Calling a “civil conflict” or “civil war” a war itself is very misleading. Wars are fought with external enemies. However, a civil conflict or civil war is a fight that takes place among the brethren, with the people who should in fact be living together as a nation. What the ties of blood could mean within a family is politically and socially speaking what exists among everyone that belongs to a nation.
Civil war is a tragedy and it could destroy the very foundation of a society and of a nation. The primary responsibility of all concerned is to avoid a situation which could lead to bloodletting between those who, whether they like it or not, are a part of the same body called the nation. While avoiding such a situation is a primary responsibility of all, the greater burden falls on the hands of those who are running the State. The primary purpose of a State is to create the necessary condition for everyone, despite their various differences, to live together within a framework of mutual trust, leading to mutual benefits.
Thus, when we talk about winning a war, we are in fact talking about a failure that has occurred which has profound implications. At the end of such an unfortunate situation, the most elementary common sense obligation for everyone, and particularly the State, is to ask where we failed. The only meaningful question that could lead to a positive result for the present and the future is to give priority to that question about the causes of the failure which created the civil war in the first place.
It is easy to engage in blame games. However, such blame games are also childish and foolish. It belittles the gravity of what is meant by a civil war and also trivialises the heavy cost in terms of lives and also material losses that individuals as well as the whole of society have suffered as a consequence of such a civil war.
To be cynical on an issue like this and to portray the whole affair in terms of various claims of triumphalism is in itself a manifestation of an extremely degenerate moral sentiment. It is said that the defining quality of civilisation is the capacity for empathy. If even a tragic situation like a civil war does not evoke feelings of empathy for all those who have suffered and all those who will further continue to suffer from such a conflict, then something has got to a deadening point in terms of sensitivity and morality. If a civil war ultimately produces a dead nation – dead psychologically, dead socially, dead emotionally, and dead institutionally – then in fact nothing has been won. The truth, then, is that we continue to lose.
To continue to lose and not be able to recognise this continuing loss can create only further distancing of the people and the paralysing of all forms of creativity within society and the nation as a whole.
That in fact is what is continuing to take place within Sri Lanka, not only in terms of a particular group of persons against whom the war may have been directed, but also towards everyone who lives within such a society.
The highest manifestation of the fact is that we are in fact -–we meaning all – are still losers.
Every major crisis that exists within Sri Lanka today can be traced to some extent or the other to these unfortunate civil wars which have happened in the South, the North, and the East ever since 1971 up to 2009. Sri Lanka, within those decades, became a place of great instability and ever-increasing poverty.
All these conflicts have contributed to Sri Lanka becoming one of the most indebted nations in the world. It is common talk today that our debt payments exceed our annual income as a nation. Thus, this indebtedness became a necessary product of having to make extreme expenditures to contribute towards this war. And that is going to continue for a long time. So long as that economic crisis deepens, there will be more and more internal conflicts of all sorts. As poverty increases, the discontent of all sectors of society will grow, and with that, there will be greater and greater conflicts, and the kind of state structure that we have has no other solution to conflict than to resort to more and more security measures to repress the people.
Social control by extreme forms of repression would thus become a permanent part of Sri Lankan life until and unless the major causes that made Sri Lanka incapable of settling its disputes through internal discourse and conversation are rectified.
Already, there are manifestations of the abuse of the powers to use administrative detentions in order to suppress every kind of dissent. As we know from past experiences, the abuse of the detention processes under the pretext of national security has been the major cause of dictatorship that we have known in history. Much-talked-about concentration camps and gas chambers during Nazi Leader Adolf Hitler’s regime started with the use of this idea of preventive detentions. When that process of preventive detention starts, where it will end is something nobody could guess. Every form of evil has its own logic. This logic also has its implications on administrative detention.
When more and more repression is needed, there is something that the authorities will find necessary to displace. And that is the law. The law in its normal sense begins to disappear and is replaced more and more with what would normally be considered illegal and even criminal. Administrative detention itself is such a measure. However, judging from the past few decades, it could go much further. It was not long ago that the disposal of dead bodies without following the normal legal procedures – such as the provision for postmortems in the case of suspicious deaths – were allowed. That was nothing more than the legalisation of murder. Such highly planned systems of murder achieved through gazette notifications could take place at any time under these circumstances.
In order to displace the law and to make the abuse of power legalised, it is necessary to weaken the Judiciary as much as possible. If the Judiciary remains strong, then the people will resort to the courts when they are threatened. When the courts are weakened, people have nowhere to go to and therefore are reduced to a pathetically helpless situation. And such a situation is created by design.
One of the most important aspects of a civilised social life is a well-functioning criminal justice system. One of the major results of the war was the destruction of Sri Lanka’s criminal justice system to a very great extent. Even the successive governments have admitted that the Police were used during the conflict times for military purposes. That meant the Police function suffered a great defeat. With large-scale deaths which have never been investigated, the criminal investigation function suffered a great fall from which it would find it most difficult to rise again. However, after the conflict periods, instead of trying to restore the criminal justice system, it has been greatly undermined by interferences into the investigative mechanism, the prosecutorial mechanism, and also the adjudication systems. It has gone to the extent of a government-appointed commission calling for the withdrawal of the indictments filed according to the law, and to punish those who investigated those crimes and even those who prosecuted them. A culture of extreme fear has been spread throughout the entirety of the system of the administration of justice.
Unable to control even the prisons in a decent manner, the use of inhumane treatment and torture has become part of the way the prisons are run in Sri Lanka, as pointed out by a preliminary report that has been published by the National Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka itself. Thus, the conditions created by the war continue and get aggravated with each day. The impending catastrophe is everyone’s prediction. However, the very system that allowed an internal conflict to degenerate into a civil war is still the supreme law of Sri Lanka, and that is the 1978 Constitution. At the root of all the major conflicts that have taken place in recent decades is the introduction of the abrogation of the principles of constitutional law by a document that in Sri Lanka is called the Constitution. The negation of constitutionalism is considered the Constitution of Sri Lanka.
In that, all power has been given to a single person. While Sri Lanka’s situation in a broader sense cannot be compared to that of Germany in the Second World War, because Sri Lanka has not been engaging either in a civil war or any external war, nor have we done crimes against humanity to the extent of the extermination of Jews and other such evils, in one respect, Sri Lanka and its constitutional situation is the same as that which was created by Hitler for his advantage. He took all the power into his hand. All simply had to obey. No independent institutions were allowed to function in any way. That situation is similar to the situation created through the 1978 Constitution and it has become worse as the times have gone by.
Thus, the 12th anniversary after the end of the war is unfortunately a moment at which we cannot say the same thing Abraham Lincoln did at the end of the great American civil war. Lincoln’s speech is known as the famous Gettysburg Address. It ends with the following words: “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolved that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that the Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”
(The writer is the Director of Policy and Programmes of the Asian Human Rights Commission)Won the ‘war’ but lost the law
13 May 2021
Won the ‘war’ but lost the law
13 May 2021
Calling a “civil conflict” or “civil war” a war itself is very misleading. Wars are fought with external enemies. However, a civil conflict or civil war is a fight that takes place among the brethren, with the people who should in fact be living together as a nation. What the ties of blood could mean within a family is politically and socially speaking what exists among everyone that belongs to a nation.
Civil war is a tragedy and it could destroy the very foundation of a society and of a nation. The primary responsibility of all concerned is to avoid a situation which could lead to bloodletting between those who, whether they like it or not, are a part of the same body called the nation. While avoiding such a situation is a primary responsibility of all, the greater burden falls on the hands of those who are running the State. The primary purpose of a State is to create the necessary condition for everyone, despite their various differences, to live together within a framework of mutual trust, leading to mutual benefits.
Thus, when we talk about winning a war, we are in fact talking about a failure that has occurred which has profound implications. At the end of such an unfortunate situation, the most elementary common sense obligation for everyone, and particularly the State, is to ask where we failed. The only meaningful question that could lead to a positive result for the present and the future is to give priority to that question about the causes of the failure which created the civil war in the first place.
It is easy to engage in blame games. However, such blame games are also childish and foolish. It belittles the gravity of what is meant by a civil war and also trivialises the heavy cost in terms of lives and also material losses that individuals as well as the whole of society have suffered as a consequence of such a civil war.
To be cynical on an issue like this and to portray the whole affair in terms of various claims of triumphalism is in itself a manifestation of an extremely degenerate moral sentiment. It is said that the defining quality of civilisation is the capacity for empathy. If even a tragic situation like a civil war does not evoke feelings of empathy for all those who have suffered and all those who will further continue to suffer from such a conflict, then something has got to a deadening point in terms of sensitivity and morality. If a civil war ultimately produces a dead nation – dead psychologically, dead socially, dead emotionally, and dead institutionally – then in fact nothing has been won. The truth, then, is that we continue to lose.
To continue to lose and not be able to recognise this continuing loss can create only further distancing of the people and the paralysing of all forms of creativity within society and the nation as a whole.
That in fact is what is continuing to take place within Sri Lanka, not only in terms of a particular group of persons against whom the war may have been directed, but also towards everyone who lives within such a society.
The highest manifestation of the fact is that we are in fact -–we meaning all – are still losers.
Every major crisis that exists within Sri Lanka today can be traced to some extent or the other to these unfortunate civil wars which have happened in the South, the North, and the East ever since 1971 up to 2009. Sri Lanka, within those decades, became a place of great instability and ever-increasing poverty.
All these conflicts have contributed to Sri Lanka becoming one of the most indebted nations in the world. It is common talk today that our debt payments exceed our annual income as a nation. Thus, this indebtedness became a necessary product of having to make extreme expenditures to contribute towards this war. And that is going to continue for a long time. So long as that economic crisis deepens, there will be more and more internal conflicts of all sorts. As poverty increases, the discontent of all sectors of society will grow, and with that, there will be greater and greater conflicts, and the kind of state structure that we have has no other solution to conflict than to resort to more and more security measures to repress the people.
Social control by extreme forms of repression would thus become a permanent part of Sri Lankan life until and unless the major causes that made Sri Lanka incapable of settling its disputes through internal discourse and conversation are rectified.
Already, there are manifestations of the abuse of the powers to use administrative detentions in order to suppress every kind of dissent. As we know from past experiences, the abuse of the detention processes under the pretext of national security has been the major cause of dictatorship that we have known in history. Much-talked-about concentration camps and gas chambers during Nazi Leader Adolf Hitler’s regime started with the use of this idea of preventive detentions. When that process of preventive detention starts, where it will end is something nobody could guess. Every form of evil has its own logic. This logic also has its implications on administrative detention.
When more and more repression is needed, there is something that the authorities will find necessary to displace. And that is the law. The law in its normal sense begins to disappear and is replaced more and more with what would normally be considered illegal and even criminal. Administrative detention itself is such a measure. However, judging from the past few decades, it could go much further. It was not long ago that the disposal of dead bodies without following the normal legal procedures – such as the provision for postmortems in the case of suspicious deaths – were allowed. That was nothing more than the legalisation of murder. Such highly planned systems of murder achieved through gazette notifications could take place at any time under these circumstances.
In order to displace the law and to make the abuse of power legalised, it is necessary to weaken the Judiciary as much as possible. If the Judiciary remains strong, then the people will resort to the courts when they are threatened. When the courts are weakened, people have nowhere to go to and therefore are reduced to a pathetically helpless situation. And such a situation is created by design.
One of the most important aspects of a civilised social life is a well-functioning criminal justice system. One of the major results of the war was the destruction of Sri Lanka’s criminal justice system to a very great extent. Even the successive governments have admitted that the Police were used during the conflict times for military purposes. That meant the Police function suffered a great defeat. With large-scale deaths which have never been investigated, the criminal investigation function suffered a great fall from which it would find it most difficult to rise again. However, after the conflict periods, instead of trying to restore the criminal justice system, it has been greatly undermined by interferences into the investigative mechanism, the prosecutorial mechanism, and also the adjudication systems. It has gone to the extent of a government-appointed commission calling for the withdrawal of the indictments filed according to the law, and to punish those who investigated those crimes and even those who prosecuted them. A culture of extreme fear has been spread throughout the entirety of the system of the administration of justice.
Unable to control even the prisons in a decent manner, the use of inhumane treatment and torture has become part of the way the prisons are run in Sri Lanka, as pointed out by a preliminary report that has been published by the National Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka itself. Thus, the conditions created by the war continue and get aggravated with each day. The impending catastrophe is everyone’s prediction. However, the very system that allowed an internal conflict to degenerate into a civil war is still the supreme law of Sri Lanka, and that is the 1978 Constitution. At the root of all the major conflicts that have taken place in recent decades is the introduction of the abrogation of the principles of constitutional law by a document that in Sri Lanka is called the Constitution. The negation of constitutionalism is considered the Constitution of Sri Lanka.
In that, all power has been given to a single person. While Sri Lanka’s situation in a broader sense cannot be compared to that of Germany in the Second World War, because Sri Lanka has not been engaging either in a civil war or any external war, nor have we done crimes against humanity to the extent of the extermination of Jews and other such evils, in one respect, Sri Lanka and its constitutional situation is the same as that which was created by Hitler for his advantage. He took all the power into his hand. All simply had to obey. No independent institutions were allowed to function in any way. That situation is similar to the situation created through the 1978 Constitution and it has become worse as the times have gone by.
Thus, the 12th anniversary after the end of the war is unfortunately a moment at which we cannot say the same thing Abraham Lincoln did at the end of the great American civil war. Lincoln’s speech is known as the famous Gettysburg Address. It ends with the following words: “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolved that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that the Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”
(The writer is the Director of Policy and Programmes of the Asian Human Rights Commission)Kapruka
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Discover Kapruka, the leading online shopping platform in Sri Lanka, where you can conveniently send Gifts and Flowers to your loved ones for any event. Explore a wide range of popular Shopping Categories on Kapruka, including Toys, Groceries, Electronics, Birthday Cakes, Fruits, Chocolates, Automobile, Mother and Baby Products, Clothing, and Fashion. Additionally, Kapruka offers unique online services like Money Remittance, Astrology, Medicine Delivery, and access to over 700 Top Brands. Also If you’re interested in selling with Kapruka, Partner Central by Kapruka is the best solution to start with. Moreover, through Kapruka Global Shop, you can also enjoy the convenience of purchasing products from renowned platforms like Amazon and eBay and have them delivered to Sri Lanka.Send love straight to their heart this Valentine's with our thoughtful gifts!