Like in Israel-Palestine, the issue at hand in Sri Lanka is the peaceful coexistence of two peoples with deep mistrust towards each other.
When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?
-Eleanor Roosevelt
The ongoing tragedy taking place in Israel-Palestine is in some crucial ways a rescript of what took place in Sri Lanka more than a decade ago. The same basic features are to be seen—terrorism, unimaginable atrocities, military confrontations on land, sea and air, and in the last phase, a hostage problem of epic proportions when Sri Lankan army encircled the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and 300,000 civilians in the last pocket of resistance. Even as the world watches in anguish and anger the events that unfold in Israel-Palestine, there are lessons to be learnt from Sri Lanka.
For nearly three decades, the LTTE fought the Sri Lankan state to carve out a separate Tamil state in the north and east of the island where the Tamil minority is a majority. The LTTE engaged in suicide killings, not only of military personnel but also of top level politicians, including a president of Sri Lanka at a May Day workers rally and a former prime minister of India at an election rally in India itself. Among their acts of terror, they executed 600 policemen who had surrendered to them on the orders of the government, exploded bombs in crowded civilian places including buses and brought down the country’s central bank through a suicide truck attack.
In its attempts to militarily suppress the LTTE, the Sri Lankan security forces committed their own excesses, massacring civilians in the vicinity of ambushes, bombing indiscriminately from the air, restricting food and medical supplies to prevent them from falling into the hands of the LTTE and engaging in counter-insurgency operations that led to thousands of enforced disappearances. Throughout the period of the war, successive Sri Lankan governments sought to negotiate with the LTTE, both with and without international mediation, even going to the point of offering to negotiate on a federal state with Norwegian facilitation. But on every occasion, the talks broke down.
Like in Israel-Palestine, the issue at hand in Sri Lanka is the peaceful coexistence on the island of two peoples with deep mistrust born of ancient enmities and differing in ethnicity, religion and language. Today, 14 years after the end of the war, this problem of coexistence remains unresolved though the guns have fallen silent but with new issues added on, the most significant of which revolves around human rights violations and war crimes at the war’s end.
Sri Lanka cannot get away from the accusations that its security forces committed large scale violations of human rights when they went into the midst of the civilian population in pursuit of the LTTE. The UN Office for Human Rights has estimated that up to 40,000 civilians perished. The prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau has publicly charged that genocide took place. Sri Lanka has denied both of these allegations, but these have snowballed year after year.
Israel today faces a similar situation though on a bigger geopolitical and international canvas. Gaza has a population of more than two million on whom Israel has issued an exit order. Hamas, like the LTTE, will not permit those people to leave the killing fields even if they want to. Unlike in the Sri Lankan case, with the world’s attention being focused on Gaza, the question of disproportionate use of forces common to both, and the horrors of bombardment of areas of civilian inhabitation will generate more opposition. Also, unlike in Sri Lanka, despite its technological superiority, Israel will not be able to physically eliminate the Hamas fighters in the way the Sri Lankan army eliminated the LTTE fighters. After they were encircled by the numerically larger Sri Lankan army, the LTTE fighters had nowhere to go. The Israeli security forces cannot encircle the Hamas fighters who have neigbouring Arab territories to go to, and will live to fight another day. Many Palestinians may support Hamas, as indeed many Tamils supported the LTTE’s fight for a separate Tamil state. But even those who supported the LTTE were not combatants, and needed to be treated as such. The same applies to the Palestinians.
The violence and counter violence in the Gaza is polarizing the international community with even student groups in American and Western universities getting embroiled in partisan stands on the issue. At Harvard, student groups supporting Palestine have issued statements and are being blacklisted by others. The need for de-escalation is urgent. The right to exist of Israel and Palestine needs to be guaranteed. Until the political issues in Israel-Palestine are settled by political means the conflict will remain and escalate with international human rights sanctions being added to complicate the solution even more.
Jehan Perera is Executive Director of the National Peace Council of Sri Lanka. He studied at Harvard where he obtained Bachelor of Arts and Juris Doctor degrees. He travelled to Israel in April with the American Jewish Committee.