commission, and government mechanisms.
Child protection work included eight at-risk youth facilitated to find a safer location; a meeting at one of the youth training facilities with a small group of parents and the administrators to air mutual concerns was facilitated by NP; district child protection meetings were attended for better information sharing and coordination; and attendance at the passing-out ceremony of 180 youth at one of the training centers NP has worked closely with. NP’s support of conflict affected youth and the Center was publicly recognized for several hundred attendees and their families at the ceremony. More coordinated efforts with Save the Children’s reintegration program are also happening. Other actors who also work with CAAC issues (children affected by armed conflict) were also included, Such as ILO, WUSC, and Sarvodaya, to improve district coordination and identify gaps or overlap. Both teams participated in 2007 UNICEF partnership evaluation meeting and district plans for 2008.
Four IDP camps and several resettlement processes continued to be regularly monitored, and bi-weekly Protection Working Group coordination meetings are regularly attended by both teams. The Valaichchenai team has been able to return to an area of resettlement called Vakanery where the team previously worked with ZOA Refugee Care in 2005-06. A meeting has been held with ZOA to explore further collaboration. Nutrition has been identified as a major issue, especially among children and infants. Other issues around adequate shelters, availability of drinking water, and the danger of wild elephants in some areas are also affecting the resettlement processes. At a Ministry of Resettlement meeting, food and welfare disparity between IDP camps was also raised. In one camp visit, the team was presented with a situation of a man with serious knife wounds; the team was able to secure emergency ambulance service through communication to the team base and subsequent contacts at the Italian Red Cross.
In work at the community level, both teams continue to meet with local organizations in listening sessions on community needs and realities, as well as in helping to build relationships of trust among local groups for better information sharing, establishment of early warning networks, and to strengthen existing community-based mechanisms and institutions, such as the Rural Development Societies and Women RDS’s in the southern part of the district. In the northern part of the district the fourth monthly network meeting of 17 local Tamil and Muslim community groups also met. The goal is to try to eventually shift the focus away from NP’s facilitation role and to the local groups themselves for long-term capacity building and development of sustainable community-based protection mechanisms.
Because of the rural location of the Valaichchenai office and the fact that other international organizations do not maintain offices in the northern half of the district, NP has been approached to share space in our Valaichchenai Annex with ASB and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) 2-4 days per week to reach rural civilians and the court system in offering legal services and other support on human rights cases. NRC has been focusing on the many documentation needs that civilians had in the post-tsunami environment but now wishes to shift that work to the government mechanisms and to focus more on human rights. A collaboration with NP would facilitate this work for the northern part of the district and underscores the benefits of our presence in that part of the district.
By Rita Webb, Programme Officer
Footnotes:
1. The other countries identified by International Crisis Group as having deteriorated situations in April also included: Burundi, Georgia, Haiti, Somalia, Uganda, Yemen, and Zimbabwe.
2. The TMVP was formed by the former eastern military commander of the LTTE, Karuna, after he broke away from the Tigers in April 2004. It now controls all nine local governing divisions in its native Batticaloa District and is contesting the Eastern Provincial Council election on 10 May as a coalition partner of the ruling party, the United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA).
3. See www.watchlist.org for this and other reports.
4. TMVP has promised to release all under-aged children from their ranks by the May 10th Provincial Elections in the East. It is not clear how this will be monitored or verified.
5. “Watchlist for Disaster,” by Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha http://www.peaceinsrilanka.org/peace2005/Insidepage/
6. Editor’s Note: Having recently moved to Colombo, I noticed this week that the price of a small loaf of bakery bread that was 15 rupees when NP first came to Sri Lanka is now as high as 45 rupees in some places, and perhaps higher in others.