Even though the recently concluded elections were excruciatingly boring, the UNP more than compensated for it last week. I listened to a ball by ball commentary on what went on in the main decision making bodies of the UNP last week, sitting on the edge of my chair. The written word can’t even begin to do justice to the fury and emotion of the spoken word!

The UNP political affairs committee met on Tuesday with Karu Jayasuriya, Gamini Jayawickrema Perera, Tissa Attanayake, Ravi Karunanayake, Lakshman Seneviratne, Johnston Fernando, Ranjith Madduma Bandara, Renuka Herath and others in attendance. The first matter discussed was the progress in the talks relating to the formation of the ‘grand opposition alliance’ headed by the UNP. Ranjith Madduma Bandara wanted to know how many parties had entered into negotiations with the UNP. It was revealed that discussions were on with Mano Ganesan, Rauff Hakeem and Mangala Samaraweera.

Madduma Bandara pointed out that both Ganesan and Hakeem were already with the UNP, having contested on the UNP list. As for Mangala Samaraweera, he said that Mangala was down and out, and cannot bring even a thousand votes into the UNP. Madduma Bandara had wanted to know whether there was any point in the discussions that were going on. Jayawickrema Perera said that his name had been included in the negotiating team but he had not known that he was on such a committee. Johnston Fernando raised the question that according to the decision made in the PAC, the negotiating team for the formation of the grand coalition should have been appointed by the political affairs committee subject to the ratification by the working committee, but that Ranil Wickremesinghe has appointed the negotiating team arbitrarily and that Rukman Senanayake and Lakshman Seneviratne had been kept out.

Uva election

The next item to be taken up for discussion was the Uva election. Karu Jayasuriya, said that the party was in a ‘difficult’ position and that a report should be compiled on this matter. Lakshman Seneviratne said that by the time a report was written, the southern PC elections would be upon them and by the time they completed the report on the southern PC election, the presidential election would be upon them; and by the time a report was written about the presidential election, the parliamentary election would be upon then and by that time, everything would be over. He said that everybody knew where the problem lay and that there was no need for reports.

Karu Jaysuriya informed the PAC that a mini-election had been held in the Ratnapura district to elect a district leader and that the results of the election would be announced at the working committee. The PAC decided that Thalatha Atukorale should be the district leader regardless of the result of the so called mini-election.

Rukman Senanyake said that the most important issue at hand was the presidential candidate of the UNP as there was very little time left. He stated that the UNP was once a mighty tree but that it had been turned into a weed by Ranil Wickremesinghe. He said that a proper candidate had to be put forward at the presidential elections in order to at least put up a fight if not to win. Ranjith Madduma Bandara and Ravi Samaraweera concurred with that view. They added that while the president was campaigning full time in Uva, Wickremesinghe had not been in the Badulla and Moneragala districts even for four days. He had been in Moneragala for one and a half days and in Badulla for two days. Seneviratne said that it would have been better if he had not come at all – then he wouldn’t have made that highly damaging gaffe about the day of the election.

The UNP working committee met on the same day at 4.00pm. Karu J had given a copy of the minutes of the just concluded PAC meeting to Wickremesinghe who had put it aside without presenting it to the working committee. The politics of the Kurunegala district featured prominently in the working committee discussion. Earlier in the PAC, Ravi Karunanayake had proposed that Piyasoma Upali had to be given an electorate. Lakshman Seneviratne had proposed that one of the two vacant seats in the Kunrunegala district, Panduwasnuwara or Nikaweratiya should be given to Upali. Dayasiri Jayasekera said that the party leader was making arbitrary appointments in electorates without reference to the electoral organizers.

He said that he had spoken for 45 minutes at the previous working committee meeting appealing that Justin Galappaththy should be kept on as the district leader of Matara, but that the leader had taken no notice. He said that while the party was losing every election it faced, Wickremasinghe was busy promoting favourites like Sagala Ratnayake and Akila Kariyawasam. He said that Mahinda Rajapakse had never done anything wrong to them but that they attacked Mahinda nevertheless in order to make the UNP win. At this point Jayasekera had broken down in tears and said that he had decided to resign from the working committee. Thereupon he had left the meeting.

Akila Kariyawasam has spoken next and defended himself saying that the appointments made in the Kurunegala district were not arbitrary and that he had his reasons for making the disputed appointments. He had also said that Jayaskera had joined the UNP only recently whereas he had been holding various positions in the UNP for 14 years. Sagala Ratnayake also spoke up and said that the Matara district leadership was rightfully his as he had got more votes and was the only UNP parliamentarian in the Matara district. He stated that the district leadership should have been given to him back in 2007.

When the Uva election was taken up for discussion, Wickremesinghe had said that there is a problem and that a report should be compiled on the matter. Rukman Senanyake raised the question of who the next presidential candidate was going to be. He said that the party fell to 15% in Moneragala and could fall to 10% in the south and that they could not get anywhere with this leader.

Ranil flayed

Johnston Fernando said that Wickremesinghe was personally responsible for Justin Galappaththy’s defection, that he was promoting his favourites and that he had mixed his private life with his politics. Lakshman Seneviratne stood up and said that on a few of the ballot papers in Uva, the voters had written (unprintable obscenities) and said that they would never vote for the party so long as Ranil remains the leader. Johnton Fernando said that the working committee would be meeting only three times more before the presidential election was announced and he called upon the party leader to announce the presidential candidate. Wickremesinghe remained silent.

Lakshman Seneviratne stood up and asked whether anyone in the room thought Ranil can win the presidential election. He repeated himself six times, but nobody spoke up. Vajira Abeywardene however, said that he agrees that the party had hit rock bottom, but that they should not reveal the name of their presidential candidate just yet. Palitha Range Bandara said that they should all get together and support the leader. Ravi Samaraweera asked Wickremesinghe to step down gracefully so that the party could appoint a new leader and go forward.

At the end of all these exchanges Wickremesinghe said that he listened to everything that has been said. He agrees with what Palitha Range Bandara said. He stated that the party should know how to win elections and that a reorganization is necessary. Wickremesinghe also said that a friend of his told him that the party could win under his (Ranil’s) leadership and that all the problems were being created by those who were asking for reform. Johnston Fernando stood up and told Wickremesinghe not to talk nonsense.

At this point Wickremsinghe raised his voice and Johnston Fernando shouted him down saying that the ‘friend’ that Wickremesinghe refers to can only be a ‘napunsakaya’ and that was where the problem was. By this time, Wickremesinghe was yelling for order but Johnston Fernando continued speaking and said that the UNP rank and file are cursing Wickremesinghe for what he has done to the party. Fernando had then walked out of the room. Wickremesinghe shouted after Fernando that he was doing all this on behalf of the government.

The most significant thing about this stormy working committee meeting is that Wickremesinghe, and his two most embattled favourites Akila Kariyawasam and Sagala Ratnayake, had to defend themselves against the accusations hurled at them. Earlier, there had always been someone else to defend them.

On trial in Europe

The decision of the European Commission of October 14, 2008, which instituted the ongoing investigation against Sri Lanka regarding the extension of GSP+ mentioned three UN documents in particular as being the basis on which the investigation against Sri Lanka was launched. The three UN documents mentioned are; the report of the Special Rapporteur on extra-judicial, summary and arbitrary executions (Philip Alston) of March 27, 2006, the statement by the special advisor to the United Nations special representative for children and armed conflict (Allan Rock) of November 13, 2006, and the report of the Special Rapporteur on torture, and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment (Manfred Nowak) of October 28, 2007.

The process that is in progress in the European Commission at the present moment is in effect a judicial process in all but name. There will be a trial/investigation, a verdict will be announced, and if found guilty, a punishment will be implemented; which in this case will be the suspension of GSP+. The punishment itself will be ‘genocidal’ in its application – the crippling of an economy, the throwing out of employment of anything up to 300,000 workers, mostly rural women and the laying waste of what can only be described as a showpiece industry painstakingly built up over three decades, by some of the best professionals in the world. Since we are on trial for our lives on the basis of the three documents mentioned above, it will be useful to see what we are on trial for. The most bizarre and unfounded accusation leveled against Sri Lanka was by Allan Rock on the question of children and armed conflict, and I will take that up for examination today.

Given the genocidal scale of the penalty, the least the European Commission can do is to introduce an element of judicial rigour into the process of investigation in order to be fair by Sri Lanka. The reports of UN Special Rapporteurs and Advisors were never meant to be used in judicial or quasi judicial proceedings. UN Special Rapporteurs are eminent professionals from various fields who do not receive salaries or any other financial compensation for their work. The UN only helps them with logistical support. The work of special rapporteurs is of necessity subjective and will depend in large measure on the personality, beliefs and prejudices of the individual.

There are no internal regulations that oblige them to report both sides of the story. They can be as biased or as balanced as they wish. The reports themselves are of a journalistic nature and they do not use rigorous judicial standards of evidence before they report anything. Indeed this would be an impossible task given the fact that these rapporteurs visit the countries concerned for brief periods of time and form their opinions on what they are told by people they meet. Conducting what is essentially a ‘trial’ on the basis of such reports and statements is, to put it mildly, a farce.

Most Sri Lankans would be flabbergasted to learn that their country has been accused of conscripting children into armed conflict when even adults were never conscripted. Outsiders like the three investigators appointed by the European Commission, who have probably never been to Sri Lanka, rely on reports filed by the likes of Allan Rock for their information and this is where the problem lies. In Allan Rock’s statement, the purpose of his visit was described as follows. "The purpose of Mr Rock’s visit was to ascertain first hand the situation on the ground, mainly in the north and east, with a particular focus on compliance with the action plan for children affected by conflict. The action plan was endorsed by the government and the LTTE following their commitment during peace talks in 2002 and 2003 to work with UNICEF and the government to end the recruitment of children and to release underage recruits in their ranks".

Child soldiers canard

This paragraph would give outsiders the impression that both the government and the LTTE were recruiting children. And indeed this is the impression that Allan Rock tries to convey in the rest of his statement. To outsiders unfamiliar with Sri Lanka, when Rock says that ‘the government and the LTTE’ endorsed an action plan to end the recruitment of children, it may appear that both the government and the LTTE were involved in child recruitment. But what actually happened was that following the signing of the ceasefire agreement between the government and the LTTE in April 2002, officials of UNICEF began to engage the LTTE in attempts to get child conscripts released. On June 20, 2002, a UNICEF press release announced a verbal agreement reached between Pulithevan of LTTE’s Political Wing and Senior Officials of UNICEF to the effect that the LTTE would not recruit anyone below the age of 18. At that time, there was no talk at all about the Sri Lankan government’s involvement or otherwise in child recruitment.

Following the initial agreement between the LTTE and UNICEF, the government got involved only to help in the implementation of the rehabilitation. In October 2003, the first of three transit centres for child soldiers released by the LTTE was opened in Kilinochchi with two more centres in Batticaloa and Trincomalee - all in the north and east. That itself was an indication that child recruitment was an LTTE issue which did not affect the rest of the country. Allan Rock does not refer to the proper sequence of events in his statement of November 13 and it could be very misleading to anyone not familiar with the Sri Lankan situation. Rock wrote this statement in question almost four full years after the ceasefire agreement in November 2006. By that time the LTTE had split into the Vanni faction led by Prabhakaran and the Karuna faction led by Karuna Amman - the LTTE’s eastern leader.

Rock says in his statement that the Karuna faction continues to forcibly recruit children in government controlled areas in the east. But he fails to point out that the Karuna faction is a breakaway faction of the LTTE with its work practices and attitudes formed over three decades of being part of the same organization. Rock further says that he "found strong and credible evidence that certain elements of the government security forces are supporting or sometimes participating in the abductions and forced recruitment of children by the Karuna faction". (It’s because of this part of Rock’s statement that the government is being hauled over the coals on the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child). No hint is given in Rock’s statement as to what this ‘strong and credible evidence’ is. The best test to apply in cases like this that of ‘motive’. We all know that the LTTE had a motive in recruiting children but what motive did the government have to be involved in child recruitment?

Underage conscripts are a liability to any military organization. The reason why the LTTE lost the war so ignominiously is also because they had too many forced underage recruits whose first instinct was to flee or surrender. The government which never had a dearth of adult, physically fit volunteers, had no need to recruit Tamil children or help the Karuna faction to do so either as that would only have increased the number of useless mouths that the government had to feed and look after!. Moreover, after he split from the LTTE, Karuna disbanded the 6,000 strong LTTE cadre under his command and came to Colombo. There were no real pitched battles between the LTTE and the Karuna faction. The government needed the information and support that the battle hardened members of the Karuna faction could give it, but had no need for child soldiers who had no information and would be a liability on the battlefield as well.

Rapporteur’s prejudice

In any event, in a statement of around 900 words Allan Rock has only 150 words to speak of the LTTE’s child recruitment while he has almost 300 for the child recruitment carried out by the Karuna faction. This, despite the fact that in terms of sheer numbers of children involved, the LTTE was by far the main culprit. The few words that Rock has said about the LTTE are curt and matter of fact. He said they have not yet stopped child recruitment and not released the several hundred children in their ranks either. He said he got an undertaking from the LTTE that they would accelerate the release of child soldiers. In contrast to these brief, crisp clinical statements about the LTTE, Rock waxes eloquent on the transgressions of the Karuna faction.

With regard to the LTTE, Rock uses the term ‘recruitment’ while he uses the term ‘abduct’ and ‘recruitment by abduction’ when it comes to the Karuna faction. With regard to the Karuna faction, he also uses the term ‘criminal acts’ while the same term is not used in the case of the LTTE anywhere in his statement. The choice of words alone indicates that Rock considers the same act more heinous when committed by the Karuna faction than when committed by the LTTE. His choice of words shows that he was not impartial and he reflected the general prejudice shown by the western diplomatic community in Colombo towards Karuna. It was almost as if Karuna had done something wrong in breaking away from the LTTE. Had he remained within the LTTE, he would never have faced the same criticism.