A pamphleteer and an organiser, rather than a writer of books of theory, he is best known for a series of trenchant essays published from the early 1970s onwards, each focused on the immediate political priorities of the day. But implicit in all of his work has been a set of coherent and powerful ideas on culture, imperialism and political change.

Sivanandan has been receiving renewed attention since the recent publication of a collection of his non-fiction writing, Catching History on the Wing: Race, Culture and Globalisation (Pluto). At the heart of it is a visceral sense of the painful experience of racism and imperialism.

‘There is all sorts of personal pain in a colonial society,’ he says. ‘Especially when you have an English education and you come from a poor village where hardly anybody speaks English.’ Yet the absorption into European culture that at first alienated him from his people also provided the basis for his political activism. ‘I was able to articulate the pain of imperialism with the language that the Englishman gave me. I have taken the tool from the system to fight the system with.’

Sivanandan was born to a Tamil family in a small village in the north of Sri Lanka, then a British colony and known as Ceylon. His father had risen from a poor, tenant farmer background to become first a postal clerk and then a postmaster. But his Gandhian politics got him into trouble with his British bosses, who punished him by assigning him to one malaria-infested country post office after another.

To avoid this disruption, Sivanandan, the eldest of five children, was sent off to stay with his uncle in the capital Colombo, where he was able to enrol at a top Catholic school on discounted fees. ‘My uncle lived very close to the school but in a more or less slum area. So I played around with the slum boys and went to school with the petty bourgeoisie.’

Encountering Marxism as a student in 1940s Colombo, Sivanandan felt a resonance with some of the things that his father used to say. ‘Anything that is bad has a good side. Anything that is good has a bad side. In other words, there are contradictions. Nonetheless, life moves in terms of those contradictions. Life examines you and that is how knowledge grows.’

Still, activism with any of the Marxist sects did not appeal and Sivanandan was soon working as the manager of a large bank, firmly ensconced in the elite society of newly independent Ceylon and somewhat notorious for marrying across ethnic and religious lines – he was a Hindu from the minority Tamil community, his wife a Catholic from the majority Sinhalese. Then, in 1958, state communalism led to an eruption of anti-Tamil pogroms – the first salvo in the civil war that has continued on and off to the present day (see pages 43-47).

Disillusioned, he came to London. Soon afterwards, his marriage fell apart. And racial discrimination relegated the former bank manager to the lowly status of a tea-boy at a north-west London public library.
Double baptism of fire

These two experiences – of ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka and racism in Britain – became the twin poles of his politics, his ‘double baptism of fire’. One inscribed in his soul the dangers of ethnic separatism, the other brought home the need for a black politics autonomous from the established left.

It was these, potentially conflicting, demands that drove his political creativity in the following decades. A perennial question would be how to steer a course between an inward-looking separatism on the one hand and oppressive absorption into another political culture on the other. Because that same question lies behind current debates on multiculturalism and globalisation, even his early work still has continued relevance.

For Sivanandan, culture is a vehicle for political and personal growth and ‘no culture grows except through bastardisation – a pure culture is a dead culture’. As he says of himself, ‘I am a bastard – culturally!’ Through colonialism, ‘the Portuguese have messed me up, the Sinhalese have messed me up, and so have the Dutch and the British. And I find myself a rich man because all these cultures are sitting inside of me.’

Coming from the north of Sri Lanka, where, as he puts it, ‘nothing grew, except children’, he has made ‘organic’ growth the touchstone of his thinking. He introduced the idea of ‘disorganic development’ to refer to the imposition of a capitalist economy on a feudal society, which is thus unable to produce the kinds of ameliorating social democratic tendencies that emerged with European capitalism. Breaking with the left dogma that took the western class struggle as the sole, legitimate progressive politics, he argued that, in conditions of disorganic development, political struggles emerge that take the form of mass resistance to the state and to imperialism with culture and religion rather than class as the rallying cries. Moreover, new technology had dispersed the hard edge of capitalist contradiction from the European factory floor to the imperial periphery.

In the process, the western labour movement had lost its political radicalism and become vulnerable to racial prejudice. The then common practice on the left of subsuming the question of race to that of class – on the grounds that once you have a classless society it will also be a raceless society – needed to be rejected. ‘We had to have a different politics,’ he says.

A different politics

The creation of that ‘different politics’ – carving open an intellectual and institutional space on the left for anti-racism – has been Sivanandan’s most important contribution to this country. Ironically, with the waning of the class struggle itself from the mid-1980s, he was forced to defend that space from more narrowly conceived forms of ethnic identity politics, which effectively piggy-backed on the opening up of left dogma that he himself had helped foster. Throughout, Sivanandan maintained his insistence that only in the symbiosis between race and class struggles could a genuinely radical politics be found.

Ultimately, what has remained constant in Sivanandan’s thinking is its morality rather than its politics. ‘It is a faith that you have in human beings. I love human beings. I hate the power they have. But they are necessary for me. All the contradictions, the hate, the love, the quarrels, the coming of wisdom, the losing of wisdom – all that comes in the process of growing. That is organic. We don’t need great philosophers to tell us all this. It’s there in what a village boy who became a postmaster had to tell me.’

Arun Kundnani is author of The End of Tolerance, Racism in 21st-century Britain and editor of Race and Class

Catching History By The Wing: Race, Culture and Globalisation is published by Pluto

Currently 350,000 Tamil civilians are being held in what the Sri Lankan government has described as a ‘safe area’. In an interview with the BBC on 2 February, defence secretary Gotabaya Rajapakse said that everything was a legitimate target if it was not within this area. The only hospital in the region is not in the ‘safe area’.

Last November, Rajapakse went on record stating that 14.4 million kilos of explosives had been dropped in the Vanni area and that the government had bombed Tamil areas on 6,000 occasions. Since the beginning of 2009, more than 2,000 Tamil civilians have been killed by the Sri Lankan armed forces, including by the use of cluster bombs.

The former UN high commissioner for human rights, Mary Robinson, has compared the situation in Sri Lanka to that in Darfur and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She was quoted by the Inner City Press at the UN in New York on 20 February as saying: ‘We diminish the value of life … if we don’t question the disproportionate use of force.’ The same news article, referring to the death toll in Sri Lanka, and underlining the lack of international concern, suggests that: ‘One thousand was deemed too much in Gaza, but 2,000 for now seems deemed okay in Sri Lanka.’

Historical background

Some historians have asserted that the ancestors of the present-day Tamils were among the original inhabitants of the island of Sri Lanka. Tamil people have certainly lived for more than 2,500 years in the northern and eastern parts of the country. In pre-colonial days there existed a Tamil kingdom in the north-east (Jaffna) and two Sinhalese kingdoms in the south, called Kotte and Kandy. Drawings and maps from the time of the Greek astronomer and geographer Ptolemy, and later from the period when the British came to the island, show how the areas of the Tamils and the Sinhalese were recorded separately from antiquity.

The Tamils are predominantly Saivites, Hindus who revere Shiva as the supreme being, whose religion and written language date back more than 2,500 years. There are also Christian Tamils, who converted from Saivism during the colonial era, and Muslims, who share much of the Tamil culture, including the language. The Sinhalese people are predominantly Buddhists but there are also Christians.

The Portuguese (from 1505) and the Dutch (from 1658) colonial powers ruled the kingdoms of the Tamil and Sinhalese peoples separately, in recognition of the two peoples having a distinct culture, religion and language. In 1796, though, Britain conquered the island and in 1815 captured the Kandyan kingdom, until then unconquered by the two previous colonial powers.

For administrative convenience, the British amalgamated the Tamil and Sinhalese kingdoms in 1833, creating a ‘unitary state’, later named Ceylon. Britain acknowledged the concept of a Tamil homeland, using the distribution of Tamil and Sinhala place names as the basis to demarcate the boundaries of two Tamil provinces in 1873. The British also brought around a million Tamils from south India to work mainly on tea plantations in the central hill country. They are known as the plantation, or ‘up-country’ Tamils.

The island’s total current population is about 20 million. According to the most recent island-wide census, conducted in 1981, nearly three-quarters of the population were Sinhalese, whereas Tamils, including Muslim Tamils, comprised about one-quarter of the population. There are also Burghers (dual-heritage descendents of the Europeans), Malays and the Vedas.

Attempts by the British to create a homogeneous single Ceylonese nation failed. Proportional representation was agreed between the Sinhalese and the Tamils in an attempt to defuse the gathering ethnic conflict, and measures were put forward to ensure that no single community would be able to outvote all other communities combined, but they were eventually dropped. Although section 29(c) of the Soulbury constitution of 1946, which provided the basis for independence in 1948, prohibited parliament from introducing discriminatory legislation, laws that discriminated against Tamils were nonetheless introduced and implemented. In any case this constitutional safeguard was abolished in the new constitution of 1972.

Buddhist chauvinism

Given Buddhism’s presumed nonviolent philosophy, the question arises: how could committed Buddhist monks and their wider community in Sri Lanka actively take part in the political violence against the Tamils?
The nature of the participation of monks in national politics became increasingly volatile from the 1940s. Some Buddhist monk ideologues have been seeking to establish an ‘ideal Buddhist-administered society’. In this, they refer to and rely on the ‘Myth of Reconquest’ (Mahavamsa), which eulogises the ancient victories of the Sinhalese Prince Dutugemunu over the Tamil King Ellalan, in which thousands of Tamils were killed, and makes a virtue of killing in defence of Buddhism. It also inculcates the belief that Sinhala Buddhists are racially superior to the Tamils.

In the early 20th century, the leading proponent of these ideas was Anagaraka Dharmapala. In his view, the Tamils and other non-Sinhalese did not belong on the island. It is this ideology that influences the policies and actions of the Sinhalese government today.

Ethnic conflict

In the 61 years since independence, Sri Lanka has implemented regular waves of anti-Tamil legislation, starting with the disenfranchisement of the one million plantation Tamils in 1948. Barely eight years later, a single language act (Sinhala Only Act) discriminated linguistically, culturally and economically against the Tamils. In the 1970s, discrimination in education (requiring, among other things, Tamils to gain more marks than Sinhalese to gain university entrance) and the new constitution (which as well as abolishing section 29(c) gave precedence to the religion of the Sinhalese Buddhists) further advantaged the position of Sinhalese over the Tamils.
Tamils objected to the suppression of their language and their civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s they used satyagraha (nonviolent resistance) to no avail. Military suppression was the response from the authorities, and peaceful protesters were slaughtered.

Alongside the nonviolent resistance movement in the 1950s and 1960s, Tamil politicians proposed political solutions. However, peace agreements, based on a quasi-federal system devolving certain powers to the Tamils in the north-eastern province, which were signed between the Sinhalese leaders (prime ministers) and the Tamil leaders (parliamentarians) to resolve the political turmoil in the country, were unilaterally abrogated by the governments of the day. This became a continuing pattern, accompanied by increasing violence against Tamils – which occurred long before the birth of the armed resistance movement.

In the 1977 general election Tamils voted overwhelmingly in support of their right to self-determination. And international outrage followed ‘Black July’, the horrific pogroms in 1983, when thousands of Tamils were burnt alive. But no mechanisms were put in place to prevent what was clearly genocide, and documented as such by the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists.

Instead, after 1983, there began the next phase of persecution: torture, rape and extra-judicial killings on a genocidal scale, under the pretext of counter-insurgency and later counter-terrorism. This phase is continuing now, with total impunity. More than 80,000 Tamil civilians have been killed in the past 25 years. 12,000 Tamil women have been raped by members of the Sri Lankan armed forces. Some 2,300 Tamil places of worship – Churches and temples – have been destroyed. Not one perpetrator has been brought to book.

The Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) and 29 years of emergency regulations have given unlimited powers to the Sri Lankan security forces, who arrest, detain, torture, rape, kill and dispose of the bodies of Tamils with impunity. Tamil detainees are forced to sign confession documents written in Sinhala, a language that the vast majority of them do not understand.

Media ban and killings of journalists

The media, both local and international, has consistently been banned from the conflict areas by the government. Instead, military-guided press trips are used to disseminate the government’s propaganda. Assassinations of eminent Tamil journalists have become systematic, and now Sinhala journalists too are being killed, as a result of their attempts to report on the conflict in a balanced way. Early this year, the editor of the Sunday Leader, Lasantha Wickrematunga, was assassinated by unknown gunmen in the capital Colombo. There has been no independent inquiry into this or any other killing. He wrote his own obituary before he was killed.

Disappearances

Former foreign minister Mangala Samaraweera stated in January 2007 that there was one abduction taking place every five hours in Sri Lanka. According to the UN, the country has the highest number of ‘disappearances’ in the world. Given the population and size of the island, this is a shocking fact.
Nobel laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel has compared the routine torture and the hundreds of ‘disappearances’ and extra-judicial killings committed by government forces to the ‘dirty wars’ waged by various Latin American governments against their own citizens in the 1970s and 1980s. He says: ‘As Latin Americans know all too well, there are few crimes more horrible for a government to commit than summarily removing its own citizens from their homes and families, often late at night, never to be heard from again.’

Arms to Sri Lanka

There has been increasing concern at the support given to the Sri Lankan government by other countries. In 2007, according to the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, quoting Foreign Office figures, Britain exported £1 million worth of armaments to the military there. The items sold include components for heavy machine guns, communications and ground equipment for military aircraft, small arms ammunition, components for military helicopters, military sonar equipment, parachutes and ejector seats.

Andrew Love, chair of the parliamentary all party committee on Sri Lanka, stated on BBC Radio 4 on 6 February 2009: ‘The (UK) government of course tell us that they don’t sell arms that can be used against civilian populations. But clearly as we can see from what is unfolding now, this is happening, and whilst much of those arms are coming from other countries it is a real concern that Britain may be contributing towards the humanitarian disaster that we are seeing.’

The Tamils of the north and east of the island of Sri Lanka deserve better than yet more brutality. They deserve our solidarity.

The tragedy of Sri Lanka is characterised by two destructive nationalisms. On the one hand, we have Sinhala Buddhist nationalism and its mobilisation by successive regimes in their bid for state power. On the other hand, the Tigers, with their most extreme interpretation of Tamil nationalism, have dominated the Tamil political scene.

This ethnicisation of politics is the legacy of colonial reforms, whereby Sinhala nationalists appropriated state institutions, followed by discriminatory legislation against minorities, particularly on citizenship, language policy and access to education during the decades after independence in 1948 (see Deirdre McConnell). The attacks on the Tamil minority also took on violent form with periodic pogroms, culminating in the July 1983 riots and the government-engineered massacre of more than 2,000 Tamils. This led to the mushrooming of Tamil militancy, with thousands of youth taking up arms against the state.

While there were a number of Tamil militant groups during the early 1980s, by 1986 the Tigers had all but eradicated the other Tamil militant groups, staking their claim for ‘sole representation’ of the Tamil community. The Tigers went further in isolating both themselves and the Tamil community, not only by the massacre of Sinhalese civilians, beginning in 1985, but also by the ethnic cleansing of the entire Muslim population in the north, numbering about 75,000 people, and the killings of Muslims in the east, including the 1990 massacres in two mosques during prayer, resulting in at least 150 deaths.

These two destructive nationalisms reinforce each other and together have produced a deadlock trapping both communities. The ensuing political crisis has been deepened by the effects of 25 years of war. The warring parties have both sought military solutions to the problem, undermining efforts to resolve the conflict through a democratic and inclusive process that would bring all those concerned to the negotiating table.

Since abrogating the ceasefire agreement in the latest phase of the war, the Rajapakse government has again chosen the military option, sidelining the political process. In the past couple of years, the centre stage of Sri Lankan politics has been dominated by the discourse of war, including that of ‘war on terror’. This has given the most recalcitrant Sinhala Buddhist nationalist forces new vigour. In the past, when the political process was being pursued, albeit temporarily, these forces from time to time were sidelined. Now they have an important role in the heart of government.

Likewise the LTTE has time and again scuppered attempts at a settlement by successive Sri Lankan governments, the Indian government with its intervention in the mid-1980s and more recently the international community in the form of the Norwegian brokered peace process. It has remained inflexible in its quest to achieve military objectives and an exclusively Tamil independent state. It systematically assassinated independent Tamil politicians and intellectuals, including Neelan Tiruchelvam and Kethesh Loganthan, two of the most engaged constitutional scholars, as the Tigers did not want the political process to find any traction within the Tamil community.

After 25 years of war, however, the LTTE’s armed campaign has sapped the energy of the Tamil people, who are desperate for the war to end. For them, the LTTE’s armed campaign for its secessionist project has not been a liberatory process. It has held its writ over the people it purports to represent with brutal and total control, crushing all dissent, and using them only to feed off as resources, practising extortion and the forced recruitment of child soldiers. The Tamil people’s experience of their self-styled leaders has in many ways made them lose faith in the armed campaign for secession, and the Tamil constituency that is voicing a dissenting position vis-à-vis Tamil nationalism and the LTTE’s military objectives is a growing one.

Reframing the national question

One way to break the deadlock spawned by the two destructive nationalisms is to reframe the ‘national question’, as the problem is historically known in Sri Lanka. This would necessitate going beyond any formulaic solution based on the ‘right to self-determination’.

Some intellectuals are indeed reframing the problem as a question of the minorities’ share in state power and the protection of the political rights of minorities against a majoritarian state. This reframing of the issue as one of minorities gains importance given the assertion of separate identities by the Muslim and up-country Tamil communities, both of which were marginalised by the rhetoric and deadlock of the two nationalisms, not to mention the caste, class and gender concerns within the Tamil and Sinhala communities that are repressed by nationalist politics.

Democratisation and a political solution

With the victory of President Chandrika Kumaratunga on a peace platform in 1994 after 17 years of United National Party (UNP) rule, the devolution debate made significant progress in understanding and seeking to reolve the problem of minorities. The draft constitution of 2000 and the experts’ committee majority report of 2006 submitted to the all-party representative committee – appointed by President Rajapakse and deliberately undermined by the president himself early on in the process – provided solid foundations for a new constitutional order. This would need to clearly demarcate powers for the provinces, limit executive interference, loosen the centralised character of the state, remove the executive presidency and create a bicameral legislature with greater representation for minorities at the centre.
While the contours of a political solution may be apparent to the intellectual community that has been at the centre of the devolution debate, there are two major problems that will hinder any progress. First, there is the lack of political will on the part of the Rajapakse government, which seems more interested in giving centrality to Sinhala Buddhist majoritarianism. And second, there are serious concerns over the deterioration of the democratic health of the country in the context of war politics and the Rajapakse government’s attempt to entrench an authoritarian oligarchy.

The issue of democratisation has not historically been one that Tamil politics has engaged in seriously. This may be in part because of the LTTE’s brutal culture, but it was also the case with Tamil moderates prior to the Tigers’ emergence. An important lesson from Sri Lanka’s post-colonial history, however, is that a political solution is unlikely to work if democracy in the country is under attack. There is also the corollary that the brazen attacks the minorities as practiced by the current regime are linked to the attacks on democracy that affect the Sinhala community as well. The issue of the hour is as much about democratisation as it is about finding a political solution: one is unworkable without the other.

The task at hand, then, is the construction of a consensus among the minorities, who include the Tamils and Muslims but also caste minorities, the economically marginalised, the rural poor in the Sinhala community and so on. Tamil nationalism, due to its exclusivist politics, alienated the other minorities and large sections of the Sinhala communities; a minorities’ consensus would seek the opposite and work towards coexistence within an inclusive vision.

Historically, there have been frequent calls for a ‘southern consensus’, meaning now a consensus between the two major political parties, the SLFP and the UNP, as a way of arriving at an agreement towards a political solution and the two-thirds majority in parliament necessary to change the constitution. While such an agreement on a far reaching political solution would be welcome, the historical failure of Sri Lanka’s elite to forge the consensus necessary to build a stable bourgeois democratic state and the current political scene, with the ascendancy of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, does not bode well. Nevertheless, calls by the powerful international actors towards a ‘southern consensus’ and a political process towards constitutional reform would be one important way of checking the rapidly deteriorating environment.

A minorities’ consensus, on the other hand, would be an attempt at a bottom-up approach, beginning with the marginalised, to rekindle a national debate on a political solution and democratisation. The tragic history of Sri Lanka points to no easy solutions. The long march towards peace and justice may have to begin with the difficult process of building social movements but it will also require solidarity. That is, solidarity to dislodge destructive nationalisms, the militarisation of state and society, to support efforts at democratisation and to challenge authoritarianism.

International solidarity

Over the decades the powerful Tamil diaspora and the emerging Sinhala diaspora have reinforced the dynamic of destructive nationalisms through both financial and political support. The unconditional support for the Tigers by large sections of the Tamil diaspora can even be witnessed today in many of the protests in western capitals, with slogans such as ‘Prabhakaran is our Leader’ and ‘We want Tamil Eelam’. Feeding such nationalism goes hand in hand with the silencing of other minorities who came under brutal attack by the Tigers. Furthermore, it also reflects the irresponsible mindset that does not question the continued forced recruitment and use as cannon fodder of thousands of Tamil children and youth belonging to the poor who could not flee Sri Lanka.

While the unprincipled machinations of the ‘international community’, led by the Norwegians in the peace process of 2002, which glossed over questions of democracy, human rights and the other minorities in the interest of the foreign discourse of conflict resolution is not of much surprise, there are worrying questions about the role of progressive actors in the west. Have they questioned their acts of solidarity to see if they lead to constructive developments in the interests of the marginalised in Sri Lanka? Or has the western left merely retreated into formulaic acts of support for the ‘right to self-determination’ and the ‘national liberation movement’?

Within Sri Lanka, courageous voices have arisen, such as the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), who at great human cost challenged nationalist ideologies and raised the concerns of marginalised communities. Such intellectual challenges should be heard in the west and solidarity should entail intense scrutiny of positions and politics on the ground, including critically challenging the various ‘representatives’ of the Tamil and others in the diaspora.

This does not mean that solidarity must be muted on the abuses and actions of the Sri Lankan state. The urgent need of the hour is a resolution to the humanitarian crisis and strong pressure to address the human rights situation. There needs to be mounting pressure on UN forums to challenge the Sri Lankan government. At a time when media freedom and dissent is under severe attack inside Sri Lanka, the discussions and debates on a political solution and democratisation have to be supported from outside. But it has to be done in a manner that is pluralist in vision and does not polarise or marginalise communities even further. Local efforts to rejuvenate the devolution debate should be encouraged and social justice perspectives that challenge the blindness of donors’ ‘post-conflict development’ should be supported. Now more than ever the peoples of Sri Lanka need not just solidarity, but solidarity that is constructive and responsible.

Ahilan Kadirgamar is an activist with the Sri Lanka Democracy Forum and contributing editor of Himal Southasian magazine.

While this seemingly never-ending war has often been compared, especially recently, with another where too many people have butted heads on too little land, and had their lack of space is further disturbed by neo-fascist flights of fancy about the preordained superiority of one ethnic group over another, Palestine this isn’t. Welcome to the teardrop isle: Sri Lanka.

Ends justify the means

Last weekend, on 25 January, the Media Centre for National Security (MCNS), the Sri Lankan ministry of defence, public security, law and order’s so called ‘official website for counter-terrorism propaganda’, hailed the capture of the north-eastern town of Mullaitivu from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as the culmination of a series of significant victories by the security forces against the ‘terrorists.’ The MCNS went on to boast that ‘the area dominated by tiger terrorists has been reduced to an area of 20 km by 15 km’.

Significant as these Sri Lankan forces military victories have been since President Mahinda Percy Rajapakse’s government unilaterally ended the 2002 ceasefire agreement with the LTTE on 2 January 2008, can the government’s claims that its operation has been humanitarian be believed?

Clearly, the answer to such a rhetorical question is not going to be in the government’s favour. In the history of human conflict innocent civilians have always been killed and, in the last century or so, the numbers of civilians killed has risen exponentially. Sri Lanka is no different. Whether it is the country’s government or the LTTE, both sides have treated the country’s ethnic groups with similar cold disdain. In other words – for both parties – the ends have always justified the means.

For more than twenty-five years,Sri Lankan civilians – Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim and Burgher – as well as combatants, have been killed, tortured and otherwise brutalised in ways too many to list. Since 1983, the civil war between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE has – ‘officially’ – resulted in anywhere between 70,000 to 85,000 people killed. But despite the reams of reports by Sri Lankan commissions of inquiry, the United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the like, no one really knows how many have been killed, disappeared and tortured.

While horrendous violence has, in recent decades, gone hand in hand with censorship – formal and otherwise – both practices have arguably been taken to new heights since Rajapakse rode a wave of Sinhalese ultra-nationalism to the presidency in November 2005. Under President Rajapakse, the Goebbelsian propaganda released by the MCNS and state media has been buttressed by a tsunami of vitriol directed at any group or person, local or international, brave enough to question the official word of the government.

‘If this be treachery, we where this label proudly’

International reporters have also been banned from the war zone, except on rare guided tours by the Sri Lankan forces, and all international humanitarian agencies except the International Committee of the Red Cross were ordered out of the (then) LTTE controlled northern Vanni region in September 2008. When such practices haven’t been enough to cow dissent, especially by local media workers, the latter have – literally – been put on the firing line.

According to Amnesty International, since the beginning of 2006, at least 14 media workers in Sri Lanka have been killed, while others ‘have been arbitrarily detained, tortured and allegedly disappeared while in the custody of security forces.’ Due to such unrelenting pressure, for their own safety, dozens of local journalists have left Sri Lanka. According to Reporters Sans Frontieres, in its annual Press Freedom Index released in September 2008, Sri Lanka ranked last for press freedom out of any democracy on the planet,165th place out of 173 countries surveyed.

Recently, on 8 January 2009, Lasantha Wickrematunge, the indefatigable muckraking editor of the English-language Sunday Leader, was assassinated while driving to work. Wickrematunge wore the national heretic’s badge with pride and in a self-penned editorial posthumously published on 11 January, he presciently predicted his murder. He wrote: ‘We have also agitated against state terrorism in the so-called war against terror, and made no secret of our horror that Sri Lanka is the only country in the world routinely to bomb its own citizens. For these views we have been labelled traitors; and if this be treachery, we wear that label proudly.’

Ironically, as the Sri Lankan government is winning its so-called ‘humanitarian operation’ against the LTTE, its efforts to maintain the canard that its forces have killed no civilians has started to unravel. Like with the dissemination of Samizdat information during the Soviet era, reports have come out in the past week about Tamil civilians killed in the Mullaitivu area because of shelling by the army and the LTTE. Unlike most previous claims in the past year, which have tended to show up just on Tamil nationalist websites or blogs, and were rarely picked up by the international media, claims of widespread civilian deaths and injuries as a result of the recent fighting have found there way to the wider world. Mullaitivu district government agent, Emelda Sukumar was quoted in a Reuter’s article (published 22 January), saying ‘Around 30 people died in the morning … [And that] Personally I saw that nearly 100 people have died from Saturday up to today. More than 300 have been injured’.

While the Sri Lankan government currently looks set to strike a near mortal blow to the LTTE’s hopes of carving a separate state, without a political solution that treats all Sri Lankan citizens as equals, whatever ‘peace’ emerges looks likely to be short-lived. In his final editorial, Lasantha Wickrematunge predicted that a ‘military occupation of the country’s north and east will require the Tamil people of those regions to live eternally as second-class citizens, deprived of all self-respect.’

In a direct challenge to his Sinhalese compatriots, Wickrematunge further wrote: ‘Do not imagine you can placate them [the Tamil people] by showering “development” and “reconstruction” on them in the postwar era. The wounds of war will scar them for ever, and you will have an even more bitter and hateful diaspora to contend with. A problem amenable to a political solution will thus become a festering wound that will yield strife for all eternity. If I seem angry and frustrated, it is only because most of my compatriots – and all the government – cannot see this writing so plainly on the wall.’

According to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, Karuna has longstanding involvement in torture, extrajudicial killings, attacks against Tamil-speaking Muslims, and the recruitment of child soldiers in Sri Lanka, all of which are crimes under international law.

Before he split with his eastern followers from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in early March 2004, Karuna was one of the most senior members of that separatist organisation. While the Tamil Tigers have always been able to use the long-standing wellspring of antigovernment resentment amongst Tamils to recruit fighters, LTTE leaders have never had any qualms about using force to compel recruits. Karuna was no different in this regard. One of his responsibilities was to maintain the recruitment of cadres for the LTTE from the eastern Batticaloa region, since recruits from his part of the country had a reputation as some of the most reliable and battle ready cadres the LTTE had.

While he was not initially successful following the split with the LTTE, having been routed in a military campaign by the LTTE against him over the Easter weekend of 2004, by late 2005, Karuna convinced the Sri Lankan government to fully back him and his band of Tamil cadres as part of its counterinsurgency strategy against the Tigers.

Child soldier recruitment

Then, in November 2005, following the election of current President Mahinda Rajapakse, the Sri Lankan army and the Karuna faction went on a war footing following a series of provocations by the LTTE. As a result, by mid-2006 Karuna was back in the game of child soldier recruitment with a vengeance. The difference this time, his Tamil-based group were aided and abetted by the Sri Lankan government, as I saw for myself during a research mission with Human Rights Watch in Eastern Sri Lanka in October 2006. (See ‘Complicit in Crime: State Collusion in Abductions and Child Recruitment by the Karuna Group’ http://hrw.org/reports/2007/srilanka0107/ )

While traveling through the East that month, my colleagues and I spoke to dozens of local Tamil and Muslim civilians caught in the fighting between the LTTE and the government forces and its paramilitary ally, the Karuna faction. Karuna and his people came up in almost every interview that we conducted. The scale of his operations had gone viral since I had last been in Sri Lanka the previous November. According to what we were told and verified, it included extortion, kidnapping, assassinations and other forms of extra-judicial killings, illegal detention, and child soldier recruitment.

The complicity between Karuna and the Sri Lankan armed forces was so blatant that when we asked a woman near Batticaloa town how her 14 year old son and his friends could have been taken through all the checkpoints to the Karuna faction office in Batticaloa without being questioned by the security forces, she looked at us as if we were stupid and said rhetorically, ‘They [the security forces and Karuna's people] are all working together, no?’

A fair trial?

The UK government is now in a quandary about what to do with him. While there has been much fine talk about the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the emerging universality of international law, the rhetoric often doesn’t meet up with reality because the international infrastructure and legal norms are still very much a work in progress. The UK’s adherence to the existing international human rights conventions, while better than many countries, needs to improve dramatically in cases like Karuna.

Many perpetrators from the world’s war zones are inevitably going to show up from time to time in London. The UK government needs to be fully on board with the conventions against the recruitment of child soldiers, torture and the jurisdiction of the ICC, to name just a few. It’s simply not acceptable to just be a signatory to such documents. The government also needs to make all such conventions and international courts applicable to UK law both on paper and in practice.

Instead of suggesting, as it did to the BBC a few days ago, that Karuna could possibly be sent back to Sri Lanka because he apparently came here illegally. The government and the judicial system in this country should take a more nuanced and humane stance to the situation that they find themselves.

When the BBC uncovered the fact that Faryadi Zardad, an Afghan warlord, was living in the UK in March 2001, the case was examined by Scotland Yard’s antiterrorism branch. Charges were laid and Zardad was found guilty in a UK court of a campaign of hostage-taking and kidnapping in Afghanistan in July 2005.

Karuna has a long-list of offences that he could potentially be charged with and held accountable for in a UK court. Anyone who tells you that he would receive a fair trial in Sri Lanka, now that he is no longer useful for the government there, is simply not believable.

Andrew Kendle has been a consultant on Sri Lankan issues for Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. He worked for Peace Brigades International in Sri Lanka in 1994-1996