On the eve of the Feb. 27 Human Rights Council Session in Geneva, during which human rights advocates had hoped the issue of alleged wartime abuses in Sri Lanka would finally be put to rest, the Sri Lankan government announced its appointment of a five-member court of inquiry to investigate laws of war violations during the first five months of 2009.

Soldiers at the funeral of a man who was fatally shot during a protest of the government's pension scheme. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

Sources like U.N. spokesperson Gordon Weiss, informed by real-time bulletins and post-war reports from grassroots agencies, doctors, survivors and international NGOs operating in the country’s northern and eastern warzone, posit that the war ended in a “conflagration of grenades and gunfire”, killing tens of thousands of civilians and leaving hundreds of thousands shell-shocked, maimed and homeless.

The Sri Lankan government, meanwhile, insists that it performed a “No Civilian Casualties” humanitarian operation in the last days of combat during which it rescued countless Tamil civilians from the clutches of the Tigers and ferried them to safety in government “welfare camps”.

Backed by allies such as Iran, Burma, Libya and China – the latter of which plied Sri Lanka with over a billion dollars worth of aid and military hardware between January and May 2009 – the Sri Lankan government has, for the last three years, managed to stall U.N. Security Council resolutions and ignore the recommendations put forward by the U.N. panel of experts’ fact finding mission in Sri Lanka, deferring instead to its own Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) to establish a roadmap towards justice and accountability.

“This government has a long record of setting up commissions and not implementing their recommendations,” Elaine Pearson, deputy director of the Asia Division at Human Rights Watch (HRW), told IPS.

Given that the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war was “one of the worst episodes in U.N. history – including failure to even table a discussion while the abuses were taking place – the HRC really must take this forward,” Pearson added.

She stressed that the U.N.’s decision to respond relatively quickly to the Arab Spring, even in highly controversial cases like Libya and Syria, suggests that bringing Sri Lanka back into focus would be not only timely, but also essential in the spirit of justice for the victims of war and for the sake of consistency in international standards.

However, “The Sri Lankan army’s announced inquiry appears to be a transparent ploy to deflect a global push for a genuine international investigation, not a sudden inspiration nearly three years after the war,” Brad Adams, Asia director at HRW, said in a press release Wednesday.

“This inquiry, coming on the eve of a possible Sri Lanka resolution at the Human Rights Council, looks like yet another cynical and meaningless move,” he added.

Various human rights groups have also expressed incredulity at the fact that Lt. General Jagath Jayasuriya – the man responsible for commanding all security forces in the Vanni, a region that weathered intense fighting during the last stages of the war – was in charge of appointing the army court of inquiry.

“An inquiry appointed by the commander who oversaw and was a colleague of senior officers who might themselves have been implicated in serious abuses cannot possibly be expected to be an independent and impartial finder of facts,” HRW said.

Yet this process is indicative of a larger, much more insidious trend in Sri Lanka today, where, despite a so-called declaration of peace, the presence of the army in nearly every aspect of civil and political life in the former warzone has raised the ire of the Tamil people and a slew of human rights organisations across the country.

The North and East remain the only places where former military personnel hold key government posts, including that of governor and government agent – the highest-level district officer in the country.

Many rights advocates believe it is a “shame” to see Sri Lanka’s once-proud civil service fall piece by piece into the army’s hands.

The government insists that these measures are both necessary and temporary. Earlier this year, Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa proclaimed that troops “are maintaining an absolutely essential presence” throughout every district in the country.

He added that the government has accomplished unprecedented post-war development and should be lauded for its efforts rather than chastised as “human rights abusers”.

But voting patterns in the Tamil community ever since the war’s end suggest that roads and water wells matter less to a politically disenfranchised people than personal dignity and a political voice.

Though well over 70 percent of the island turned up at the ballot boxes for the January 2010 presidential election, only 18 percent of registered voters in Jaffna made the trip to the polling stations.

This was largely chalked up to the fact that scores of Jaffna residents had fled during the war or were incommunicado in the government “welfare camps”. But every subsequent election since then suggests that the Tamil people are hungering for political representation.

Despite a dearth of election promises beyond land, language, resettlement and self-determination, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) have won everything from parliamentary elections to pradeshiya sabha (local government) elections since 2010, Ruki Fernando, head of the human rights in conflict programme at the Law and Society Trust in Colombo, told IPS.

“Unlike the government, the TNA did not have the capacity to promise a massive development programme – yet the Tamil people voted for them, proving that they cannot be bought over by schools, buses and hospitals. Their votes have been an absolute rejection of the Mahinda Rajapaksa regime. In elections that the government itself declared to be free and fair, this government was fairly and squarely beaten (in the North and East),” Fernando added.

In essence, the TNA has been all but stripped of its political efficacy by the presence of the military, which answers to a higher power than the will of the people.

*This is the second of a two-part series on Sri Lanka in the aftermath of its three-decade civil war.

With the Feb. 27 session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) looming on the horizon, human rights watchdogs are making yet another push to get Sri Lanka onto the agenda – and once and for all settle the issue of alleged wartime abuses that the government continues to deny.

Nedunkerni village limps back to peace. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

In a recent letter to UNHRC permanent representatives, members and observers, Human Rights Watch said, “Almost three years after the end of the military conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the government has not kept its commitments to the people of Sri Lanka, the U.N. Secretary-General, and the Human Rights Council to undertake credible measures to provide justice and accountability for the widespread and serious wartime abuses.”

In fact, far from taking steps towards accountability, the Sri Lankan government has embarked on a process of intense militarisation of the formerly rebel-held areas of the North and East, which, according to local and international advocates, could be the death knell for any meaningful reconciliation process after the 30-year-long civil war.

An internal report circulated in early January by Sri Lanka’s National Peace Council notes that very little effort has been made to facilitate a transition from an environment of war to one of normal, civilian life.

A senior NPC policy advisor speaking under strict condition of anonymity told IPS that the main road from Jaffna to Kilinochchi is dotted with checkpoints every few thousand metres, outposts that hint at the level of control deeper inside those areas, where the military has become the dominant institution of both civil and political life.

By various NGO estimates, 35,000 Sri Lankan troops are still stationed in Jaffna alone, overseeing a population of 626,000 people – roughly one soldier to every 18 citizens, including women, children, the elderly and the sick.

“Even in the most interior villages it is impossible to walk or travel by motorbike for even five minutes before seeing, encountering or being stopped by a soldier,” Ruki Fernando, head of the human rights in conflict programme at the Law and Society Trust in Colombo, told IPS.

“The presence of military personnel is very different in Colombo, where they are mostly hailed as war heroes. But in the North and East, civilians are forced to walk among soldiers who bombed their homes and villages, killed their family members, abducted their loved ones and engaged in physical and sexual abuse – this is hardly a recipe for reconciliation,” he added.

Same day, different uniform

It is a widely acknowledged fact that a necessary part of human healing is the expression of grief. But in the North and East, the military has rendered collective grieving virtually impossible by tearing up graveyards thought to contain fallen Tigers, buried amidst civilian remains; razing memorials to the ground and paving over historic battle sites where once school children had laid flowers and lit candles for their martyred parents.

Having lived for 30 years under the LTTE’s steel-toed boot, Tamil civilians had hoped that the war’s end would bring a chance to eke out a living and rebuild their lives, but the military’s omnipresence appears to be stifling every possibility for the largely impoverished population.

“The army is blatantly obstructing people who are trying to develop themselves economically by taking over a range of commercial establishments and sectors,” Fernando said.

The NPC and the Law and Society Trust – both well-respected human rights defenders – have extensive documented evidence of the army’s creeping presence in the economy, including scores of army-run restaurants alongside major highways; military-owned farms, souvenir shops and grocery stories; navy control over fishing and the transportation of food as well as the civil-military coordination website listing “tourism” as one of its primary services.

Even more troubling, according to NPC, is “the appropriation of land in Kilinochchi, Mullaitivu and Vavuniya for agricultural purposes; the presence of soldiers at all civilian activities, including temple or church meetings; and family gatherings such as weddings, naming of a child and even funerals requiring prior permission from the nearest police post.”

By the defence ministry’s own admission, a new security forces complex complete with air-conditioning and conference halls was built at the princely cost of 40 million rupees (roughly 360,000 dollars), even at a time when funds for refugee relocation, humanitarian aid and livelihood development have been virtually bled dry.

The International Crisis Group recently carried out an in-depth study on the particular impact of militarisation on women, who occupied an unusual social space during the LTTE’s three-decades-long reign and are now bearing the brunt of the post-war nightmare.

Many women and young girls became hardened cadres, forming the ranks of the LTTE’s female wing, Birds of Freedom. Others rose swiftly to the head of tens of thousands of households, as men and teenage boys were absorbed into the Tiger’s armed forces.

“That women must (now) rely on the military for everyday needs not only puts them at greater risk of gender-based violence, but also prevents them from building their own capacity within communities,” the ICG report said.

“Fear of abuse (at the hands of the army) and the reassertion of patriarchal norms within the Tamil community have further restricted women’s movement and impinged on education and employment opportunities,” said Robert Templer, Crisis Group’s Asia Programme director.

The LTTE spent years developing a complex and coercive centre from which to dictate civil and political life. While its collapse is doubtless a blessing for thousands of civilians, “the devastation of the final year of war and the replacement of the LTTE in effect by the military and its proxies negate the gains for these communities,” the report concluded.

“All of this is very harmful to reconciliation,” Fernando told IPS. “How can people move on when the harassment and language discrimination that led to the conflict in the first place is ongoing? When you are not allowed to farm or cultivate? When children are disappeared and their mothers are left without a trace?”

“While many people around the country are celebrating the end of the terrorist threat, people in the North and East feel that nothing has changed, except the uniforms of the armed forces who are controlling their lives – in reality, they are still living under a military occupation,” he concluded.

*This is the first of a two-part series on Sri Lanka in the aftermath of its three-decade civil war.