News: Groundviews

Around 100 young men from Navanthurai, a village in the Jaffna District, were detained in an operation conducted by the Sri Lanka Army around 1.15am on 23rd August 2011. The villagers were severely beaten by the army and dragged to the main road near the Navanthurai Army Detachment located around 300 meters from the village. The men were loaded onto buses and handed over to the Jaffna police around 4 am and taken to the Jaffna courts by 10 am and produced before the Jaffna District Judge at around 1 pm the same day (23rd August).

Anushka Wijesinha (who blogs here), a Research Economist at the Institute of Policy Studies, sent us these incredible photos and video of the chaos in Colombo today when thousands of Korean job seekers appeared for Korean exam applications at the Police Park down Havelock Road. Mainstream media reports a figure of 10,000, which going by the video and photos appear to be mostly young men.

In his most famous and controversial work, Prof Samuel Huntington listed Sri Lanka’s armed conflict as an example of his key category of ‘fault line wars’. The war is over but the fault lines perhaps remain. Are the fault lines staying static, widening, narrowing, or in a dialectical sense, both widening and narrowing? Is it still too early to tell? Ours is an uneven peace, but it is not unusual, two years after a war, especially a decades-long one. The crucial questions are whether things are better than in wartime or worse, and whether the rate of improvement is on par with the global and historical average or far below.

Indeed, the Government’s inadequate response to the problem of accountability for war atrocities does not bode well for the future of Sri Lanka. It lays the ground for suspicion, fueling calls for international action, which are then used by those in power to justify their repression of domestic critics—actions that only indicate growing authoritarianism and raise further questions. Evasions of accountability thus serve to undermine local efforts at post-war rebuilding and reconciliation, and in fact leave the back door open for those who would make an example of the state’s failures. These efforts toward truth and justice—and not the whitewash of an international propaganda battle–are the real challenges for a democratic Sri Lanka, as it strives for everyday and political reconciliation, and the prosperity of its citizens in the years to come. After watching the Channel 4 film, many of us asked: What will the Government do now? If these scattered, frenzied “responses” are the answer, don’t the people of Sri Lanka—and in particular, the war-battered people in this film – deserve better?