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When Sri Lanka’s 26 year civil war ended in May 2009 with the final defeat of the insurgent Tamil Tigers rebel group (LTTE) by government forces, there were immediate concerns about the civilian death tolls and methods used by the government in the final months of the war. The UN found that approximately 7,000 civilians were killed primarily by government forces in the final weeks of the war, a number that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon called “unacceptably high.” Some media reports have placed that number as high as 20,000, though those claims remain unconfirmed. Nonetheless, the humanitarian crisis that emerged from the end of the conflict led observers to call for a full-scale war crimes inquiry. And while Sri Lanka escaped those calls at a special meeting of the UN Human Rights Council in May, the issue has not yet died down.
The Sri Lankan government claims that such death tolls are exaggerated, a claim that is hard to dispute since very few humanitarian agencies were granted access to the conflict zone in the final months of the war. However, one source of information that observers relied on were reports by Sri Lankan doctors who supposedly kept detailed records of the casualties as they came into local hospitals and kept estimates of how many victims they believed were not making it to the hospitals because of the fighting. Those doctors were arrested by government forces in May after the fighting stopped and have remained in custody since then, accused of allegedly supporting the LTTE. It therefore came as no surprise when they recanted their previous statements in a government press conference this past week and said that they were forced to exaggerate the casualty numbers by the LTTE. They also recanted their reports that a key hospital had been shelled by government forces in February, killing nine people and injuring twenty, even though there were representatives from the UN and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) that also witnessed the shelling. While no one at this point really knows whether the doctors were telling the truth last week or when they first spoke to the media earlier this year, human rights groups have raised doubts about the recantations as they come after two months in custody with unknown conditions. The UN responded to the doctors’ press conference by stating that it stood by its figures. However, the entire incident raises questions about what role human rights has, or should have, in international politics.
At the UN Human Rights Council meeting in May, many representatives applauded Sri Lanka’s success in defeating the LTTE and one of ending Asia’s longest modern wars. The final resolution passed by the Council, which applauded Sri Lanka’s current policies and urged humanitarian cooperation, passed 29 to 12 with 6 abstentions. Since then, Sri Lanka has asked the ICRC to scale back its operations in the war-torn northeastern part of the island where an estimated 300,000 Tamil civilians are still being held in government camps after being displaced by the conflict. Human rights observers claim that the displacement camps are little more than prisons. Yet the Sri Lanka government is now saying that it no longer needs the assistance of the ICRC, who angered the government in May after warning of a possible humanitarian catastrophe as the war came to an end. There has been no comment yet from the UN, who strongly condemned Sudan’s expulsion of major aid groups in March. The main concern in Sri Lanka is that without the ICRC in the area, there will be no observers monitoring treatment within the camps. However from the government’s point of view, it may be that exactly what they are looking for.
The events in Sri Lanka have also highlighted that the job of upholding human rights all too often remains in the non-governmental sphere, while governments are free to play with standards, and at times ignore them if the political gain is good enough. However, at its basis the human rights movement of the 20th century is a global attempt to discard the notion that ‘the ends can justify the means’ and instead govern politics with principle and the basic respect for human dignity, but too often these days human rights has instead become a public relations issue, one that is subject to superficial analysis and political spin. This is what Sri Lanka failed did this past week by presenting doctors it had held in custody for two months to the international press and asking them to believe their recantations. What remains to be seen is whether the rest of the international community will accept these events, or actually try to hold Sri Lanka accountable to the human rights that it claims to respect.
