‘Human Rights, canards and review of Sri Lanka performance’ : A reply - 8th April 2008

The Editor Daily Mirror

Dear Editor

I write in response to the article by Nimalka Fernando entitled ‘Human Rights, canards and review of Sri Lanka performance’ which appeared in your paper on Wednesday March 26th. I would be grateful if you publish this letter with similar prominence in terms of my right to respond, as her article refers to me both explicitly, as head of the government’s Peace Secretariat, and implicitly, in a strange category in which she claims that the ‘only expertise required to defend human rights in Sri Lanka seems to be (a) allegiance to the Rajapakse trio (b) able to utilize family and personal feuds in developing canards against the opponents (which SCOPP has enough expertise adding few more would be exciting though.

Initial indulgence of Ranil Wickremesinghe

The bizarre syntactical structure of that category (b) would suggest that something has dropped out, but I realize that Ms Fernando’s prose sometimes gets out of control, and the general point she wishes to convey is clear enough, namely that my writings with regard to human rights somehow spring from a family or personal feud. I have no idea what she means if she thinks I have any personal feuds with anyone, since my deep personal affection and regard for those I know whose views on human rights in Sri Lanka differ from my own – individuals such as Jehan Perera and Rohan Edrisinha - is a matter of common knowledge. Doubtless what Ms Fernando meant characteristically to insinuate, in a manner that only denizens of Colombo High Society would understand, is that I have some sort of family feud with Ranil Wickremesinghe.

Such a canard – not an unfounded rumour, as Ms Fernando defines the word, on the strength of a dictionary she has been erudite enough to consult, but rather a deliberate falsehood, which is what most people understand by canard, the source of which is apparent – can only appeal to those who are not concerned with evidence. Though from the early eighties, when now doughty defenders of human rights such as Ms Fernando were not much in evidence, I was critical of the racist authoritarianism of the Jayewardene government, I was not especially critical of Mr Wickremesinghe, since I felt he was too young to be held responsible for much that was wrong with that government. Though I know he was a particular confidante of President Jayewardene, that he was reported as being in charge of handing out the pre-prepared letters of resignation with which the President announced the referendum to put off elections, that he was witness at the marriage of Kalu Lucky who led the state sponsored demonstration outside the homes of the Supreme Court judges who had found against the government on a Human Rights issue (Ms Fernando has doubtless forgotten that the guilty policeman was promptly promoted), I was much less critical of him than Chanaka Amaratunga, whose politics I followed, who accused me of indulgence on the basis of family ties. Indeed in those days I used to defend Mr Wickremesinghe from even the charges of delinquency that Chanaka and younger liberals, who now admire him more, used to fling with gay abandon, similar to those I gathered Mr Wickremesinghe used to level in turn at Chanaka.

In the early nineties, despite initial qualms, I supported Chanaka in his alliance with President Premadasa, at a time when the younger Liberals left the party and worked with the then opposition. Mr Wickremesinghe then seemed the repository of the Premadasa tradition, and I remember indeed his emphatically loyal sister and I bewailing President Wijetunge’s antics which she too characterized as detracting from the Premadasa vision. Later, after the UNP lost the 1994 election, when Chanaka was asked to draft Mr Gamini Dissanayake’s Presidential manifesto, I was initially unwilling to assist because I felt Mr Wickremesinghe had been betrayed by his party. I gather Mr Dissanayake too was unwilling initially to seek my assistance, because he thought my loyalties lay with Mr Wickremesinghe, though as it happened Chanaka overcame the qualms of both of us, and I contributed a little and was immensely impressed with Mr Dissanayake’s intellectual acumen and political understanding.

Losing faith in mismanagement of the Ceasefire Agreement

When Mr Wickremesinghe took over as Leader of the Opposition, I welcomed his less confrontational approach, and indeed regretted what I thought was President Kumaratunga’s failure to consult with him satisfactorily about constitutional reform. In 1999, although I stood for the Presidency myself, I gave him my second preference. I did not vote for the UNP in the 2000 General Election because the Liberal Party was standing. However, despite some qualms about the manner in which he had responded to President Kumaratunga’s constitutional proposals of 2000, I voted for the UNP in the 2001 General Election, and welcomed the Ceasefire Agreement that was signed a few months later.

Far from there being any feud, my opposition to that government began only when I realized that the Ceasefire had become a joke, and the LTTE was taking advantage of it to renew its military strength, and to murder Tamils who opposed it, as well as to decimate army intelligence, in part through the information it had obtained after the infamous Athurugiriya raid. I must also admit that I was deeply disappointed at Mr Wickremesinghe’s cavalier attitude to the reintroduction of English medium, which I discussed with him at the behest of his brother, one of three for whom my personal affection continues undiminished. Mr Wickremesinghe’s assertion that English medium should be stopped forthwith, and that he had told his Minister of Education not to go ahead with it, struck me as not only callous but myopic.

Still, had peace proceeded on the basis of the Ceasefire, I would have thought that a relatively minor issue. It was what seemed to me culpable indulgence of the LTTE, combined with a public assertion of doubt (in Chennai when he was Prime Minister) about the principle that ‘a functioning democracy is essential for sustainable economic growth and development’ (South Korea and Indonesia before democratization being cited as admirable examples, along with China and Vietnam), that led me to feel he was not an appropriate leader for this country. That belief, which has not inhibited social intercourse on the last occasion we met (not of course intimate, for that has never been his style with those outside the inner circle) has nothing whatsoever to do with my critiques of the attacks on the country’s human rights record launched by individuals such as Ms Fernando.

I have answered this oblique charge at length, because it seems to lie at the core of what elite activists disseminate about my political views. All I can say – and fortunately, because I have always written openly what I believe, my views over the years can be checked quite easily – I have been utterly consistent in my support for minority rights and devolution, for democracy and regular elections, for an independent judiciary and a free media, and both consistent and forthright, long before many of those who now flaunt their human rights credentials, in my condemnation of authoritarianism, racial violence, tampering with democracy and intimidation of the judiciary. Mr Wickremesinghe’s views on some of these matters may have changed for the better since the dark days of the eighties, though his new found allies in the Human Rights industry should read the Chennai speech before they promote his return to power. But it is possible however that I caution them too late, for I note that the Law and Society Trust and the Centre for Policy Alternatives, perhaps under the aegis of Mr Wickremesinghe’s mentor Bradman Weerakoon, have added the UNP’s Jathika Sevaka Sangamaya, the same I believe that under Cyril Mathew used to thrash leftists and Tamils, to the list of those who have made representations along with them and against Sri Lanka to the Human Rights Council in Geneva.

NGOs treating Louise Arbour as a football

This brings me to the second of Ms Fernando’s canards, in which she claims that, ‘When UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour called for a UN monitoring mission in Sri Lanka, the head of the government’s Peace Secretariat described her as having become “a football, to be kicked about at will, to score goals for terrorists and others who do not mind sharing a terrorist agenda provided it gets them their goals too.”’

The quotation is quite accurate, but the context Ms Fernando ascribes is totally wrong. The statement she quotes from was issued after Louise Arbour’s admirable press statement, issued in Colombo after discussion with our Minister of Disaster Management and Human Rights, in which she did not call for a UN monitoring mission, even though the UNP’s Lakshman Kiriella had confidently declared beforehand that this was what she would do, and that nothing could stop the fulfillment of such a call. We knew by then that some members of her staff had in fact approached some workers in the Human Rights industry to pack their bags and get ready to be part of a Monitoring Mission in Sri Lanka, even though in theory Louise Arbour’s visit was to check on the situation. The article in which I first used the metaphor of the football was one in which I said that I believed that, despite such pressures on her, from the Sri Lankan opposition as well as members of her staff, she would not allow herself to be kicked around like a football.

So indeed it proved, and the good lady even resisted those of her staff who wanted her to have a private press interview contrary to the commitment she had made to the Minister. It will be remembered that the trouble over Sir John Holmes arose precisely because he had violated his commitment, and given such an interview in which something he said was, as he indicated in his handsome letter of clarification to the Minister, taken out of context and blown up out of all proportion. The phrase used in the headline still reverberates, even though in his correspondence with me Sir John sent the UN regulations with regard to aid workers that made it clear the Agence Contre le Faim had violated those regulations which call for much greater care than they extended towards local workers.

Avoiding alien agendas

To return to Louise Arbour, the particular article from which Ms Fernando quotes was written after Louise Arbour’s admirable performance in Colombo, despite which some newspapers, along with workers in the human rights industry, claimed quite falsely that she had recommended a monitoring mission. It was the use such individuals were trying to make of Ms Arbour that I criticized in the phrase which Ms Fernando quotes out of context. Far from criticizing Ms Arbour then, I was drawing attention to the callous use people like Ms Fernando, who make a living out of the misery of others, was trying to make of the poor lady.

The pressure on Ms Arbour continued, and she did finally bring out the idea of a monitoring mission, though I was assured by her Senior Adviser in Colombo that that speech was made, in Afghanistan, without consulting her. It is doubtless as a result of all the pressure that myopic individuals like Ms Fernando have been applying that Ms Arbour has been kicked now into touch as it were, and that she has decided not to extend her term in office, and the Human Rights Council has begun a search for a replacement with clear requests to ensure that no particular agendas will be fulfilled by the office of the High Commissioner and that its staff will be more representative of the United Nations on behalf of which they are supposed to function.

Recent events in Colombo have shown that, admirably though senior members of the UN behave, they often deal with staff who cannot be kept on pedestals. Some merely overdose on heroin, others involve themselves in local politics and try to work towards their own goals, regardless of the interests of the country they are supposed to serve, regardless of the policies of elected governments with which they are supposed to work together. Sri Lanka will not allow such individuals to hijack human rights for their own purposes. We recognize there are problems which need to be solved, but this must be through discussion, training, practical support, not through fiats that allow unprincipled incompetents excessive authority.

Yours sincerely,

Prof Rajiva Wijesinha

Secretary General

Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process