by Prof Rajiva Wijesinha

The Asian Human Rights Commission has once again decided to engage in critical generalizations about Sri Lanka, in pursuit of its aim of proving that the government cares nothing about human rights whereas AHRC is the noblest, not to say, the most garrulous, champion of them all. This time it hangs its critique on the UN Day in Support of Victims of Torture, and claims that Sri Lanka is indifferent to torture charges, its principal arguments being that the Ministry of Disaster Management did nothing to commemorate this day, and instead a statement ‘from the spokesman for the ministry manifested the usual lack of political will to deal with the issue of torture’.

As proof of this, Basil Fernando cites a sentence from a recent statement which arose indeed from yet another missive from AHRC. That earlier AHRC missive claimed that Sri Lankan attempts to seek assistance to improve the Human Rights situation was also somehow proof that Sri Lanka was not really interested in Human Rights. Initially the claim was that Sri Lanka was in a state of denial about violations of Human Rights, but when Sri Lanka accepts that flaws need to be corrected, that in turn becomes a subject of criticism, from an agency that obviously cannot bear to be contradicted in its belief that it knows things lesser mortals cannot comprehend. 

This time round the argument is even more specious than usual, in that Basil Fernando cites just part of a sentence, namely the first fifteen words of the following paragraph -

‘With regard to torture, it is well known that it exists all over the world, and as the recent death in Britain of a young soldier punished to death shows, it is not only in a context of ‘othering’, as in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay that such horrors occur. It is of course the duty of any country to put a stop to such occurrences, through training and education, but also through punitive action. In this regard it has been noted that Sri Lanka has issued indictments, but the conviction rate is low. The UN Special Rapporteur has suggested that one reason for this may be a mandatory high sentence, and this should perhaps be adjusted. But it is also necessary to improve our investigative techniques and prosecution skills, and these are now being addressed. There is certainly no need to feel ashamed of seeking expert assistance in these areas, and indeed it is unfortunate that the so-called international Police Support Group failed in its several years of existence to deal with the problems more systematically.’

This paragraph clearly indicates that Sri Lanka sees the need for both training and punitive action to stop incidents of torture. It refers to inadequacies in both areas, and the type of remedial action that might be taken. Instead of taking any notice about this, Basil then goes on, with that peculiar logic that does no credit to his initial intellectual training as a seminarian, to claim that the ‘statement that torture exists all over the world is like saying that deaths occur in all hospitals and therefore there is no difference between good hospitals and bad hospitals’. In case the reader did not get the point, he adds, forgetting his syntactical structure, again with no credit to his earlier vocation as an English teacher ‘or to say that there is child mortality in all countries and therefore there is no distinction between those countries that have proved capable of minimizing it and those countries which have failed to do so’.

Basil ignores the fact that the paragraph does not make any value judgments of the sort he introduces in the second of each pair of noun clauses – ‘therefore there is no difference ….. therefore there is no distinction’. Of course there are differences, and that is why we need to improve. But my point was very simply that, while Sri Lanka can and must accept that torture occurs in Sri Lanka – which is why we need measures to control it – we do not accept that torture is systemic in Sri Lanka.

The suggestion presumably is that Basil Fernando engages in such pyrotechnics as a matter of principle, and that the salary he is paid has nothing to do with his performance. But the relentless attempts to personally denigrate anyone with whom he disagrees, by attributing motives, by suppressing their arguments that are inconvenient to his own case, by introducing statements they did not make, are all signs of a personality that has been taken over by its own sense of righteousness. This does no credit to the Christian spirit he and his organization should manifest, and suggests that engagement with such an institution cannot be productive.

Prof Rajiva Wijesinha
Secretary General
Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process