In March 2003, the US and its allies invaded Iraq with the stated objective of liberating the people of that country from a leader whom the Bush administration accused of both supporting terrorism and producing weapons of mass destruction (WMD). There was no doubt that President Saddam Hussain was a dictator who systematically unleashed terror on his opponents. But, he was not the only leader of a country doing this then. There were scores of them around the world who were equally or more ruthlessly doing so – and many of them were the friends and allies of the US. As for WMDs, many of US allies were sceptical of US claims that Iraq had a weapons programme in place or a stockpile of WMDs. And they were proved right within two years of ‘liberation’. It was discovered that Iraq had abandoned a nuclear programme in 1991 and no stockpile of WMDs existed. So, the raison d’etre for the invasion was found invalid. What is more tragic is that Iraq has (irretrievably?) plummeted to a level where the rule of law does not exist and there is unprecedented violence and terror. That seems to be the price Iraqis are paying for ‘liberation’.

A similar situation has developed in the East of our country. After capturing the last stretch of territory that the LTTE controlled, the Government announced with much fanfare that it had ‘liberated’ the East. But, the Easterners, like the Iraqis, are now experiencing unprecedented terror. Prior to the vote on the second reading of the Budget, a relative of a TNA Member of Parliament from the East was abducted and released only after the MP had abstained from voting in Parliament. Now, comes the news that prior to the voting on the crucial third reading, relatives of three other MPs have been abducted. The people of the East know that Karuna/Pillayan Group (TMVP), which enjoys the protection of the security forces, is responsible for these abductions and for other acts of violence and terror in the East. They realise that they have just moved from one yoke of terror to another. The present terrorist attempt to influence the voting in Parliament is a serious threat to our freedom and is unprecedented in our parliamentary history. If unchecked now, it could well spread to other parts of the country to stifle dissent and parliamentary rights. Time has come for our intellectuals, the media and the religious and civil society leaders to begin a mass public campaign to reverse these trends of subverting democracy and the rule of law. It was Martin Luther King who said, ‘We shall have to repent in this generation not so much for the evil deeds of the wicked people but for the appalling silence of the good people’.

A retired ‘soldier who remembers’ writing in The Island this week referred to the courage of army officers who refused to obey illegitimate orders from influential politicians during the JVP insurgency both in 1971 and in the late eighties. They were willing to pay the price for standing up for their professionalism and moral integrity. The old soldier compares it to the spinelessness of three Army Commanders who gave in to illegitimate orders from politicians and even went to the extent of providing arms to the LTTE in order that the then weakened LTTE might further harass the Indian Peace Keeping Force which did not find favour with the then government. Is history repeating itself? The people of the East know and can see the well armed TMVP (formerly led by Karuna, currently by Pillayan and god-knows-who in the future) acting with impunity. There is no doubt in their mind that the abductions, disappearances and targeted killings are the work of the TMVP and that the Government and the security forces are turning a blind eye to its sordid operations. Worse, as in the case of the latest political abductions, the TMVP is said to be doing so at the behest of the Government. As The Island asked editorially, has the Government ‘cleared’ the East to enthrone another monster?

A similar trend is seen in the North. There are daily instances of abductions, disappearances and killings. In place of the much dreaded white vans, there it is the motor cycle assassins. The people of the North hold an outfit, whose leader enjoys perks from the Government, as being responsible for much of this. Like the TMVP in the East, the EPDP in the North has the protection of the security forces. During the years following the signing of the CFA in 2002, the Government turned a blind eye to LTTE atrocities in the North East so that it would be left alone in the South; today the TMVP and the EPDP are being used similarly so that the Government can survive in the South by polarising the country. That is the rationale for the posters and full page advertisements appearing now that claims any opposition to the Government is act of treachery (to the Sinhala people).

The latest report of the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) has unfortunately not received the publicity it deserves. No doubt, it is due to the rationale that ‘patriotism’ demands that there should be no exposes of Government misdeeds and there should no opposition to it. As always, the UTHR report is a detailed documentation of several cases. We wish here to quote some salient conclusions they draw:

‘This ideological imperative and refusal to engage politically with the Tamil people, as distinct from the LTTE, is the main driving force behind ongoing killings and disappearances in the North-East. These killings are marketed as counter-terrorism in the war against terror in this corner of the world. Indeed, the Norway-brokered CFA conveniently gave the LTTE opportunity to paint stripes on every Tamil.

What could a fisherman or an auto driver do if they had been forced to join the LTTE union to be allowed to make a living, picked out through the union for defence training in the Vanni, and photographs of it posted on pro-LTTE web sites for expatriate pickings? No one, neither the Government nor the peace makers tried to stop it. Today these people are being murdered in cold blood by state killers, with their wives and children standing by. And those responsible have the temerity to hide behind Buddhist piety.

Such is the partnership between the LTTE and a government of Sinhalese extremists to make life hell for people in the North-East. The reality is that both sides are skating on thin ice, bleeding the people and holding out for ends that, if attained at all, would be at an unbearable cost to the people and absolute infamy to the name of this country and its peoples.

We have in this report focussed on Jaffna rather than spread our efforts too widely. It is both compact and diverse enough to exemplify government attitudes, policies and practices that are slowly crushing the people of the North-East. A cursory look at incidents in other parts of the North-East would show the same disease at work. In the programme ‘Killing for Peace’ in Channel 4’s Unreported World, the Army Commander said with reference to the East that ‘people getting killed and some people going missing will happen as far as the anti-terrorist operations are continuing’. Who in the State’s logic is not a Tiger and would be spared murder is hard to define.

And so torture, killings and disappearance continue as deliberate policy, while dissimulation and buying time is done by the Government’s man as a Vice President of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, a Minister for Human Rights and a Peace Secretariat. The Human Rights Commission appointed illegally by the President has become an embarrassing vestige. It has the machinery for documentation, but what it receives despite the increasing limitations on the ground, and keeps under wraps, is dynamite – which makes its terrible ineffectiveness a scandal.

We have stated repeatedly that the Tigers, their totalitarianism and their killings have been the main obstacle to peace and the security of the people in the North-East. But that cannot in any way excuse the State imitating them. The Government’s course is not finding a political solution to the ethnic problem, but literally killing the ethnic problem by crushing the people. The present government seems to have learnt with the Tigers that until the worms turn, murder, threat, violence, extortion and blackmail, fronted with a ‘patriotic war’, make effective tools of governance."