Eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind…

By N Sathiya Moorthy

At the commencement of the ongoing UNHRC session in Geneva, Deputy Commissioner Nada Al-Nashif, talked about ‘accountability deficit’ on war crimes probe in Sri Lanka, and warned the nation of ‘universal jurisdiction’.

In the absence of credible investigations and prosecutions into alleged war crimes accusations at the domestic level, a specially-mandated UNHRC team continued to make progress pursuant to resolution 51/1. “The team is in the process of providing concrete support to several jurisdictions which have ongoing criminal justice investigations,” he said.

Maybe, such statements, resolutions and actions thereof are a greater impediment to ethnic reconciliation in the country than is understood by West, whose one-size-fits-all approach to problem-solving of their kind does not work everywhere. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to social reconciliation even if initiated at the political level, especially when it is based not on true ‘Christian values’ of forgiveness and ‘turning the other cheek when one slaps on your right cheek’.

It is in this context, Mahathma Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” He gave a new meaning to what Jesus said in His ‘Sermons on the Mount’. Gandhi, as Ben Kingley spoke the words in Richard Attenborough’s Oscar-winning movie by his name, practiced what he preached: “They can beat me…. They will have my dead body, not my obedience.”

But in the case of post-war Sri Lanka and many other similarly-placed nations and societies, the domineering West has gone by the eminently-forgettable phrase of Hammurabi, the king of the old Babylonian empire, who lived over 4,000 years back: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” And that is what they claim as modern civilisation, civil society and more – and what they want the rest of the world (alone) to practice.

Eliminating ‘evil forces’

If you ask them about the way western armies carpet-bombed hundreds of innocent Afghans and Iraqis before the eyes of the millennial generation, then it is about the ‘evil forces’ that ruled them. To them, maybe, it was as if a mass, rather massive human sacrifice of some cult communities from the distant past, to propitiate some unseen goods to take those ‘evil forces away’. Or, was it so? Thank god, none of them have come out with such a theory or explanation.

It is nobody’s case that those genuinely guilty of war crimes should go scot-free. But it should be everyone’s collective position that it should be done in such a way that such a course does not reopen or deepen old wounds or make the existing ones messier than already. The idea should be to discipline the soldier class and their commanders if they have erred wantonly – and also if they have obeyed illegal or immoral directions of the civilian bureaucracy or elected leaders.

That could be achieved if and only if a domestic mechanism is created for the victims or their dear ones to file a criminal complaint in specific cases with specific information and evidence in their possession – and not through sweeping international mandates that is going to alienate an entire nation from the rest of the global community on the one hand, and spread and deepen the ethnic-divide and open the existing wounds much more than already.

The West and their Tamil-backers – or, is it still the other way round – need to ponder over if the recent Sinhala-Buddhist assertions about the existence of Buddhist archaeological sites where Tamil-Hindu temples have existed in the North and the East for centuries and millennia, also flows from such apprehensions that the Tamils are now using much of the rest of the world against them, especially the more powerful West.

In the previous century, and until the IPKF withdrawal forced by an ungrateful Sinhala-Buddhist government of President Ranasinghe Premadasa, later slain by the very same LTTE that he had nurtured to train guns against India and physically so, and also the Rajiv Gandhi assassination, not much later, made the Sinhala-Buddhist majoritarian especially and their cohorts in the Sri Lankan State apparatus to believe that India was unduly backing the ‘Tamil terrorists’ against them all. Now, India is not their target, but the West certainly is.

Fair trial, what?

Clearly, the Diaspora Tamils, having worked overtime with western governments and their twisted conscience since the two Great Wars of the previous century, have a narrative that is easy to digest but not as much to prove in a court of law – whether inside the country or outside. Terming them all as ‘genocide’ and blaming the political and military leaderships of the time, whether in Sri Lanka or elsewhere, makes it easier for them to try their targets without a ‘fair trial’ they demand even for their nosy journalists and ‘civil society activists’, or INGOs, in blatantly and patently ‘autocratic’ countries.

In this case, Canada has reiterated its charge that war-time President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brother Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was the Defence Secretary, at the time, were culpable for ‘genocide’ of innocent Tamils during the LTTE war. Now that the Rajapaksas are down and out, with their perceived popularity rating hovering at a low four per cent, as against a higher rate hovering around ten times that figure until ‘Gota’s folly’ took them all in last year, the daggers are out and open.

What all shape it all takes is too early to say, but war-time army commander, Field Marshal Sarath Fonseka, once a relatively blue-eyed boy of the West after he fell out with the Rajapaksas in the very year of their joint military victory over the LTTE, has been repeatedly contesting the West’s claims on ‘war crimes’. And mind you, his name does not find any mention in the list of offenders, either of the West or of the Diaspora, the two having plotted for him to challenge incumbent Mahinda in the post-war presidential polls of 2010, which the former lost and the latter won.

But many a western nation ‘sanctioned’ field commanders and lesser soldiers but spared Fonseka, then a lieutenant-general and elevated General, post-war. No, this is not to say that Fonseka too should be penalised in ways the rest of them all have been named to be shamed – but has not happened that way on the ground where it mattered the most. It is only to point out that in the western calculations, there are friends and favourites, enemies and adversaries. And the issue is much more, or much less than the human rights and war crimes!

(The writer is a policy analyst and political commentator, based in Chennai, India. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)