Correcting the Misinformation of the Tamil Information Centre - 14th March 2008

'''The report of the Tamil Information Centre to the United Nations Human Rights Council deserves some respect since it is specifically addressed to the Council. This distinguishes it from the productions from other interested organizations that appear with monotonous regularity to coincide with Council meetings, whilst avoiding acknowledgment of this crucial factor.'''

However, like so many of those documents, the TIC report is full of inaccuracies and misrepresentations, which betray its main purpose, which is not the promotion of Human Rights, but denigration of the Sri Lankan government and all its institutions. Though, as in most of the others, there is some desultory criticism of the LTTE, it is hedged in by much more devastating attacks on the government. As in other cases, there are some points that should be taken into account in the efforts the government is making to improve the Human Rights situation, even as it tries to fight against terror, whilst also reintroducing democracy in the East which was bereft of it for so long, and advancing administrative reforms based on better devolution than before. In all these efforts the government welcomes the assistance of all democratic pluralist forces, and hopes that at least some members of the TIC will abandon their reliance on terrorism to improve the situation and work politically to achieve political ends.

This does not seem likely in the short term, if the present document is anything to go by. It makes several categorical statements that ignore recent positive developments. It is possible that many members of the TIC left Sri Lanka in the early eighties, when the government of J R Jayewardene promoted racist attacks on Tamils through some of its members. But those days are long gone, and even Jayewardene learned his lesson soon enough and tried to work with less chauvinistic forces in his government, as when he brought forward the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, that established Provincial Councils. Sadly, the intransigent opposition of the LTTE to that measure, which led it to a war against the Indians who had supported the Provincial Councils and those elected to lead them in the predominantly minority areas, meant that Provincial Councils could not really accomplish what had been anticipated.

Those were days in which there was a tame Supreme Court, the judges of which were mobbed when a few of them found against the government on a Fundamental Rights case. That was seen as unusual, and the government promptly promoted the police officer against whom the verdict had been given. The situation is very different now. The Supreme Court has found against the government frequently in recent Fundamental Rights cases, and its orders are promptly followed.

TIC is evidently unaware of all this, since it claims that ‘the Legislature and the Judiciary have become subservient to the Executive’ (clearly it does not understand the Westminster system of government, in which the majority in parliament, the Legislature, is naturally subservient to the Executive, with the hoary tradition of independent backbenchers being eroded now even in Britain). TIC goes on about this supposed lack of independence, even claiming that the Supreme Court appears to be acting ‘to promote a programme of the Executive aimed at denying the fundamental rights and aspirations of the people of Sri Lanka’, a ridiculous claim when the Supreme Court ruled that checkpoints should be removed, that searches should not be conducted at night, that the 376 Tamils removed from Colombo should be promptly brought back.

The presentation of this last incident indeed illustrates the tendentious nature of the TIC report, in that it claims that arrests are carried out on the basis of ethnicity. TIC knows well that there are hundreds of thousands of Tamils resident in Colombo, none of whom were questioned. It knows that over 10,000 Tamils temporarily in Colombo were not sent out. Only 376 were sent away, which should not have happened, which is why the Supreme Court promptly reversed the decision. Again, of the 2.250 Tamils questioned in December, most were released on the same day, only a few hundred were detained overnight, and most of these were released as soon as they were able to establish the reasons for their presence in Colombo. Within a couple of weeks those still in custody were in single figures.

All this occurs in the context of relentless terrorist attacks on civilians in the heart of Colombo, of a suicide bomber blowing the house up when on information received the police knocked at his door, of children being killed at a railway station. Though Emergency Regulations do give the security forces sweeping powers, these have proved essential in the current context, and have not led to the type of abuse that has occurred in other countries dealing with terrorism.

TIC begins its attack by claiming that the ‘Sri Lankan State has violated every democratic principle’ – this is ridiculous in the light of this government having conducted local elections in the predominantly Tamil Batticaloa District in the Eastern Province for the first time in a decade and a half. It is even more ridiculous in that a few foreign funded NGOs and the main opposition party and the TNA, which is a surrogate for the LTTE and was elected in a poll that was universally seen (including by EU monitors) as grossly unfair, tried to stop the election – even though their own reports indicated that violence was low. Sadly, TIC’s illogicality can only strengthen undemocratic, indeed authoritarian forces, like the LTTE.

TIC talks about a large number of civilian deaths through aerial bombing, as well as sexual abuse. It does not admit that there was only one incident of civilian casualties during the entire military operation to liberate the east, and no accusations even of rape – unlike when the LTTE effectively used propaganda about rape against the IPKF, when it fought them in the late eighties. Even with regard to aerial bombing there have been very few incidents of civilian casualties, and the Leader of the Tamil United Liberation Front, in condemning one of these actions, notes that the LTTE is known to use human shields.

On the first page TIC talks about impunity, but on the very next page it approvingly quotes the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture as citing ‘the high number of indictments for torture filed by the Attorney General’s Office, the number of successful fundamental rights cases decided by the Supreme Court’. Illogicality is obviously not a problem in launching a diatribe. Incidentally TIC fails to notice that one of the reasons given by the Special Rapporteur for the few convictions with regard to torture is the excessive nature of the mandatory penalty for the crime.

TIC goes on about the Constitutional Council and the independence of various institutions appointed when it was not in place, but fails to address the inadequacies of the provisions regarding its setting up, which are now being considered by a Select Committee of Parliament. It goes on about ‘war-mongering statements’ by the government, ignoring the fact that the President has made it clear that the peace process will continue, and indeed be fast-tracked through more devolution and democracy, even while continuing the struggle against a terrorist organization that refused to negotiate for years – despite this being the primary purpose of the Ceasefire Agreement that was signed in 2002.

TIC also complains of restrictions on food and other essential needs, even though there has never been any shortage of food in the areas under LTTE control, and even the Jaffna peninsula has been well supplied except for a brief period at the beginning of 2007 when the LTTE hijacked one of the ships supplying food, after having withdrawn guarantees from the ICRC when it accompanied an earlier supply vessel. Since then the Commissioner General of Essential Services has engaged in concerted efforts which led the UNHCR, in a recent report on Welfare Centres in Jaffna, to declare that all food supplies were available, and most were affordable.

That report, in also recording that 99% of primary children were in school, and most secondary children too, confirmed the continuing commitment of the government to provide social services to all its citizens. This extends even to areas under LTTE control, where the government continues to pay salaries of educational and medical personnel, and supply all facilities. It is only materials that can be used for terrorist activities that are restricted, while a wide range of international agencies are permitted to function in those areas. It was the LTTE that recently expelled workers from some of those agencies, having earlier extended its campaign of forced recruitment of one member of each family even to the families of employees of both local and foreign NGOs.

The TIC figures for humanitarian workers killed in 21 months are well in excess of those a similarly aggressive Sri Lankan NGO has published for 24 months. Neither acknowledge that the figure went down in 2007, and the 2006 figures were in any case artificially increased because of the 17 aid workers sent in by ACF, contrary to UN regulations on the care of local staff, to a conflict ridden area from which all other agencies were withdrawing their workers.

There is much more that one could contest. But to avoid tedium, this correction of the record will only deal with one more outrageous claim, that the airforce killed ’61 children attending a training course’. TIC knows perfectly well that these were children forced to leave their homes and schools to take part in military training. This may have been intended to be temporary, but the pictures of the poor girls in military fatigues indicated that the training was serious, and why the airforce was right to assume this was a military training centre. Three girls were still living when medical aid got there, and took them to Kandy, but they were hastily taken back to the Vanni where one of them died. Fortunately the government was able to rescue the other two, and keep them safe, and record their evidence about the appalling nature of LTTE terrorism.

TIC should be aware of what they are supporting when they relentlessly and fraudulently attack a government that has been able to restore democracy and pluralism to at least one of the provinces the LTTE brutalized for so long. Whilst continuing to enunciate genuine concerns, they should assist the government to liberate the north too, and then develop it in a manner that the Tamil people deserve after all they have suffered.

Prof Rajiva Wijesinha

Secretary General

Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process