Peace Sans Human Rights
Not Worth HavingBy Rohini Hensman
12 December, 2007
The IslandText of a talk at the celebration of Human Rights
Defenders, Organised by the Law and Society
Trust, Inform Human Rights Documentation Centre
and Rights now Collective for Democracy at the
BCIS auditorium on Dec. 06I have been asked to talk about Rajan Hoole and
Kopalasingham Sritharan of the University
Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) (UTHR(J)), who
received the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights
Defenders this year. I was absolutely thrilled
when they got the award, because I had been
feeling for years that they hadn't received
sufficient recognition for the amazing work they
had been doing under extremely difficult
circumstances, without any institutional support
or proper funding, and leading a hunted existence
due to their refusal to give up human rights work
despite death threats from the Liberation Tigers
of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).Rajan is my cousin, I have known him practically
from the time he was born. We played together as
children and later had arguments on issues
ranging from Tamil nationalism to feminism. But
one thing I never disagreed with was his deep
commitment to non-violence, justice and human
dignity, which underpins his human rights work. I
got to know Sri properly only after Rajani
Thiranagama's murder and his hair-raising escape
from Jaffna. Coming from a Marxist background,
his politics are in some ways closer to mine, and
his razor-sharp analysis is a notable element in
the UTHR(J) reports.
UTH(J) was founded in 1988, in the midst of the
worst period Sri Lanka has been through in its
entire existence, with tens of thousands being
killed in the course of fighting between the
Indian Peace-Keeping Force (IPKF) and LTTE in the
North and East, and between the Janata Vimukthi
Peramuna (JVP) and government of Sri Lanka in the
rest of the country. The precursor to the UTHR(J)
publications was The Broken Palmyra, co-authored
by Rajan, Sri, Rajani Thiranagama and Daya
Somasundaram. Rajani, a co-founder of UTHR(J),
was a doctor and lecturer in anatomy. Her murder
by the LTTE in 1989 was not only a terrible
tragedy, but also a serious loss for the group,
to which her focus on women and strong feminist
voice made a major contribution. Daya is a
psychiatrist, who has written very illuminating
books on the psychological trauma resulting from
violence, both for its victims and for its
perpetrators. He stayed on for a while after
Rajan and Sri left Jaffna, but he, too was
finally forced to leave.The Broken Palmyra set a pattern that persists
till today, and which was mentioned explicitly as
a reason why UTHR(J) got the Martin Ennals Award,
namely, the ability to see and report on the
evils of human rights violations regardless of
who the victims or who the perpetrators are.
Thus, the book deals with violations committed by
the Sri Lankan security forces and the IPKF, but
it also reveals the ugly record of abuses by the
LTTE and other Tamil groups. In fact, this is in
some ways its focus: the palmyra, the symbol of
Tamil society, can bend before the blast of
external repression, but it breaks only when
something is rotten within. The agony of seeing
the society they loved torn apart by fratricidal
violence and of innocence desecrated by the
induction of children into armed groups comes
through loud and clear in this and subsequent
publications.This means that unlike the phony human rights
advocates who are silent about atrocities
committed by members of their own ethnic or
religious group against members of other groups,
UTHR(J) has highlighted and condemned massacres
of Sinhalese and Muslims, and the wholesale
expulsion of Muslims from the North. Unlike human
rights defenders who felt that the case for
defending the human rights of Tamils would be
weakened if atrocities committed by Tamil groups
were publicised, they felt that precisely those
atrocities had the potential to destroy Tamil
society more completely than anything inflicted
on them from outside, and therefore should be
condemned most vehemently.UTHR(J) got a lot of flak for this, especially
after the 2002 ceasefire, when the bulk of their
criticism was directed against the LTTE. Not only
Tamils but also many Sinhalese accused them of
LTTE-bashing. I think I understand where this
criticism comes from: it is based on a
fundamentally different conception of being
'even-handed' or 'unbiased', one that I think is
deeply flawed. I already outlined UTHR(J)'s
conception: basically the belief that all
violations of human rights should be recorded,
reported and condemned, regardless of who is
committing them and against whom. This other
conception is that if there are two parties to a
conflict, then whenever you criticise or condemn
one party, you must criticise and condemn the
other equally. But, if the LTTE is conscripting
children and the government is not involved in
child conscription, then how can you criticise
government forces for child conscription? If the
LTTE is committing ten times more ceasefire
violations and extra-judicial killings than the
government, as even the Sri Lanka Monitoring
Mission admitted, then how can you condemn them
equally? The answer given by far too many NGOs
was by downplaying or even remaining silent about
LTTE abuses. I have listened to speeches about
human rights in Sri Lanka where LTTE atrocities
against Muslims were not even mentioned. No
mention of child conscription. Not a word about
the killings of Tamil critics. No wonder UTHR (J)
sounded as if it were Tiger-bashing when it went
on and on about those issues! It was because of
the deafening silence coming from the peace
lobby, which didn't want to rock the peace boat
by raising them, even though this amounted to a
decision that the human rights of Muslims, Tamil
children and Tamil dissidents were not worth
defending.I think there were several catastrophic
consequences of this silence. Firstly, it meant
that nothing was done to rein in LTTE. Secondly,
it led to an enormous build-up of bitterness and
resentment among Sinhalese, especially in cases
where Sinhalese were the target of attack:
resentment that should have been directed against
the LTTE, but could later be unleashed against
Tamil civilians because the Sinhala nationalists,
LTTE and peace lobby all colluded in propagating
the myth that the LTTE represented all Tamils.
Thirdly, it discredited human rights advocates in
general by making it appear that they were biased
towards the LTTE, because the sad fact was that
many of them were. Thus, when the war broke out
again and government forces really did start
committing horrific violations, the accusations
of these people could be dismissed with a certain
amount of credibility by government propagandists.UTHR(J), on the other hand, has made the sharpest
denunciations of government policies, and not a
single government propagandist has dared so much
as to hint that they are pro-LTTE. That is the
advantage of a principled commitment to human
rights which is not swayed one way or the other
by contingent political considerations, such as
whether peace talks are in progress or not: no
one can question your bona fides without sounding
absurd. And any political considerations are
immaterial when set against respect for human
rights, which is the very basis of our humanity.
'Peace' without human rights is not worth having,
because it is the 'peace' of humanity crushed and
killed, the 'peace' of the graveyard in which
humanity is buried.A project like UTHR(J) can't be run entirely by
two individuals, however great they may be. I
mentioned Rajani, who was killed, and there were
others who paid with their lives for
participating. Rajan's wife Kirupa and Sri's wife
Vasantha have been towers of strength, providing
financial, logistical and moral support, as well
as caring for the children. In some ways the
burden they bear is even heavier than that of
their partners, since it is worse to fear for the
life of a loved one than to risk your own, yet
these two courageous women have never faltered.
Then there is a network of grassroots
fact-finders in the North and East whose names I
don't know, and don't even want to know at the
moment, because what they are doing is so
dangerous. The award is shared by all of them.
If we are being sincere in felicitating them, I
feel we must commit ourselves to promoting their
work in whatever way we can. That could mean
quoting them or publishing extracts from their
work wherever appropriate, but also, more
generally, taking up their stance and making it
our own. This includes a clear and
uncompromising rejection of both the LTTE's
ultimate goal - an exclusively Tamil,
totalitarian state - and the methods by which it
is sought to be achieved, using innocent
civilians and even the LTTE's own cadre simply as
objects to be blown up at will. Here, I appeal
especially to Sinhalese human rights defenders
and peace campaigners. Muslims are vulnerable to
attack from both sides, and most Tamils who have
taken on the LTTE in a major way have either been
killed or been forced to flee Sri Lanka. On the
other hand, to the best of my knowledge, the LTTE
has not engaged in targeted attacks against
Sinhalese intellectuals and activists. So, they
are uniquely placed to be able to criticise the
Tigers with impunity.This would enable them to launch a blistering
attack on government policies without being
hypocritical or biased, and that is very much
needed at present. The whole notion that a war
against terrorists demands that the hands of the
government and its security forces should not be
tied by the requirement to respect human rights
and civil liberties should be torn to shreds. We
should argue the very opposite: that every
clamp-down on civil liberties which takes away an
avenue of non-violent protest forces people into
violence as the only path left open to them, and
every violation of human rights pushes more
recruits into the arms of the terrorists.Many Tamil nationalists have not hesitated to get
foreign citizenship and give up the idea of
living anywhere in Sri Lanka, much less in the
North-East, whereas Rajan and Sri have not
settled down elsewhere, despite the fact that
their formidable academic qualifications would
easily enable them to do so. The reason is that
they still long to return to Sri Lanka, and
preferably to Jaffna. So, the best way to honour
them is to do whatever we can to make it possible
for them to realise their dream of coming home
safely.Leave A Comment
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