Robert O Blake, Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs and former United States Ambassador to Sri Lanka is due to visit Sri Lanka on May 3^rd, a visit originally scheduled to occur in April but postponed to May. Bob Blake will be coming to Sri Lanka at a time when the government is facing a serious international situation with the publication in full of the UN experts report on accountability issues in Sri Lanka. It is widely believed that the US will be at the forefront of pushing for accountability in Sri Lanka. This also comes at a time when the US State Department has raised serious concerns regarding the state of human rights in Sri Lanka.

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The UN panel of experts has submitted their report to the UN Secretary General, who in turn has forwarded it to the Government of Sri Lanka and consequently we have the executive summary leaked to the media to inform the reading public. The government has promised a full response and as we await the response and perhaps the publication of the full report, some preliminary comments on the report has become the public political discourse.

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Human rights flow from us being human beings. Civilized societies and legitimate states are required to protect them. Human rights violations in Sri Lanka are a sensitive subject. The government denies it; the people ignore it, all part of a social compact, where during a necessary war against separatist terrorism the suspension of civil liberties and resultant violations of human rights were necessary. As Cicero argued in the Roman Senate, “In the war of good against evil, the laws are silent”. However surely there is a very valid political question whether two years after the end of the war, such a situation should continue, whether as part of our peace dividend, an improvement in the human rights situation should not occur. Here are extracts of what the US State Department reported about the post war state of human rights in Sri Lanka, during 2010.

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Late last week, on 23^rd February 2011 a Sri Lankan Government delegation led by Attorney General Mohan Peiris and comprising Foreign Secretary Romesh Jayasinghe, Ambassador Palitha Kohonna and Major General Shavendra Silva, now our deputy Ambassador to the UN, met with UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and a team of his senior officials. The Government of Sri Lanka, through Deputy Foreign Minister Neomal Perera first denied the meeting, reported in the Daily Mirror web, but then retracted the denial and claimed the meeting was on legal issues as reports and photographs of the meeting was splashed over the Internet by the New York based news agencies. The government should really have a more sophisticated media management policy than inaccurate denials of factual realities.

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India, has a Sri Lankan problem which is two dimensional, one aspect of the problem having a technical solution and the other requiring a political one. The first part of the problem was mitigated for the moment last week with the release of over one hundred Indian fishermen that had been arrested and remanded by the relevant authorities for poaching in Sri Lankan waters. Now the attraction of Sri Lankan waters for fishing is understandable. For the past several decades through the period of the war, deep sea fishing in Northern waters was prohibited by the military and consequently our Northern waters teem with fish making poaching a very attractive proposition for Indian fishermen. However, this aspect of India’s Sri Lankan problem can be resolved through technical solutions, including a better coast guard program, joint patrolling with the Indians and other protective measures of maritime boundaries and fisheries resources. The mechanism to arrive at such solutions is the Indo-Lankan Joint Committee that was established way back in 2006, but has never got off the ground, an error that is being rectified now.

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