21 November 2012, 3:54 pm
By Kath Noble
Last
week I felt like I had been transported back in time. We were back in those
awful first six months of 2009, when I was by turns horrified at the plight of
the people caught up in the fighting in the Vanni and disgusted with the way in
which the international community was responding.
Of
course, we all wanted to stop the war. I hate violence. But as I argued then
and continue to believe, at that point, the only way the war was going to stop
was with the defeat of the LTTE. Prabhakaran would not give up on Eelam. He was
going to continue his vicious campaign against the Sri Lankan state and all its
communities until he was caught or killed. Our task, therefore, was to minimise
the damage. We had to try to ensure that it was done with as little death and
destruction as possible.
The UN
has inadvertently confirmed this hypothesis. In the report of the Internal
Review Panel into its actions in Sri Lanka in the final stages of the war,
which was released by Ban Ki-Moon last week, it says that it had realised by
the end of January that the LTTE was going to lose. And it did the right thing.
It worked out a plan for a surrender.
This
could have saved a lot of lives.
Some
people are very keen to find out how many. The UN count, according to the quite
reasonable criteria that they employed in what were very difficult
circumstances, is 7,737. I think that even a tiny fraction of that number would
have been too many.
The
surrender plan was put to the LTTE at the beginning of February, but it was
rejected. The LTTE had lost both Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu by then, but
Prabhakaran would not relent. He rejected it again in April, even after having
lost most of his senior commanders at the Battle of Anandapuram. He was trapped
inside the No Fire Zone, but still he would not accept the inevitable.
Some
people no doubt consider that heroic. But it was the biggest crime in the
history of the conflict.
Prabhakaran
wanted a massacre.
His
strategy was to create a humanitarian disaster so extraordinary that the
international community would feel compelled to intervene. He must have known
long before it dawned on the UN that he would not be able to hold out against
the Sri Lankan forces. He was no idiot when it came to war.
He
wasn’t so stupid when it came to international politics either.
I said
at the time that the international community was not going to get involved in
Sri Lanka. But many people thought otherwise.
The
West had by then established a pattern of ‘humanitarian wars’. It had dropped
enough bombs on Serbia in 1999 to make Slobodan Milosevic withdraw from Kosovo.
Then in 2001 it had set about trying to wipe out the Taliban in Afghanistan,
and in 2003 it had invaded Iraq and finished off Saddam Hussein. The attacks on
Iraq and Afghanistan were part of the post-9/11 War on Terror, but they were
sold to the Western public as struggles against governments that not only posed
a danger to the rest of the world but also suppressed their own people. Those
wars were still going on when Prabhakaran was holed up in the No Fire Zone, but
they had already achieved regime change. And Kosovo was his dream come true. In
2008, it was declared an independent nation.
Western
politicians had other motives for intervening, but they always talked about
fighting to save the world from a repeat of Rwanda. Prabhakaran thought that
Western forces might be persuaded to come to Sri Lanka too.
For
this, somebody somewhere certainly deserves blame.
The UN
contributed to the misconception, but the really guilty parties are, of course,
those in the West who started these ‘humanitarian wars’.
It
would be comforting to believe that we can always prevent killings if only we
try hard enough. Nobody likes to feel powerless. However, in Iraq, Afghanistan
and even Kosovo, ‘humanitarian wars’ killed more people than they saved. If
Western forces had set foot in Sri Lanka, the result would have been exactly
the same.
That is
why when I said that the West would not intervene in Sri Lanka, I said it with
relief. Rwanda was a very special case.
If the
West had not abused the memory of Rwanda so often, Prabhakaran might have
chosen a different tactic. He might have abandoned the idea of holding onto
territory. Instead of retreating into ever smaller areas of land, dragging with
him at gunpoint those 300,000 plus civilians, conscripting more and more of
them with every passing day and sending them to the frontlines to die, while
compelling the rest to cower in bunkers with too little to eat and limited
medical supplies as his cadres fired from among them at the Sri Lankan forces,
bringing down on their heads such a devastating rain of bullets and bombs, he
might have gone back to the jungles and waged a guerrilla war. (Of course, he
might still have done exactly the same thing, on the basis that there’s nothing
like a massacre to mobilise future generations. He clearly didn’t care as much
about human life as the rest of us do.)
The
Internal Review Panel report criticises the UN’s Resident Coordinator in Sri
Lanka for his lack of political understanding in dealing with the Sri Lankan
state, but it fails to recognise that it still hasn’t answered the question of
how to deal with Prabhakaran.Yet this was the million dollar question!
The UN
knew that the LTTE was going to use civilians as a human shield in 2008. The
report admits that the LTTE repeatedly tried to use the UN’s presence in
Kilinochchi as protection for its activities, positioning its facilities next
to UN offices despite agreements to the contrary. It also acknowledges that the
UN had to leave behind its 17 national staff when it officially withdrew from
the Vanni in September because the LTTE was holding their 86 dependants
hostage. In 2008, the UN knew what an impossible situation the Sri Lankan
forces were facing.
What
could it have done better, then, in 2009?
How
about persuading David Miliband and all the other Western politicians who stuck
their noses into Sri Lanka that the responsible course of action was to tell
Prabhakaran that he had no option but to surrender?
No,
that isn’t even mentioned as a possibility.
The
‘master plan’ that the UN’s experts have come up with after six months of work
makes exactly the same mistakes the international community did at the time. It
ignores the LTTE.
Instead
of making it clear to Prabhakaran that he was on his own, which at least might
have encouraged him to think again, the Internal Review Panel report proposes
that the UN should have increased its pressure on the Sri Lankan forces.
It
argues that the UN should have publicised the casualty figures that it was
gathering via sms and highlighted its belief that most of the deaths were
occurring in shelling by the Sri Lankan forces. It says that the UN should have
been more forceful in warning the Sri Lankan state against committing war
crimes. This would have saved lives, the report claims. But how? No doubt
people like Gordon Weiss would have felt better if they had done so. But what
would it actually have changed? At the beginning of February, the UN was sure
that about 1,000 civilians had been killed in a period of three weeks. This had
increased by a little more than 1,500 in another four weeks to the beginning of
March.
By this
stage, as we surely all remember, there was already tremendous pressure on the
Sri Lankan forces. The LTTE’s propaganda machine had its genocide bumper
stickers out, and it was stage managing protests around the Western world.
In the
next six weeks to late April, the UN’s body count had gone up by another 5,000.
Of
course I agree that this is appalling. But stopping people getting killed is
not just a matter of being very upset about it.
Pressure
is only a good thing if it is pushing in the right direction. What the
international community did was to give the Sri Lankan forces every reason to
think that the West was about to try to stop them ending a generation long
conflict. I simply donsee how intensifying this effort could possibly have
encouraged them to adopt a more careful approach. Logically, it could only have
made them think that they had better hurry up and find Prabhakaran before he
could be offered yet another chance to escape.
If we
have to relive those miserable days, let us at least come up with some
genuinely useful insights.
