Recently, Ram Manikkalingam argued that Sri Lanka must not prioritize accountability for mass atrocity crimes until a new constitution addressing Tamil autonomy is formulated. He also argued that international human rights advocates must stop giving precedence to war crimes trials over other forms of reconciliation. Yet with these very arguments, Manikkalingam is at risk of mimicking the patronizing error of those he critiques. He fails to recognize that the intellectual and moral leadership in respect to the demand for accountability has long shifted from those outside to those who live and work in Sri Lanka.
Manikkalingam’s article touches two recurring debates within Transitional Justice, first, the peace versus justice debate, and second, the question of sequencing reconciliation related measures. He suggests that because a political solution is more important than war crimes trials, the sequence in which they are unveiled should privilege a political solution. Yet not only is this dichotomy false, it is also strategically better to establish the legal architecture to try atrocity crimes earlier rather than later.
Of course, the argument that a political solution to Sri Lanka’s national question overshadows the importance of prosecuting a few perpetrators has a certain intuitive appeal. Yet this analysis does not account for the role of unpunished atrocities in fuelling the ethnic conflict. The Tamil political mobilization for equality in Sri Lanka predated independence and has since been consistently visited with unpunished violence in escalating degrees. Each unpunished episode of violence—what we would now call mass atrocity crimes—added fresh fuel to ethnic tensions and eventually to unhinged violence from both sides. The 1983 ethnic pogrom—indubitably the largest such attack against civilians of any ethnicity in post-independence Sri Lanka—quickly transformed a bothersome youth revolt into a full-fledged war of devastating proportions. Impunity and resulting violence, and the fear borne out of impunity, is at the heart of demands for autonomy. This is why Tamil politicians have insisted on the right to powers over police above fiscal and economic powers—control over physical security is, rightly or wrongly, perceived to be a more urgent and important concern.
