Sri Lanka’s killing fields cast a long shadow

 Impunity for crimes committed during the civil war has fueled post-war repression in Sri Lanka.

Ethnic Tamil victims of a shell attack wait outside a makeshift hospital in an LTTE-controlled 'No Fire Zone' in Mullivaaykaal, Sri Lanka on May 10, 2009 [File: AP]

Today we mark the 15th anniversary of the bloody end of Sri Lanka’s three-decades-long civil war. This anniversary comes around at a critical historical juncture, amid the humanitarian catastrophe unleashed by Israel’s assault on Gaza.

The global response to Gaza, across many states, peoples and international institutions, shows that there is a strong will to uphold international norms on protecting civilians and a strong will to address the underlying political injustices of the conflict itself, rather than seeing it merely as a problem of security and terrorism. The international failure to translate this will into concrete action is appalling but sadly not unprecedented.

The state of Sri Lanka, 15 years after the end of the armed conflict there, shows what happens when mass atrocities are unaddressed and the political fault lines that led to them in the first place remain unresolved and are arguably exacerbated. There are also striking and unavoidable similarities between the events still unfolding in Gaza and those that took place in the Vanna, the area of northern Sri Lanka where the war ended.

In the final months of the conflict, the Sri Lankan military besieged and bombarded a civilian population of 330,000 along with an estimated 5,000 Tamil Tiger fighters, corralling them into ever thinner strips of land in the Vanna. The offensive was brutal and unconstrained. It destroyed and defeated the Tamil Tigers’ armed group LTTE but also made a raging bonfire out of international humanitarian law, the laws of war and basic norms of civilian protection.

The Sri Lankan military bombed and shelled food distribution centers, hospitals and civilian shelters even though it had received the precise coordinates of these from the United Nations and International Committee of the Red Cross. It ordered civilians into ever-shrinking “no-fire” zones that it would then relentlessly attack using unguided artillery shells and multi-barreled rocket launchers, firing hundreds and sometimes thousands of shells a day.

The last of the no-fire zones was a mere 2-3 square kilometers and the death toll often reached 1,000 civilians a day, sometimes more. Sri Lanka also limited the supply of food and essential medicines including anesthetics in moves calculated to compound and exacerbate the humanitarian distress.

Subsequent UN investigations concluded that the Sri Lankan military’s campaign amounted to the “persecution of the Vanni population”. At least 40,000 people were reported killed in the fighting, but some estimates based on population figures suggest the death toll could be as high as 169,000.

At the end of the war, the Sri Lankan authorities summarily executed LTTE cadres and others who surrendered and herded the remaining civilians into barbed wire-ringed internment camps, allegedly for “processing”. The government only released them after immense international pressure.

Sri Lanka justified its campaign as the only way to defeat “terrorism” and proclaimed its “victory” over the LTTE as a military model that other countries could follow. It has consistently and vehemently rejected international demands for meaningful accountability and has also refused to implement political changes that would ensure real political equality for the Tamils and address the root causes of the conflict.

Yet, Sri Lanka’s trajectory after 2009 shows that mass atrocities and the “victory” they secure entail consequences that rebound and not just for the Tamil population. After the war ended, Sri Lanka simply doubled down on its repression of Tamils.