&euro&tildeNationalist thug terrorises, massacres civilians in drive to crush separatists&euro&trade.
It&euro&trades a story which, when played out in southeast Europe a decade ago, brought fearful retribution on the head of the perpetrator, Yugoslavia&euro&trades president, Slobodan Milosevic. A Nato bombing campaign rained down ordnance on his country for 78 days, and he later ended up in The Hague accused of crimes against humanity. Ten years on, it&euro&trades been replayed in south Asia, with the bloody end game of Sri Lanka&euro&trades war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The Tigers waged an indiscriminate campaign of violence for a quarter of a century. Their counterparts in Serbia were the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), seen by many in the West as a plucky little group of rebels, but known locally for their trademark attacks on civilian representatives of the federal government such as police and postal workers. A UN report found they had elbowed their rivals, the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), out of power in town halls across the province by the simple expedient of instructing officials to join them instead, and shooting those who refused. The task of brokering an acceptable deal to recognise the aspirations to self-determination of the Albanian Kosovars was taken up by a high-level Contact Group, comprising the foreign ministers of the US, UK, Russia, Italy, France and Germany. They finally put a deal on the table in Paris that would have led to Kosovo&euro&trades independence &euro“ the red line for Milosevic, and one they knew he would not cross. John Gilbert, a defence minister in the British government, later told a committee of MPs, inquiring into the sequence of events that led to war, that the talks &euro&oeligset the bar deliberately too high&euro to get an agreement. The Norwegian government tried to facilitate a peace deal in Sri Lanka, their efforts being rewarded by a ceasefire agreement in 2002. But Mahinda Rajapaksa&euro&trades narrow presidential election victory three years later sent the process into reverse. Like Milosevic, he was quick to forge alliances with right-wing nationalist parties, opposed to any concessions. The agreement they made with Rajapaksa included revisions of the ceasefire agreement to give the military broader powers against the LTTE, as well as ruling out any devolution of power to the Tamil people: the red line they could never cross. The logical conclusion of that political gambit has just been played out, with Rajapaksa and his supporters in Colombo celebrating a military victory. The UN estimated the number of civilians killed, between January 20 and May 7, at over 7,000, with 16,700 wounded. We can only guess how many more perished in the final, desperate ten days. That statistic, along with the appalling and dangerous conditions in &euro&tildeInternal Displacement Camps&euro&trade run by the military for those who fled the fighting, amounts to a humanitarian disaster. I use the phrase in a deliberate echo of the debate over Kosovo. It was to forestall just such an outcome, we were told, that Nato&euro&trades intervention, Operation Allied Force, took to the skies of Europe. The significant difference, of course, between the two cases, is that in Sri Lanka there was no military intervention from outside. The British, fierce foes of Belgrade back in the 1990s, this time confined themselves to volleys of words, leading calls for a ceasefire that went unheeded. &euro&oeligThere will be consequences&euro, Prime Minister Gordon Brown intoned. It shows how the principle of &euro&oelighumanitarian intervention&euro has fallen into disrepute: debased, indeed, to the extent that the phrase was used by the Sri Lankans themselves to describe their &euro&tildeoperations&euro&trade in the north-east of the country, on the basis that they were &euro&tildefreeing&euro&trade civilians effectively held captive by the Tigers.
Questions, then: why have things changed, and what can be done