OHCHR’s Lanka report and fig leaves for some

Last week’s UN report on Sri Lanka from the Office of its High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), if one was to use a Churchillian phrase, was a ‘ riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. For one, the release of the report’s timing gave the show away. It was a move by the Geneva office plainly to ‘play to the anti-Sri Lanka gallery’. They obliged sections of the Sri Lankan diaspora that is making maximum this election year of their ‘vote banks’ in the domestic politics of the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada to discredit Sri Lanka. What other explanation is there for the release of a damning report on the country’s human rights record for three-fourths of its years since Independence, and on the eve of the 15th anniversary of the crushing defeat of the LTTE terrorist organisation that ended the cursed armed conflict for a separate state in Sri Lanka?

The visit of the head of Amnesty International to coincide with the release of that UN report and her paying obeisance at the memorial for the victims of the conflict at Mullaitivu, but not at the memorial for the soldiers who also lost their lives defeating a terrorist group and saving a State from being bifurcated by force, betrays an orchestration between the UN human rights agency and the Western ‘ Non- Government’ Organisations (NGOs).

If the timing of the release of the UN report was not bad enough, it was, as a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry pointed out last week, an unnumbered, unauthorised document issued in a vacuum without a mandate to submit it to any policy-making organ of the Human Rights Council (UNHRC), its authors hidden in a veil of secrecy.

And then, to cap it all, it suddenly brings the 1971 insurgency into the picture and calls for an investigation into enforced disappearances against people long dead and gone. The OHCHR was seemingly trying to counter the argument as to why it was silent all this time about enforced disappearances during the ‘Sinhalese insurgencies’ (JVP) and only concerned about the ‘Tamil insurgencies’ (LTTE). In the process, it only made what was a farce into a mockery (the 1971 insurgency was 25 years after the end of World War II and 50 years ago).

Significantly, the report has also failed to research the OHCHR archives relating to the disappearances allegedly perpetrated by the Indian Army (IPKF) in Sri Lanka. Clearly, the OHCHR felt it was too high voltage to burn itself by venturing to challenge the ‘big boys’.

While the OHCHR now wants to dig into the last 50 years of Sri Lanka’s human rights, it is ignoring the genocidal violations of human rights taking place under its very eyes in the Occupied Territories of Palestine. It has been left to the ICC (International Criminal Court) in The Hague to take a proactive stance in one of the, if not the worst, ugliest, most brazen violations of human rights the world is witnessing with not just the tacit approval, but the connivance of the US, the UK and Canada, nations behind the resolutions against Sri Lanka in Geneva.

Coinciding with the OHCHR report on Sri Lanka, the ICC’s chief prosecutor, however, applied for arrest warrants against the Israeli Prime Minister and Defence Minister, and the Hamas group leaders over ongoing events in Palestine.

Western nations angrily rejected the ICC exercise calling it “outrageous” (Biden) and “will not help end the war” (Sunak). They were questioning the jurisdiction of the ICC to call for arrest warrants against the Israeli leaders and for equating Israel, a state, with Hamas, a non- state actor and terrorist organisation out to destroy a state. What is good for Israel is not good for Sri Lanka.

The US decried Hamas as a “monster” terrorist organisation “which started the conflict on October 7, 2023, and argued the right of the state of Israel to defend itself. The reference to ‘selfdefence’ for Israel in the Palestine conflict has become tantamount to an open licence to continue the massacres in Gaza while the majority in the UN is pleading for a ceasefire.

Furthermore, privileging the claim of self-defence for Israel suppresses the daily reality of the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. ‘Foreign occupation’ as legally endorsed in multiple multilateral fora invokes the right of the Palestinian people for the non-violent struggle for self-determination, as recognised by international law.

In parallel, Sri Lanka’s experience highlights the exact reverse— international law privileges sovereignty and territorial integrity of states, and does not justify secession or the break-up of existing states in frivolous misrepresentations of the right to self-determination—which was a fig leaf for the LTTE’s attempt to usurp power by means of armed violence and terrorism. The partisan 45-page OHCHR narrative makes no mention of Sri Lanka’s success in defeating terrorism, and in overcoming other attempts to challenge democracy as was attempted by the JVP.

In a related development, the UN voted this week to recognise an annual day of remembrance for the 1995 Srebrenica genocide in former Yugoslavia. By supporting this unprecedented resolution, Western countries such as the US and Canada including the main sponsor Germany, may have expected to regain some public endorsement of the values they claim to uphold in their foreign policy in view of their morally indefensible reluctance to stand firm on the side of justice in the genocide in Gaza, and the right to statehood of the people of Palestine. Several states, including those who voted in favour, clearly expressed discomfort with the prevailing double standards even on legal principles of the highest order of customary international law, Jus cogens, such as genocide.

In Geneva, The Hague and New York, it seems genocide and war crimes are emerging at the forefront of the diplomatic agenda. In the case of Sri Lanka, it is clear that some overseas activists sympathetic to the LTTE have realised that this is an opportune moment to capitalise on the Western silence on Gaza for an overdrive on Sri Lanka.

Some have seen an advantage in timing the OHCHR report from Geneva with the Srebrenica resolution at the UN in New York, and the anniversary of the end of the conflict in Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka will need to be extra vigilant as it is once again an easy experimental ground for some nations to cynically demonstrate commitment to ethics and values in foreign policy so as to compensate for their blindness to the terrible events in Palestine.