On Easter, Christians the world over celebrate the risen Lord, a joyful time following a season of fasting, self-sacrifice, and reconciliation. This year, on Easter, the world was shocked with the news of multiple suicide bombings in Sri Lanka. After 10 years of peace, the people of Sri Lanka were thrust back into violence, similar to and different from the turmoil of 1983-2009, which was an ethnic rather than religious conflict.
The events on Easter are now well-known. There is little point in repeating the numbers of attacks or the numbers of killed and injured. But two numbers should still stand out, first that the attacks on Easter resulted in one of the greatest loss of lives in a terrorist attack since September 11, and second that on a single day the number killed by suicide bombers amounted to more than one-fourth of those killed at the hands of Liberation Tigers of Tamil (LTTE) suicide bombers in a quarter century of civil war. Until the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Sri Lanka had suffered more suicide bombings than any other country in history during the civil war with the LTTE (Data available from the Global Terrorism Database, at https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd).
The government and military of Sri Lanka ended that war in 2009, eliminating the threat from the LTTE, which was one of the world's most brutal terrorist organisations. The LTTE was banned by over 30 countries, including the United States and Sri Lanka.
Victims of war
With the demise of the LTTE, Sri Lanka began to enjoy a period of peace and prosperity unknown to an entire generation, with funds previously devoted to the war effort instead dedicated to development. However, the end of the conflict also brought harsh criticism amid concerns of human rights violations, particularly with respect to civilian casualties incurred during the final years.
All casualties are tragic, civilian casualties especially so given the defenceless nature of these particular victims of war. The deliberate targeting of civilians is certainly prohibited under customary and codified international law, with military tribunals holding accountable those who do so. Several proceedings took place resulting from exceptionally rare instances of such events in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with the U.S. holding its own account for these senseless acts.
National courts, such as those constituted by the U.S. to address violations of the law of armed conflict, remain the primary means for judicial due process. The U.S. and Sri Lanka previously affirmed this in 2003 with an agreement regarding the International Criminal Court (ICC), recognizing the ICC as a complement to national criminal jurisdiction, not a replacement for it.
Although it has been nearly 10 years since the end of the civil war with the Tamil Tigers, Sri Lanka should be permitted to pursue any violations of the law of armed conflict within its own criminal justice system, not through the ICC or some other international process that seeks to supplant its national jurisdiction.
Rehabilitation programmes
Those deliberating targeting civilians should certainly be held accountable, but so should those among the Tamil Tigers who refused to permit civilians to evacuate areas of conflict, holding them hostages as human shields, shooting those attempting to flee the conflict, and forcibly recruiting child soldiers throughout the conflict, even in its final phases (From Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History, by Nira Wickramasinghe).
But upon ending the civil war, the government of Sri Lanka did not wholesale incarcerate the defeated Tamil Tigers. The senior military and political leadership were imprisoned, to prevent any resurgence of the group, but extensive and expensive de-radicalization and rehabilitation programmes were developed for former Tamil fighters, to reintegrate them into Sri Lankan civil society. The success of the programmes can be demonstrated simply by the lack of any terrorist attack within Sri Lanka for nearly 10 years until the events on Easter (From Sri Lanka's Rehabilitation Programme, A New Frontier in Counter Terrorism and Counter Insurgency, by Malkanthi Hettiarachchi). The criticism directed at the government of Sri Lanka, with muted criticism directed at the Tamil Tigers for their history of suicide bombings, their use of human shields, recruitment of child soldiers, and other human rights violations, resulted in unnecessarily ostracizing Sri Lanka from much of the international community. Although Sri Lanka chose reconciliation, rather than wholesale prosecution and warehousing of an entire group of people, Sri Lanka was pushed towards pariah status.
Nevertheless, this spirit of reconciliation continued even after the suicide bombings on Easter, with the pastor of the Zion Church, bombed in Batticaloa, the Reverend Roshan Mahesan, stating love and forgiveness for the suicide bombers and those who sent them.
This, despite an ongoing terrorist threat, with Christian Church services cancelled for over several weeks since the bombings. And rather than turning insular at a time of crisis, the government of Sri Lanka reached out to the international community for assistance, even to those critical of the previous war effort. It is time for that same international community to end its criticism of Sri Lanka, to reconcile with a nation and people that suffered greatly during a quarter century of conflict and to recognize the substantial efforts that the government, the military, and even Sri Lankan civil society have made to bring peace to a long-troubled corner of the world.
(The writer is an unaffiliated researcher based in Las Vegas, Nevada.)
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