{"id":84081,"date":"2013-04-26T04:11:47","date_gmt":"2013-04-25T22:41:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=84081"},"modified":"2013-04-29T13:35:59","modified_gmt":"2013-04-29T08:05:59","slug":"sri-lankas-rights-violations-bring-commonwealth-to-turning-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/sri-lankas-rights-violations-bring-commonwealth-to-turning-point\/","title":{"rendered":"Sri Lanka\u2019s Rights Violations Bring Commonwealth To Turning Point"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Frances Harrison<\/a><\/span> –<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Frances Harrison<\/p><\/div>\n

When they decided to have a meeting at their party office in the north of the island, the four Sri Lankan MPs probably didn\u2019t expect that it would start raining concrete boulders.<\/p>\n

Before they knew it, a mob of about 60 people had surrounded the building. After half an hour of sustained assault, the roof broke and the elected representatives found themselves sheltering in the archways of the doors, as if it were an earthquake. All the while the police looked on, doing nothing. At the end, they caught a few of the attackers but quickly released them, including a man who turned out to be one of their colleagues in civilian clothes.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not the first or second time this has happened,\u201d said one of the MPs, \u201cit happens all the time and this was just a month ago\u201d.<\/p>\n

This is the way elected Tamil representatives are treated in a country that claims to be on the road to reconciliation and will soon head the Commonwealth. A Tamil newspaper in the north was recently attacked for the 37th\u00a0time \u2014 its printing press set on fire just 10 days after its distribution staff had been attacked and its request for police protection turned down.<\/p>\n

Jaffna\u00a0University\u00a0students who tried to protest peacefully last November were arrested and bundled off for forcible \u201crehabilitation\u201d. In March, grieving mothers and wives of the disappeared were prevented from travelling to the capital to stage a peaceful protest. Catholic priests who signed a letter to the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights detailing abuses have been called for questioning and intimidated.<\/p>\n

This is nothing compared to what some of the ordinary people have suffered.\u00a0ABC News<\/a><\/span>\u00a0in\u00a0Australia\u00a0just broadcasted the shocking story of a Tamil man who was raped and tortured in Sri Lanka three weeks ago. Equally disturbing is the\u00a0story\u00a0of a young Tamil woman who was gang raped<\/a><\/span> for 47 days in custody as recently as last November and the broader pattern of sexual abuse which the\u00a0Human Rights Watch\u00a0documented<\/a><\/span> from 75 case histories. An extraordinary\u00a0film<\/a><\/span>\u00a0made secretly inside the country by anonymous social scientists has revealed the extent of continuing sexual abuse of former female combatants by soldiers, with a Tamil woman explaining how she was routinely taken to the local army camp and sexually coerced by different men.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no will for reconciliation; this is the victor\u2019s peace,\u201d commented Paikasothy Saravanamuttu, who runs the Centre for Policy Alternatives in\u00a0Colombo. \u201cWe have descended into a darkness back home,\u201d he told the Commonwealth Journalists Association in\u00a0London\u00a0recently, explaining that the media in\u00a0Sri Lanka\u00a0has to \u201cput up or shut up\u201d.<\/p>\n

Lack of rule of law has become a problem for everyone in\u00a0Sri Lanka, not just Tamils. \u00a0A disturbing new wave of\u00a0Islamaphobia<\/a><\/span>\u00a0championed by extremist Sinhala chauvinist monks has seen\u00a0Muslim businesses<\/a><\/span>\u00a0attacked with total impunity and drawings featuring pigs and swear words scrawled on mosque walls. Families in the capital who tried to hold a\u00a0candlelit vigil<\/a><\/span>\u00a0to protest the attacks on Muslims found themselves arrested and abused.<\/p>\n

Even the country\u2019s top judge hasn\u2019t received justice. The illegal impeachment of Justice Bandaranayake<\/a><\/span> has been condemned by every possible\u00a0international legal body<\/a><\/span>.\u00a0At the launch of a recent International Bar Association\u00a0report<\/a><\/span>, the author, Sadakat Kadri, said the chief justice\u2019s legal team was given only 12 hours to study 989 pages of evidence. After a day and a half, her accusers had deliberated and written a 35 page report.\u00a0 Kadri said they had \u201cmade up the rules as it went along\u201d and he elaborated on a number of conflicts of interest, including nine cases where the new chief justice (a former legal adviser to the government and ex Attorney General) had simply failed to prosecute serious crimes committed against government critics.<\/p>\n

It is perhaps not surprising that the Commonwealth lawyers\u2019 meeting in\u00a0South Africa\u00a0last week unanimously passed a\u00a0resolution<\/a><\/span>\u00a0calling for\u00a0Sri Lanka\u00a0to be suspended from the organisation \u2014 rather than run it for the next two years and host its major summit meeting this November.\u00a0Nigeria\u2019s former chief justice, Justice Muhammad Lawal Uwais, said the case of\u00a0Sri Lanka\u00a0was similar to the coup in\u00a0Fiji, which the Commonwealth did not allow to go ignored.<\/p>\n

On April 26, a group of foreign ministers from the Commonwealth known as the\u00a0Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group<\/a><\/span>\u00a0will meet in\u00a0London\u00a0chaired by\u00a0Bangladesh. This group is charged with enforcing human rights and democratic principles and yet strangely they don\u2019t even have\u00a0Sri Lanka\u00a0on their official agenda. To its credit,\u00a0Canada\u00a0will make sure\u00a0Sri Lanka\u00a0is raised in the \u201cOther Matters of Interest to Ministers\u201d section and will call for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting to be held elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Many believe April 26 will be a turning point for the 54-nation body \u2014 a test of the body\u2019s shared values and recent commitment to institutional reform.<\/p>\n

If the Ministerial Action Group doesn\u2019t act it will mean the other 53 nations have no problem at all being headed by the only country in the world to have two chief justices, not to mention a state accused by two United Nations reports of war crimes and crimes against humanity.<\/p>\n

*Frances Harrison is the author of\u00a0Still Counting the Dead<\/a><\/span>: Survivors of Sri Lanka\u2019s Hidden War\u00a0and a former BBC Correspondent in\u00a0Sri Lanka.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[…]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":70218,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,46,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-colombotelegraph","category-constitutional-reforms","category-editorial"],"yoast_head":"\nSri Lanka\u2019s Rights Violations Bring Commonwealth To Turning Point - Colombo Telegraph<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/sri-lankas-rights-violations-bring-commonwealth-to-turning-point\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sri Lanka\u2019s Rights Violations Bring Commonwealth To Turning Point - 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