War's end and competing models for recovery

Peace without unity, unity without reconciliation, and reconciliation without accountability. (Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu)

The way the war ended cast a legacy on its aftermath, and two models of recovery were advocated by those in power as a means to peace: namely, the Singapore model of economic development to make Sri Lanka the Wonder of Asia, and notions of reconciliation, as defined in government circles. The residual dilemma was the clash between these dominant approaches and the actual underlying causes of the war.

War to peace transitions may be understood through the prisms of resistance, accountability and that elusive term 'governance'. Resistance because civil war and its ending entail the reconfiguration of power relations and friction among and between societal actors; accountability because a population and its leaders need to come to terms in some way with the effects of violence and construct a viable narrative on which to begin again; and 'governance' in the sense of levels of norms and mechanisms to enable the renewed functioning of a given society. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam fought for over three decades in Sri Lanka, a bitter armed struggle in which ceasefires failed to hold and a degree of territorial control was achieved and then lost. This civil war arose from historical grievances over language rights, issues of land, higher education, employment and the socio-political status of the minority Tamil community.

War's end

In the aftershock of the military defeat of the LTTE in May 2009, a mixture of euphoria, anxiety and profound uncertainty seemed to grip the capital Colombo. The city was a grey and concrete labyrinth of military fortification: watchtowers, roadblocks, checkpoints, razor wire, enforced curfew and armed patrols. International media had reported for months about the northern assault: a frantic situation in the Vanni including entrapment and deprivation and attacks on thousands of civilians. In February, an interview with Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa aired on BBC appeared to condone attacks on hospitals if they were outside the official no-fire zone (Crawford 2009). Satellite imagery abounded of the full pincer effect of the assault, as well as rumours of additional satellite imagery held by US intelligence. What had been fever-pitch activity in embassy and mission corridors to find a ceasefire or halt to hostilities gave way to diplomatic numbness, while citizens were encouraged to celebrate a final victory over terrorism.

For over a quarter of a century, the veracity of the Tamil–Sinhala conflict had attracted considerable international attention and intervention attempts, from the Government of India (at considerable cost, with the related assassination of Rajiv Ghandi) to numerous relief and development NGOs dedicated to peace making, a process of Norwegian-brokered talks and the international donor community backing economic incentive packages, particularly in the wake of the 2004 tsunami. As the Petrie report would later observe, the UN's political engagement in Sri Lanka during the period from 2007 to the end of the conflict in May 2009 was consistently secondary to the efforts of other external actors (UN 2012). These included countries in the region, primarily India and China. Norway sponsored the Ceasefire Agreement, with the EU, Japan and the US joining a Co-Chair Group of States to coordinate financial contributions to Sri Lanka in support of the peace process. The UN was not invited to be a member of the Co-Chair Group.

The final determined government offensive of the war was launched in late 2008. International agencies were forced by official directive to relocate from the Vanni in September 2008, a time when hundreds of thousands were being displaced within this increasingly dangerous conflict zone (IDMC 2009). By January 2009, an editorial in The Economist was asking 'Where have all the people gone?' in reference to the deserted streets and destroyed buildings in Kilinochchi, once the showcase de facto capital city of the declared Tamil Eelam (The Economist 2009). The LTTE had lost the city, with thousands of families displaced into the district around Mullaitivu. A final offensive was under way under the rubric of counter-terrorism with a rejection of perceived half-way measures and compromise as per the Norwegian brokered (aborted) peace initiative. There was a total rejection of calls for a ceasefire as the final battle loomed in 2009. Rajapaksa was quoted as saying: 'They are trying to preach to us about civilians. I tell them to go and see what they are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan' (Revise 2009). It was widely reported that a quarter of a million civilians were trapped in a shrinking area of land, caught in the crossfire and suffering casualties as well. Rumours flew of a massacre of people who were not themselves combatants and had no exit possibility, later confirmed in the wake of the final battle (Weiss 2012).

In fact, Norwegian facilitation (Sorbo et al. 2011) had been accepted and tried not long after the advent of the US-led narrative on 'the war on terror', described in detail by Kleinfeld in 2003. Kleinfeld documents how both the People's Alliance Government and the Tamil Tigers of Tamil Eelam used the '9/11' lexicon 'associated with the U.S. attacks and early global response to brand their adversary as terrorist, to recode political and conflict narratives in September eleventh terms, and to indicate the appropriate scale and scope of the war' (Kleinfeld 2003). The future Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a US citizen, was living in California at the time of the Bush administration measures that echoed 'with us or against us' as an uncompromising stance (Montlake 2009). His official governmental website invoked geo-political analogies when referring to subsequent United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) war crimes investigations, stating that the:

Sri Lankan government should closely study the Iraq case. It should be a priority. The Iraq case presents an excellent opportunity to highlight the double standards adopted by those threatening to haul Sri Lanka up before an international war crimes tribunal on the basis that the local process lacked credibility. (MoD Sri Lanka 2014)

It was Gotabaya who warned ambassadors, news agencies and international NGOs of dire consequences if they were 'partisan' in their concern for the LTTE or made comments in support of their cause during the military ground offensive. As he singled out BBC journalists and the Swiss and German ambassadors for particular criticism, a joint statement was issued by five leading Sri Lankan bishops calling on both sides at war in the Vanni to keep civilians safe from the line...