Sri Lanka: Ethnic Strife, Fratricide, and the Peace vs. Human Rights Dilemma

Abstract

The rapid intensification of the conflict in Sri Lanka during the mid-1980s followed the July 1983 communal violence. Agents of the state perpetrated human rights violations, including attempts at demographic transformation through massacres and the displacement of minority Tamils. The accompanying rise of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam through the brutal elimination of rivals brought another dimension to the conflict. Conventional human rights work, which dealt exclusively with the State, distorted the problem. The new totalitarian cult of the hero within a disillusioned Tamil society portended internal terror, recruitment of women and children, debasement of its own civilians in peace and war, and a barbarous approach to civilians from other communities. Amidst the devastation of 1987, a group of academics from the University of Jaffna, drawing on wider discussion within the community, wrote the Broken Palmyra in a bid to tell the whole truth and challenge the fatal trend. Through this experience, the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) [UTHR(J)] was born. Its reports have endeavoured to expose and challenge all perpetrators of abuses irrespective of affiliation. Its members also engaged with the university community and those outside against violence, whether out of narrow ideologies or sheer anger. The risk was knowingly taken and Dr Rajani Thiranagama, a leading member, paid with her life. Throughout its 20 years, UTHR(J) has challenged peace activity that privileged ‘peace’ over human rights, whose culmination was the recent Sri Lankan peace process with Norwegian facilitation. Both sides had powerful camps with fixed ideological obsessions, which either tried to manipulate the peace process or exploited its vulnerabilities to go on the rampage. The combined effect discredited the process and strengthened extremism on both sides. The collapse of the process owed to a theoretical aversion to mechanisms that pose a strong deterrence against human rights abuse by any party. The Sri Lankan experience is a further warning that a peace process that fails to advance human rights is doomed.