Monsoon Journal

“We need to be able to respect the culture, tradition and leadership style of each and every leader,” UN Secretary General Ban-Ki-moon, a former South Korean foreign minister, told reporters in a visit to Oslo on Monday, Aug 31st. “I have my own charisma, I have my own leadership style,” he is quoted as saying in an article published in The Washington Post of Sep 1st, 2009. Excerpts from the article on Sri Lanka as follows: U.N. Chief’s ‘Quiet’ Outreach To Autocrats Causing Discord For Ban, perhaps the greatest test of engagement as a policy came earlier this year. In Sri Lanka, where the government was pushing to crush the ruthless Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the secretary general reached out to President Mahinda Rajapaksa to persuade him to show restraint to protect the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians forced to serve as the Tigers’ human shields. In an effort to maintain a cordial working relationship with Rajapaksa, Ban and his top advisers withheld criticism of the government, advising U.N. human rights officials not to publish U.N. estimates of the civilian death toll in the conflict, arguing that they were not convinced of their credibility, according to officials familiar with the discussions. In the end, Ban’s diplomatic intervention achieved a brief weekend pause in the fighting but did little to stem to slaughter, which cost the lives of 7,800 to 20,000 civilians. Ban says he won commitments from Sri Lankan leaders to improve conditions for displaced people and to pursue reconciliation, but his handling of such crises has raised questions among some U.N. diplomats about his viability for a second term. Norway’s U.N. ambassador, Mona Juul, wrote that Ban is a “spineless and charmless” leader who has failed to convey the U.N.’s “moral voice and authority,” according to a confidential memo to Norway’s foreign minister. Juul, whose husband, Terje Roed-Larsen, serves as one of Ban’s Middle East envoys, sharply criticized Ban’s handling of the crises in Sri Lanka and Burma in the memo, which was first published in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten. “The Secretary-General was a powerless observer to thousands of civilians losing their lives and becoming displaced from their homes,” Juul wrote of Ban’s role in Sri Lanka. “The moral voice and authority of the Secretary-General has been missing.” Ban has been stung by the criticism and said he is striving to improve his performance. But he suggested that the criticism stemmed from a misunderstanding in the West of his Asian diplomatic approach. “We need to be able to respect the culture, tradition and leadership style of each and every leader,” Ban, a former South Korean foreign minister, told reporters in a visit to Oslo on Monday. “I have my own charisma, I have my own leadership style.” Spotlight’ on Sri Lanka In Sri Lanka, Ban and his advisers sought to perform a delicate balancing act, pressing the country’s leader in private to halt the shelling of civilian zones, while avoiding an open confrontation with cautiously worded public statements about the violence. Human rights advocates faulted Ban for not pressing hard enough to hold Sri Lanka accountable for its actions. Days after the war ended, the secretary general signed a joint agreement with President Rajapaksa committing Sri Lanka to pursue political reconciliation with ethnic Tamils and release hundreds of thousands of displaced ethnic Tamils in government- controlled camps. In exchange, Ban dropped a U.N. push for an independent investigation into war crimes, leaving it to Sri Lanka to determine whether its military was responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians in the final offensive. Two days later, Sri Lankan diplomats, citing the agreement, quashed a proposal by the top U.N. human rights official to create an independent commission of inquiry to probe war crimes in Sri Lanka. Some diplomats have defended Ban’s handling of the crisis, saying he pushed far more aggressively to protect Sri Lankan civilians than did any government, including the United States, India, China, Russia and key European powers. “He put a spotlight on what was happening in Sri Lanka,” said John Sawers, Britain’s U.N. ambassador. “So it’s not perfect in Sri Lanka; far too many civilians got killed and there is still an outstanding problem with the civilians in the [Internally Displaced Persons] camps. But I believe Ban’s engagement made the situation less bad than it would otherwise have been.”

Sphere standards at internally displaced persons (IDO) camps in northern Sri Lanka are being undermined due to overcrowding, say aid workers. The Sphere Project, a collaboration of international NGOs and the Red Cross Movement to improve the quality of disaster response, outlines best practices in food aid, nutrition, health, water and sanitation and emergency shelter provision. “We are missing Sphere standards by a long way, particularly in the WASH [water, sanitation and hygiene] cluster,” David White, Oxfam’s country director in Colombo, told IRIN, citing instances where some people were going without water for washing for up to three days. “We’re not even close,” said another international aid worker. “With the monsoon rains, it’s going to get worse,” he warned. Close to 300,000 people now languish in 30 government camps in Vavuniya, Mannar, Jaffna and Trincomalee districts, after fleeing fighting between government forces and the now defeated Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who had been fighting for an independent Tamil homeland for more than two decades. Many of the camps - which were hastily erected in the final days of the war after thousands fled south from former LTTE-controlled areas - suffer from severe overcrowding. Most are located in and around the town of Vavuniya - the epicentre of one of the island nation’s worst levels of displacement ever. “Many of the camps now exceed their planned capacity,” confirmed one international aid worker in Vavuniya. Of the 246,000 IDPs in Vavuniya, more than 200,000 now stay in Menik Farm - a sprawling 809ha site about 50km outside the town, comprised of six separate zones and easily the most overcrowded. This despite the fact that a large percentage of them actually have families in the area they could stay with. Decongestion Decongestion is now taking on an even greater sense of urgency. “The issue has been recognized by the government already in late May during the UN Secretary-General’s visit, as reflected in the joint statement made by President Rajapakse and [Ban Ki-moon], and work is ongoing to resettle people as well as to permit vulnerable people to leave,” Neil Buhne, the UN resident representative in Colombo, said. “Concerns about security are recognized by everyone, but from all my discussions with everyone involved with the camps - from government to UN to NGOs, everyone also recognizes that the sooner people can get back to their homes or with host families, the better.” “UNHCR [the UN Refugee Agency] and its shelter partners are supporting the government’s decongestion efforts to ensure that the conditions in the emergency shelter sites reach international standards,” said Elizabeth Tan, officer-in-charge for UNHCR Sri Lanka, which is working with the government to prepare the site as best as possible to withstand the upcoming monsoon season. More than three months since the conflict ended, Zone two of Menik Farm continues to hold close to 55,000 - almost double its planned capacity. “If those zones had the amount of people they were built for, we would be a lot closer to Sphere standards,” Oxfam’s White said. In fact, in some parts of Menik Farm, a single latrine caters to up to 80 people [Sphere standards call for 20], while some tents designed for five were accommodating up to 14. Yet according to Buhne, how close or how far Sphere standards could be met depended on the sector, as well as the location within the camps. “Some of newly established small areas are close to or even meet some standards, while in the larger, longer-established sites there is more work to be done,” he said. “Camp conditions were gradually stabilizing until mid-August,” he said, citing government efforts and those of international agencies since the last influx in late May. “Schools [and] health clinics had been or were being established; access to water and sanitation had improved and most people now had the calorie intake they needed,” he said. Even so, significant challenges persist, highlighted and accentuated by the recent rains, he said. “Last week’s rains were a warning for us. We have to act and act soon,” said an aid worker. Set to arrive within a matter of weeks, the monsoon will sorely test the ability of the authorities and the aid community to cope. “The international community is watching. We can’t pretend we didn’t know it was coming,” she said, explaining that even if you took 50,000 people out of the camps tomorrow, once the monsoon arrives the camps would no longer be viable. “The clock is now ticking,” she said. Report by UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs ~ IRIN News

Footage of the Sri Lankan justice is dead in Sri Lanka army callously executing Tamils, as shown on a reputable British news channel, has deeply troubled Tamil Canadians. The scenes on Britain’s Channel 4 News have increased concerns about the safety of Tamils who are confined against their will in Sri Lanka’s barbed-wire camps under strict military supervision. Their internment violates international norms and law. Many of these detainees have families and friends in Canada. The footage features Tamils, who have been stripped naked and blindfolded, being killed. Eventually, the camera angle widens and shows several similar naked bodies lying in the dirt. Some move, many do not. “The footage shows part of the truth the Sri Lankan government has been trying to hide for months,” said Harini Sivalingam, policy director for the Canadian Tamil Congress. “These types of war crimes are what so many Tamil Canadians tried to warn the world about, but no one listened. The brutality and complete disregard for human life evidenced in these scenes shows how far Sri Lanka is from being anything close to a democracy.” Channel 4 News and BBC received the footage from Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka (JDS), a group that includes both Sinhalese and Tamils. The JDS is a group of journalists, writers, artists and human rights defenders who fled persecution in Sri Lanka. The footage is said to have been filmed in January 2009. In light of the treatment of Tamils in the video, the Canadian Tamil Congress (CTC) is even more concerned about the security of camp detainees. The CTC believes the international community must enact tougher measures to press Sri Lanka into releasing them. With no independent monitors able to freely visit the camps, Amnesty International has said many people are unprotected and at risk from enforced disappearances, abductions, arbitrary arrest and sexual violence.

Statement by Asian Human Rights Commission: The Asian Human Rights Commission is saddened, disappointed and shocked but not surprised at the judgment of the High Court of Colombo in sentencing J.S. Tisssainayagam to 20 years of rigorous imprisonment for a simple piece of writing which he had done and which was interpreted as aiding and abetting terrorism. The AHRC is not surprised by this judgment because at the very inception of this case the AHRC pointed out that this is purely a political case, the first of its kind in which the accused, Mr. Tisssainayagam’s guilt or innocence was not an issue but an opportunity to send a message to society on the changed circumstances of the country where freedom of expression does not matter at all. That was the real aim of this case. It is the sort of prosecution that could have happened under the regime of Joseph Stalin through the prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky. In Vyshinsky’s trials the outcome was predetermined. The trials of the 1930s were known worldwide as show trials. Those actually accused were not really the targets of the proceedings. The accused were mere exhibits to be advertised before the rest of Russia in order to pass a message to the people about the fundamental beliefs that Stalin wanted to impose on society. Vyshinsky’s biographer Arkady Vaksberg writes that the “purpose of the trial had not been to disgrace or, indeed, to annihilate some of the accused but to create a precedent and pave the way for a psychological attack on the population.” Tisssainayagam has been selected for a show trial where there was not even any evidence to base a charge on. The particular passages which were arbitrarily selected from his writings did not represent any attempt to raise feelings of racism or to instigate people to violence on the basis of race. The text was selected as the pretext and there was no genuine thought in this prosecution at all. What the case points to is the illusions of the liberals both in Sri Lanka and abroad who fail to see a persecution staged as a show trial. The illusion that somehow things may turn out and that there would be a fair trial was the comfort zone in which many people were resting, unwilling to accept that justice is dead in Sri Lanka and that the executive can manipulate and get whatever verdict it wants. The greatest loser in this case is not J.S. Tisssainayagam it is the justice system and the judiciary in Sri Lanka that has suffered the greatest loss which would be hard for it to overcome. Even this is not a huge surprise for most people in Sri Lanka. They know that justice has been dead for a long time in their country. The Tisssainayagam case will also remain the most glaring proof of the absence of freedom of expression in Sri Lanka. The memory of this case will shame so many journalists and media men in the country who have found it possible to lick the very feet of the executive which has completely destroyed the freedom of expression in the country. Some have fought back and lost their lives and some finally fled for their own safety. But this has also created a paradise for those who live by their contribution to misinformation and suppression of freedoms. We urge the local and international community to condemn the judgment and the sentence in Tisssainayagam’s case and to call for his unconditional release. We also urge the local and international community to grasp the reality that justice is dead in Sri Lanka and the freedom of expression and the media which has also been killed. Justice and media freedom in Sri Lanka is like the phantom limb; a dream of an amputee who still believes that his limbs are intact. The reminder of the Tisssainayagam case should always be associated with the image of the phantom limb. (About AHRC: The Asian Human Rights Commission is a regional non-governmental organisation monitoring and lobbying human rights issues in Asia. The Hong Kong-based group was founded in 1984)