Abstract
Since the brutal end of Sri Lanka’s decades-old civil war in May 2009, scholarship has explored the international community’s approach to the close of the conflict, processes of transitional justice and the perceived intransigence of the Rajapaksa government in its response to international pressure on its human rights record. However, few inquiries have offered the theoretically incisive lens adopted here. Combing a nimble, Foucauldian conceptualization of the rapidly changing landscape of ‘global governance’ and notions of ‘illiberal peacebuilding’, the inquiry demonstrates how the Rajapaksa government sought to situate itself ‘inside the international community and at the same time totally outside it and unencumbered by it’ (p. 12). This approach is used to trace how national and international narratives were dexterously deployed by the Rajapaksa government to challenge liberal-interventionist thinking and attempts to compel it to address a range of human rights abuses. This lens has even less frequently been applied across the entirety of the controversial and transformative presidential term of Mahinda Rajapaksa from 2005 to the dramatic change of government in 2015. His traumatic term of office is explored here in greater depth than is often the case, taking a longer and broader view of how Sri Lanka’s post-colonial history and the changing geopolitical landscape led to and enabled the Government of Sri Lanka’s increasingly autocratic and vehemently anti-liberal response to domestic and international pressure.
Faced with two possible paths towards reconciliation following the end of the war, the Sri Lankan government followed the ‘Singapore model’ that emphasized economic growth and stability, rather than constitutional reforms aimed at ameliorating structural grievances or permitting processes of reconciliation familiar to post-conflict contexts such as Peru or South Africa. Using utopian frames, the Rajapaksa government declared that Sri Lanka would become the ‘emerging wonder of Asia’. In contrast, Large argues that the approach of Rajapaksa’s government to post-conflict reconciliation resembled to a far greater extent the ‘military-business’ paradigm employed in Indonesia. The Tamil-dominated north of the country remained militarized, military spending continued almost at pace and the Prevention of Terrorism Act, along with other measures restricting freedoms, remained in place. In keeping with her consistently balanced analysis, Large notes that Sri Lanka did achieve remarkable economic growth during the post-conflict period, bolstered by mega-projects funded in large part by Chinese and other non-Western backers.
Rajapaksa’s United National Party (UNP) election campaign in 2005 was heavily nationalistic, drawing on ancient Singhalese myths of a return to a golden age of prosperity and independence and emphasized the indivisibility of the island. Jingoistic narratives would continue throughout the final throes of the conflict and dominate political discourse well into the post-conflict period, in particular as the Government of Sri Lanka would seek to circumvent, deflect and delegitimize attempts by the West to influence reconciliation and transitional justice processes. The narratives seeking to blunt Western intervention included counter-terrorism discourses, which capitalized on the West’s common refrain of ‘with us or with the terrorists’; leveraging its historic placement in the non-aligned movement to resist pressure from Western governments and liberal norms, as well as a nationalistic, Sinhalese minority frames suggesting that resistance to intervention is aimed at protecting a ‘world minority’ population.
Despite Sri Lanka’s historic track record of international engagement in forums such as the Commonwealth and as a signatory of the Geneva convention, the post-conflict Government of Sri Lanka was viewed as a principal delinquent in the eyes of the West as it sought to ‘push back’ against liberal-interventionism, in particular in processes of reconciliation, transitional justice and human rights reform. Efforts to pressure the Rajapaksa government were driven largely by an established and consistent coalition of international human rights advocacy organizations and Tamil diaspora organizations who lobbied assiduously at the United Nations the Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), and national capitals such as Washington DC, London and the EU in Brussels. Despite the Government of Sri Lanka’s early victory of a supportive vote at the United Nations in 2009, the mounting international effort against the government in the years following the end of conflict included the publication of The Cage citing eyewitness accounts of the final months of conflict by UN staff and the release of Channel 4’s documentary No Fire Zone: In the Killing Fields of Sri Lanka. These served to mar the government’s terrorism narrative and would help to spur international action against the government, including the establishment of UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon’s Panel of Experts to investigate the conflict, three contested UNHRC resolutions, three High Commissioner’s reports and the 2014 Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) investigation into war crimes, which the Rajapaksa government refused to recognize or participate in.
Attempts by the government to implement a staunchly ‘home-grown’ reconciliation process through the much-maligned LLRC were dismissed by Western governments and institutions as falling well short. In addition to the West’s dissatisfaction with this entirely domestic process, activists also campaigned against the government’s Singhalese-Buddhist majoritarianism in the form of the construction of large, Buddhist projects in predominately Hindu and Muslim areas; the recasting of Tamil place names into Singhalese and similar efforts to minimize the presence of the country’s minority Muslim population. Campaigns towards an inclusive transitional justice process resulting in the release of political prisoners, return of IDPs, the provision of information about missing persons and the memorialization of victims were met with the maintenance of anti-terror laws, the repression of journalists and free expression, as well as continued ‘white van’ disappearances. These tactics were similarly used to stifle activism still seeking to address the structural grievances that had fuelled the conflict in the first place, such as the devolution of power and rights to language.
Internationally, the Rajapaksa government deftly took advantage of changing geopolitical calculations to respond to pressure. It sought to counter liberal-interventionist campaigns at the UN Security Council and the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva through the hiring of professional lobbyists to paint Sri Lanka in a positive light, the release of its own video to counter the Channel 4 documentary and to cultivate the support of other non-Western countries through the embrace of non-aligned movement, anti-liberal-interventionist frames. These efforts were unsuccessful in changing the view of Western governments, as evidenced by British Prime Minister David Cameron’s call for an international investigation during the 2013 Colombo Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting and the boycott of other leaders. However, the international community was ultimately unable to forcibly chart Sri Lanka’s reconciliation process under the Rajapaksa government.
Setting out to understand the trajectory of the Rajapaksa government during its war for a unitary state and its attempted deflection of internal and external pressure thereafter, the inquiry concludes decisively that the government’s ‘zero-sum trajectory’ dominated through both periods in an effort to consolidate power. In respect of global governance, the Rajapaksa government capitalized on anti-liberal narratives and support from non-Western states, but by 2014 international lobbying and transnational activism, combined with domestic economic factors, began to deflate the ‘triumphalism’ of the Rajapaksa government. This inquiry’s open-ended conclusion reflects the still unfolding story of reconciliation in Sri Lanka under the Government of Maithripala Sirisena, which has taken steps to ameliorate structural deficiencies and to put in place comprehensive reconciliation mechanisms far more inclusive of the country’s diversity. However, this process remains heavily driven by domestic forces and the government remains resistant to liberal-interventionism, in keeping with wider international trends and the policies of his far more bellicose predecessor.