The quarter-century long secessionist campaign of violence waged by the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) has almost completely collapsed. All that is left for the international community to do now is sit back and watch as thousands of civilians trapped in the cross-fire are slaughtered.
A recent statement by Seevaratnam Puleedevan, secretary-general of the Tigers’ peace secretariat saying that the “LTTE will never surrender and we will fight and we have the confidence that we will win with the help of the Tamil people,” does not bode well for the estimated 50,000 civilians still trapped in the rapidly shrinking conflict zone in the north-east of the country.
The UN has voiced its “deep concern” over the situation but has so far proved unable to act. A meeting of the Security Council called by France failed to agree on a resolution owing to the fact that Russia and China, two veto-wielding members, insisted the situation was strictly an internal matter and did not jeopardise international peace and security. Neither Russia nor China wishes to set a precedent of interference in a country’s internal matters for fear it could lead to increased pressure on themselves to deal less severely with their own dissident minorities. Strictly speaking, they have international law on their side.
The post-WWII Westphalian consensus restricts action from the Security Council to situations which threaten “international peace and security”. The so-called Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, which aimed to give the UN the mandate to act beyond its traditional role as a mediator of international disputes, has thus far proven to be nothing more than unenforceable cant.
Realistically speaking, the prospect of the Sri Lankan government allowing for the deployment of peacekeepers, even with a Security Council ready and able to act, is virtually zero. However, the international community should, at the very least, be putting serious pressure on the Sri Lankan government to allow the aid agencies to operate in the country right now, with the threat of economic sanctions the price of non-compliance. Sri Lanka is heavily dependent upon imports and foreign aid, and the EU and US are the country’s two biggest export markets, together accounting for almost 55 per cent of Sri Lankan exports.
There can be little doubt that serious human rights violations are taking place in the conflict zone, thus explaining why the Sri Lankan government is restricting aid agencies and media coverage in the area to the extent that it is. The government claims on its website to be conducting the “world’s largest hostage rescue mission” having rescued over 30,000 civilians from Tamil forces so far. The wildly varying estimates of refugee numbers coming from the various aid agencies demonstrates that the reality is no-one knows quite what is going on. A final confrontation between the government and the LTTE is inevitable and cannot be stopped. The LTTE will almost certainly go down. What can and must be stopped is the government’s enthusiasm to finish the job, and the LTTE’s determination to throw everything at them in a final cast of the dice, resulting in thousands of innocent civilians going down with them.