N Sathiya Moorthy 22 October 2019
By declaring that a government under his presidency would not honour the incumbent’s commitments to the UNHRC and co-sponsored resolutions on war-crimes probe, that too in his much-watched maiden media meet as presidential candidate, war-time Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa may have sent out a clearer message to his campaign managers than his very nomination may have entailed already. The instruction for them seems that they should forget the SLT votes and use his posturing and positioning, to fetch more votes from the Sinhala-Buddhist South, instead, for his being able to win the 16 November polls, and become President.
By conventional reckoning, which may or may not have been backed by more recent opinion polls, the Rajapaksa ticket can reportedly count on a minimum of 40 per cent vote-share. Given that the victor would have to cross the 50-per cent mark to be seen as having a ‘national mandate’, Gota would require at least another 10 per cent. None from his camp may have fancied the SLT constituency to vote a Rajapaksa ticket, possibly other than former Parliament Speaker Chamal R by a distant reckoning, if at all, but Gota’s declaration n ow would make it difficult even for his Tamil allies to talk their fellow electorate to consider his candidacy.
Be it as it may, what does it entail for the nation and the world if Gota were to become President? Some media analyses have read Gota’s repeated references to his willingness to work with the UN as his willingness to work with UNHRC. He may have to clarify sooner than later on this aspect, not that it would change the voter-mood, either in the Sinhala heart-land or the Tamil constituency, one bit. But if Gota was drawing a distinction between the two, it can be a different ball-game than is commonly understood.
Back and forth
Sri Lanka’s travails with the UNHRC began when the European Union (EU) especially moved a motion on HR violations and the like even as the LTTE war was reaching its final stages. Though much of the nation did not take note of at the time, the EU nation did come up for UNHRC consideration within 10 days of war-victory. Going by Sri Lankan commitments, and also wroking together on the larger issue of terrorism, unliekly regional allies in India, China and Pakistan joined hands to not only defeat the EU resolutuion at the UNHRC, but also to get a Sri Lanka-friendly substitute passed by a substantial margin.
It was then that the ‘international community’ Iread: West) thought of hauling up Sri Lanka before the UN Security Council (UNSC), their favourite hunting ground before the UNHRC was thought of as a more convenient alternative collesium at Geneva. If nothing else, the UNHRC was not bound by the ‘veto vote’ that ‘errant-nations’ like Sri Lanka readily got at UNSC, from such other nations as China and Russia.
One only needs to recall the post-UNHRC efforts of 2015 for taking up Sri Lanka informally at the UNSC, even without going through formal motions of a full-House discussion and vote – and which failed because two veto-members in China and Russia would have none of it. It was only then that when numbers began adding up at UNHRC when the US and the rest thought of the Geneva route all over again.
If Gota’s reference to the UN, as different from the UNHRC, was deliberate at his maiden media-meet, then it would flow that the Rajapaksas have strategised already for facing off Geneva at its game all over again, if he were to become President, with brother and predecessor Mahinda R as his even more powerful Prime Minister. Anyway, UNSC would be the route that Sri Lanka would have to travel if and when UNHRC reported back to the parent-body about the ‘intransingence of a member-nation.
India angle…
At UNSC, Colombo could still be able to count on two veto-nations, and possibly more of member-nations, even if the matter were to go to the General Assembly, in its turn and at its time. If nothing else, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights have already hurt a powerful nation like India, whose vote against Sri Lanka, had facilitated a smooth vote for the proposers in the past.
New Delhi had promptly pooh-pohed the UNHRC report alleging HR violations in Jammu and Kashmir. That was before the Indian Government and Parliament together abrogated Articles 370 and 35-A of the nation’s Constitution, in early August, withdrawing whatever ‘special status’ that was conferred on the State and its population at their accession to the Indian Union, though months after Independence and Partition.
Today, post-abrogation, New Delhi may not be unaware of efforts and initiatives of sections of the international community to haul up the nation on HR violations in Jammu and Kashmir, as and when they could have a ‘credible report’ and also the required numbers. True, China was seen as fighting the losing Pakistani cause at the UNSC’s informal consultations on the ‘Kashmir issue’, post-abrogation, but then there may have been more than meets the eye, going by the ‘carefully-worded’ tweet by the Permanent Representative of Russia, on the occasion.
The question is if nations like India, which have also been targeted by select others in the name of HR violations, afford to take stand-alone positions on larger issues of ‘outsider interference’ in the international affairs of such sovereign nations as theirs? Leave aside what New Delhi may or may not do if and when the UNHRC were to pull up an ‘intransigent’ Sri Lanka, when the current deadline for Colombo reporting back follow-up action on ‘consensus resolutions’ from more recent years and sessions, the original proponents of the UNHRC resolutions themselves may not have the stomach for a ‘big fight’ on the larger issues concerned, and be handed down a reversal that they may not enjoy.
‘Illegal agreements’
For all this however, as Gota himself clarified, haltingly at times, forcefully otherwise, it was anyway the Rajapaksa policy not to yield to or on UNHRC resolutions. When the US, UK and the rest moved the original draft for discussion and vote, the Mahinda R regime would not even give it the minimum respect of acknowledgement in the House, and discussion with other stake-hoolders, for an honourable or a not-so-honourable way out. All that Gota R is saying or implying is that if he the people of Sri Lanka were to elect him President, then there was no way a government under his care working with the UNHRC, leave alone honouring whatever has been committed by the incumbent government of President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.
Clarifying further for Gota on the occasion – or, was he adding fuel to the fire – was war-time Foreign Minister G L Peiris, now chairman of the Rajapaksas’ very own political entity and identity, in the SLPP. GL, who was also the Rajapaksas’ chief pointsman on la affaire UNHRC, recalled how some leaders in the present dispensation had gone back on their own positions on the UNHRC front. That was after Gota had reiterated more than once that they were ‘ilelgal agreements’, whatever he meant by the same, or what he was referring to the UNHRC resolution or the government’s commitments, if any, on the same.
It is anybody’s guess however what Gota means by calling the Sri Lankan State commitments in the matter as ‘illegal’. Unless the Supreme Court describes them as such, there is no way, a successor-Government in Colombo can dismiss such international commitments of the UNHRC kind as ‘illegal’. Even when upholding the 13th Amendment first, and also ordering de-merger of the North-East, effected under the accompanying Provincial Councils Act, the Supreme Court stopped at that. The Jusges did not refer to the parent Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement, which is a bialgteral/international agreement, standing on a different plane altogether.
Partisan,divisive
It is thus anybody’s guess why and how the Gota campaign came to use the pictures of incumebent army chief, Lt-Ge Shavendra Silva and other men in uniform, as if to make ‘gullible voters’, if any left in a nation with high literacy rate, to believe that they were all supporting the Goa ticket. Already, the Election Commission has taken up the issue, but not with the candidate, whose campaign has not distanced itself from the propaganda, at least as yet – but with the President and the Prime Minister, and everyone else.
It is most likely that Gen Silva and the rest, if asked, would flatly deny their own invovevment would also know that the defence forces are the nation’s asset and cannot be doing, and more so seen as doing, anything partisan or divisive. Whatmore, their loyalty is to the Sri Lankan nation and its population, and they report directly to the President as the Head of State, not even to the person of the President, under the Constitution.
Yet, none of it would answer the badly-required answer for the clearly obvious question: Whee would Gota’s ‘other’ 10-plus per cent vote come from? True as it may there is another veteran in none-other-than more recently retired army commander in Gen Mahesh Senanayake in the presidential fray as a candidate attached to a lesser-known political entity. Of course, that should leave out war-time army commander, then Lt-Gen Saath Fonseka, still the nation’s only Field Marshal since, who however lost to incumbent President and his one-time boss Mahinda R, in post-war Elections-2010.
It could mean only one thing for Gota. All the ‘pro-war votes’ are already in his kitty,and some of it might have travelled back to where they belonged, and enriched Mahinda’s rival candidate and present President Sirisena, in the subsequent polls of 2015. The question is this: Would all those additional votes return to Gota, because of his talking touch on the UNHRC and the rest? Or, would his campaign look for newer and fewer options that are otherwise available to them, to shore up the numbers, even while hoping to retain their own perceived basic vote-share of 40 per cent. Or, what else for the Gota ticket, now and later?
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