‘Success in War: My time at the Peace Secretariat, 2007-2009’
February 21, 2016, 7:54 pm
Tamara Kunanayakam
Presentation by Tamara Kunanayakam
On the occasion of the Launch of Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha’s latest book, 18 February 2015
Rajiva’s latest book, Triumph and Disaster: the Rajapaksa Years,
is a remarkable documentary of the first Rajapaksa years that
constituted a turning point in Sri Lanka’s recent history. The book
celebrates the victory over LTTE terror, which had determined almost
every aspect of our lives for a quarter of a century.
It
provides an exceptional insight into the work of a state institution
that played a central role, even as it had to adapt to changing
circumstances when the LTTE forced a radical shift from talks across the
negotiating table to a brutal war in which it transformed civilians
into cannon fodder. It is a profound personal account of the events as
they unfolded between June 2007, when Rajiva was appointed
Secretary-General of the Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace
Process, and the end of the war in May 2009. In June 2008, he was also
appointed Secretary to the Ministry of Disaster Management and Human
Rights, and his account, therefore, also includes insights gained while
he was there. Apart from providing fascinating reading, painting as it
does a vivid image of the characters and events,the duplicity and the
intrigues, substantiated by a wealth of documentation, I found in his
book pieces of the puzzle that were missing in my own analysis, from my
Geneva vantage point.
When I say Geneva, I
don’t mean only the year I spent as Permanent Representative of Sri
Lanka to the United Nations. I mean most of my adult life, which I
spent in Geneva, studying and working in and around the UN System, of
which more than 10 years were in the Office of the High Commissioner
for Human Rights. I had seen and experienced the functioning of the UN
System from various angles: - as a student at the Graduate Institute of
International Studies in Geneva, which trained international civil
servants; then, as an international civil servant; and, more recently,
as Permanent Representative of a Member State.
Unlike
the LTTE yesterday, the separatist lobby today, and their Western
backers, the major failure of successive Sri Lankan governments was an
underestimation of the international dimension of the conflict. In my
view, it is this understanding that permitted the LTTE then, and the
separatist lobby today, to occupy the international space fully, made
easier by the absence of the Government in this domain. My presentation
will, therefore, essentially focus on the chapters that address this
dimension.
International intervention
Rajiva’s
book is not so much about the military operations, but about an aspect
of the war that is less spectacular, but perhaps more important and
more dangerous, because insidious. It is about what Rajiva calls the
"battle that had to be fought to prevent the government being stalled
in its tracks by international intervention." That battle is not over
and that is also why this book is a must read for anyone interested in
lasting peace.
Significantly, Rajiva’s account
corroborates the argument that the motivations behind initiatives in
Geneva are to be found elsewhere, not in a desire to protect the human
rights of Tamils. He convincingly demonstrates with numerous examples,
communications and press releases issued by the Peace Secretariat how
Western governments, the international and national advocacy groups
funded by them, and the United Nations failed to condemn the killings,
abductions, forced recruitment and use of child soldiers by the LTTE. He
describes how, on the contrary, despite first hand knowledge of its
totalitarian nature and widespread abuse, the LTTE had been, directly
or indirectly, aided in various ways.
Rajiva’s
account clearly demonstrates that external intervention to undermine
Sri Lanka’s sovereignty and to steer the course of its history did not
begin during the last phase of the war, despite it being the focus of
the on-going Western campaign.Western intervention began well before
that, adapting its form to changing circumstances, but always with a
single-minded determination.
Priority for support to LTTE and interventionist lobby
At
first, they sought to wield influence through their support to the
LTTE. The presence of pro-Western UNP governments under the Presidency
of CBK was also reassuring. Rajiva’s book is replete with facts and
figures demonstrating the mutually-reinforcing relationship that
existed in particular between the CBK-Ranil Wickremesinghe regime, the
LTTE, Western powers, sections of the UN, and interventionist NGOs –
both national and international. During this period, millions of rupees
in foreign funding had gone to finance the LTTE – authorised by the
UNF government, even after the LTTE had made clear it would not attend
the negotiations. Funding to the"conglomerate of like-minded
interventionists," as Rajiva described the NGOs, was on a massive scale,
coming in good stead during the Rajapaksa years when this "funding for
peace" was "diverted to critics of government," which is the title of
the book’s Chapter 6.
Several chapters of
Rajiva’s book are dedicated to facts, figures, names of organisations
and individuals involved in the giving and receiving of what amounted
to over 200 million rupees of foreign funding.
Appearance of Responsibility to Protect (RtoP)– framing the Rajapaksa government
In
the period immediately following Rajapaksa’s election to the
Presidency, there was a tendency, both by his political opponents in Sri
Lanka and by Western governments, to underestimate the man. In 2007,
they were still predicting that his government would be toppled and
that international pressures would contribute toward this end.
That
perception changed, however, somewhat with the defeat of the LTTE in
the Eastern Province in July 2007. It became increasingly evident that
the LTTE may not, after all, emerge victorious from the military option
it had chosen. Rajiva describes how, during this period, the
anti-government campaign grew in strength and viciousness and how the
interventionist NGOs, Human Rights Watch in particular, launched
concerted unsubstantiated attacks against the government, but without
the government considering it necessary to counter them. He also
discusses how this coincided with preparations for the September 2007
Human Rights Council session at which the British hoped to revive a
draft resolution they had tabled in 2006. There were three failed
attempts in 2006, 2007 and March 2009 to move a resolution against Sri
Lanka, with the former colonial power, Britain, taking the lead.
It
is appropriate to recall that many senior Human Rights Watch officials
come from the US State Department and the National Endowment for
Democracy. The Advisory Committee of its Americas Division even boasts
of a former Central Intelligence Agency official by the name of Miguel
Diaz.
It is likely that it is with the prospect
of a total LTTE defeat and the consolidation in Colombo of the
Rajapaksa Government that Washington turned to the possibility of
framing a RtoP case against Sri Lanka, as a means to limit State
sovereignty and to legitimise unilateral intervention "pre-emptively
and preventively" at a future date. In another country, Washington could
have opted to intervene directly using the pretext of fighting
terrorism. The Obama Administration, as the Bush Administration before
it, continued to be influenced by the neoconservatives who advocated
unilateral intervention to combat what they called "new global
threats," terrorism being one. Donald Rumsfeld, the former Defense
Secretary, described these new threats as "unknown unknowns" or "things
we don’t know we don’t know," which, because invisible, justify the use
of military force, unilaterally, pre-emptively and preventively,
anywhere and at anytime, even in the absence of evidence, because,
according to Rumsfeld, "absence of evidence is not evidence of
absence." For obvious reasons, Washington could not argue that Sri
Lanka was unable or unwilling to fight terrorism.
To be continued
Source : http://www.island.lk/index.php?page_cat=article-details&page=article-details&code_title=140756
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