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Transitional Justice and Reconciliation

in Sri Lanka
©2018 Dr Romesh Senewiratne-Alagaratnam

In March 2018 a short article was published online in The Diplomat titled
“Transitional Justice in Sri Lanka: From Denial to Delay”. It was authored by a
Swiss-trained Indian lawyer by the name of Yashasvi Nain, who the article says
is working as a Programme Officer at the Commonwealth Human Rights
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Initiative where he leads its international advocacy program at the UN Human

Rights Council. His Linkedin profile says that he studied at the Rajiv Gandhi
National University of Law (Punjab) from 2008-2013 followed by training in
international criminal law and International refugee law at the University of
Geneva. He has also worked with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for
Human Rights and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The former Indian
Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by a female Tamil Tiger (LTTE)
suicide bomber in 1991.

Nain claims that Sri Lanka has failed to live up to its promises and that a UN
report by the Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights “specifically
highlights the delays in constituting the long promised transitional justice
mechanism on the atrocities and human rights abuses committed by both the
Government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)”.

The LTTE was militarily defeated in May 2009, when its military leader, who
had led the organization’s “armed struggle” for “Tamil Eelam”, Vellupillai
Prabakaran, was killed. This ended a 30-year civil war, but not the calls for
“Tamil Eelam” among the Tamil expatriates who had backed the Tamil Tigers
and the separatist war. The “struggle” for Tamil Eelam was continued by the
so-called “Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam” (TGTE) headed by the
Tamil Tigers’ New York-based lawyer Visuvanathan Rudrakumaran, who calls
himself the ‘Prime Minister’ of the TGTE. The TGTE has established offices in 10
nations, namely the USA, UK, Canada, Norway, Germany, Italy, France,
Switzerland, New Zealand and Australia, but notably not in India or Sri Lanka.
Sri Lanka formerly banned the TGTE, which still flies the LTTE flags at its events
and broadcasts (despite the LTTE being banned as a terrorist organization in
several nations in which the TGTE is active). Wikipedia describes the TGTE as a
“government in exile” but the organization is a farce and does not have the
support of the vast majority of Sri Lankan Tamils. The TGTE claims to be
democratic (unlike the LTTE) and committed to achieving Tamil Eelam by
peaceful political means, but has wasted a lot of money trying to mount
vexatious legal action against the Sri Lankan military leaders that defeated the
LTTE and charge the Sri Lankan government with ‘genocide’. In truth, if there
was genocide committed in Sri Lanka, it was conducted by the LTTE, and not

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the government. It was the LTTE that tried to rid the “north and east” of Sri
Lanka of Singhalese and Muslims.

The legal concept of ‘transitional justice’ was developed after the Nuremberg
Trials following World War Two, when Nazi and Japanese war criminals were
tried by military tribunals and imprisoned or executed. It was justice of the
victors, followed by efforts to de-Nazify Germany. However, under Operation
Paperclip many of those involved in atrocities, including psychological warfare,
human experimentation and collection of human tissue for study, were not
prosecuted. Both the Soviets and the Allies competed for known war criminals
with what was regarded as valuable scientific knowledge.

According to the Nuremberg precedent, it is Sri Lanka and the Sri Lankan
military who should be trying the defeated forces – the LTTE – which started a
separatist war, with foreign backing, in 1977. This was a war of aggression and
it is a war crime to start a war. The war was also a front in the Cold War,
something that is not fully appreciated and little written about. However, a
close study of the war in Sri Lanka, the Korean War and the Vietnam War as
related fronts in the Allied war on Asia, helps one understand the duplicitous
role that several ‘Western’ nations played in the war and why the separatist
propagandists talked about the Tigers being armed with “AK 47s” (Russian-
made Kalashnikov assault rifles) which are depicted on the Tamil Tiger flag,
along with a ring of AK 47 bullets surrounding a charging Chola Tiger. The LTTE
claimed to be secular and socialist, but never democratic. The military wing
was hierarchical, and Prabakaran was the boss of the military wing, but the
LTTE’s international operations were more opaque and less hierarchical. The
Tamil Tigers were big on cult-worship, fear, violence and terrorism but small on
ideology.

Transitional justice includes judicial measures, like criminal prosecutions and

non-judicial measures like truth commissions and reparation programs. Nain
wrote in March this year that “the government had not yet made public the
draft Bills for a Reparations Office and a Truth and Reconciliation Commission”.
He fails to mention the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC)
that was held immediately after the war. The LLRC made several sensible

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recommendations and was not the government white-wash its critics had
predicted it would be.

The matter of reparations is one that needs holistic appraisal. Who should
compensate the people in Sri Lanka who suffered in this war and how should
the compensation and reparations be paid? To settle this matter the war needs
to be looked at in its entirety, and those who profiteered through the war (and
there were many war profiteers) should be identified and charged. It is those
who waged war against the small but sovereign nation of Sri Lanka that should
pay reparations. The governments that overtly or, more usually, covertly
supported the LTTE included India, Britain, the USA, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, Norway and Israel. The USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand
form the ‘Five Eyes’ (or Eschelon) alliance, that shares intelligence and runs
joint psy-ops. The ex-Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky wrote in his book By Way
of Deception how the Mossad (the Israeli secret service) trained both the Sri
Lankan forces and the Tamil Tigers, at the same time.

Nain does not mention reparations by the LTTE’s backers and focuses on
allegations of human rights abuses by the Sri Lankan government, police and
military. It is common knowledge, however, that India armed and trained the
LTTE and rival Tamil gangs of youths before unleashing them on Sri Lanka in
the early 1980s. Later India sent troops to Sri Lanka (the IPKF or Indian Peace-
Keeping Force) to disarm the gangs it had trained and the only gang that
refused to disarm was the LTTE. The LTTE had, by then, eliminated the rival
Tamil leadership of other separatist gangs (‘armed groups’). They also
murdered several Tamil leaders who they accused of being ‘traitors’ for being
prepared to work with the Colombo government, including the much-loved
Tamil mayor of Jaffna Alfred Duraiappah, who was killed by Prabakaran himself
in 1975. The mayor was in his sixties and had gone to a Hindu temple to pray,
though he was a Christian, and was gunned down after he greeted the young
Tamil lads who had taken out the contract to kill him. The gang was led by
Prabakaran who was 21 and had formed his first armed gang, called the Tamil
New Tigers (TNT), in 1972, when he was only 17 years old.

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Though Prabakaran was known as the leader of the LTTE, the self-declared
“theoretician and strategist” of the organization was an older man by the
name of Anton Balasingham. In traditional Tamil culture the older brother –
anna – has rank and authority over the younger brother – thambi. In the LTTE
Balasingham was known as “Anna”, while Prabakaran was known as “Thambi”.
Balasingham was the brains while Prabakaran was the brawn. But the real
brains behind Balasingham was his second wife, the Australian-born and
trained nurse Adele Ann Wilby, who met Balasingham in England when he was
nursing his terminally ill wife Pearl, and married him in 1978. It was she who
wrote the notes at the repeatedly unsuccessful peace talks that the LTTE held
with the Sri Lankan government, in which her husband was the chief
negotiator and “strategist” for the LTTE.

Anton Balasingham was raised a Roman Catholic but became a self-professed

Marxist. Marx famously said that religion is the opium of the masses. In the
1960s Balasingham worked in Colombo as a journalist and editor, translating
foreign news into Tamil, before getting a job as a translator (Tamil and English)
for the British High Commission. It was the British High Commission that
arranged for him to go with his wife Pearl, who he had married in 1968, for
medical treatment in England. This was in 1971 and she died in 1976, with a
diagnosis of chronic renal failure due to chronic pyelonephritis. During her
illness Balasingham met Adele, who had trained as a nurse in Warragul in rural
Victoria (in Australia).

Balasingham was recruited into the LTTE by the organization’s London

representative and moved to Tamil Nadu with Adele. In 1986 he accompanied
Prabakaran when the LTTE leader met Rajiv Gandhi, the Indian Prime Minister
who he later assassinated using a programmed suicide bomber. The
Balasingham couple orchestrated the LTTE’s activities from Madras, but moved
to Jaffna, temporarily, in 1987. In 1987 war erupted between the Indian Peace
Keeping Forces (IPKF) and the Tamil Tigers and the Balasinghams fled back to
London.

In 1990 the Balasinghams returned to Sri Lanka to lead the LTTE delegation in
the peace talks in Colombo. The peace talks failed, but the IPKF withdrew and
the Tamil Tigers took over the Jaffna peninsula. The Balasinghams were in
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Jaffna at this time, when the LTTE gave Muslim citizens 24 hours to get out of
Jaffna or be killed in a clear act of “ethnic cleansing”. Ethnic cleansing is a
euphemism for genocide. The LTTE’s intent was to rid ‘Tamil Eelam’ of both the
Singhalese and the Muslims, who were mostly Tamil-speaking as their mother
tongue, but identified themselves as Muslims, Moors or Sri Lankans rather
than ‘Tamils’.

After the Sri Lankan Armed Forces retook the Jaffna Peninsula in 1995, the
LTTE forced thousands of Tamil civilians to accompany them as a human shield,
as they retreated into the jungles of the Vanni, where they established what
they called their ‘capital’ in the village of Kilinochchi. This was when Adele
Balasingham was filmed by an Australian film crew handing out necklaces of
cyanide to young Tamil girls – ‘cadres’ of the ‘Women’s Wing’ of which she was
the boss. They respectfully called her “Aunty”. The girls were ordered to
swallow the cyanide if they were captured, and terrorised that they would be
raped and tortured by the “brutal” Sri Lankan soldiers if they were taken alive.
They were told to swallow the poison to “protect their honour”. The real
reason was to protect the secrets of the organization. Cyanide poisoning is a
particularly unpleasant way to die.

The Balasinghams returned to London in 1999 and flew on to Oslo, Norway,

after Anton Balasingham developed renal failure (he was a long-standing
diabetic). In Oslo he had a kidney transplant with a kidney donated by a young
Tamil Sri Lankan and was able to continue his political leadership of the LTTE,
leading discussions with the Norwegian government that resulted in the
February 2002 ceasefire followed by peace talks in Thailand, Norway,
Germany, Japan and Switzerland. These talks were not held in good faith by
the LTTE, which used the opportunity to collect funds and prepare for the next
“Eelam War”.

It has been said that truth is the first casualty of war. Balasingham was a
propagandist. He was based in London, the centre of dissemination of British
colonial and neo-colonial propaganda, and worked for the British High
Commission. The British gave him a base to wage war against the sovereign
nation of Sri Lanka that they used to rule as the Dominion of Ceylon. The
British continued to arm and train the Sri Lankan military while also giving a
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base to the LTTE in London and elsewhere in Britain. After the war ended they
are providing a base for the TGTE, which still flies the LTTE flag and is actively
rewriting history and concealing the truth about the LTTE and its crimes against
humanity. Furthermore, Sri Lanka is not the only nation in which Britain has
contributed to warfare and division. “Divide and rule” was an accepted
strategy of the British imperialists and colonists, and employed throughout
what is now called the Commonwealth of Nations.

After she returned to England from Sri Lanka, Adele Balasingham wrote the
autobiographical The Will to Freedom about her years as the boss of the LTTE’s
women’s wing. In it she argued that the fact that the LTTE allowed women to
fight was a sign of women’s liberation and the fact that that they wore cyanide
necklaces was a sign of their commitment to the cause. Nothing could be
further from the truth. The young women were carefully programmed,
through slogans and images of the “leader” to be prepared to sacrifice their
lives to protect the secrets and especially the whereabouts of the mainly male
leadership. The suicide bombers were given their own name – the Black Tigers
– and their last meal was the “honour” of dinner with Prabakaran himself.
Balasingham and the real masterminds of the LTTE created a cult figure out of
Prabakaran and promoted a glorified image of the killer as a “liberator of
Tamils” in Tamil Nadu and among the Tamil ‘Diaspora’ (expatriates). This
propaganda is readily evident on the Internet, but began before there was an
Internet.

Transitional Justice

Transitional justice includes both judicial measures such as criminal

prosecutions and non-judicial measures like truth commissions and reparations
programs.

Transitional justice implies transition from authoritarian, repressive regimes or

civil conflicts to a more peaceful, democratic future. This is part of the
movement to promote democracy as a system of government, as opposed to

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the Chinese (or Communist) system. The LTTE claimed to be Marxists and to be
against the caste system, but in practice the war involved poor “low caste”
Tamils in Sri Lanka being killed and maimed and being indoctrinated into a
suicidal, militaristic mindset while the rich “high caste” Tamils enjoyed the
luxury of professional life in the West, while sending money to buy weapons
for the poor Tamils and Singhalese to be killed. Millions of dollars were
collected every year in the USA and UK, and later in Canada and Europe.
Meanwhile the sob stories of would-be asylum seekers and refugees were
repeated without due scrutiny by various Western NGOs, human rights
organizations and media outlets. Over the 30 years of the war the LTTE built up
a considerable international propaganda network.

The fact is that Sri Lanka has had a democratic system of government since it
obtained independence from Britain. Though President Mahinda Rajapaksa
was widely denounced in the West as “dictatorial” and “authoritarian”, when
he lost the election in 2015 he left power without calling in the military to
protect his “rule” as some of his enemies predicted he would. The efforts to
demonise President Rajapaksa and his brother Lt Col Gotabaya Rajapaksa were
extreme, with comparisons with Hitler’s regime by people entirely devoid of
historical knowledge and good sense.

Criminal prosecutions for transitional justice can be held in international or

domestic courts. Sri Lanka is not a signatory to the Rome Statute that
established the International Criminal Court (ICC), but there are several
individuals who led the LTTE that live in countries that have, including Adele
Balasingham and Visuvanathan Rudrakumaran.

After the war many LTTE cadres and leaders were given amnesty after de-
radicalisation and rehabilitation by the Sri Lankan government. Some were
given employment in the military and have been involved in the dangerous
work of clearing mines. The progress of mine-clearing in Sri Lanka compares
well with the situation in other nations in which landmines have been sown. As
part of the transitional justice measures the end-user certificates and sales and
use of landmines by both sides should be examined, as well as the source of
other weapons, including chemical weapons like cyanide and explosives.
Possible links to Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) and Orica (the ICI subsidiary
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based in Australia that exports cyanide, explosives and electronic detonators)

should be explored as part of the investigation into the truth about the war
and who profited from it.

Truth Commissions

Some of the questions that might be investigated by the truth commission:

1. Who sold the weapons and who purchased them?

2. What weapons were bought by Prabakaran and his outfit since 1972?
3. Trace end-user certificates for weapons
4. How many casualties from LTTE attacks?
5. How many injured in LTTE attacks?
6. How many fatalities from LTTE attacks?
7. Names of civilians killed by LTTE
8. Ages of civilians killed by LTTE
9. Mode of death/cause of death as per death certificate if issued
10. Names of people killed in LTTE attacks
11.Names of civilians and armed forces injured by LTTE
12.Names of civilians killed/injured in government attacks
13.Names of injured requiring hospital care
14.Names of hospitals treating injured
15.Nature of treated injuries
16.List of drugs used in treatments
17.Fatalities/deaths in hospital
18.Cause and mode of death as recorded by hospital
19.DNA analysis of remains
20.Names of missing persons in all 3 languages

According to Wikipedia, transitional justice aims at

1. Halting ongoing human rights abuses

2. Identifying past crimes
3. Identifying those responsible for human rights violations
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4. Imposing sanctions on those responsible

5. Providing reparations to victims
6. Preventing future abuses
7. Security sector reform
8. Preserving and enhancing peace
9. Fostering individual and national reconciliation

Nain claims that there is ongoing torture by Sri Lankan police and that “attacks,
death threats, surveillance and harassment of human rights defenders and
victims of violations has continued”. This needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
Sri Lanka has a history of being maligned by India and the West by critics who
fail to examine their own countries for egregious human rights abuses. The
psychiatric system in the UK and India are cases in point. There is also the
problem of embellished or false reports by Sri Lankans seeking asylum in the
West, for which they need to prove ongoing persecution. This is a big industry,
which the TGTE boss Rudrakumaran is part of as a “refugee lawyer”.

Regarding the identification of past crimes it is worth noting that in the

Nuremberg Trials the crimes of the ANZAC and Allied victors were not
investigated or prosecuted. The Sri Lankan government has extended amnesty
to many thousands of LTTE cadres that have committed crimes against the
state, and chosen not to prosecute known LTTE leaders who cooperated with
the armed forces, police and government. This has only been done if people
have renounced violence. Some of the recalcitrant LTTE fighters are still in jail.
It is reasonable to ask that these people be charged or released and their
names made available for the missing persons investigations.

Imposing sanctions on those responsible requires tracing the LTTE funding and
propaganda networks, which are international and requires an international
policing effort. This is a job for the Sri Lankan police and Interpol.

Providing reparations to victims requires the identification of the victims and

identification of the perpetrators of their suffering. These perpetrators are
those who financed and orchestrated the war, especially those who
duplicitously supported both sides in the war.

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Preventing future abuses, in this case preventing a return to conflict, is a

complex matter that I have given thought to for many years. In 2002 I
developed my first Peace Plan for Sri Lanka, a 40-proposal peace plan of which
the first proposal was the promotion of tri-lingual education in Sinhala, Tamil
and English from primary school onwards. This will break down the language
barrier that is one of the roots of the conflict. The other proposals in my peace
plan can be found by searching “Peace Plan for Sri Lanka” on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAkLVReimbw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rrJA3xnoUk

Reform of the Sri Lankan military and police (the security system) is ongoing
and there have been efforts to recruit and train Tamil-speaking and ethnic
Tamil youths to serve in the armed forces and police. This is welcome. Cultural
exchange is the best way to heal divisions.

Sri Lanka has long had laws against torture, but there have not been
prosecutions of police and security forces for torture, as far as I know. This
implies a culture of impunity, as has been alleged. It should be noted, however,
that torture is engaged in by the Western armed forces as well, and to a
greater degree. There is also the systematic torture of “mental patients” in the
West, with the same abusive drugs and treatments being used both by the
LTTE (they ran a ‘psychiatric hospital’) and the Sri Lankan government. The
chemical restraints used in the West are also used in Sri Lanka and the Western
diagnostic system, which constitutes labels of incurable disease, blamed on
“chemical imbalances” is used around the world, including Sri Lanka, under the
influence of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the British Royal
College of Psychiatrists, which has trained successive generations of senior Sri
Lankan psychiatrists.

The Sri Lankan military have shown exemplary leadership to the world in
combating terrorism and making peace after the long war. Several military
leaders gave up their military careers and entered the diplomatic service,
actively promoting reconciliation and peace-building, like General Shavendra
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Silva. The military were involved in de-radicalising the LTTE cadres and
rehabilitating them for civilian life as well as reconstruction projects. They
were also involved in business ventures in tourism and agriculture in what had
been LTTE-controlled areas and is still claimed by the separatists as “Tamil
Eelam”. These have been criticised, with some justification. The separatists are
angry that talk of separatism is against Sri Lankan law, and angry at the
presence of military bases in “Tamil areas”. They are also angry, and have been
for many decades, about what was unfortunately termed “colonization
schemes” where poor Singhalese were given land and settled in the Eastern
Province in areas (around Batticaloa and Trincomalee) that had mainly been
inhabited by Tamils (and Muslims, who were mainly Tamil-speaking, though
many were bilingual or trilingual). Granting land to the landless should be
based on need, not religion or ethnicity. Everyone needs a home.

One of the root causes of the conflict was the division of Tamils and Singhalese
in the education system. This worsened in the 1970s with laws that were
intended to foster the national languages of Sinhala and Tamil at the expense
of English. When I studied at Trinity College in the 1970s boys whose parents
were ‘Sinhalese’ had to study in the “Sinhala medium”, boys with Tamil
parents had to study in Tamil, while those boys with mixed parentage
(Singhalese/Tamil), were Muslim (Moor or Malay) or Burger were allowed to
study in English, Sinhala or Tamil. It was a disastrous policy. It also led to many
English-speaking professionals leaving the country for their children’s
education. This had been the intent; the measures were taken partly to
counter the so-called “brain drain”, where Ceylonese professionals, fluent in
English, were accepting better paid jobs with better conditions in the West,
notably doctors and engineers.

These are some of my suggestions for preserving and enhancing peace:

 Promote trilingualism and multilingualism

 Wealth redistribution to poor
 Land redistribution to landless and needy
 Education – a computer for every classroom aiming towards a
laptop/tablet for every student
 Health promotion not drug promotion
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 Holistic approach to health

 Program of reforestation
 Promote nature awareness and love of nature
 Restriction of weapons to military and police
 Security cameras
 Electricity grid access
 National electricity grid
 Focus on renewable/sustainable/green energy
 Reconstruction – roads, railways, schools
 Green architecture and housing
 Develop hi-tech industry and training
 Promote Colombo as beautiful metropolis
 Promote ecotourism

Fostering individual and national reconciliation is a simple matter if people

identify as Sri Lankan rather than according to their language, religion or ethnic
group. Patriotism is to be encouraged along with Sri Lankan nationalism rather
than tribalism. However, reconciliation between rival Singhalese, Tamil and
Muslim views of Sri Lankan history is not easy – there are deep differences in
the myths and legends that are venerated by Singhalese Buddhists, Singhalese
Christians, Tamil Hindus, Tamil Christians and Sri Lankan Muslims. Every
religion has its own myths and legends about human origins and history, often
at odds with each other. There are deep differences between the beliefs of
Catholics and Protestants and between members of the different Protestant
churches.

Then there is the scientific view, which reports that the first human remains
found in the island, those of Balangoda Man, date back to more than 30,000
years ago. The view of archaeology is also a scientific view; the archaeologist
Paul Pieris surmised a century ago, that when Prince Vijaya arrived in the
country, according to the Mahawamsa legend on the day of the Buddha’s
death (543 BC) there were already several Hindu (Shaivite) temples on the
island. More recent archaeological studies in the ancient city of Anuradhapura,

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long the capital of the Rajarata kingdom shows evidence of settlement several
hundred years before the legendary arrival of Prince Vijaya. Reconciliation
does not require one to accept the other’s perspective on all matters, however.
Diversity in beliefs and views is to be encouraged, along with respect for
different opinions; tribalism, racism and intolerance are not.

Finally, Sri Lanka needs transnational justice as well as transitional justice. The
nations that attacked Sri Lanka’s sovereignty and supported the LTTE during
the 30-year war should pay reparations to the people of Sri Lanka. These
include India and the United Kingdom. Justice delayed is justice denied.

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