Charu Lata Hogg: Victory will be hollow without constitutional reforms
Digg
del.icio.us
Facebook
Reddit
Google
Stumble Upon
Fark
Newsvine
YahooBuzz
Bebo
Twitter
Independent Minds
Along with many other Sri Lankan observers, I have watched recent events unfold in the country in disbelief, horror and despair.
Cornered in a shrinking conflict zone in the north-east of the country, with little access to food, water or medicine since the beginning of this year, nearly 100,000 civilians have been the worst casualty of this fighting, which promises to reach its bloody denouement soon. Tamil civilians have paid a heavy price for their conflict, and their misery has largely been ignored.
Sure, the UN has issued strong statements and concerned governments have routinely expressed their outrage. But the response of the international community so far has lacked collective will.
With both the government and the Tamil Tigers violating the rules of war, an urgent and combined response is vital. The UN Security Council needs to act urgently to protect civilians; influential countries – such as Sri Lanka's largest bilateral donor, Japan, and neighbouring India – need to put pressure on a government heady with military success.
The end of the organised LTTE does not guarantee the end of terrorism in Sri Lanka, as continuing militant strikes suggest.
And the process brokered by Norway that led to a ceasefire agreement in 2002 seems truly dead. Only a new process, built on different foundations, has any chance of bringing sustainable peace. For now, President Mahinda Rajapakse's attempts at a negotiated settlement with the minority Tamil community have been dismissed by even the moderate Tamil leadership. The Sri Lankan government's "liberation" of the eastern provinces – a model they seek to replicate for the north – does not inspire confidence.
Daily killings, extortion and disappearances are a fact of life in the restive Batticaloa district. The government still has not devolved power to the Eastern Province, as promised in 1987 in response to demands for regional autonomy. After decades of brutal conflict, the government's desperate bid for the end game is understandable. But justice and pragmatism require a package of constitutional reforms that will offer Tamils real rights and an effective share in power. Until that happens, victory in the battlefield will remain hollow; an aggrieved minority at home and an embittered diaspora abroad will ensure that peace remains elusive in Sri Lanka.
Charu Lata Hogg is an Associate Fellow in Chatham House's Asia Programme
View all comments that have been posted about this article.
Offensive or abusive comments will be removed and your IP logged and may be used to prevent further submission. In submitting a comment to the site, you agree to be bound by the Independent Minds Terms of Service.
- Print Article
- Email Article
-
Click here for copyright permissions
Copyright 2009 Independent News and Media Limited
Comments
Ms Hogg has over the past three years consistently worked against Tamil interests and helped to engineer the current catastrophe. She has treated the Tamil people as less than human and espoused double standards for the Tamils. She has refused to acknowledge that a genocide was taking place in Sri Lanka, she failed to respond to correspondence from US legal advocacy group "Tamils Against Genocide" asking her to recognise genocide. At debates she denied genocide.
When she was asked to comment on why the British army is allowed to recruit British children of age 16, while the Tamil Tigers have been pilloried for recruitment under 18, she said different standards applied to different groups (!!!!), she refused to provide statistics and evidence of whether the Tigers recruited under 16, but she worked very hard to demonise them and achieve an international proscription, leaving the Tamil people defenceless against a racist, neo-Nazi state.
She subscribes to the "Hostage" theory, when it is obvious that it is the Sri Lankan government which is planning to lock Tamils up like zoo animals in internment camps and it is the government that will use them as hostages against the creation of a separate Tamil state. If the "hostage" discussion had been about any european peoples - say the French and the Germans, if the Germans had created concentration camps for the french and the french people and fighters had been holed up together on a small piece of land, we would hardly be accusing the french fighters of holding their people hostage, we would have recognised that it was the Nazis that was putting people in concentration camps. Similarly if we were talking of the British army in relation to the British people, instead of the Tamil army in relation to the Tamil people like Ms Hogg would not have been allowed to get away with their odious anti Tamil spin. How racist.
But it is a sign of just how unacceptable the Sinhala State has become that even Charu now says she despairs of them - well , Charu, its simply too late. You aided and abetted the Tamil genocide. Please stop pretending you care about the Tamil genocide, just because you have made a career out of Sri Lankan analysis.
This informaton shows that Rajapaksha regime killed all the people in Vanni. This is the absolute genocide like Rwanda and Darfur.
Rajapaksha state government website tells over 122000 vanni civilians reached his territory but only few thousand people trapped in the concentratedcamp in Vavuniya and Jaffna. So what happend to the rest of the Tamil civilians? Did Rajapaksha regime kill all the civilians? UN, it is your duty to find what's happning in Srilanka? where are the human rights watch and other NGOs? what is the funtion for those organizations?
The Tamil people on the ground in Sri Lanka see, for the first time, a democratic alternative to the Tigers' separatist project. The Tamil diaspora might disagree, but then, the Sri Lankan diaspora, whether Sinhalese or Tamil, tends to be more extremist ethnically, the further it is from Sri Lanka.
It is true that full devolution has not yet been implemented. However, the Mahinda Rajapaksa government is working towards this; it has consistently been referred to as 'hardline'. However, it is the first government since 1977 to take practical measures to solve the ethnic problem.
The All Party Representative Committee discussing the ethnic problem, presided over by the socialist cabinet minister Tissa Vitarana, has been working out a practical and workable solution. Its recommendations are due to be implemented by the Communist cabinet minister DEW Gunasekera, who has been involved in implementing the constitutional provisions regarding Tamil as an official language.
This government is not the same as the free-market JR Jayawardene regime which, with full backing from the Western powers, which burnt down the Jaffna Library in 1981, and carried out anti-Tamil pogroms in 1977, 1979 and (spectacularly) in 1983. It was the anti-Tamil free-market Fascism of the JR Jayawardene regime which game new breath to the moribund Tigers, who had a mere 100 armed cadres as late as 1983.