That great betrayal and institutional accountability

Visiting United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon’s assertion that ‘much needs to be done in order to redress wrongs of the past and restore accountability of key organizations, particularly the judiciary and the security services’ raises an interesting question.

Myopic framing of core questions

Post last year’s ‘rainbow revolution’, where is the focus on substantive institutional reforms? Let me delight in being as heretical as always and pointing out that, on the contrary, there appears to be a ‘settling’ for a straight-jacketed transitional justice package, each in separate limited components. This is quite distinct from an uncompromising insistence on state accountability for systemic wrongs. Put harshly but nonetheless justifiably, this resort to ‘settling’ is nothing but a great betrayal of long and bitterly fought struggles on fundamental failures of justice.

Lest we mistake the matter, these failures predate the grievous Medamulana affliction upon this land. Rather, every political party along with every political leader, living or dead, has to bear responsibility for the same.

But to be fair, the Government is responsible for this myopic framing of core questions only up to a certain extent. The issue of systemic accountability is a ‘hard question’ that any political regime will prefer to leave undisturbed if allowed to by citizens. This is precisely what has happened in Sri Lanka’s frantic rush towards the tempting glamour of ‘justice in transition.’

Unacceptable compromises on fundamental issues

Constitution. The issue is not really the law itself, superior or subordinate as the case may be.

So when the habeas corpus application of a mother whose sixteen year old daughter had disappeared when fleeing from the Wanni with her other family members during 2009 is met by stony silence of the defence establishment in the Vavuniya courts, there is a failure of justice. A Special Court with or without international involvement, aimed at a few military or political scapegoats, leaves that failure undisturbed.

This is also not satiated by an Office of Missing Persons (OMP) which subsumes the ‘disappeared’ under the bland euphemism of the ‘missing’ or a Truth and Reconciliation Commission both of which lack an explicit link to an effective criminal justice process or an efficacious habeas corpus remedy. . In the end, who arrives at these decisions on behalf of the victims and then claim the right to ask the victims to ‘believe’ in those choices? Making these linkages and insisting on reform of these processes would not have been met with howls of protest from the South despite Rajapaksa histrionics

Dismissing crassly simplistic arguments