The
UN Human Rights Commissioner didn’t mince her words this week when she accused
the Sri Lankan government of
‘triumphalism’ in the Tamil north, home of the vanquished Tamil Tiger
insurgency. In a report published on Monday, Navi Pillay said civilians in the region
known as ‘the Vanni’ have been forbidden from commemorating those killed in the
war.
Tamil
Tiger cemeteries, containing more than 20,000 graves, have reportedly been
bulldozed by Sri Lankan government forces, now occupying the Vanni. Museums and
memorials commemorating the victors have sprung up across the province. These,
in Ms Pillay’s words, “tend to use triumphalist images from which the local
population feels a strong sense of alienation.”
Government rejects call for demilitarisation
The
high commissioner again called for an international investigation into alleged
war crimes committed as the 27-year-long war drew to a close four years ago.
The
Sri Lankan government response to the UN human rights commissioner’s report was
predictably dismissive. It rejected her call for
the demilitarisation of the Vanni.
The
government also continued to insist that “there is no evidence that the Channel
4 footage of executions is genuine”. The footage, first broadcast by Channel 4
News has been authenticated by numerous independent
experts including the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings.
Immediately
following the publication of Ms Pillay’s report, President Mahinda Rajapaksa
decided it was an appropriate time to pay a visit to Jaffna, capital of the
Vanni. He’s just spent two days on the Jaffna Peninsula, inspecting “ongoing
development activity”.
‘Military-run tourism’
The
triumphalism described by Ms Pillay is well illustrated in this article, on
“the rise of military–run tourism” in the former war zone, and published by the
London-based Sri Lanka campaign for peace and justice.
“Visitors
are offered a guided tour” of the former Tamil Tigers’ operations hub, it
reports, comprising “a three-storey underground bunker, a firing range, a film
hall, a semi-underground garage and a funeral parlour.
“What
is absent are details of the suffering faced by the Tamils who lived in
constant fear of the LTTE, and then persecution by the Sri Lankan army.”
The
ghosts of Sri Lanka’s violent past are proving hard to exorcise. Not least for
the second-most-powerful man in the country: the president’s brother, Gotabaya
Rajapakse.
The
defence and urban development secretary, credited with crushing the Tamil Tiger
rebellion (at the cost of tens of thousands of Tamil civilian lives) has now
been widely linked in the Sri Lankan press to mass killings 20 years ago while
he was a senior army commander. Back then, though, the alleged victims are said
to have been Sinhalese Marxist insurgents.
JVP demands investigation
Human
remains of what could be as many as 200 people were first discovered in the
central town of Matale in December last year. Politicians belonging to the JVP
party allege that the victims were killed having been tortured and that the
heads and arms of legs of many of them had been severed.
The
then government was widely accused of running torture chambers in the Matare
area in the late 1980s and of conducting extra-judicial executions. As many as
60,000 JVP insurgents were reportedly killed. The JVP, now a parliamentary
party, is demanding a thorough investigation into what happened in Matale.
According
to the Sri Lankan defence ministry website, the military’s coordinating officer and
then commanding officer in the area at the time was none other than Gotabaya
Rajapaksa.
And
among more junior officers serving under Lt Col Rajapaksa, names familiar to
Tamil survivors of the Vanni war. Names like Shavendra Silva and Jagath Dias, both senior generals in
the final decisive months of the civil war. Another was Sumedha Perera, the
security forces’ commander in the Vanni until last August.
