Peace and Justice in Sri Lanka - An Article Written For The Tablet

Post-conflict peace-building is hardly an exact science. But the international community by now has enough experience of it to agree on some general propositions, one of which is that lasting reconciliation must be based on recognition of, and some form of reparation for, both the grievances that gave rise to the conflict and the wrongs committed during it.

Six months after the military defeat of the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) in Sri Lanka, these processes have yet to start. Despite the well documented excesses of both sides in the long civil war there is no sign of such honesty surfacing; and sadly no sign of the Catholic Church's leadership playing a prophetic role in the healing necessary for reconciliation to take place. Instead the newly installed Archbishop of Colombo, Malcolm Ranjith, has just been to Europe at the head of a group of Sri Lankan Catholic, Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist faith leaders, on a visit which seems clearly to ally him with a Government concerned mainly to sanitise its brief but bloody history in power.

Christians of all denominations are a minority in Sri Lanka, still thought of as culturally western and as having allegiances far beyond the Island. But the Catholic Church is by far the largest Christian community, with a history going back to the early Portuguese missionaries. Being slightly better represented among the Tamil ethnic minority than among the Sinhalese majority, it has also traditionally been well placed to build bridges between the two. Archbishop Ranjith himself had, when Bishop of Ratnapura, undertaken more than many of his predecessors to try to build peace. He worked, for instance, with the Tamil Bishop of Mannar to open back-channel communications between the Tamil Tiger leadership and the Sinhalese-dominated government in Colombo, which helped bring about the (eventually unsuccessful) Norwegian peace initiative.

Yet his recent trip to Europe, where he met (among others) the Italian and British foreign ministers, has been reported as supporting a Sri Lankan Government lobby for retention of the privileged EU trade concession known as “GSP+”, which allows Sri Lankan textiles free access to European markets. The European Commission has advised the Council of Ministers not to extend this concession beyond June next year - obviously bad news for Sri Lanka’s ailing textile industry, but no surprise given the Government’s blatant failure to observe the conditions it had freely accepted, including notably the ratification and implementation of key international agreements on human rights. 


The Archbishop and his delegation appear to be rather recent converts to the cause of workers’ rights and well-being. Certainly none of them is on record as calling for investigation of the many human rights abuses that have been reported from Sri Lanka in recent years, or as raising with foreign investors the long working hours, restrictions on trade union activity and pitifully low wages to which textile workers (most of them women) are subjected. The Sri Lankan hierarchy’s record contrasts with that of the Catholic Church in difficult situations elsewhere in Asia – most recently in Burma but earlier also in the Philippines and Korea, where it has shown that it can disengage from the apron strings of dictators. It also contrasts lamentably with that of grassroots church activists within Sri Lanka, such as Father Nandana Manatunga’s Human Rights Centre in Kandy, which is pursuing justice for rape and torture victims, or Father Harry Miller in Batticaloa and Father Sarath Iddamalgoda in Jaela, who have helped survivors of human rights abuses struggling for legal redress and security from intimidation. Such activists, so far ignored by Archbishop Ranjith, were also prominent among the crowds protesting the recent sentence of 20 years’ hard labour meted out to the journalist J.S.Tissanayagam, whereas the Bishops greeted it only with a deafening silence. 
 

 
 



Sri Lanka’s reputation for human rights abuses is appalling by any standards. In recent years successive visiting UN special envoys and rapporteurs have documented a continuous disregard for international law, and even for Sri Lanka’s own national laws. Such expert witnesses are routinely either dismissed as 'Tiger sympathisers‘ or told to go and investigate abuses elsewhere before coming to Sri Lanka. The 17th Amendment to Sri Lanka’s constitution, which sought to curtail the dictatorial power of the Presidency by establishing a constitutional council to oversee appointments to major executive and judicial functions, is effectively a dead letter. Despite the much publicised Presidential Commissions or 'urgent and thorough’ police investigations into massacres of NGO workers, fishermen and farmers, or the many assassinations of political leaders and editors, no one is ever charged or found guilty of these crimes. Instead, the investigations last long enough for international media attention to drift elsewhere, and then are quietly dropped. Military or other state personnel, on whom suspicion often rests, are given a clear signal that they are beyond the reach of the law. Indeed, in the closing stages of the war against the LTTE the wholesale slaughter of civilians was almost given a heroic dimension. If the Archbishop had called for justice for those who have suffered at the hands of state actors in this way, and if he had marshalled the undoubted capacity of the church to monitor and report on such abuses, his pleas to European governments on behalf of textile workers would certainly have gained in credibility. 
 

 
 



Caritas agencies of the Church have been visible throughout the war bringing humanitarian relief to the many civilians who have suffered. Churches, as well as Hindu Kovils, became prime sites of refuge and security throughout the north and east of the Island, the traditional Tamil homelands. Through Caritas, the Church was witness to this immense suffering, and has been one of only a few national agencies allowed into the internment camps in which the vast civilian populations who fled the intense fighting early this year are have been incarcerated. Under intense international pressure the Government has now started a reluctant resettlement programme, but the nightmare is far from over. Families are being moved from the IDP camps to smaller so-called transit centres. Independent agencies have restricted access to the few families that have finally been able to return home, making it difficult to monitor their well-being or ensure that humanitarian standards of rehabilitation are observed. The government treats any monitoring of its behaviour as destabilising and undermining national sovereignty, and thus removes any safeguard against continued disappearances and extra-judicial killings. Far from the process of reconciliation which the Pope called for during the Ranjith delegation’s private audience in the Vatican, the Government clearly has in mind a process of subjugation and containment. 
 

 
 



The point bears repeating: the members of this delegation might have some credibility in Europe if they had been equally eloquent on behalf of the government’s victims. As it is, one can only hope that the response they received was the same as that given by the EU ambassador in Sri Lanka: that the GSP+ tariff concessions are institutionally linked to respect for the various international conventions. 
 

 
 



Surely, Sri Lanka’s Church leadership should lead the country’s faith communities in insisting that the Government respect and uphold Sri Lankan citizens’ fundamental rights. Archbishop Ranjith should use his influence with the government (the President’s wife and several ministers are Catholics) to campaign for international Red Cross access to all camps, and for all internally displaced Sri Lankans to be treated according to international standards. If church leaders like him would reflect the grass roots activism of their followers and bring about a sea change in government policy, then perhaps a new GSP+ package could be negotiated, and conditions established in that troubled country for a lasting peace built on justice. 
 

 
 



Edward Mortimer is Senior Vice-President and Chief Programme Officer of the Salzburg Global Seminar.

Steve Alston is a Development Consultant who formerly worked in Sri Lanka

Explore The Sri Lankan Dilemma - War or Peace

Short Report on MSC in East Timor - August 2008

I facilitated two workshops in Dili, East Timor (Timor L'Este) in August 2008 at the request of Trocaire and CAFOD as a combined initiative. Each workshop was split into 3 parts; the first day focused on studying and practicing the Most Significant Change (MSC) method followed by a 10 day period for using and practice among each participating agency's members and then a final day to assess what problems or benefits had been encountered in using the process.

A summary of guidelines on how to conduct a simple MSC process, was written in Tetum and provide to each workshop participant along with a sample story collecting form. Websites relatingto MSC were also given and the participants introduced to internet discussion groups where problems and experience encountered in using MSC could be shared.

The design of the workshop was seen as equating to an 'on the job' training where participants would conducted a real MSC study. The intervening space of 10 days enabling an agency to focus on delivering a story collecting process. The final workshop dealt with analysis of these stories, selecting one most significant one, then drafting a report based on the experience.

We had approximately 30 participants with at least 80% attendance in the follow up workshops. Given the disparate nature of the those attending it was not possible to make the 2 week exercise a real MSC study. The 30 participants came from approximately 18 agencies which made this impossible to implement. Instead the methodology was redesigned to use the 2nd day workshop as an opportunity to re-visit the methodology and to see what problems had been encountered by those participants who'd been able to use it in the intervening period.

Conducting a successful MSC entails considerable staff time allocation, and for the host agency to fully commit itself to participating in the selection and analysis process. It also provides an important means of community participation in programme impact assessment. In addition it can potentially give an agency heightened feed back on wider issues being faced by the community.

Some lessons learnt.

A number of those attending the workshops verbally expressed their interest in the MSC methodology and showed enthusiasm in seeing how it might be adapted to use in their work. Of particular interest was the participative model whereby the local community takes a key part in selecting and analysing stories of change.

The workshops were conducted in English with a Tetum consecutive translation. There were clear signs that the concepts were not fully understood by all the participants. In the 2nd workshop it was also not clear that the guidelines written in Tetum, had been fully understood and communicated effectively.

A number of participants had conducted some story collecting during the intervening period between workshops. These showed limited but some critical understanding of the methodology. Their efforts had mostly been conducted amongst staff (as we had done in the exercise used in the 1st day workshop) however the question used in gathering their stories focused on the impact of work in the communities. A key aspect of the methodology had therefore been misunderstood; that the question is designed to understand change through the community's story and not through the staff member's story.

An MSC can be legitimately conducted amongst an agency's staff but only to measure the impact of work within the agency itself, i.e. its impact on its own staff. Hence in the first workshop the question used for our experimental MSC was 'What was the most significant change you experienced in your work during the least month?

One agency presented a story collected from a local facilitator which had been chosen from one of three facilitator's stories. The story form, given out to workshop participants, had also been adapted for use by the facilitators. This particular participant said he didn't really understand the process at the end of the first workshop and was not clear how it might be applied but had gained interest after reading the documents provided. Although the MSC he presented fell short of a real MSC, because the question had not defined a period for the story teller to address and was not addressed to members of the community from which impact was being assessed, it nevertheless gave rise to a useful discussion where these deficiencies were explored and then better understood.

Some Recommendations:

There was genuine interest expressed in seeing how MSC could be adapted to be used in Timor L'Este as one tool of impact assessment. However a lot of support and ongoing assistance will be needed to enable local partners to implement successfully their own MSC studies.

We should explore opportunities for Timorese staff to attend MSC trainings being conducted by Rick Davies and Veronica Magar in India (a 4 day training being conducted in India November 2008). With a locally trained resource person in Dili a much better understanding of the MSC methodology can be expected and this would represent a needed commitment to building local capacity.

Hosting a regular (possibly half yearly) discussion group with invite agencies asked to share and discuss their MSC studies would also help to build interest and skill. This would not only build competencies in using the method but could be an interesting way of sharing the agency's work, and build links between partner groups, both in-country and beyond.

Where the equipment is available using video and digital images in an MSC way can become on ongoing resource for all stakeholders in small community development projects. It builds a pictorial history of the project and provides excellent training material. One village can see how another has understood the changes a particular project or programme has achieved. Providing a small a incentive, such as a digital recorder or camera, for agencies and local community organisation to participate can both stimulate interest and provided a long term resource.