by

N. Sathiya Moorthy

Military Spokesman Brig. Ruwan Wanigasooriya’s exposition that Sri Lanka will need foreign help to determine the number of deaths in ‘Eelam War IV’ stands to reason. He has said, and rightly so, that many have migrated through the years of ethnic conflict; some among the 300,000 freed from the LTTE’s clutches during the closing weeks of the war or hospitalised at the time had escaped to foreign countries. There is nothing new in the claim for it to be dubbed an imaginative, post-Geneva initiative.

It is anybody’s guess if this also contributed to the ‘international’ part of the ‘independent and credible’ inquiry that some in the global community wanted before the US sponsor dropped the term from the UNHRC resolution last month. Yet, it beats simple minds why Colombo did not tell the international community precisely what it felt about it all, and what it did and did not know about the ‘missing persons’ through the past years – and has now said so not in Geneva, but only in Colombo, that too between one in a series of anticipated dust-storms on ‘war crimes’ and ‘accountability’.

Almost simultaneously with Brig. Wanigasooriya’s declaration, the Census Department too has said that it plans to conduct a survey of those dead in the ‘Second JVP Insurgency’ (1987-89) to figure out how many were dead. Past estimates (rather, guesstimates, in the absence of any genuine government acknowledgement of the dead when ‘Press censorship’ and a ban on ‘independent investigations’ of the ‘Eelam War’ kind were among the worst in the country) had put the dead in those two years between 60,000 and 100,000.

It is acknowledged that many JVP leaders and cadres had escaped to foreign countries, though not in droves as the Tamils had done, the latter only too visible in overseas protests, politics and elections in their adopted homes. The arrest and subsequent exit of ex-JVP Tamil leader, Premakumar Gunaratnam, travelling under an alias as an Australian citizen, around this time last year, has lessons for all sides, if nations of the world too are genuine about their concerns about tracing the ‘missing’ Tamils in Sri Lanka. ‘Col’ Karuna’s exit and that of another person months later also hold lessons, but such cases were very, very few to affect ‘large-scale’ disappearances.

‘Economic migration’

War and violence, particularly of the State-sponsored type, have been an excuse for many Tamils in Sri Lanka to present their ‘economic migration’ aspirations as ‘political asylum’, almost since the ‘Sinhala Only’ protests and violence, and even after the ‘ethnic war’. Sri Lankan Tamils who have obtained local citizenship (leaving out their children born in those lands) have numbers enough to tilt local electoral scales in many countries. Their numbers add up to a million, again, according to some claims.

Illegal Sri Lankan Tamil migrants in Europe and elsewhere have been widely acknowledged. Post-war news reports indicated Ministers and even Sinhala soldiers may have been involved in ‘human-smuggling’ from IDP camps. The ‘boat people’ caught off the Australian coast too are a drop in the ocean. Leave the early UN report that put the war-dead at 7,000 and the Darusman Report that gave 40,000 dead, local Tamil institutional probes that gave a high 180,000-plus should help the Government reconcile the ‘dead’ and ‘missing’ with those they could trace to foreign lands.

Minister Anura Priyadarshana Yapa has since said that the Cabinet has now fixed an 18-month deadline for implementing the LLRC Report. He has not said if it included the ‘accountability’ part being handled by the armed forces themselves, which could throw up figures, big and/or small. For their part, the Diaspora Tamils should ensure that their own ‘dead’ and ‘missing’ are counted, if they are genuine in their demands and if they are not to use the tickled global consciousness to further ‘economic migration’ in the name of ‘political asylum’, all over again.

This does not mean that there may be no truth in the charges about ‘war crimes’ and ‘accountability issues’. Yet, tallying and reconciling numbers as Brig. Wanigasooriya has said alone will give an idea about the size and seriousness, both of crime and punishment.

In Sri Lanka’s case, the UN Secretary-General’s office, the UNHRC and the rest stand discredited in the eyes of the Colombo government, but that bridge needs to be crossed.

The government has to prove its credibility and genuineness even more. In the light of the JVP demands for a probe into the ‘Matale mass-graves’ supposedly dating back to the ‘Second Insurgency’, the Government has to prove that the Census effort, for instance, is not aimed at embarrassing the Opposition UNP that was in power at the time – but is a genuine first step ahead of a global Tamil head-count. It would also help to restore lost credibility, nearer home and afar.

(The writer is Director, Chennai Chapter of the Observer Research Foundation)