Date Published: 07/10/09

SRI Lanka : The Unfinished WAR  

By Emmanuel Onwubiko

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The brutal thirty year old war in Sri Lanka which reportedly ended on May 19 th 2009 is known as one of the world’s most atrocious civil wars in the history of mankind.

Two major scenarios signposted the just ended civil war in Sri Lanka as one of the most vicious in human history and these events are the introduction on a larger scale of suicide attacks by militants of the rebel group known as the liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (the LTTE), also known as the Tamil Tigers, a separatist militant organization which unsuccessfully fought to create an Independent Tamil State named Tamil Eelam in the North and the, East of the Island. Another development that marks the Sri lanka’s recently ended civil war as one of the most atrocious battles fought by man was the nature and the modalities for ending the war which are widely regarded by human Rights practitioners as clear violations of rules of engagement, the laws of war and the international humanitarian laws including the Geneva convention of 1949 and Article 4 of the 1977 protocol 1 to the Geneva convention which automatically makes the rule of law applicable to all military operations both local and international.

Although the Sri lankan government through president Mahinda Raja- Paksa and his brother Gotabhaya Raja-Paksa, the Sri lankan secretary of Defence, declared on May 19 th 2009 that the bloody war which began on July 23 rd 1983 has ended, the fact remains that as long as all those combatants and their commanders on both sides of the divide that waged the 30 year old brutal fratricidal civil war, accused of fragrantly and grossly abusing the human rights of civilians caught in the dangerous web of that unfortunate conflicts, are not brought to book and punished for their crimes against humanity, then the war has not ended.

In compliance with the widely held belief that “an injury to one is an injury to all” or that “an abuse of the human right of a member of the human race is an abuse on all” at least symbolically, most rational beings watched in pains and agony, the broadcast on the international television networks of how several hundreds of civilians were brutally massacred few days to the end of that bloody civil war in the Island nation of Sri lanka. Most observers are however shocked to find out that the United Nations’ Human Rights Council because of the dominance of countries whose political leadership commit atrocities against their civilian populace, has maintained undignified silence on bringing those accused of gross violations of human rights of the ordinary people of Sri lanka to justice several weeks after the end of physical combats. The Sri lankan Government has ironically lodged official complaint against the United Nations spokesperson in Colombo, Sri lanka Mr. Gordon Weiss who was very outspoken during the closing phase of that bloody conflagration in that crowded beach where the rest of humanity watched helplessly as the Army and Tamil Tigers rebels fought the last battle which left in its wake several innocent civilians dead, maimed and their properties wantonly ravaged by the inferno that characterized the explosions and bombs used by the combatants.

Just before the bloodshed that marked the end of the war in Sri lanka, the Economist magazine wrote a piece which depicted the unprecedented level of gross human Rights violations committed by the fighters against the innocent civilians, girls, children and women including the aged of all genders.

In the piece prophetically titled “The feared carnage comes to pass,” the Economist Magazine of May 14 th 2009 wrote thus; “It is too late to warn of a civilian slaughter in North Eastern Sri lanka. The blood bath (predicted) has become a reality” says the United Nations spokesperson in Colombo on May 11 th as news of the latest atrocity emerged from the crowded beach where the Army and Tamil Tiger Rebels are fighting their last battle”.

The Economist Magazine quoting reliable hospital sources averred that on May 9 th and 11 th 2009 alone, over 480 civilians refugees were reported to have been brought dead or dying to a makeshift hospital in the war zone as victims of shell fire. The Economists in the same vein alleged that a bigger number are buried uncounted in the sand. Ironically, the Economist quoting doctors on ground reported that on 13 th May 2009, that makeshift hospital was bombed and around 100 people killed. The United Nations, according to the Economist Magazine, considers the testimony of these doctors who gave eye-witness account of the carnage as “consistently reliable.” One wonders why the United Nations Human Rights council is currently dillydallying in initiating comprehensive and independent investigations into the above and several other instances of grave human rights breaches.

Human Rights watch, a research and lobbying organization with men on ground in Sri lanka throughout the duration of the ending phase of the civil war has accused both the Tamil Tigers and Government soldiers of committing war crimes.

For the avoidance of doubts, war crimes are violations of the laws or customs of war including but not limited to murder, the ill-treatment or deportation of civilian resident of an occupied territory to slave labor camps, the murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war, the killing of hostages, wanton and mindless destruction of cities, villages, and towns and the unwarranted devastation of the environment not justified by military or civilian necessity.

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In his well researched military law book titled; “Military Law in Nigeria, under Democratic Rule,” Brigadier General Tom Chiefe, who passed on recently, wrote that Article 22 of the Hague IV (laws of war: laws and customs of war on land (Hague IV), October 18 th 1907 states that “the right of belligerents to adopt means of injuring the enemy is not unlimited “and over the last century many other Treaties have introduced positive laws that place Constraints on belligerents”.

General Chiefe who bagged a doctorate degree in law and ranked as one of the finest military law experts on the African continent also rightly wrote that “under the laws of war, the term military objective is used to refer to targets and objects, which make an effective contribution to military action and whose neutralization offers a definite military advantage. The rules restrict deliberate attacks to non military objectives. In other words, only military objectives are legitimate targets that can be made objects of deliberate attack.”

General Tom Chiefe gave what he considers the ordinary ethics and laws of war to include combat rules which specifies that combatants should fight only combatants, attack only military targets, spare civilians and civilian objects and restrict destruction to what your mission requires”.

The allegations that both the Tamil Tigers and the Sri lankan Army massacred civilians during the closing period of that bloody war must be investigated by a group of impartial United Nations appointed Human Rights experts and all those fingered in that dastardly acts of indiscriminate killings of civilians must be tried by the international crimes court because most current Government officials in Sri lanka including the Defence minister have being accused of violating the laws of war and for committing crimes against humanity.

Just before the war ended, the Defence minister was quoted as saying that all the key senior Commanders of the Tamil Tiger rebels must be killed and the Tamil Tiger Rebels were also accused of killing their own people who made attempts to flee to the “no-fire zone” an area of battlefield the Government declared as sanctuary for untrapped refuges.

Apart from the facts that officially, 80,000 people perished during the war and the tactics adopted by the Tamil Tiger Rebels made it imperative for over thirty countries including the United States of America to declare the group as a terrorist organization, if the rest of the civilized world maintains undignified silence and allow all those accused of war crime in Sri lanka to go scot free, then impunity would have succeeded in that part of the global village and other combatants in other parts of the world would see it as a precedent for them to keep perpetrating unprecedented war crimes.

It would be recalled that it was the Nuremberg Tribunal set up after the bloody Second World War in 1945 that first established and applied the principle that “crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced.”

Lastly, the Tamil minority tribes people numbering a little less than four million out of a total Sri lankan population of several millions must be fully integrated into the larger society of Sri lanka and must not be treated as a conquered population because if that is done, then humanity would sooner rather than later see another bigger bloody civil war in Sri lanka.