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When Saladin took Jerusalem in 1187 the Christian population holed up in the city feared it would be put to the sword and its women violated. In 1099 when the First Crusade captured the Holy City the massacre of the Muslim population was horrific; every living thing, man, woman and child, dog and cat was slaughtered, quite literally in the name of god. Christendom feared that Saladin would seek vengeance 88 years later; instead he resolved to display the superiority of his faith and civilization to barbarian Europe. His treatment of the Christian population, as much as his military valour, made him a legend in Europe much romanticised by the likes of Sir Walter Scott (The Talisman). El Malik en-Naser Salaha ed-Din Yousouf ibn-Ayoub, though chronicled as the greatest Arab warrior, was not an Arab at all; a Kurd he came to the helm as a young man when his uncle, the ruler of Egypt, died of overeating. Richard Lion Heart, leading the Third Crusade, repaid the debt when he captured the fortress at Acre, four years later and then put to the sword 3,000 of Saladin’s men who he had taken prisoner! Such is the tangled story of man’s inhumanity to man, the backdrop to what we call human rights violations and war crimes these days.
National sovereignty the curse of human-rights
Human-rights as enforceable against sovereign states and internationally justiciable is new, but respect for ones fellow beings has been around for millennia. The shining beacon is the Maurya emperor Asoka when he determined to follow in the steps of the Buddha. Nearly two millennia later another Indian emperor, the enlightened Mogul Akbar was so enamoured of the knowledge of all civilisations that his reign is remembered for its tolerance. With Asoka it was compassion, with Saladin the greatness of Islam, and with Akbar the love of learning; it came from the inside, from the person, from the soul if you will. It went away when the helmsman was no more; Akbar’s grandson Aurangzeb was a fanatic, cruel, intolerant and bigoted. The great religions taught love of one’s neighbour, the brotherhood of man, compassion for all beings, or respect for the universal omega, but the institutional manifestations of these religions have not hesitated to slaughter the infidel in the name of god, the good book, the nation state, or the cleansing of the motherland.
The state, in essence, is an institution for subjugating citizens and holding them in thrall to the purveyors of power. States do various things like collect taxes, build schools and coddle political thieves, but their quintessential function is control and domination; stop for a moment and think of the institutions of state and political power all around you. Therefore, anything that forces accountability on a ‘sovereign state’ in the court of world opinion is a forward step. Global technology, cultural intercourse and commerce tear down barriers and make shared humanity ascendant over farcical sovereignty. As the number of states proliferate and the lesser ones flex their pigmy muscles, their sovereign function is increasingly limited to crushing their own people. They survive by borrowing, maybe from the IMF, from China or elsewhere, militarily they live by the writ of a giant neighbour, culturally they are piffle unless they commune with the world, but they are giants of repression.
Nihal Jayawickrama (NJ) noted that ascendancy of human-rights over national sovereignty had its genesis in breaking the slave trade when ships of any nation could accost others suspected of plying the trade (Sunday Island 28 March). Today’s state-enamoured nationalists will see here a violation of sovereignty on the high seas and neoconservatives would bemoan interference with free trade. But a more powerful moral imperative overrode these objections, then and now. NJ traces this history in a narrative through treaties, conventions (Geneva), and UN covenants. He might have added the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution’s ‘Rights of Man’ to the storyline. The Enlightenment brought about a gestalt shift in attitudes, changed philosophical paradigms, and underwrote the rise of capitalism.
It is a paradox that the rise of capitalism tears down barriers between nations, more so in the age of globalisation, and at the same time multiplies the nation state count – how many members does the UN now have, 160 something? The answer to the paradox is two fold; first the sovereign state is a sub-unit for the management and subjugation of peoples within ethnic or historically meaningful boundaries, hence it serves the needs of pluralism within a globally integrated world. The other half of the story is that pigmy states exist in fealty to great ones or in the interstices between them. What is the sovereignty of Haiti today? Nil, it is broken and destitute; the world has to fix it; ditto Ethiopia, Eritrea, much of West Africa, Costa Rica, North Korea and dozens more. And what pray is Lanka’s sovereign independence? We live by our wits playing hide-and-seek between India, China, Japan, the West and the IMF.
In reply to NJ, Dayan Jayatilleke (DJ), writing in the Island of 1 April, indulged in formalisms and a head count of the number of mostly pigmy states, taking no account of how sovereign they really are. Even territorially giant oil rich ones in Central Asia are dependent hide-and-seek cases. In the present international context the implication of DJ’s rejection of NJ’s thesis is the rebuttal of the right of the international community to scrutinise and act against war crimes by satraps running sovereign outposts. The Sri Lankan backdrop to the NJ-DJ debate is all too obvious, it is far more important than the legal and theoretical abstractions of the debate itself.
An irreversible process
The real issue behind NJ-DJ shadow boxing is the accountability of GoSL on human rights; if your theory of state holds that GoSL is not internationally answerable for violations within its borders, then you take a DJ stance. But such thinking is now passé; the world has moved on along a unidirectional thread. I have been saying this for years and NJ puts it succinctly in his refutation of DJ on 4 April (Sunday Island): "(T)he emergence of international human rights law has resulted in a government’s treatment of its own nationals becoming the legitimate concern of the international community". This is irreversible, the pressure for ever more accountability will mount, not just on Zimbabwe, Sudan, Serbia, Sri Lanka, and the like; great powers like China and the United States are also on the spot.
Take the US example. Why is it that a vile and corrupt dictatorship is not taking charge in Iraq as American forces withdraw? Occupation usually leaves behind a client dictatorship as in Latin American banana republics, or South Korean and South Vietnamese dictatorships. The reason is that the world has changed; even mighty America now suffers in the glare of global headlights. It is answerable for the outcome in Iraq and Afghanistan and a blot on its escutcheon will be intolerable.
One does see vile regimes take root is in so-called sovereign states, sheltered from global publicity, contriving to play off some great powers against others. There is a lot of traction in that business; Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Burma, North Korea, the list is long and includes our home. Hence we have the paradox of countries which suffer the purgatory of foreign invasion coming out as relatively more democratic societies while regimes such as ours use sovereignty to cloak an opposite outcome. For this reason war crimes need to be probed by an international process since the sovereign state is the entity in the dock.
The internal dynamics
True as these international dimensions are, it is the internal dynamics that is primary in driving the processes in a country. Personalities, JR, Rajapaksa, the Bandaranaikes, governmental excess, the slide to despotism, these are all manifestations of something deeper. True the role of the individual, like condiments and seasoning, much influences the taste of a dish, but what goes on in the body of society is the meat in the pot. There have been social and ideological changes fermenting in the bowels of our nation for five decades and these constitute the primary process. The gut socio-economic transformation is the rise of the petty bourgeois to a political location from which it held sway over the state. Equally important, a chauvinist Sinhala nationalist ideology underpinned and accompanied this process, which in turn located ethnicity at centre stage. War, the suspension of rationality, the rise of a new populism hand in hand with militarism, the degeneration of public life, this is all connected.
Botched democracy and rubbing out dissent is the current state of play in this regression. The capitulation of the Kumar Rupesinghes, Victor Ivans, Sumanasiri Liyanages, Vasudevas and to a degree even the DJs (I hate to be personal, but without names no one will get what I am driving at) follows from their recognition of what, I presume, they would see as the inevitability of this erosion. They will not couch it in my vocabulary but they have suspended judgement - with eyes wide open – and decided to throw in their lot with the regime and with this process. One may say their choice is politically degenerate, but there is a raw historical truth to the recognition that this profoundly reactionary regression which has been maturing over time, is hard to reverse. Others who cannot bring themselves to capitulate need to baton down the hatches for the long haul and learn to work with sustained resolve, but in a treacherous and dangerous political milieu. They must ponder old Socrates who defined courage as presence of mind.
