Creating a crisis to resolve - 12 June 2009

I have just been at a course on the Law of Internal Displacement organised by the International Institute of Humanitarian Law, along with the Brookings Institute, which is the leading think tank in the field. Together with Walter Kalin, the Special Representative on the rights of the Displaced of the UN Secretary General, it produced the Guiding Principles on the subject, a manual that is now widely accepted as definitive.

Kalin, who essentially ran the course, has visited Sri Lanka often, and well understands our situation. He is also very practical in his commitment to principles, and has been consistent in demanding attention also to old cases of IDPs, instead of going along with fashionable concern only with recent cases. Thus, though he granted when he visited us in April that he could understand why the old cases had been put on the back burner, he remained very concerned about them.

I have no doubt he would be pleased that we are seeking to resettle them too, and that the process has begun in Musali. Sadly it seems that this has not met with the approval of donors who have been using fair means and foul to ensure that we swiftly resettle the most recently displaced first. They are prepared therefore to withhold funding from the protractedly displaced, and also to restrict funding to the recently displaced, believing that thus making the lives of all the displaced miserable will help them achieve their ends.

What are these ends? The claim is that they want people released from what were described as internment camps - notably last year by TamilNet and other agencies which thus justified the refusal of the Tigers to let people leave the Wanni while they were dragging them away to become hostages.

But what would that lead to? Some of the presentations at the course suggested that, while freedom of movement was a desirable principle, protection problems were better dealt with in camps rather than by using host families. And even though the situation may be better now, in that Mr Prabhakaran can no longer exercise his malign influence, we cannot forget that the most vociferous critics wanted the displaced sent out when they could well have been at the mercy of terrorist recruiters. Given the current predilection now amongst the more unprincipled Europeans for Mr Pathmanathan, we have to wonder what they hope he might achieve with his ill-gotten millions and a whole host of vulnerable youngsters.

Kalin himself has always made it clear that security concerns cannot be ignored. His point is that, while maintaining its vigilance, government should ensure that it does not engage in blanket protracted prohibitions, and that it should develop a road map for action that explains the rationale for any measures taken.

All this makes sense and he would be delighted I think at the steady exodus of the elderly from the camps, while encouraging us to send out other vulnerable and innocuous individuals. But he would also understand, which some of our critics fail to do, that it is particularly the vulnerable, such as the disabled woman who tried to kill Douglas Devananda, or the pregnant woman who tried to kill the army commander, whom the LTTE was able to make most noxious.

Still, obviously we should send out whomsoever we can, and also resettle people as quickly as we can assure them both security and decent livelihoods. All indications are that we are working on this more effectively than in many other countries, just as we did in the east - indeed better, as far as security is concerned, given that the continuing threat of Tiger resurgence that the east faced for so many months no longer applies anywhere. But however efficient we are, we are certainly not going to be able to resettle everyone in three months.

Despite this those who have on the one hand been pressing for a war crimes inquiry or whatever else they think might embarrass the government for getting rid of the Tigers also want on the other to limit assistance to those whom we rescued. Furious perhaps that their predictions of a bloodbath were not fuilfilled, they are determined now to make those who escaped suffer by limiting assistance with food, by making them live in tiny tents, by providing them with squalid toilets. And then, with glee, when people fall ill, they can claim that the epidemic their wishful thinking predicted every month last year has finally arrived.

How can people be so wicked? How can people treat others simply as objects, and use them for their own political priorities while pretending to consider only their welfare?

The answer lies in history. The Europeans did not conquer vast tracts of other continents out of altruism, but they did manage regularly to convince themselves that their actions were for the benefit of the conquered. The saving grace of their religion, the peace they bestowed by the sheer genius of their ruling class, the economic development they promoted with some of the profits being allowed to trickle down to the producers of the commodities they traded in, all this justified their controls.

Why should things be different now? They alone can decide when and where who should do what to whom, and if history shows that they inevitably get things wrong and create more problems (the Shah of Iran, Idi Amin, Tshombe and Mobutu, Forbes Burnham etc, etc), now that the bleeding hearts are worn on a sleeve, perhaps the results will not be so obviously bad. Starve the people and give them stinking toilets while pretending to help, and then you can claim there is such a mess that only the white man is willing and able, having made such a frightful stink, to graciously take up the burden.

Prof Rajiva Wijesinha

Secretary General

Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process