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Faces that speak of suffering |
I feel
depressed, frustrated and angry thinking about the men,
women and children all innocent civilians denied any
choice and killed. How did we get here, to the vengeful
standoff in Karaithuraipattu, that imperiled the lives
of thousands of fellow citizens, in a thin strip of land
that is less than 300 kms from Colombo but far enough to
be beyond the reach of civilised world; to taking
internet polls about how many more civilians can be
sacrificed and killed to get the last few LTTE cadres.
Between the time of writing this article and it going to
the press, hundreds more were killed in pursuit of
capturing a bit of land the size of Bambalapitiya and
Kollupitiya and getting at the LTTE leadership.
Children
Everyone knows that over 7,500 Tamil civilians have been
killed in the north in the past four months. The UN
estimates from 20 days ago was that 6,432 civilians,
many of them children, have been killed in the past
three months and 13,946 have been wounded. Except the
diamond hard-distillations from either side everyone
else accepts that both the government forces as well as
the LTTE have killed civilians.
If
anyone still has any doubts, all they have to do is to
go and listen to the experiences of the 190,000 people
in the IDP camps in Vavuniya. They are more than willing
to shatter the myths. They have endured criminal
recklessness of their government who showed scant regard
for its citizens and crass brutality of LTTE who had no
compunction to shoot to death those whom it claimed to
be protecting.
“About
three-quarters of the injured coming in now have
suffered from blast injuries, and the rest are gunshot
wounds and mine explosions,” said a foreign doctor who
is treating the civilians to the Times of India. Daya
Master claimed that at least 200 civilians were shot,
presumably when fleeing, by the LTTE.
Liberation
LTTE,
in the name of liberation, had ruthlessly herded the
population at gun point over the period, and held a
further 50,000 or more as human shields till the bitter
end. The government, in the name of liberation, has
fired at them with heavy calibre guns, combat aircraft
and aerial weapons causing huge civilian casualties.
And it
was firing away till the end despite the public
pronouncements to the contrary. Both sides have been
accused of committing war crimes. Both are in denial and
are getting away with murder and much worse.
After
Rwanda and Bosnia we thought that this would not happen.
But it has. The global humanitarian system with its
legal doctrines and covenants, institutional
architecture and resources has not been able to protect
these civilians. The UN, ICRC and the NGOs have failed
the people they are supposed to protect. Worse still
they had made us complacent in thinking that they would
protect.
The
international community had failed to recognise that the
global war against terrorism as a just-cause rationale
could trap them into impotence; that right-to-protect
would crumble when confronted with walls of sovereignty
in a multi-polar word.
For a
brief period after Bosnia we thought that the human
civilisation had advanced to have the resource and
resolve to stop mass murder. But first in
Sudan
and now in Sri Lanka this belief has been shattered. The
flagrant misuse of it in countries such as Iraq and
Georgia has dealt a severe blow to the principle.
Civilians
But
this article is about the humanitarian community, more
specifically the constellation of international and
local NGOs in Sri Lanka – their commissions and
omissions. As far as the 7,500 civilians who have
already been killed and the thousands who were just a
shell or bullet away from death trapped beyond
everyone’s reach –
we had
failed them. The sad part is we knew it coming. We knew
it for a long time and did not get our act together to
prevent it. Let me be clear, I am not referring to the
prevention of conflict between the government and LTTE.
It was for the political leadership to have done it and
they shall be held accountable for it. Neither am I
placing the humanitarian community in the dock as the
sole accused.
The
intransigent and ruthless LTTE and the government are
the principle culprits. The international community of
nation states stands accused of negligence. But the
humanitarian community is culpable by becoming
irrelevant. Why did this happen? Why did we fail and let
thousands be killed? What should have been done to have
averted this? What follows is a confession of
commissions and omissions, some proximate while most
have been long term in the making.
First
and foremost we abdicated our responsibility to voice
out. This is both a failure of leadership as well as
strategy. We let our collective voice be silenced and
the voice of our consortium to be silent on civilian
killings. Practically everyone in the world voiced out
in anguish about the plight of civilians, made
statements or representations in the strongest possible
terms but nothing meaningful came out from us in the
last few months or indeed for a very long time – either
collectively or individually.
We
failed to create an entity to be in the forefront in
voicing out the concerns of humanitarian agencies. We do
not even speak up in one voice for our own staff who
have been killed, disappeared or detained. So, it is
hard to expect the humanitarian community to speak on
behalf of civilians, to have called for a ceasefire or
to do anything that can be interpreted as taking up
position disliked by the government.
Some
of the prominent members in the humanitarian community
when thrust into making statements re-define
obfuscation. Therefore there is very little hope of the
weak and compromised collective of humanitarian agencies
to advocate for principles rallying the support of the
public on behalf of the civilians.
Strategy
Simultaneously, rather than being strategic and figuring
out ways of voicing out we readily accepted that the
only approach is to work ‘silently and behind the
scenes.’ This meant taking information and analysis to
those who could influence. While it has merit when
conceived as a small part of a broader strategy, it
fails to capture the public imagination – an essential
pre-requisite for any public pressure and transfers the
responsibility onto others who have less of a stake.
Implicitly it is susceptible to be painted as
conspiracy. More often these ‘behind the scenes’ type of
engaging with the issues was for convenience rather than
based on calculated risk analysis. It was laziness, fear
and a lack of capacity to think through.
Prominence
This
gave room for influence peddlers and ‘operators’ to gain
prominence in the sector. Having access to the
powers-that-be was touted as an achievement and
accomplishment – little realising that it was at the
expense of being able to speak the truth to these
‘powers’ and was gradually robbing these busy-bodies of
their credibility. ‘Constructive engagement’ at
different levels was defined by the destruction it was
causing to the long term legitimacy of the sector.
It
also made many (naïve?) expatriate NGO leaders feel
important – by co-opting them into different forums and
affording opportunities at hob-nobbing with ministers
and other important people in the administration. While
the government was strategic in gradually turning the
heat on the agencies and its leaders were so risk averse
that they failed to counter it. There usual reaction was
to engage ‘behind the scene.’
It has
to be noted that when the LTTE was in control in the
north, the agencies reacted in the same manner. They
agreed to work under the overall framework of a Planning
and Development Secretariat which was an LTTE creation,
they did not voice out publicly or withdraw when they
were being extorted directly and indirectly or when
their staff were being threatened or worse, abducted.
Failed
We
failed to build movements for change or support the
indigenous efforts at building movements. For a country
that had given rise to mass movements like Sarvodaya
inspired by Gandhian philosophy or progressive movements
that brought together different sections of the
population on common causes like the ‘Mothers Front,’
‘Mothers and Daughters of Lanka,’ ‘Protect Eppawala’
etc, currently we are in a crisis as never before.
While
the humanitarian community cannot be faulted for the
non-generation of progressive movements in the country,
the INGOs are squarely to be blamed for adopting a donor
practice that has blunted the efficacy and growth of
many of these movements and have made bad NGOs out of
good movement building initiatives. If they had been
left to grow in their own mould now we would have mass
movements that might have taken up the cause of the
Tamil civilians caught in the middle of the conflict –
rather than running around raising funds to build
emergency sheds for people, like what some were doing.
Reach out
The
single most important failure of the humanitarian sector
has been its inability to reach out to the southern
population. Many in the sector are still oblivious to
this omission. We have not been able to communicate
effectively with the south and take the message about
the suffering of the Tamil civilians killed and those
who are caught in the conflict. The effective and
pervasive government propaganda is saturating the public
space – with a distorted image of the NGOs – and
crowding out other view points.
The
humanitarian community as a credible alternate source of
information and analysis has been compromised by their
conduct in the recent past. They no longer occupy the
moral high ground in public perception – many of whom
consider NGOs as wasteful and with a hidden agenda, like
being pro-Tiger. The opulent and extravagant way in
which some implemented the tsunami projects and the
high-end life styles of some of the staff have left a
bad impression.
The
tsunami of expatriates (often more and for longer
periods than what the situation demanded) and their
context blind and often insensitive interventions still
rankles many. While upward accountability to the donors
and to respective head quarters was prioritised they did
not pay attention to the gradual shift in the public
perception in the south. Worse still even when it was
diagnosed effective steps were not taken to counter
them.
The
compulsion to spend within a stipulated time and a
supply driven aid agenda that de-prioritised local
capacity building converted many local organisations
into sub-contractors. As one of the local activists put
it ‘you failed to build capacity on value based advocacy
and networking with and among the local NGOs’. As a
result, though we are able to get any number of local
agencies to implement infrastructure and welfare
projects, we have but a handful of partnerships that are
rights-based or values-based.
The
failure in accountability and in maintaining appropriate
standards (that we expect the others to follow) became
fertile grounds for sowing seeds of resentment and later
for a flourishing growth of anti-NGO sentiments. So when
the government and the marginal sections of the polity
engaged on regular and cheap-shot mud-slinging campaign
some of it stuck. It was of course compounded by the
aforementioned failure of the sector to collectively
voice out and boldly respond.
The
sector ducked and dodged rather than own up and correct
it in the eyes of the people. The result was the loss of
credibility and the legitimacy for the humanitarian
sector with the southern constituency. The message
(about civilian killings in particular but the northern
humanitarian situation in general) in this instance
suffered because of the messenger.
The
humanitarian actors in the country had by and large
remained isolated from the rest of the Sri Lankan civil
society. Presided over by expatriates many of the
agencies failed to establish strong links across Sri
Lankan civil society. Even the handful that has some
interaction limited it mostly to narrow funding
relationships. Some of the personal relationships
cutting across the divides do not translate into any
sustainable institutional engagement. Nowhere is it more
pronounced than in the dichotomy between the
humanitarian and human rights sector in Sri Lanka.
Barring a few exceptions they virtually operate in two
different worlds in Sri Lanka.
Different
Similarly the fellowship with other civil society actors
like the media, trade-unions and progressive academics
too is extremely rare. They have over the period,
particularly after the tsunami, grown and begun to
imagine ourselves in the mould of UN agencies little
realising that the mandates and rationale for existence
are very different. We are still clamoring for a place
in the table with the UN when dealing with the
government rather than being out there with the Sri
Lankan civil society holding not only the government but
also the UN accountable.
While
in Afghanistan the very same NGOs are able to publicly
caution the United States warning them that an increase
in troop levels will lead to greater civilian casualties
– over here we are not even able to get a collective
statement out condemning the unacceptable loss of
civilian life due to the military operations or worse
still even about the conditions in the internment
camps.
Recognised
Even
in Darfur the NGOs are recognised and respected as a
stakeholder with a voice in dealing with the IDPs. When
the UN meekly submits to government pressure tactics and
surrenders its principles, there is hardly any
collective pressure coming from the other humanitarian
actors in partnership with other civil society actors.
The
sector as a whole has a reputation for being mediocre.
But it had always compensated for it with passionate
engagement. The sector attracted men and women who were
committed to the cause and were willing to put in the
extra effort and take the extra risk. While they could
be faulted for being too idealistic and paternalistic
they could be counted upon to stand by the civilians and
principles.
But in
the last few years the sector has become ‘professionalised.’
We have traded activists for ‘experts’ and ‘managers.’
While the ‘experts’ and ‘managers’ are able to tell us
what the problem is and what could be the potential
solution they are not able to work for it like an
activist would.
Finally, one of the key weaknesses is that the sector is
fragmented. For every effort at coordination there are
always some agencies ready to break the line. The
agencies compete for project funds and then fall over
each other to implement those projects. Institutional
imperatives over ride any collective principles. If all
the agencies speak in one voice on critical issues like
the killing of civilians there could be greater effect
and we could leverage that kind of a bargaining position
more effectively.
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