Building a Democratic Middle Ground - Professional Civil Society and the Politics of Human Rights in Sri Lanka’s Peace Process

[Forthcoming in "Human Rights and Conflict: New Actors, Strategies and Ethical Dilemmas," edited by Jeff Helsing and Julie Mertus (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2006).]

by Alan Keenan

Introduction

With the signing in February 2002 of a Norwegian-brokered cease-fire agreement between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE, or Tamil Tigers), the people of Sri Lanka gained a desperately needed respite from war. Raging off and on, with increasing ferocity, for more than twenty years, the separatist war led by the Tamil Tigers against the Sri Lankan state had, at the time of its suspension, killed an estimated 65,000 people on an island of fewer than twenty million people. Upward of two million others have been displaced or injured, lost family members, or otherwise been devastated by the armed conflict.

The period since the signing of the cease-fire has seen the longest sustained stretch without active warfare in Sri Lanka for twenty years. Sri Lankans of all ethnicities have reaped substantial benefits from the cessation of armed hostilities, even as more lasting peace dividends are still awaited. In the southern, predominantly Sinhala areas of the country, there has been relief from the absence of LTTE bombings and the security restrictions imposed to prevent them, as well as appreciation for the thousands of soldiers’ lives that have been spared by the cessation of fighting. There has been increased freedom of movement throughout the country, especially for Tamils who were subject to restrictions imposed on them by either the government or the LTTE, or both. Tamils in the south are, for the moment at least, no longer vulnerable to arbitrary arrest and brutal treatment at the hands of “antiterrorist” police. In the north and east of the island, which the LTTE claims as the “traditional Tamil homeland” and where the bulk of the fighting and destruction has taken place, the government lifted a crippling economic embargo, and many civilians have begun, very slowly, to rebuild their lives as best they can, returning to their villages, reconstructing houses, and starting new businesses. Initial hopes ran high that large amounts of financial support promised by international agencies and donors might begin to translate into real changes on the ground, and that the shattered economies throughout the island might begin to be rebuilt.

With the LTTE’s withdrawal from peace talks in April 2003, however, and with its refusal to take part in the much heralded international donor conference in Tokyo in June 2003, the peace process entered a prolonged state of uncertainty and stalemate. The LTTE’s sweeping proposals for an “Interim Self-Governing Authority” (ISGA) in the Northeast of Sri Lanka, announced with much fanfare in late October 2003, have still not been taken up for discussion. After months of negotiations and bitter dispute between President Chandrika Kumaratunga and her rival prime minister, Ranil Wickremasinghe, the president dissolved parliament in February 2004 and called new elections for early April. Following a campaign in which the government’s security concessions made to the LTTE as part of the peace process were a topic of heated debate, a coalition between the president’s Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and the leftist and Sinhala nationalist People’s Liberation Front (JVP) defeated the prime minister’s United National Party (UNP). With the support of smaller parties, the SLFP-JVP alliance was eventually able to gain a majority of seats in parliament, but major policy disagreements between the two main partners—especially with regard to the peace process—largely crippled the new government. With the JVP blocking any moves toward accommodation with the LTTE, President Kumaratunga was unable to reach agreement with the LTTE on an agenda for new negotiations.

The uncertain political situation was further complicated in March 2004 when the LTTE’s military commander for the Eastern Province, known by his nom de guerre, Karuna, declared his autonomy from the main wing of the LTTE, based in the north of Sri Lanka. After his forces in the east were attacked by the northern LTTE in April 2004, Karuna’s fighters began waging a low-intensity guerrilla war against the LTTE—with assistance from the Sri Lankan military, the LTTE has repeatedly charged. With the LTTE facing a serious threat to its hold on the Eastern Province and unable to force the government to negotiate on its terms, there were signs by the end of 2004 that war was imminent.

The devastating arrival of the South Asian tsunami on December 26, 2005, seemed at first to change the political equation. Initial cooperation between civilians across ethnic lines, and even between ground-level LTTE and Sri Lankan security forces, however, quickly faded in the face of a renewed power struggle between the Tigers and the government. With the various parties all attempting to exploit the situation for their own political gains, negotiations to devise a “joint mechanism” to distribute the billions of dollars of international relief and reconstruction assistance were protracted and politically divisive. The President’s eventual agreement with the LTTE – six months after the tsunami – led to the JVP’s withdrawal from the government, in protest at what it saw as dangerous and unnecessary accommodations to the “terrorist” LTTE. The Supreme Court’s decision soon thereafter to strike down major portions of the agreement, however, effectively rendered it inoperable, further undermining any lingering faith the LTTE might have had in the potential of negotiations with the government.
The August 2005 assassination of the Sri Lankan foreign minister Lakshman Kadirgamar – an ethnic Tamil long considered a traitor by the LTTE – threw the peace process into even deeper crisis. Following as it did a period of increased attacks by the LTTE on Tamil opponents and Sri Lankan police and military personnel that it claimed were in league with Karuna, it led to universal international condemnation – including a ban on travel by LTTE representatives to the European Union – and further inflamed Sinhala nationalist opposition to negotiations with the Tigers.

It was in this context that Sri Lanka held an unexpected election for President in November 2005, following another decision by the Supreme Court. Running on a platform largely dictated by his alliance with the JVP and another smaller Sinhala nationalist party, the SLFP’s candidate and sitting Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse argued against giving the LTTE any role in the distribution of tsunami relief and reconstruction, defended the “unitary” state against proposals for a federal constitutional solution to the conflict, and criticized what he saw as the structural bias of the ceasefire agreement in favor of the LTTE. Rajapakse won a narrow victory over the UNP’s Ranil Wickremasinghe, the former prime minister and architect of the Norwegian-backed peace process. He was helped by an LTTE-enforced “boycott” by Tamil voters in the areas they control – expressing the Tigers’ apparent desire for the victory of the more hardline candidate. One of Rajapakse’s first acts as President was to call for a fundamental reworking of the peace process so as to prevent further human rights and ceasefire violations by the Tigers and protect the sovereignty and unitary nature of the Sri Lankan state. The LTTE responded by saying that its patience was wearing thin and suggesting that it was contemplating a return to warfare in the near future if the new government failed to address quickly the fundamental aspirations of the Tamil people.

The election of Rajapakse effectively marks the end of Sri Lanka’s nearly four year old peace process, while leaving great uncertainty about whether a new mode of engagement between the Sri Lankan state and the LTTE can be devised before escalating tension and low-intensity conflict explodes into war. Given how charges and counter-charges of human rights violations have played a major role in undermining trust on all sides of the conflict, the moment offers a useful vantage point from which to reflect on the role that human rights protections might play as part of conflict resolution efforts in Sri Lanka. This chapter will explore the challenges facing civil society activists and organizations that want to make human rights principles an integral part of any negotiated settlement between the government and the LTTE.

Efforts to ensure effective human rights protections during the peace process have, from the very beginning, run counter to the basic thrust of the conflict resolution strategy being pursued at the level of the formal “track one” negotiating process. This has become even more pronounced since the Tigers’ withdrawal from negotiations. With no sign that the major players are likely to integrate human rights protections into the peace process of their own accord, the task of pushing a human rights agenda and broadening the nature of peace building has largely fallen to the set of local organizations, intellectuals, and activists known as “civil society.” This has been, in part, a role assigned them—at least in public discourse—by the foreign governments and international donors that provide Sri Lankan civil society organizations with virtually all their funding. With donor governments and institutions themselves reluctant—especially after the LTTE withdrawal from direct negotiations—to push very hard for a rights-based approach to the peace process, they have preferred instead to assign this task to “civil society.” The vision of local civil society as the defender of human rights and as a popular agent of peace building is one that local groups and activists themselves are generally happy to promote. Indeed, there is a powerful normative ideal of civil society to which both donors and local organizations regularly pay homage, one in which local NGOs and citizens’ groups are seen as a source of independent political initiatives—ideally emerging from relatively free and open public discussion—in defense of basic liberal and democratic rights and values.

So far, however, the practice of those organizations and activities that claim the mantle of Sri Lankan civil society—those that I will be referring to as “professional civil society”—fall short of this demanding democratic and liberal ideal. The first three and a half years of cease-fire have revealed Sri Lankan civil society to be severely damaged from thirty years of ethnic and class conflicts, during which it was itself a target of combatants from all sides. In particular, civil society groups committed to human rights and to a negotiated and just settlement to the war have proved to be divided over the proper relation to take toward human rights violations during the peace process. In part as a result of these divisions, they have so far been unable to generate significant or coordinated actions to promote human rights norms as a central aspect of the peace process, despite the wide consensus in favor of such efforts and despite the courageous efforts of many individuals.

Such difficulties are in many ways not surprising, given that Sri Lanka’s conflicts and the dilemmas involved in trying to solve them are themselves rooted in undemocratic structures of power and, crucially, the lack of space for independent, nonethnicized political work. Nonetheless, close consideration of the difficulties that civil society groups and activists have faced in being effective defenders of human rights during the peace process raises more general—and troubling—questions about the capacity and role of “civil society” in sustaining and deepening the peace.

My analysis also aims to bring out the democratic deficits of Sri Lankan human rights discourse and of the peace process itself as it has been constructed and enacted to date. Organized almost exclusively as a deal between two politico-military entities—the Sri Lankan state and the LTTE—that have shown scant respect for basic human rights, the achievement of “peace” has been understood by its chief architects and by many of its civil society and international supporters as being at odds with any serious acknowledgment of past human rights violations and with attempts to institute effective safeguards against ongoing and future abuses.

However, as developments over the first three and a half years of the peace process have made clear, there are powerful arguments to be made that without a stronger emphasis on the ongoing protection of basic human rights and on negotiating a settlement that addresses the basic injustices and rights violations that have fueled the conflict, any “peace” will rest on dangerously weak foundations. With a basic tension between human rights and the official peace process now firmly established, however, developing effective civil society interventions in defense of human rights and a just peace will require great skill and perseverance.

To begin to overcome these obstacles, civil society organizations, together with their international donors and supporters, must consciously work to cultivate more deeply democratic conceptions and practices of human rights and of “peace building,” or conflict resolution. For these efforts to prove successful, “civil society” must first begin to democratize itself. What is generally understood today in Sri Lanka by the term “civil society”—especially in the discourse and funding practices of international donors—is a relatively small set of well-established organizations, mostly based in the capital city, Colombo, and staffed by the English-speaking, generally cosmopolitan middle class and elite. Because of its centrality to the public discourse on “civil society,” the work of this professionalized segment of civil society will be this chapter’s primary focus. However, professional civil society can hope to challenge the entrenched forms of power and inequality that underpin systematic violations of human rights only by broadening its base of support and mobilizing deeper democratic energies and influence. Democratization, in this sense, means the creation of more inclusive, representative, and egalitarian organizations and forms of civil society practice.

Such democratic transformations will be possible, however, only by initiating processes of collective self-questioning within and between civil society groups. The willingness to entertain and respond more openly to criticisms of their own work not only offers resources for developing more effective forms of practice, but also promises to open up new lines of dialogue among civil society groups and between such groups and the larger Sri Lankan public. Of particular importance here would be the possibility of building stronger ties among human rights groups and activists presently divided in complex ways along ethnic and ideological lines, particularly over the appropriate stance to take in relation to the human rights violations of the LTTE.

Finally, given the central role of international donors in funding and defining the programmatic agenda of Sri Lankan civil society, no democratization of the latter is possible without some democratization of its relationship to the former. Strengthening the ability of Sri Lankans to intervene independently and effectively in defense of human rights and peace building will require serious efforts to create more transparent, equal, and mutually accountable relationships between local groups and their international funders, built on a free exchange of information, ideas, and criticism.

A Very Short History of Sri Lanka’s Postcolonial Conflicts

At the heart of the protracted war between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan state is a more than fifty-year failure of Sri Lankan political elites to work out an equitable and mutually acceptable distribution of power between the Sinhala majority and the Tamil minority. Almost immediately upon independence from Britain in 1948, Sri Lankan Tamils found themselves on the receiving end of a delayed assertion of Sinhala majoritarian nationalism. Regardless of whether it was controlled by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party or its chief competitor, the United National Party, any government that attempted to accommodate the peaceful demands for political autonomy in the Tamil-speaking-majority regions of the north and east found its efforts thwarted by the party in opposition, which never failed to invoke the threatened rights of the Sinhala (and Buddhist) majority. No party in power has ever found itself strong enough or committed enough to define the Sri Lankan state in more pluralist and inclusive terms. Eventually, the repeated failure of Sinhala political leaders to meet the legitimate aspirations of Tamils for equal citizenship fueled more radical demands for a separate state of “Tamil Eelam.” A vicious cycle of state and counterstate violence and mutually hardening nationalisms finally exploded into full-scale war following the massive state-sanctioned anti-Tamil violence in July 1983. Since then, the LTTE has proved to be a ruthless and extraordinarily disciplined political and military antagonist. Itself a product of the terror of the Sri Lankan state, it has eventually crushed or incorporated its various military and political rivals and emerged as a deeply antidemocratic counterstate, controlling much of the north and east of Sri Lanka and maintaining tight political control among Tamils across the island and in the international diaspora.

But Sri Lanka has suffered through far more than a simple “ethnic conflict” between the mostly Hindu Tamil minority and the mostly Buddhist Sinhalese majority. For more than three decades now it has been the site of multiple and overlapping violent conflicts. These include two uprisings, one in 1971, the other in 1987–90, by left-wing Sinhala youth of the People’s Liberation Front (known according to its Sinhalese initials as the JVP), both of which were ruthlessly crushed by government and government-supported vigilante forces, at the total cost of an estimated 50,000–60,000 lives. The better-known war, between the Sri Lankan state and Tamil militant forces, has gone through many phases and starred many protagonists. After the withdrawal of Indian peacekeeping forces in 1990, the ethnic conflict eventually developed into an increasingly conventional war between government forces and fighters of the LTTE. A number of former Tamil militant groups, which had joined the democratic process as political parties, continued to maintain paramilitary wings that ended up fighting alongside government police and army units against the Tigers, while also engaged in their own illicit moneymaking and “policing” activities. In 1990 long-standing tensions between the LTTE and largely Tamil-speaking Muslims living in the north and east of the island took more violent forms, with LTTE massacres of Muslim civilians and the expulsion of an estimated 90,000 Muslims from the LTTE-controlled northern Jaffna Peninsula. This drove deeper a wedge of anger and suspicion between many Tamils and Muslims, hardening the sense of separate identity among many Muslims and complicating peacemaking efforts in Sri Lanka to this day.

The past three decades of civil conflict have thus left a legacy of massive violence from which virtually all Sri Lankans—Tamil, Sinhalese, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Christian—have suffered to different degrees. The particular forms the violence has taken have also meant that there are no innocent political groups or actors, despite the attempts of many to present their group as innocent victims of someone else’s injustice. The violence, discrimination, human rights violations, and antidemocratic repression have come from self-proclaimed “representatives” of all the major communities (though certainly not from all Sri Lankans). Moreover, much of the violence has been within ethnic communities. This intracommunal bloodshed includes the often violent political rivalry between the two major Sinhala-dominated political parties, the United National Party (UNP) and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP); the brutal violence between the JVP and the Sinhala-dominated government; and the vicious infighting among competing Tamil militant groups, which continues to this day as the LTTE attempts to make its political hegemony among Tamils complete. Among other things, the complexity of Sri Lanka’s recent history of collective violence teaches us that the war between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government cannot be brought to a peaceful end without involving other actors. This includes other communities, the most important being Muslims, as well as competing elements among both Tamils and Sinhalese.

Re-engaging with the Tigers: The Road to Peace?

Despite this complex history, the Norwegian-facilitated peace process has been almost entirely focused on the government-LTTE relationship—more specifically, on satisfying the political needs of the LTTE for long enough to convince it of the benefits of becoming part of “mainstream” politics, and of the excessive costs of going back to war. The current Norwegian-led effort began in 2000 as an initiative under the government of the SLFP-dominated People’s Alliance (PA) and President Chandrika Kumaratunga, and its first two years contrasted sharply with the basic strategy of the PA government during its seven years in office. The PA and President Kumaratunga, elected in 1994 on a platform of peace and negotiations, initiated an eight-month period of negotiations, de-escalation, and humanitarian relief for the northern and eastern regions of Sri Lanka. In response to the LTTE’s decision to break off negotiations in April 1995 and return to war, claiming that the PA government wasn’t negotiating in good faith, the government developed a double strategy that it called “war for peace.” While attempting to weaken the LTTE militarily, the government simultaneously tried to address what it considered the “core issues” of the conflict through groundbreaking constitutional proposals. These issues centered on recognizing the legitimacy of Tamils’ political grievances through the devolution of significant power to a combined Northeastern Province, within the structure of a federal but united Sri Lanka. The idea was to address the root causes of the Tamil people’s political alienation and oppression, thereby weakening the need—and support—for the violent militancy of the LTTE. The LTTE, naturally, was less than enthusiastic about the government’s attempt to distinguish between it and the Tamil people. What from one angle was an important attempt to increase democratic space for the articulation of less militant, nonseparatist Tamil political voices can be seen from another angle as a typical divide-and-rule strategy, especially given the failure of all earlier attempts by non-LTTE political parties to win fair treatment and equal rights for Tamil people.

The PA’s and Kumaratunga’s strategy ultimately proved a failure, because of both the LTTE’s successful military responses and the Tamil population’s growing alienation from the government as a result of the heightened intensity of the war. This included the terrible suffering of Tamil civilians caught in the war zones of the north and east, but also the indirect effects on the large number of Tamils living outside the north and east, especially in Colombo, who were constantly subject to harassment by the police and other security forces in search of “terrorist suspects.” The decision of the United National Party (UNP) to oppose the PA’s constitutional proposals in August 2000, even after the autonomy provisions for Tamils had been significantly watered down in response to UNP and Sinhala nationalist pressure, was also a crucial factor in the failure of the PA policy.

The UNP, under Ranil Wickremasinghe’s leadership, had for the previous several years proposed a very different strategy, and its return to power in December 2001 elections gave it the chance to put that strategy into practice. Rather than try to weaken and isolate the LTTE, and without proposing its own long-term solution to the central political and ethnic issues at stake, the UNP government chose to accommodate many of the Tigers’ central needs and demands, at least in the short term. These included, first of all, the cease-fire agreement, the terms of which have allowed the LTTE to consolidate its administration in the northern Wanni region and expand its political influence into the Eastern Province and Jaffna peninsula. Equally important was the UNP government’s agreement in principle to establish an interim administration in the north and east that would be largely under the control of the LTTE.

Indeed, the underlying idea of the Norwegian-brokered peace process has been to offer the LTTE greater political legitimacy in the international arena, access to international resources and money for reconstruction, and increased political control of the north and east—short of a formal state—in exchange for an end to the fighting, the chance at economic reconstruction of the south, and the hope of eventually bringing the Tigers into the constraints of world-system and “mainstream” democratic politics. While the LTTE agreed in principle, during the initial rounds of talks, to negotiate a political settlement along federal lines, these negotiations have yet to take place, and neither the Tigers nor the UNP government with whom they had talks expressed any real interest in directly addressing the fundamental political issues at stake in the conflict. Throughout its first three and a half years, even after the SLFP-JVP alliance took over the reins of government, the official peace process has been dominated by a specific model and discourse of conflict resolution. It is one that emphasizes the importance of “trust building” between official “partners”—almost entirely limited to the government and the Tamil Tigers—and the urgency of solving humanitarian needs and concerns, a concern that effectively endorses the LTTE’s demand that “normalization” of life in Tamil areas precede any discussion of long-term solutions to the war and the ethnic injustice and distrust. Rather than emerging from a desire to address the needs, rights, and aspirations of the Sri Lankan people—most especially the Tamil people—the LTTE-government negotiations of 2002–3 were rooted almost solely in the narrow political and economic interests of the two negotiating parties. For various reasons, neither side was eager to address the complex political and legal issues that underlie the armed conflict. Nor were they working to strengthen connections and mutual understanding between the different communities. The UNP, whether in government or in opposition, has yet to offer any serious proposals to address the underlying grievances of the Tamil people. This avoidance of issues of justice and accountability has extended beyond the complex issues of constitutional reform and the exact nature of a federal solution to Tamil demands for self-determination. It includes a reluctance to initiate any public discussion of the causes of the war and of how the now well-established patterns of mutually reinforcing group hostility can be reduced. Despite the critique of the UNP’s approach to peace offered by the SLFP-JVP alliance, the JVP’s rejection of any engagement with the LTTE prevented the alliance from doing any better.

Human Rights Violations: A Threat to the Peace Process

The approach to peace dominant throughout the peace process has allowed little or no room for making human rights protections an integral part of the negotiating and peace processes. Indeed, even as the track one negotiations were making initial headway, the process was shadowed by human rights–related concerns. By the first anniversary of the cease-fire, the frequency and volume of complaints of human rights violations, together with worries about their possible impact on the peace process, had increased noticeably. Specific allegations by various groups, as well official findings of cease-fire violations by the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission—the team of Nordic monitors established to maintain adherence to the cease-fire agreement—have been made against both negotiating parties. The issue that has generated the greatest public concern has been the ample evidence of the LTTE’s recruitment—often forced—of child soldiers. This has continued despite repeated promises by LTTE leadership that no recruitment would take place and that any underage soldiers in its ranks would be released immediately. Also of major concern has been the systematic assassination, abduction, and “disappearance” of members of Tamil political parties opposed to the LTTE, including many Tamils who had acted as informants for the Sri Lankan army and police. Other human rights criticisms of the LTTE have centered on its practice of demanding large “contributions” (or “taxes”) from individuals and businesses throughout the north and east of the island, as well as various forms of economic pressure and even violent attacks on Muslims throughout the east coast. The cumulative effect of these actions has been the marked shrinking of any space for dissent, or for democratic politics, in the north and east of the island and within Tamil society in general, virtually all of which is now under the effective control of the LTTE. The LTTE’s control – which includes the nearly complete LTTE domination of Tamil “civil society” organizations in the north and east – has come about in part through threats and intimidation and in part through widespread allegiance to the Tigers’ nationalist goals. While Karuna’s split from the main faction of the LTTE initially created some room for dissenting voices in the Eastern Province, the frequent killings of Tamils of both sides that followed has only further reduced the space for Tamils throughout the island to engage in independent political activity.

Although the overwhelming majority of cease-fire violations officially verified by the SLMM have been committed by the LTTE, the government has been judged by the SLMM to be guilty of its own cease-fire violations. These have ranged from the security forces’ continued occupation of temples, schools, and private homes in the north and east, to a number deadly police shootings of Tamil protestors, and continued acts of harassment against Tamils in the north and east. Since the commencement of Karuna’s guerrilla campaign in the east against the main faction of the LTTE, the Tigers have consistently complained that the Sri Lankan military is lending logistical and intelligence support to Karuna’s fighters, in their opinion a direct violation of the ceasefire agreement. The Tigers have responded to the killings of their members by escalating attacks on Tamil political opponents and Sri Lankan military and police intelligence officers of all three ethnicities.

The response by the various parties involved in the official peace process to these violations has so far been very weak. While the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) was expected by many to act as a de facto human rights monitor, this is a role that the SLMM is neither comfortable with nor well equipped to undertake. In addition to the lack of any enforcement mechanism for its rulings, the SLMM has repeatedly made clear that it views its mandate as preserving the cease-fire agreement—even if this means ignoring or downplaying human rights violations by both sides (which, in the context of the cease-fire agreement, have mostly been by the LTTE). When the SLMM has ruled against the LTTE, particularly with respect to the forcible recruitment of child soldiers, its rulings have been largely ineffectual. Indeed, while the LTTE has made repeated public commitments that it will cease all recruitment of children, the practice has continued throughout the duration of the cease-fire. In addition, the LTTE has refused SLMM monitors access to its training camps, has threatened parents of abducted children in the presence of SLMM monitors, and continues to deny access by either the SLMM or the ICRC to its well-known but hidden prisons, which are estimated to house hundreds of detainees. In addition to their failures to investigate their own questionable actions, the police and government security forces have been criticized for not taking action to prevent or investigate LTTE violence and harassment against civilians (primarily other Tamils and Muslims), even when the facts of the case are well known. The government, even under the SLFP-JVP alliance, has generally tried not to antagonize the LTTE, even at the cost of its obligations to its own citizens, whether Tamil, Muslim, or Sinhala.

The widespread nature of such violations, particularly those of the LTTE, together with the ineffectiveness of the monitoring and legal mechanisms now in place, have been a cause of great worry for both supporters and opponents of the present peace process. Particularly worrisome is the effect that such violations have had on popular support for the peace process. The evident inability or unwillingness of the LTTE to respect even the most basic liberal and democratic rights of those living in areas it effectively controls, together with its efforts to strengthen itself militarily through continued recruitment and rearmament, have lent credence to a number of disaster scenarios put forward by opponents of the peace process. According to these scenarios, the LTTE is using the peace process merely as a means to strengthen itself militarily and politically in order to better attain its ultimate goal of a separate state of Tamil Eelam. Indeed, the fact that the LTTE’s own antidemocratic activities feed into Sinhala nationalist fears and suspicions, and thus make a Sinhala political consensus harder to achieve, is interpreted by some as a deliberate aspect of the LTTE’s politico-military strategy. The LTTE’s human rights violations, antidemocratic practices, and continued military buildup have been seized on by individuals and groups opposed to the peace process. These have ranged from sections of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) to the nationalist JVP and smaller, explicitly Sinhala parties and nationalist groups, including segments of the Buddhist clergy, some of whom were elected in to parliament April 2004 under the banner of the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU), or National Heritage Party.

However, it is not only unprincipled “spoilers” or other opponents of a negotiated settlement between the government and the LTTE that see LTTE violations as a cause for concern. The most sustained, detailed, and in many ways sophisticated critiques of LTTE actions, and of the structural weaknesses of the Norwegian-sponsored peace process, have come from the University Teachers for Human Rights, Jaffna (UTHR-J). Since the late 1980s UTHR-J, a small but influential group of Tamil activists originally based at the University of Jaffna, has offered detailed bulletins and reports analyzing the human rights situation throughout Sri Lanka, with a particular emphasis on the north and east of the island. UTHR-J’s reports have been noteworthy for offering sharp criticisms of all parties to the conflict, whether the government, the LTTE, other Tamil paramilitary groups, or the Indian Peace Keeping Force, which occupied the north and east of the island from 1987 to 1990.
For UTHR-J, the central weakness of the peace process has been its purely pragmatic basis. UTHR-J argues that the initial priority that the Norwegians and the UNP government gave to keeping the LTTE happy has had the effect of placing under even greater pressure whatever fragile ethnic and political middle ground among the public might have survived the war. By acquiescing in the LTTE’s violent assertion of its status as “the sole representative of the Tamil people,” all the while offering the Tamil people nothing substantive in the way of increased rights that might weaken the LTTE’s hold on Tamil politics, the peace process threatens to ratify the equation—both in appearance and in fact—between Tamils and the LTTE. Given the unwillingness of the government or the Norwegian mediators and the SLMM to hold the LTTE in check—allowing the Tigers to strengthen their antidemocratic grip on the north and east, terrorizing their “own” people while asserting hegemony over the local Muslim population and frightening Sinhalese—this approach gives support to the dangerous belief among many Sinhalese and Muslims that “the Tamils” are being given too much, at the expense of Sinhalese and Muslim rights. LTTE violations and frequent refusals to abide by SLMM rulings, in turn, have helped legitimize the intransigence of sections of the Sinhala-dominated government bureaucracy, whose resistance to working out administrative arrangements with the LTTE in the north and east were one factor in the LTTE’s April 2003 decision to pull out from talks. After years of ferocious and bitter fighting with the LTTE, large sections the Sinhala-dominated police and security forces feel they are now being prevented, in the name of “peace,” from carrying out their duties regarding LTTE violations, creating the real risk of an explosion of anger and violence against Tamil civilians should the cease-fire break down.

Civil Society to the Rescue?

The work of UTHR-J continues to be very controversial. Despite its willingness to criticize rights violations and antidemocratic practices on all sides of the conflict, the organization’s reports are seen by many, particularly other Tamil political activists, as biased in the government’s favor. Nonetheless, although UTHR-J’s reports are frequently criticized as unduly negative toward the peace process and those who are trying to make the most of it, many if not most civil society activists would endorse the idea that the ability and willingness to criticize all human rights violations, no matter who commits them, is a crucial element for a sustainable peace. This view is based in part on pragmatic considerations: By holding all parties accountable to a single set of human rights standards, a major weapon in the arsenal of “extremists,” or “spoilers,” seeking to undermine the peace process would be removed. More important, however, such a broad-based approach to the peace process would also assist in the creation of a political middle ground for accommodation and, perhaps eventually, reconciliation across and within the various ethnic communities. By initiating a process of collective self-criticism, in which people could begin to accept that wrongs have been committed in their name by their own “representatives,” space would be created for democratic political action that is more independent of the major players and their violent methods. Many within organized civil society have thus argued for the importance of expanding participation in the peace process, both to make it more inclusive and sustainable and to ensure that whatever “peace” emerges is as democratic and rights-friendly as possible.
The first three and a half years of the cease-fire have certainly seen numerous pronouncements from almost all corners of Sri Lankan civil society to the effect that the respect of basic human rights is essential to lasting peace. In an attempt to instantiate these sentiments in a formal document, there was an early effort among some civil society activists to produce a draft human rights agreement that could be presented to the two negotiating parties for their ratification. There have also been a number of small-scale civil society initiatives in support of human rights “on the ground.” These have included a handful of independent fact-finding missions to investigate particular sites of recent intercommunal violence, a fact-finding and network-building mission by Colombo-based women’s groups in the north and east, and various ad hoc attempts to build links between civil society groups in the south and those in the north and east.

In this context, many civil society groups welcomed the announcement, at the end of the fifth session of peace talks in February 2003, that the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE had agreed to be bound, throughout the remainder of the peace process, to a set of human rights standards to be formulated by the independent human rights advisor Ian Martin. Planning began for a variety of different civil society human rights monitoring schemes, based partly on hopes of exploiting the opening provided by Martin’s official role at the track one level and by the apparent interest of Sri Lanka’s international financial donors in seeing that their reconstruction and development assistance is used in ways that strengthen democratic rights and lay the foundations for a sustainable peace. The hope was that civil society monitoring might help strengthen and make meaningful any official monitoring mechanism established by the government and the LTTE. Unfortunately, Martin’s proposals were rejected by the LTTE and the government in the final session of talks before the LTTE’s withdrawal from negotiations in April 2003. With the collapse of the human rights track at the level of formal negotiations, and the subsequent withdrawal of strong international pressure in support of human rights monitoring, Sri Lankan human rights groups have been faced with the even more formidable task of establishing their own independent monitoring programs, with no particular success to date.

The Challenge of Bringing Rights Back In

To date, then, while civil society groups have generally argued that human rights protections must be made an integral part of the peace process, they continue to have trouble putting this belief into action. Very few concrete or coordinated actions have been taken, or even forceful statements made (other than those published by UTHR-J), in response to specific violations of those rights or to the underlying structures that make them possible. There continues to be great reluctance throughout Sri Lankan civil society to translate the general commitment to human rights norms into effective action in defense of rights.
The rest of this essay will try to explain the complex of factors behind the lack of forceful human rights interventions by civil society groups in the Sri Lankan peace process. The obstacles to establishing independent civil society interventions in defense of basic human rights touch on the very nature of Sri Lanka’s professional civil society, and perhaps on contemporary “civil societies” more generally. The difficulties testify to the basic reluctance of people and organizations throughout Sri Lankan civil society to talk about, much less challenge, established relations of power. While the rhetoric of Sri Lankan politicians and political parties is often quite violently oppositional, the language and approach of those organizations and individuals who dominate the agenda of professional civil society tend to be quite mild and often indirect in their criticisms of those in power. The underlying assumption of most professional civil society interventions in the political domain seems to be that relations of unequal or unaccountable power are best approached quietly or through indirect means, if not simply ignored.

Given the ongoing threat of violence from the government and armed groups, especially the LTTE, and more recently the breakaway faction of the LTTE led by Karuna, it is obvious that fear plays a large role in keeping more forceful public criticism to a minimum. Such fear is in part the product of decades of political violence, in which independent political and citizens’ groups were often the direct target of organized violence, both by the Sri Lankan state and by armed militant groups (and even by the Indian Peace Keeping Force that occupied the north and east in the late 1980s). Since the early 1970s, the modern Sri Lankan state, regardless of which political party happens to be in power, has repeatedly shown its willingness to violently repress any countervailing political force, whether it be independent trade unions, members of opposition political parties, or ethnic minorities. It has in large part been the systematic willingness of the Sri Lankan state to resort to illegal violence that has spawned the particularly brutal nature of its violent opposition, whether the massive antistate violence of the JVP in the early 1970s and late 1980s, or the ultimately much more disciplined and effective violence of the LTTE. Given this history and the LTTE’s continued willingness to bully and murder its critics, especially other Tamils, into submission, it is not surprising that most Sri Lankans, even those who are politically educated and active, prefer to avoid direct confrontations with the holders of political power. Even among those Tamils who will criticize the LTTE’s actions forcefully in private, few within Sri Lanka are willing to do so publicly. That the LTTE has used the peace process to gain virtually complete control over all “civil society” organizations in the north and east of the country has increased the climate of fear and thus further shut down what space might have existed for articulating criticisms of LTTE actions.

But it is not only fear, however deep or well founded, that discourages more forceful civil society interventions against both the government’s and the LTTE’s human rights violations. Despite a basic consensus on principle, Sri Lankan civil society organizations concerned with political issues are in fact quite divided along what might be called ethno-ideological grounds, in particular over the proper position to take regarding rights violations and antidemocratic practices of the LTTE. The result is a general reluctance among all but UTHR-J and a handful of individual activists to offer forceful and sustained criticisms of the LTTE. Not surprisingly, this reluctance is particularly true of those human rights organizations staffed by Tamils and oriented toward the defense of Tamil people’s rights. Such organizations virtually never criticize the actions of the LTTE, generally seeing their role instead as defending the rights of Tamils against the oppression of the Sinhala-dominated state. While it is clear that much of this approach is due to deeply held political beliefs—including, for many activists, a deeply held Tamil nationalism and a well-founded distrust of the Sri Lankan state—it is also clear that the historical and continuing threat of LTTE violence against Tamil politicians and political activists critical of the LTTE dissuades some who might otherwise speak up.

Political divisions over the proper response to human rights violations by the LTTE do not follow strictly ethnic lines, however. While the reluctance to criticize the LTTE is strongest among Tamils, it also exists among Sinhalese activists. Many Sinhala activists and predominantly Sinhala organizations that work on human rights and conflict issues are reluctant to appear anti-Tamil or insufficiently “progressive” on ethnic issues. Like most of their Tamil counterparts, many Sinhala peace and human rights activists fear that criticism of the LTTE will distract attention from, and weaken criticisms of, what they see as the more fundamental problem of Sinhala racism and majoritarianism. In this sense, differences over whether to criticize publicly the human rights and cease-fire violations of the Tamil Tigers often result from largely unarticulated disagreements over which agent is seen to be the greatest threat to human rights and democratic values: the state or the Tigers. Of particular concern to many Sinhala peace and human rights activists is the desire not to repeat what they see as the mistakes of the past, in particular the way in which the People’s Alliance government, once spurned at the negotiating table by the LTTE, launched a “war for peace” that targeted the LTTE not only militarily—with incalculable suffering for ordinary Tamil people—but also rhetorically and ideologically, with the effect of strengthening the position of hardline anti-Tamil Sinhala groups.

For these reasons, civil society organizations and activists have grown reluctant to press too vigorously on human rights issues. Given that violations of fundamental civil and political rights during the cease-fire have been most publicly and systematically committed by the LTTE, it has been difficult to criticize such violations without seeming to offer political ammunition to opponents of a negotiated solution with the LTTE. There has also been a continuing worry among many in civil society that raising human rights concerns “too forcefully” might in a more general sense have disruptive rather than productive effects on the peace process. Such fears are not totally unwarranted, given that the peace process has been structured almost entirely as a deal between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE, neither of which is known for its open and democratic relationship with “its” people. A strong human rights agenda, were it to be pushed vigorously as an integral part of the peace process, would seem likely to increase the costs for both parties to any negotiated settlement. And the inevitable failure of the parties to live up fully to human rights standards could lend support to those opposed to the peace process, whichever “side” they happened to be on.

In light of the rejection of Ian Martin’s human rights proposals, the LTTE’s subsequent withdrawal from the peace talks, and the growing public condemnation of the LTTE’s systematic assassination of political opponents and continued recruitment of child soldiers, some prominent members of professional civil society, together with many in the powerful “donor community,” have argued that the need for “constructive engagement” with the LTTE militates too forcefully against pressing human rights issues. This is in part a natural response to the practical realities of the LTTE’s political and military strength, and to the fact that no peace process is possible without the LTTE’s cooperation. The discourse of constructive engagement, however, also tends to make much of the need to understand the sensitivities of the LTTE. Respecting its desire for recognition as an equal partner with the government and as a potentially legitimate member of the international community is seen as necessary to maintaining the LTTE’s commitment to a peaceful transformation of Sri Lanka’s ethnic crisis. Pushing the Tigers too hard on their continued violence and antidemocratic practices is seen as likely only to lead to their further withdrawal from what is seen as the potentially moderating influence of negotiations and involvement with the international community (particularly in the form of development and reconstruction assistance). The danger of withdrawal is especially high according to this argument, given the moralism that characterizes much of the human rights criticism of the LTTE, some of which seems to denounce any engagement with the LTTE before its full democratic and liberal transformation.

The emergence of public debates over how and on what terms to engage with the LTTE has offered a rare window on divisions within professional, Colombo-based civil society. Given their potentially explosive nature, disagreements between those who publicly criticize the LTTE and those who don’t have not typically been articulated in the open. To be publicly pro-LTTE, especially for Tamil activists, can be a dangerous thing, as was made clear with the May 2005 assassination of Dharmaratnam Sivaram, Sri Lanka’s most prominent pro-LTTE journalist. It could easily become dangerous again. Equally important, to accuse another human rights or peace activist, —whether Tamil or Sinhala, —of being “soft” on the LTTE has generally been considered bad form, at least within the world of Colombo civil society organizations. Thus, liberal critics of the LTTE are normally loath to make public their unhappiness with their less critical civil society colleagues. Unfortunately, both the existence of these disagreements and the continued hesitation about openly discussing them (or their psychological and ideological sources) has hindered the building of a strong democratic movement against abuses by all sides. Instead, the existence of such rarely articulated but widely known divisions has the effect of ratifying the severe limits that characterize civil society politics in Sri Lanka.

In what follows, we will explore in more detail a set of three mutually reinforcing barriers that prevent civil society organizations from playing a stronger role in defending human rights as part of a commitment to a just and sustainable peace. These are the relationships between (1) the political divisions that exist over the meaning and practice of human rights, (2) the democratic deficits of the peace process, controlled as it is by organizations (the government, the LTTE, and international donors and foreign governments) that are, in different ways, deeply resistant to democratic accountability, and finally, (3) the democratic deficits of the liberal, cosmopolitan forms of professionalized civil society political activity that have developed over the past two decades of war, in large part through international sponsorship. My analysis will suggest the need for advocates of human rights and of a peaceful, negotiated settlement to Sri Lanka’s long-running war to rethink the nature of all three categories—civil society, conflict resolution or peace building, and human rights—and to begin to refashion their practice in more fully democratic ways.

Democratizing Human Rights

The divisions within Sri Lankan civil society over the proper role of human rights principles and advocacy during the peace process need to be understood in light of the ambiguities and complexities that characterize the discourse of human rights more generally. The highly politicized, often ethnically defined differences over human rights issues, especially over the proper position to take on LTTE abuses, are sustained in part by the difficulty of defining and practicing the universality and reciprocity characteristic of enlightenment concepts of human rights. Debates that often seem to be between those in favor of giving a central role to human rights issues in the peace process (which generally has meant criticizing the actions of the LTTE) and those opposed to such a role can also be read as debates over the best or most appropriate definition of human rights, or over which kind or set of rights is most in need of protection. It is possible to draw out of the contemporary debates over human rights and the peace process three major lines of argument, which, depending on one’s dominant political principles—and at times one’s partisan allegiances—give emphasis to different strands of the larger (though rather fractious) family of human rights.

For instance, critics of the lack of strong human rights protections during the peace process, and of the lack of effective civil society outcry and action on these issues, generally focus on the standard collection of liberal civil and political rights. These include most directly the right to life, the right against arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, the right to due process of law, freedom of political association, and related political rights. Such “negative rights” attach to the individual and either protect against encroachment by the state or other groups into a “space” considered as belonging to the individual or else guarantee the tools for individuals to be active citizens and political participants. Violations of these sorts of rights by the LTTE have dominated the public discussion of the human rights situation in Sri Lanka today. (Before the cease-fire, violations of these same rights by the government took center stage among those concerned with human rights issues.)

Another major strand of human rights evoked in contemporary debates concerns those rights to basic dignity that often come under international humanitarian law: the right of refugees to shelter, food, and protection against attack, and, today, their right to return to their properties and to be provided with the basic social infrastructure necessary to a decent existence—land free of mines, roads that can be driven, schools with roofs, hospitals with medicines and doctors. These rights, while endorsed in principle by all parties to the conflict, are emphasized most strongly today by the LTTE and its supporters in their demands for a speedy “return to normalcy” for the millions of people in the north and east of the island whose lives have been disrupted by decades of war—and more recently by the tsunami of December 2004. Addressing these “humanitarian” concerns through an explicit language of rights has increasingly become the choice of the LTTE, following its long use by local and international humanitarian agencies that work with victims of the war.

The preferred language of rights of the LTTE and its Tamil-nationalist supporters and sympathizers centers on the right to “self-determination” for the Tamil people. This is the fundamental right that the LTTE says it has been struggling for from its beginning. Unlike the previous sets of rights, whether humanitarian or civil and political, the right to self-determination attaches not to individual Tamils but to the Tamil “people” as a whole. It is the right of the Tamil people, or “nation,” to rule themselves as they see fit, free from interference by other communities. One can argue that it was in part the long history of gross violations of Tamils’ individual rights—to life, property, equal opportunity—by successive Sri Lankan governments that reinforced the belief among many Tamils that neither individual nor “minority” rights are sufficient to guarantee their freedom and equal dignity. From this perspective Tamils are a nation, not just a minority, and deserve recognition as such. This is in part to guarantee the fundamental democratic right to an equal and active role in one’s own governance (which has been denied in practice due to the majoritarian characteristics of the Sri Lankan political system), as well as for pragmatic reasons of collective self-protection.

The discourse of “human rights,” then, is used in the present Sri Lankan context to defend very different political projects and to take very different positions on the peace process. Despite the understandable concerns of those frustrated at the lack of action to stop the widespread rights violations by the LTTE, it is useful to recognize that from the perspective of the LTTE—and, more crucially, from the perspective of its supporters and sympathizers—its struggle is a human rights struggle. Thus, while it is indisputable that the LTTE has systematically violated the first set of civil and political rights, LTTE officials and supporters can plausibly (though incompletely) argue that they are in fact committed to a human rights agenda. Indeed, they are fighting for nothing else but the achievement of these rights, whether through a sovereign state of Tamil Eelam or through some form of confederation or federalism.

However, the issue cannot simply be left there. Central to the appeal of the Tamil nationalist struggle and the goal of self-determination is a democratic ideal: the ideal of the Tamil people ruling themselves, governing their own affairs, freed from Sinhala domination. For that struggle to be a truly democratic one that leads to a democratic outcome, however, not all means are permissible. The collective rights of the Tamil people don’t trump or do away with individual rights; in fact, they actually need those rights in order to make (democratic) sense. Certain basic civil and political rights have to be respected even for the collective right of self-determination to be internally consistent.

Central to the democratic ideal is the notion that the powers given to political representatives and officeholders are (1) given only on trust and (2) never given completely. Instead, they must be supplemented by the people’s active involvement in their own governance, through monitoring, challenging, advising, and ultimately, when necessary, replacing those who temporarily make use of the people’s power. A democratized conception of human rights, then, would include (1) the right of individuals to organize themselves and to act politically, independent of, and even in opposition to, the government or quasi-governmental powers; (2) the right to hold those in power and the institutions of the state accountable, both making sure that the wishes and interests of the majority and of the common good are respected, and preventing abuses of rights and excesses of power; and (3) all the specific liberal rights necessary to achieving these general democratic rights: rights of speech and publication, political association, bodily integrity, and so on. In short, the establishment and preservation of independent spaces for citizen power are definitive of democratic politics. For this reason, when the LTTE and Tamil nationalists sympathetic to their struggle argue that they are fighting for the human rights of the Tamil people, it is incumbent on them to show that the democratic rights of all Tamils, and all others within the reach of their power and authority, are or can be respected.

Were such an explicitly democratic conception of human rights to be adopted, then, it would seem in principle to hold out hope for reducing, if not fully overcoming, the tension between the traditional liberal set of civil and political rights and the idea of a collective right to national self-determination. For the latter vision of Tamils’ collective rights to make sense, the former set of individual rights must also be respected. And from the evidence of history, respect for the liberal rights supposedly guaranteed to all Sri Lankan citizens would seem, in practice, to require some form of collective autonomy for the Tamil people living in the north and east of the island.

Embracing a more explicitly and consistently democratic conception of human rights should also enable Sri Lankan human rights activists of different ethnic identifications and political allegiances to discover greater common ground. It would offer a basis for the consistent critique of the violation of Sri Lankans’ democratic rights, whatever their ethnicity, and by whatever party (whether LTTE, Sri Lankan army or police, JVP, or Tamil paramilitaries). By doing so, and by articulating a perspective that could honor the shared suffering from human rights violations that members of all Sri Lankan communities have experienced, such a conception of rights could build trust across ethnic divides and help lay the groundwork for a cross-ethnic coalition of activists and organizations, beyond Colombo-based organizations, that is committed to more complete democratization of Sri Lanka as a whole. More specifically, by offering a critique of the antidemocratic practices of both the LTTE and the Sri Lankan state, greater space would be created for democratic, nonviolent political activity by Tamils, who would find themselves no longer forced quite so absolutely to sacrifice their liberal and democratic principles to the defense of their collective rights as Tamils.

As this last point suggests, however, even as a democratized practice of human rights advocacy would stress the importance of consistently applying basic principles to all parties in the conflict, it would by no means be politically neutral. Instead, a consistently democratic approach to human rights issues is itself a particular—and controversial—political project, one that directly challenges both the political program of the LTTE (and certain other forms of Tamil nationalism) and the underlying institutions and exclusionary practices of the Sri Lankan state and the Sinhala nationalism that underpins them. For instance, any attempt to create greater space for nonviolent, democratic Tamil political activity, perhaps in common with predominantly Sinhala or Muslim political groupings, would be a direct threat to the LTTE’s violent claim to be the sole representative of the Tamil people. And those undertaking such a political program, especially to the extent that their criticisms of the Sinhala-dominated state were actually embraced by progressive elements of the Sinhala polity or the state itself, would surely be denounced as traitors to the Tamil cause and as agents of a classic divide-and-rule policy.

Democratizing the Peace

A more explicitly democratic approach to human rights advocacy, then, would face difficulties not just from the psychological dynamics and ethnopolitical identifications discussed above, but also from the entrenched political realities that help sustain them. Indeed, it is precisely these basic political realities, against which the task of developing a more democratic conception and practice of human rights must struggle, that are ratified and strengthened by the Norwegian-sponsored peace process and the dominant ideas of conflict resolution embedded within the process. As we have already seen, the interests and officials of the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government (as well as the less obvious interests of the “international community”) have almost completely dominated the process so far. Given that neither party has displayed any serious commitment to human rights principles, the most obvious effect of these restrictions, as we have already seen, is to marginalize human rights concerns as the province only of “spoilers.”

Equally worrisome, however, is the nature of the “peace” that has been built on the foundations of the government–LTTE–international community triad. With the emphasis almost solely on “trust building” between the two negotiating parties, there has been very limited space or encouragement for independent civil society initiatives in favor of a negotiated settlement and accommodation across communities. This is true in the south but even more so in the north and the east, where NGOs and civil society organizations over the course of the cease-fire have been forcibly consolidated into LTTE-controlled consortia. The effect of this lack of free space has been to obstruct any serious attempts at independent trust building or reconciliation at the local or national level. Indeed, the dominant conflict resolution model followed in Sri Lanka has been characterized by a fundamental paradox: Trust building at the “track one” level has effectively prevented sustainable trust building at other layers of society. Given the troublesome political issues that might be raised, and the challenges that open discussion and free political activity would pose to the sources of both government and LTTE power, independent efforts to engage with and ultimately transform the conflicting perceptions and experiences of Sri Lankans of different ethnic and political affiliations have been discouraged. With the UNP-led government not committed to any principled long-term solution or even to a set of interim reform policies that might slowly weaken Sri Lanka’s polarized ethnic attitudes and affiliations, but solely to keeping the peace process going until the economic and social benefits of the lack of war become irreversible, their central strategy has simply been to do whatever is necessary to keep the LTTE happy and within the process.

With so little space for independent political contact between Tamils, Sinhalese, and Muslims, the divergent conceptions of “peace” that exist among most members of these three groups have, largely speaking, been further ratified rather than brought into contact in a way that makes them more susceptible to mutually beneficial transformation. For most Tamils who publicly express political opinions, “peace” means the chance to win back the political rights they lost to the Sri Lankan state. The peace process, then, is a time in which their many years of suffering, and the anger it has produced, can finally be expressed. But peace certainly hasn’t meant accepting that wrongs have been committed on all sides, or acknowledging the role that the LTTE’s own violence has played in hardening many Sinhala and Muslim hearts. Among many, perhaps most, Sinhalese, there is a strong belief that “peace” should really mean “peace and quiet,” rather than the outcome of a process of political, constitutional, and social changes necessary for Tamils to be treated as equal citizens. For many Muslims, finally, peace means a chance to return to the homes and lands from which they have been forcibly displaced and to live their lives in security, no longer harassed or politically manipulated by the competing claims of Tamil and Sinhala nationalism. For the more politicized Muslims, peace increasingly means having a political unit of their own, in and through which they are free to determine their own affairs. Unfortunately, the way in which the peace process has been so dominated by the concerns and actions of the government, the LTTE, and international donors merely strengthens these divergent conceptions of peace, rather than challenging them and leading to their democratic transformation.

For the international community, in turn, “peace in Sri Lanka” has meant an opportunity for its financial and development agencies to lay the foundations for renewed economic liberalization and “growth” and for the social stability that is seen both as one of its effects and as one of its causes. Unfortunately, this has proved to be a largely technical and bureaucratized vision of peace building, and its effects on the capacity of local civil society to do effective peace and human rights work of its own are far from obviously beneficial. From the advent of the formal government-LTTE-Norwegian peace process, there has been a flurry of new activity by the established international players in Sri Lanka: UN agencies (UNHCR, UNICEF, UNDP), the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, bilateral (i.e., government) aid agencies (e.g., USAID, NORAD, DfID, CIDA, SIDA), and smaller international nongovernmental agencies such as Care International, Oxfam, Forut, Save the Children, and many others. Their activity has involved numerous “needs assessments,” much project planning, the formation of working groups and special subcommittees, the drafting of complex rules and legal arrangements for the disbursement of reconstruction monies, and, as an essential part of this, endless liaising between the various agencies, governments, and INGOs involved, and between them and the relevant LTTE and Sri Lankan government officials. (The complex and time-consuming nature of such work only increased with the massive influx of international aid workers, INGO’s, and volunteer groups in response to the December 2004 tsunami.)

The problem with this approach to peace building is not only the inefficiency of such large amounts of time spent coordinating between the different bureaucracies but, more fundamentally, the highly technical approach to Sri Lanka’s complex social and political challenges that it involves. Highly paid conflict and development “experts” are brought in for short-term consultancies, with little knowledge of the particularities of Sri Lanka’s politics, cultures, and histories, and with little likelihood (if recent history is any guide) of systematic follow-up by those better versed in local knowledge. Instead, the assumption seems to be that Sri Lanka’s problems are similar enough to other “ethnic conflicts” that they can be addressed though largely technical means, without deep knowledge of the complexities of the political and social context or of how the social problems to be addressed—displacement, land disputes, poverty, exclusivist ethnic identifications—are embedded in long-standing and complex structures of undemocratic power. Even the longer-term international workers remain in Sri Lanka for only two or three years. By the time they have begun to gain a better understanding of the specific nature of Sri Lanka’s challenges, they are on their way out. Local groups, academics, and activists, many of whom have spent years developing careful political and social analyses of Sri Lanka’s overlapping conflicts, are primarily assigned the job of implementing the projects determined by international consultants and the resident staffs of donor governments and agencies. The peace-building and reconstruction agendas are largely set by the international donors; local organizations and activists have very little space to question or refine the agendas set by others, much less to determine the agenda themselves or to hold the donors accountable in any systematic way. Even the creation by bilateral donors of a number of different “peace funds,” designed explicitly to support the role of civil society groups in the peace process and to develop the overall peace-building capabilities of Sri Lankan civil society, has not yet succeeded in transforming this dynamic to any considerable extent.

Toward a More Democratic Civil Society

The inability of Sri Lanka’s professional civil society to carve out, in the peace process, an agenda and space independent of the government and the LTTE as well as of its international donors, is symptomatic of a more basic, structural weakness of civil society as a whole. For citizens’ groups and civil society organizations to be effective at pressing human rights concerns, holding those in power more accountable, and opening up spaces for independent trust-building initiatives, new, more democratic forms of political organizing and institution building will have to be developed. For Sri Lankan civil society to become a more effective agent of democratization, it will itself have to undergo a significant degree of democratization.
The existing democratic deficits of Sri Lankan civil society begin from the very way in which it is generally understood and addressed. In political discussions in Colombo, especially among international donors, “civil society” primarily refers to those highly professionalized Colombo-based institutions—research centers, human rights and peace groups, development-oriented NGOs—that are staffed by English-speaking, highly educated, liberal-minded, cosmopolitan intellectuals, lawyers, or activists. “Civil society” can also refer to smaller, community-based groups outside Colombo that have established recognizable institutions that are stable and well enough organized to be funded according to the standard rules of donor bureaucracies (that is, using project proposals written in English, standardized accounting procedures, regular status reports, and so on). Civil society thus refers to those groups that international donors can easily work with and identify with, and with whom they are in broad ideological agreement.

Less often included in the working definition of civil society are those political groups and institutions that do not depend on foreign donors for their activities and that do not follow today’s dominant liberal, cosmopolitan set of political positions. These groups include, for example, trade unions, professional organizations, student groups, certain other, less liberal religious groups, and the more nationalist wing of the Colombo elite. Their exclusion from the working definition of civil society is in part a result of the fact that many such groups have been and continue to be politicized in partisan, or ethnicized, ways, and at times have engaged in or justified “uncivil” behavior (e.g., the violence attributed to student groups affiliated with particular political parties, trade unions used by political parties to intimidate their opponents, and the often strident opposition articulated by large parts of the Buddhist clergy to devolution of state power).

While it is understandable that donors would be less inclined to offer support to groups that do not share their liberal, multicultural, free-market ideology, it is perhaps unwise to write them out of the working definition of civil society from the very start. For one thing, doing so makes it harder to see the value and possibility of building bridges and maintaining channels of communication between the different wings of civil society—channels that might enable one to discover areas of common ground or compromise that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Even more important, the tendency to equate professionalized cosmopolitan Colombo-based groups—and, to a lesser extent, those professionalized groups outside Colombo—with “civil society” makes it easier to ignore the unrepresentative and largely undemocratic nature of such groups. This oversight inadvertently ratifies elite control of Sri Lankan society more generally. Indeed, the very factors that make possible their strong connections with international funders are what tends to cut these groups off from the rest of Sri Lanka. For even as such elite-based groups are prone to speak in the name of Sri Lankan civil society and the Sri Lankan people as a whole, Colombo-based groups in particular are, generally speaking, quite isolated from the vast majority of Sri Lankans on the basis of class, language ability (few Sri Lankans outside the small elite speak English), and political ideology. The elite nature of the best-established and most prominent civil society organizations explains in part the lack of emphasis placed on issues of socioeconomic rights and issues of class inequality.

Colombo-based elite, cosmopolitan groups and activists thus cannot automatically be assumed to represent the needs, interests, or political views of most Sri Lankans. All the less so, given that there are no significant mechanisms established among such groups to insure their accountability to the larger Sri Lankan community in whose name they speak. Indeed, in many ways Colombo civil society groups have much the same relationship to their rural or non-English-speaking fellow citizens as international donors have to the Colombo-based recipients of their aid. While Colombo-based groups do frequently venture outside Colombo to work with other non-English-speaking Sri Lankans, the work tends to be sporadic, not very well coordinated, and rarely followed up in systematic ways. The agenda is almost always set by the Colombo groups, and the actual interactions between the groups often reinforce hierarchical power relations, with those at the grassroots level being the objects of training or skills building, but rarely being treated as equals from whom the trainers themselves could learn. There is generally no space within the activities sponsored by these groups for such power relations to be addressed or questioned. This lack of political accountability is not merely a normative, or ethical, failing. It also has negative strategic political effects, because it cuts off Colombo and other elite civil society groups from larger political energies and possible sources of knowledge and inspiration that might come from non-Colombo and nonelite constituencies. This isolation, in turn, prevents such groups from establishing the local-level political support, and thus the political leverage, necessary to have effective influence over national-level political leaders.

The democratic deficits of professional donor-sponsored civil society groups are not, however, primarily the fault of the individuals involved, many of whom are quite aware of, frustrated by, and struggling against the institutional and social constraints just described. The problems are instead more structural and have much to do with the financial dependence of such groups on international donors. The heavily bureaucratized form of so much of the work done by Sri Lankan civil society groups, especially Colombo-based research and advocacy groups, is largely a response to the needs and demands of their donors. Since most of their funding is short-term and project based, a large proportion of available time is spent on the necessities of constant fund-raising and the paperwork that comes with it: the preparation of project proposals, maintenance of records, completion of evaluations, and writing of annual reports. Indeed, maintaining the institution itself in some ways becomes the rational priority, with competition between groups (for funds and for the public recognition that leads to funds) being more common than cooperation. As a result of funding patterns, activities tend almost entirely to take the form of short-term projects rather than long-term, sustained campaigns. This leads to frequent shifts of direction within organizations, and constant loss of institutional memory, which are one cause of the lack of coordination between different groups who would seem to have much to gain from one another. Finally, staff members are recruited primarily for their ability to perform specific useful tasks rather than for their political knowledge or commitment, and generally show little interest in using their employment as a source or occasion for political education. Thus, civil society organizations tend to be characterized by a careerist rather than an activist mindset, with many members joining out of a not-so-surprising desire for a safe, relatively well paying job. This helps explain some of the cynicism that NGOs and those who work for them provoke among growing numbers of the Sri Lankan people—a cynicism that undermines the credibility and thus the political effectiveness of such groups.

What results from this combination of institutional, funding, class, and ideological dynamics is a quite cautious form of political activity, aimed at a very restricted audience rather than toward more active and challenging forms of popular mobilization. Thus, there are frequent seminars and workshops, as well as reports and publications, oriented toward the political elite and intellectual class and therefore conducted and written in English. Those training and capacity-building programs that are oriented toward nonelite and non-Colombo audiences tend to be of a highly technical sort. Thus, for instance, a wide array of “human rights education” courses and workshops catalog the various categories of rights granted Sri Lankans through international covenants and national law, but they rarely foster any discussion of how these rights might relate to the specific history of human rights abuses in Sri Lanka’s recent past and to their various social and political causes. The most politically challenging forms of civil society politics consist of public interest lawsuits and legal litigation in particularly acute cases of individuals’ rights being violated (e.g., illegal detention, disappearances, rapes by security forces, and cases under the Prevention of Terrorism Act). While such legal actions often require real courage and can involve real risk, they also reinforce a generally legalistic approach to human rights concerns, with more structural political issues, and what would be needed to challenge them, left unaddressed.

However valuable such political activity is in the abstract, and would be in a social context of a well-functioning liberal democracy with a strong judiciary and a political culture that generally respects fundamental rights, such a context is not Sri Lanka’s. The dominant forms of political work characteristic of professional Sri Lankan civil society are ill equipped to challenge the democratic deficits of the peace process or, more generally, the entrenched forms of power and conflict from which Sri Lanka has suffered for so long. Thus, the political work of professional civil society rarely names or challenges undemocratic or unaccountable power as such, nor does it organize people to recognize, criticize, and challenge it. As suggested above, this is partly born of the need to defend and protect one’s existing institution and is thus a cost incurred by what is in other ways the strength of Sri Lankan civil society: its highly organized and professional nature. It is also a product of dependence on international donors, especially foreign governments, few of which are willing to support politically controversial civil society initiatives. Caution also clearly comes from the basic liberal and elite ideological dispositions of civil society leaders. This is ultimately linked to the particularly strong disinclination among Sri Lankans of all classes to challenge established authorities and hierarchy. Some degree of discomfort, even fear, at the risks such challenges might entail is certainly understandable, and given its deep roots, it is not going to disappear soon. Yet it is striking to notice just how little elite civil society does to challenge this tendency, even in its own operations or its relations with its external donors.

The point of this analysis is not to blame or condemn Sri Lanka’s elite, professionalized civil society for the democratic deficits of its political work. Such deficits are largely the result of long-standing historical developments over which individual activists and civil society leaders have little control. The point, rather, is that for civil society to become anything like the force for lasting peace and human rights that its leaders and its donors wish it to be, the democratization of civil society must become a conscious political project for everyone involved. What is most worrying about the present state of donor-funded civil society in Sri Lanka is the absence of any space where these issues can be discussed and debated. As far as a process of democratization within local civil society—both within elite, Colombo-based organizations and between them and their nonelite constituencies—there is virtually no discussion or awareness of the issue, and little evident interest within the leadership of elite civil society organizations in producing more egalitarian, representative, and self-questioning forms of political practice.

As for relations between local civil society organizations and their international financial supporters, there is frequent, well-founded grumbling from local activists, but no forum for discussing the mutual expectations and responsibilities of each to the other. The donations of international agencies and foreign governments are generally presented and accepted as acts of generosity rather than aspects of deeply political relationships that bring with them certain responsibilities, including the willingness of donors to be held accountable to local constituencies. With such issues largely off the table even within local civil society discussions, it has been left to nationalist “spoilers” of various kinds to raise them. It has generally only been Sinhala nationalists (joined more recently by Tamil nationalists and the LTTE itself) who have dared criticize the unaccountable forms of power involved in the kinds of international support afforded to Sri Lankan civil society (and in other projects carried out directly by INGOs and mulitlaterals). In similar ways, it is often only the nationalist wings of the political left, that is, the JVP and its supporters, who articulate any kind of class analysis and critique of the elite dominance of Sri Lankan civil society.

Conclusion and Recommendations

In light of the difficulties sketched out above, it will clearly take some time before Sri Lankan civil society becomes anything like the strong force for peace and human rights that it is sometimes theorized and often hoped to be. Whatever fate awaits Sri Lanka—further stalemate, a return to war, or renewal and deepening of the LTTE-government-Norwegian peace process—stronger and more democratic forms of civil society are needed if human rights are to be better protected. While it is too much to expect that Sri Lankan civil society organizations and activists will be democratizing the Sri Lankan state, the LTTE, or the sphere of formal politics anytime soon, it is not too much to expect that democratic habits—of equal treatment and equal voice, of questioning authority, of allowing as wide and active participation as is practically possible—can begin to be cultivated more widely within civil society groups and between them and their various publics. In this, the international community could play a crucial role, by advocating for and helping to subsidize such democratic transformations. But for this to happen, international funding bodies must be willing to open themselves up for public questioning and investigation as well. Transparency and accountability, key words in the donor vocabulary of good governance, must apply to donors, too.
The following is meant to suggest what such a process of democratization might look like, and how it might strengthen the ability of Sri Lankan civil society organizations to act in defense of basic democratic and human rights. While born of an analysis of the specific challenges facing Sri Lanka’s civil society organizations, the following recommendations would also likely be useful for other situations of protracted social conflict, and even beyond.

1. Create spaces in which to discuss and strategize ways beyond the present political and social limitations of professional, liberal, cosmopolitan civil society.

(a) Such spaces for discussion and debate would aim, in the broadest sense, to cultivate habits of collective self-questioning and critique. In this way, the target of professional civil society’s critical energies would move beyond those of the state, militant groups, and nationalists of various sorts, to include the democratic deficits in its own institutions and political practices. This would require Colombo-based cosmopolitan civil society groups to give up their claims to speak for civil society and to accept instead that they constitute specific, partial, and not always democratic versions among other possible forms of civil society. Among other things, such a change in self-understanding might make it more possible to open up lines of communication between the liberal cosmopolitan groups that international funders prefer and the more nationalistic, even chauvinistic elements of Sinhala civil society, which often have strong democratic and even rights-based commitments of their own despite their being generally excluded from the standard conception and discourse of “civil society.”

(b) Cultivating habits of collective self-critique would open up space to debate ways of challenging and moving beyond the deeply rooted social and class limitations of established civil society. Professional civil society can hope to challenge the entrenched forms of power and inequality that underpin systematic violations of human rights, only by broadening its base of support and mobilizing deeper democratic energies and influence. This will require Colombo-based groups not only to work at making their own organizations more representative and less hierarchical, but also to cultivate sustainable connections to groups outside the capital and to other forms of civic organizations, such as trade unions, professional organizations, and student groups, which go beyond the standard nongovernmental organizational model of institutions.

(c) Finally, and especially important, the conscious creation of spaces for collective civil society debate would aim to stimulate discussion of the often ethnicized ideological and strategic disagreements that currently complicate civil society interventions in defense of human rights. It would be crucial here to create spaces in which disagreements over the very meaning of “human rights” and “peace” could be openly articulated and more safely debated, however difficult this might be today.

2. Establish practices through which the complex politics of the relationship between international donors and their local civil society “partners” can be brought out into the open and debated.

(a) The aim would be first of all to clarify as much as possible the different political agendas that shape donors’ funding choices and the ways these go on to structure not only the programs but also the larger political and social imagination of local civil society groups. Here the point would be to foster stronger accountability in both directions—just as donors are right to ask their local recipients of aid for greater clarity about both the means and the ends of their work, so, too, civil society organizations have the democratic right (and obligation to their Sri Lankan publics) to contribute to formulation of the overall political vision for the transformation of Sri Lankan society that drives the projects they carry out.

(b) To build such a strengthened relationship, however, would require opening up discussion about the form of donor support, and the political limitations that short-term, project-oriented, and bureaucratically managed programming places on the ability of Sri Lankan civil society groups to effect the kind of democratic social change that both donors and donees say they wish to see. While many among local groups as well as donors are frustrated with the limitations that such funding brings with it, there is no space in which these frustrations can be publicly discussed, and ways beyond them imagined. Yet it is hard to see how Sri Lankan civil society can act effectively to counter human rights abuses without developing more directly political and challenging forms of practice.

Were something like the above practices of democratic debate, dialogue, and collective self-critique to be consciously and carefully cultivated—within civil society organizations, between different segments of civil society, and between local civil society and its foreign donors—the realities of violence, unaccountable power, and gross social and economic inequalities that presently plague Sri Lanka would not suddenly come to an end. But powerful seeds of democratic thinking and practice would have been planted, the ultimate fruits of which might someday surprise even the most cynical of political observers.

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Alan Keenan is a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict. With funding from the United States Institute of Peace he is writing a book entitled Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: On the Politics of Human Rights and Civil Society Building in Sri Lanka. He is the author of Democracy in Question: Democratic Openness in the Time of Political Closure (Stanford University Press, 2003).


Note

This essay is based on three years of field research in Sri Lanka, initially sponsored by a generous postdoctoral fellowship from the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict, at the University of Pennsylvania. Research was also facilitated by a visiting fellowship at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka, and by a grant from the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies. I would like to thank all three institutions, as well as the many people in Sri Lanka who patiently gave of their time and opinions in response to my never ending requests for assistance, for their help in making this essay possible. I would also like to thank audiences in Colombo and at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as Jeff Helsing, Ian Lustick, Clark McCauley, Brendan O’Leary, and Camilla Orjuela, for their helpful comments and critiques on earlier versions of this essay