I have been asked to talk about Rajan Hoole and Kopalasingham
Sritharan of University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) (UTHR(J)), who received the Martin Ennals
Award for Human Rights Defenders this year. I was absolutely thrilled when they
got the award, because I had been feeling for years that they hadn't received sufficient
recognition for the amazing work they had been doing under extremely difficult circumstances,
without any institutional support
or proper funding, and leading a hunted existence due to their refusal to give
up human rights work despite death threats from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam (LTTE).
Rajan is my cousin, I have known him practically from the time he was born. We played together as children and later had arguments on issues ranging from Tamil nationalism to feminism. But one thing I never disagreed with was his deep commitment to non-violence, justice and human dignity, which underpins his human rights work. I got to know Sri properly only after Rajani Thiranagama’s murder and his hair-raising escape from Jaffna. Coming from a Marxist background, his politics are in some ways closer to mine, and his razor-sharp analysis is a notable element in the UTHR(J) reports.
UTH(J) was founded in 1988, in the midst of the worst period Sri Lanka has been through in its entire existence, with tens of thousands being killed in the course of fighting between the Indian Peace-Keeping Force (IPKF) and LTTE in the North and East, and between the Janata Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and government of Sri Lanka in the rest of the country. The precursor to the UTHR(J) publications was The Broken Palmyra, co-authored by Rajan, Sri, Rajani Thiranagama and Daya Somasundaram. Rajani, a co-founder of UTHR(J), was a doctor and lecturer in anatomy. Her murder by the LTTE in 1989 was not only a terrible tragedy, but also a serious loss for the group, to which her focus on women and strong feminist voice made a major contribution. Daya is a psychiatrist, who has written very illuminating books on the psychological trauma resulting from violence, both for its victims and for its perpetrators. He stayed on for a while after Rajan and Sri left Jaffna, but he, too was finally forced to leave.
The Broken
Palmyra set a pattern that persists till today, and which was mentioned
explicitly as a reason why UTHR(J) got the Martin Ennals Award, namely, the ability to see
and report on the evils of human rights violations regardless of who the victims or who the
perpetrators are. Thus, the book deals with violations committed by the Sri
Lankan security forces and the IPKF, but it also reveals the ugly record of abuses by the LTTE and other Tamil groups.
In fact, this is in
some ways its focus: the palmyra, the symbol of Tamil society, can bend before
the blast of external repression, but it breaks only when something is rotten within. The
agony of seeing the society they loved torn apart by fratricidal violence and of innocence
desecrated by the induction of children into armed groups comes through loud and clear in this
and subsequent publications.
This means that unlike the phony human rights advocates who are silent about atrocities committed by members of their own ethnic or religious group against members of other groups, UTHR(J) has highlighted and condemned massacres of Sinhalese and Muslims, and the wholesale expulsion of Muslims from the North. Unlike human rights defenders who felt that the case for defending the human rights of Tamils would be weakened if atrocities committed by Tamil groups were publicised, they felt that precisely those atrocities had the potential to destroy Tamil society more completely than anything inflicted on them from outside, and therefore should be condemned most vehemently.
UTHR(J) got a lot of flak for this, especially after the 2002 ceasefire, when the bulk of their criticism was directed against the LTTE. Not only Tamils but also many Sinhalese accused them of LTTE-bashing. I think I understand where this criticism comes from: it is based on a fundamentally different conception of being ‘even-handed’ or ‘unbiased’, one that I think is deeply flawed. I already outlined UTHR(J)’s conception: basically the belief that all violations of human rights should be recorded, reported and condemned, regardless of who is committing them and against whom. This other conception is that if there are two parties to a conflict, then whenever you criticise or condemn one party, you must criticise and condemn the other equally. But, if the LTTE is conscripting children and the government is not involved in child conscription, then how can you criticise government forces for child conscription? If the LTTE is committing ten times more ceasefire violations and extra-judicial killings than the government, as even the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission admitted, then how can you condemn them equally? The answer given by far too many NGOs was by downplaying or even remaining silent about LTTE abuses. I have listened to speeches about human rights in Sri Lanka where LTTE atrocities against Muslims were not even mentioned. No mention of child conscription. Not a word about the killings of Tamil critics. No wonder UTHR (J) sounded as if it were Tiger-bashing when it went on and on about those issues! It was because of the deafening silence coming from the peace lobby, which didn’t want to rock the peace boat by raising them, even though this amounted to a decision that the human rights of Muslims, Tamil children and Tamil dissidents were not worth defending.
I think there were several catastrophic consequences of this silence. Firstly, it meant that nothing was done to rein in LTTE violations. Secondly, it led to an enormous build-up of bitterness and resentment among Sinhalese, especially in cases where Sinhalese were the target of attack: resentment that should have been directed against the LTTE, but could later be unleashed against Tamil civilians because the Sinhala nationalists, LTTE and peace lobby all colluded in propagating the myth that the LTTE represented all Tamils. Thirdly, it discredited human rights advocates in general by making it appear that they were biased towards the LTTE, because the sad fact was that many of them were. Thus, when the war broke out again and government forces really did start committing horrific violations, the accusations of these people could be dismissed with a certain amount of credibility by government propagandists.
UTHR(J), on the other hand, has made the sharpest denunciations of government policies, and not a single government propagandist has dared so much as to hint that they are pro-LTTE. That is the advantage of a principled commitment to human rights which is not swayed one way or the other by contingent political considerations, such as whether peace talks are in progress or not: no one can question your bona fides without sounding absurd. And any political considerations are immaterial when set against respect for human rights, which is the very basis of our humanity. ‘Peace’ without human rights is not worth having, because it is the ‘peace’ of humanity crushed and killed, the ‘peace’ of the graveyard in which humanity is buried.
A project like UTHR(J) can’t be run entirely by two individuals, however great they may be. I mentioned Rajani, who was killed, and there were others who paid with their lives for participating. Rajan’s wife Kirupa and Sri’s wife Vasantha have been towers of strength, providing financial, logistical and moral support, as well as caring for the children. In some ways the burden they bear is even heavier than that of their partners, since it is worse to fear for the life of a loved one than to risk your own, yet these two courageous women have never faltered. Then there is a network of grassroots fact-finders in the North and East whose names I don’t know, and don’t even want to know at the moment, because what they are doing is so dangerous. The award is shared by all of them.
If we are being sincere in felicitating them, I feel we must commit ourselves to promoting their work in whatever way we can. That could mean quoting them or publishing extracts from their work wherever appropriate, but also, more generally, taking up their stance and making it our own. This includes a clear and uncompromising rejection of both the LTTE’s ultimate goal – an exclusively Tamil, totalitarian state – and the methods by which it is sought to be achieved, using innocent civilians and even the LTTE’s own cadre simply as objects to be blown up at will. Here, I appeal especially to Sinhalese human rights defenders and peace campaigners. Muslims are vulnerable to attack from both sides, and most Tamils who have taken on the LTTE in a major way have either been killed or been forced to flee Sri Lanka. On the other hand, to the best of my knowledge, the LTTE has not engaged in targeted attacks against Sinhalese intellectuals and activists. So, they are uniquely placed to be able to criticise the Tigers with impunity.
This would enable them to launch a blistering attack on government policies without being hypocritical or biased, and that is very much needed at present. The whole notion that a war against terrorists demands that the hands of the government and its security forces should not be tied by the requirement to respect human rights and civil liberties should be torn to shreds. We should argue the very opposite: that every clamp-down on civil liberties which takes away an avenue of non-violent protest forces people into violence as the only path left open to them, and every violation of human rights pushes more recruits into the arms of the terrorists.
Many Tamil nationalists have not hesitated to get foreign citizenship and give up the idea of living anywhere in Sri Lanka, much less in the North-East, whereas Rajan and Sri have not settled down elsewhere, despite the fact that their formidable academic qualifications would easily enable them to do so. The reason is that they still long to return to Sri Lanka, and preferably to Jaffna. So, the best way to honour them is to do whatever we can to make it possible for them to realise their dream of coming home safely.
(This is the text of a talk given at the felicitation of human rights defenders organised by the Law and Society Trust, Inform Human Rights Documentation Centre, and Rights Now Collective for Democracy at the Bandaranaike Memorial International Convention Hall, Colombo, on 6 December 2007. It was published in The Island on December 8 and is also available in Countercurrents.org at https://counter currents.org/hensman121207.htm )