 Thank you all for coming. I would apologize for the Canberra winter, but it seems that we've all of a sudden found the Canberra spring today But thank you for coming many of the familiar faces Familiar in the sense that we just had another speaker on similar topics a few weeks back And so we're very proud at the ANU College of Asian Pacific to be hosting these talks on Sherry Lanka An important part of our region in our world My name is Kent Anderson, and I'm the deputy director of the College of Asia and Pacific And it's my pleasure tonight to be able to welcome and introduce Gordon Weiss Gordon will be known to many of you and indeed the subject of the talk is about his new book The Cage the fight for Sherry Lanka and the last days of the Tamil Tigers But Gordon comes with a fascinating background and one that really prepared him to write this book He originally was a freelance journalist working a bit all over the world but the bulk of his career was working in international public sector and working in Crisis in conflict areas. So working in Prague with Radio Free Europe working in Bosnia on security and the UN with UN working in Kosovo with UN 2003 to 2006 being the chief emergency communications officer for the UN UNICEF out of New York That's the kind of experience and background that Gordon brought To writing this book, but the book really is informed by the period 2007 to 2009 When Gordon was in Sherry Lanka as the political communications advisor and spokesman for the United Nations So it comes deeply informed of what is happening on the ground This isn't a text of some academic sitting in some ivory tower, but someone who's there Gordon is now back with us in Australia based at University of Sydney Department of Political Science But I think he's got a little bit of work running around the country getting more people to buy and read his book And so we are wonderfully blessed to be on that stop on that train stop And we thank him for coming and we look forward to welcoming him back in the future with that Let me turn over to Gordon Weiss to speak about the book The Cage Gordon It's great to be here. Thank you so much for coming Thank you Professor Anderson for the introduction and thank you to being at a costa for your efforts to organize this evening I often speak off off the cuff, but considering the the venue I actually took the trouble to write something down tonight, so bear with me while I stumbled through it I come to you as a somewhat reluctant commentator on Sri Lankan affairs I was a career UN official For a dozen years three of which I served in Sri Lanka Having spent three years there the last thing I expected to do was to spend a year writing about it all But I did and and I'm speaking about it tonight with you I did write about it because I believed that I I could produce a reasonably objective view of the conflict Which provided an alternative narrative to that established by the government of Sri Lanka That account Supported with all the resources that lie with any government Made no mention of the lethal impact on civilians or at least the government's role in the lethal impact on civilians And if you doubt the readiness of the government of Sri Lanka to spend huge resources to support a neat But patchy account of what happened during the final phase of the war. I suggest that you watch YouTube I'm told that they've just released a new documentary in which I am partly featured I've not seen it, but I suspect that it will include a fair measure of Blow bluster and bullying without any meaningful effort to come to terms with the questions that I will Suggest a still left unanswered. I Note also that the 161 page report just released by the government Which is reported to acknowledge for the first time that there were civilian deaths Still leaves much more left unsaid than it actually answers I would say that it's predictable effort to delay meaningful Accountability over the final phase of the war in Sri Lanka My book my little book is by no means the end of the story as the Australian spectator noted It doesn't provide prescriptions, but it does ask a lot of questions The end of the story will be one hopes reconciliation between the antagonistic communities of Sri Lanka followed by peace and prosperity for all of Sri Lankan's people and And I don't say that lightly or tritely But I want to address some of the questions left hanging over the kind of peace now unfolding in Sri Lanka and to look at some of those Big issues hovering so uneasily in the air peace justice and Reconciliation big ideas and To look at those ideas in the context of allegations of crimes committed by both sides and the course of this final phase of the war Now crimes were allegedly committed by both sides Throughout this entire war today. However, I will confine my remarks To just the final phase of the war. I won't address a range of issues I do examine in my book and forgive me if I refer to my book a number of times But the fact is that I know what I know because I've written this book For example such things I dress in the book as the long history of overwhelming violence Used by the state when dealing with critical challenges to the authority of the state And I'm referring of course to those of you who are somewhat familiar with Sri Lanka's history To the two uprisings by the Sinhalese JVP in 1971 and the light and the late 1980s I actually go into that in quite some detail in my book in my book I argue that there is something of a continuum Which made the extreme solution that I argue we saw unfold in 2009 Perhaps predictable in some sense I'll also suggest that proper consideration of the final phase of the war Cannot be entrusted should not be entrusted to the government of Sri Lanka for reasons I'll outline But more properly belongs in the realm of an international judicial investigation Further although what's good for Sri Lanka and her people must certainly feature and up his paramount I will suggest that this is not the only factor of importance in this debate I want to give you I see that we have fortunately a relatively mixed audience tonight So I want to give you a brief potted history of Or at least my version of history of Sri Lanka that revolves around two critical dates 1956 and 1983 and for any Sri Lankan in the room that will immediately ring alarm bells Before we move on to the third critical date, which is 2009 Nobody seriously questions the basic facts or impact of these two moments in Sri Lanka's post-independence history The first years after independence from Britain in 1948 were relatively peaceful Even though even then there were the makings of the future troubles that would emerge in post-independence Sri Lanka Britain had conferred on the island a liberal parliamentary democracy Which as we know is the best of all possible systems, of course in keeping however with many countries in the decolonization period there were darker forces at play and I want you to Remember or remind you if I can of the generally tumultuous times in 1948 Throughout the world the terrible bloodshed in which so many countries were born India had just experienced its traumatic petition 1947 with perhaps a million dead Israel was founded even as five Arab armies attempted to conquer the Foundling State and in 1948 an Unrecognizable Europe had only just completed one of the biggest Population transfers or ethnic cleansings as it would come to be known in history I'm referring to the roughly three million ethnic Germans Expelled from European countries in which they had lived for hundreds of years who were forcibly sent to live in a foreign land Germany By contrast in 1948 Sri Lanka or Salon as it was then known Gained independence in relative tranquility and with great promise But that promise masked another reality The liberal democracy conferred somewhat carelessly by Britain upon Salon had an effect That had been foreseen some ten years earlier by British analysts and in fact it was the subject of the chattering classes I'm talking about the Donnellmore Commission that in fact made recommendations about the way in which Sri Lankan independence should be bought about one of the Specific things they said was they they had their doubts about whether a liberal parliamentary democracy would work in Sri Lanka The Buddhist Sinhalese who accounted for two-thirds of the population of some 12 million after 1948 held effective power The Tamils by contrast who had played an Important role under the British were suddenly left relatively powerless consigned To second-tier importance and at least it was a second-tier importance that they felt it was the source of a part of this grievance But of course that's what democracy entails of course electoral rule by a majority However, there was an initial Irresolvable tension despite the presence of functioning political parties that reflected some of the great ideologies of the first half of the 20th century Nevertheless despite these tensions The benign prime ministerships of DS Sennanaka and his son Dudley kept the body politic humming along it was a sort of gentlemen's political club and politics worked by mutual agreement in 1956 however the mask of civility fell away or rather it was torn off the year before in 1955 SWRD Bundranaka the great Sinhalese counterweight to the dominating Sennanaka family made a single rash electoral promise he said That if elected power he would introduce an act That would in effect give preeminence to the Sinhalese language over both Tamil and English As SWRD's daughter Chandrika kumaratunga a for a former prime in a former president of Sri Lanka remarked just two weeks ago Her father made a dreadful mistake Lee Kwan Yew the great statesman of Singapore has made much the same remark in relation to Sri Lanka that this was a terrible error it introduced a An irreversible element into Sri Lankan politics When Bundranaka was surely elected prime minister the Sinhala only act as it came to be known had a devastating effect as Former president kumaratunga says this law caused ethnic riots and contributed to the war that has just concluded By excluding minorities Between 1956 and 1983 there are many other dates to note But let's just say that the trajectory of state-imposed discrimination continued to disadvantage minorities Nobody today seriously questions The divisive impact of 1956 and a vast majority of Sri Lankans from all communities would I dare say Do things very differently today After 1956 tens of thousands of Tamils emigrated from Sri Lanka But not just Tamils The mixed blood burgers deserted the island in droves and large numbers of educated Sinhalese as well and many of them came here to Australia Leaving after all is one response to policies of discrimination And many people from all communities Didn't like the trajectory that their own country was taking But another response in the face of indifference or simply because one cannot leave because one is poor is armed struggle Which brings me to the next date 1983 a fulcrum moment in that year riots broke out across the island the trigger Was the killing of 13 soldiers by a rag tag outfit known as the LTTE or we know them as the Tamil Tigers There have been many episodes of inter-communal violence since the late 19th century Following independence there had been significant riots in 1956 1958 1977 in which hundreds of people predominantly Tamils had been killed But 1983 was altogether more serious It's estimated that somewhere between one and three thousand people Were killed in the course of a few days in an episode known as black July The overwhelming majority of them were Tamils murdered by gangs of Sinhalese It should also be noted however, and you will always hear this From Tamils who escaped the violence that countless thousands of Tamils owe their lives To Sinhalese families who sheltered them But Jack black July was a kind of crystal nut for the Tamils of Sri Lanka a Scar on their collective psyche The immediate effect of the riots was three-fold firstly thousands of Tamil youths flocked to enlist in the LTTE and other radical revolutionary groups transforming these rag tag Bandit outfits into very large revolutionary groups Prior to 1983 these groups had been relatively insignificant and nuisance rather than a threat to the state The LTTE for example had consisted of a few dozen men at most With a handful of murders and some bank robberies to that credit and and a lot of those murders by the way were of Tamils not Sinhalese They were often Tamil members of the security forces Secondly India for a complex of reasons The second effect of the of the 1983 riots was that India for a complex of reasons Opened training bases on her soil to thousands of Tamil fighters who were trained and then sent back to sow mischief in Sri Lanka Finally the 1983 riots converted and I think this is the most important aspect of the 1983 riots It converted hundreds of thousands of ordinary peaceful law-abiding Tamils in Sri Lanka and abroad They became convinced that the only thing Standing between the Tamils of Sri Lanka and their physical annihilation by the state was the gun It's not an uncommon and an uncommon story. In fact, you can transpose the same Conditions the same set of conditions to many other countries. I think If you want to learn about conversion of ordinary people to a violent reaction I suggest you read about the conversion to armed resistance of a 17-year-old Catholic middle-class Tamil girl Naromi Dissoysa who recently released her book Tamon Tigris points to the burning of the Jaffna Library in 1981 as her personal conversion But the point is the same Nobody in Sri Lanka seriously questions the fatal impact of 1983 or the direct link between these riots and the declaration of a defensive war By Sri Lankan Tamils This insurgency eventually became a serious threat to the state Thus we have to give some measure of credence To the fact that the armed rising against the state Was a reasonable response It was arguably a just response Given the failure of the state to provide security to its citizens. We've seen the same instances In recent times. I was certainly in Kosovo both before and after their revolution there And there are many similarities and one can point to I think a a range of similar circumstances around the world So just cause such as the right of people to rise against tyranny remains a recognized Fundamental political right. It's given birth to so many countries members of the UN It's currently driving the Arab Spring, which is demonstrably a popular response to tyranny The Tamil response to 1983 was an equal equally popular uprising Of course, there were many Tamils who dissented from this course Moderates who would later be targeted by the LTT incidentally But generally it was supported across a wide spectrum of the Tamil community The fault line at independence which became a grievance in 1956 with the similar only act Suddenly became a violent backlash in 1983 But what happened to this just cause and its associated response? I believe and I've written as much in my book That with the dominance of the Tamil Tigers the just cause was doomed at its inception by the unjust means selected by the Tamil Tigers Further, I believe that much of the responsibility for this failure Lies with the personal rule of the Tiger Supremo Velopilai Prabhakaran And I know that that will be an unpopular comment with many of you in this room You may think quite reasonably that I am Disliked by the government of Sri Lanka But if you haven't read my book you won't be aware of how unpopular I am with those who still burn a candle for this man of whom there are many. I Won't delve too deeply here into my argument that this just cause was supplanted and ultimately perverted by Prabhakaran. I will refer you to chapter 4 of my book, but I go into it in some detail there Suffice to say he was a man for his times with a punch on for violence who found his calling in the Tamil cause The American political philosopher Michael Walzer says and I quote the revolutionary Reveals his freedom in the same way that he earns it by directly confronting his enemies and refraining from attacks on anybody else The LTT Developed into an ingenious fighting force that made use of multiple forms of warfare from classic guerrilla to Conventional units supported by artillery in the 1990s They became an archetype for the non-state threat to the state in the New World order that followed the end of the Cold War But they use of terrorist tactics Which was one set of tactics in their armory of tactics Took a mounting toll on civilian lives and in my book. I go to some trouble to distinguish between The use of terrorism and other tactics used by the LTT Innocent people Commuters villages not just Sinhalese but Tamils to fell victim to this targeted violence Terror was a conscious tactical choice. It was one that the ANC in South Africa Determinately avoided because Mandela believed that terror attacks on civilians would destroy the struggle for justice This is precisely I believe what ultimately happened to the LTT To paraphrase Walzer the kind of freedom revealed by the LTT was not a very palatable one The struggle for justice poisoned by excessive violence Ultimately obscured the just cause of the Tamil people and Here's the twist and this is really important this twist at some indeterminate point in this quarter long in this quarter century long war between 1983 and 2009 at some point The right of the state to reclaim its territory and to reimpose rule over its citizens became the just cause Now it's for others to determine at what point that occurred as I say in my book I Went to Sri Lanka as a supporter of the state's right to reclaim its territory and I left with that belief intact Given the circumstances I've outlined above and here is a big but To paraphrase Walzer again if the revolution reveals itself in the way it is fought Surely the reverse must be true that the state reveals itself in the way that it is defended So for me whilst defending the right of the state to reclaim its territory from this insurgent group that there were questions serious questions left hanging at the end of the war Surely the cause was just but were the methods used by the state just and Beyond the victory Did the state reveal itself as a just victor in? 2006 the government of Sri Lanka under the leadership of President Mahinda Raja Paksa Began an unparalleled Effort to destroy the Tamil Tigers Mahinda Raja Paksa was and remains a popularly elected leader Together with his brothers got to be a and Basil They doggedly sought a military solution to the Tamil Tiger menace The advantage of the brothers Raja Paksa was their unity of purpose and that combined competence and political savvy They recruited massive numbers of troops whilst they established predictable lines of credit for cash oil and arm supplies from friendly countries such as China Pakistan and our favorite Iran India and the US Chipped in with intelligence and radar that enabled the interception and sinking by the Sri Lankan Navy of Tiger arms supply vessels on the high seas Incredible engagements fought actually not far from the Australian coast on one occasion Meanwhile over the course of about two years the armed forces of Sri Lanka steadily rolled back the Tamil Tiger lines First north and then eastwards across the island the basic strategy of the army was one of attrition Whilst they held the existing front lines small units of commandos brought havoc deep inside Tiger territory I argue in my book that between 2007 and 2009 the armed forces of Sri Lanka fought to a disciplined battle plan that involved relatively low civilian casualties Villages fled their homes as army bombardments came close artillery Pound of the Tiger lines drawing more and more fighters in before troops moved steadily forward to claim territory Gradually by late 2008 Hundreds of thousands of civilians have been uprooted and were on the move and Perhaps this is when what was happening in Sri Lanka? Peers to the consciousness of a number of people here When when the when the the full impact of this war was becoming known But all of those people who are uprooted only a few thousand managed to cross the front lines into government territory most civilians Making individual Survival decisions for their families and there were probably around 50,000 of these families inside Retreated further into Tamil Tiger held territory Military observers who always said that the Tigers were unbeatable and they continued to say that until very late in the day People who had observed this war in Sri Lanka for many many years said the Tigers were militarily unbeatable They were convinced that Prabhakaran was engaged in a Fabian retreat They waited for the master counter-stroke But it never came More and more civilians were gathered up in the retreat either unable or unwilling or forcibly prevented From crossing the front lines into government held territory by the Tigers So here we come to the issue of just war and just means Which is really why I wrote my book the cage As more and more civilians were forced into a smaller and smaller pocket of land those who led the Sri Lankan army were faced with a dilemma a Serious dilemma a real dilemma for military planners How to separate and finish off the Tamil Tigers to kill Prabhakaran the same way that Osama bin Laden was Notably killed and deliberately killed by the US and To spare as many civilians as possible This is a singularly modern problem not because these kinds of battles haven't been fought before military history from Fusilities onwards is one long bloody tale of civilians being butchered by armies intent on coming to terms with each other But the difference is today we have complex laws of war that govern in theory how armies fight The notion is that it is unjust to kill non-combatants if it can be avoided The government of Sri Lanka had nothing per se to gain from killing civilians and Everything to gain from pulling off an historic victory over an implacable enemy with as little bloodshed as possible And incidentally, I believe that that intent guided that battle plan Pretty much throughout During this period and I'm talking about late January 2009 when things apparently began to come unstuck Through to mid-May when the battle was brought to an end the government continued to maintain the following propositions Their forces were not responsible for civilian deaths They had what they called a zero civilian casualty policy If there were any civilian deaths, it was the Tigers shooting their own Which by the way had enough truth in it to make it a Presentable fact Because there is evidence plenty of it To show that the Tigers killed civilians to prevent them from leaving the siege area To this day the government continues to insist that its forces were not responsible for any civilian deaths Then they repeated another mantra The government persistently asserted that they were not using heavy artillery The use of heavy artillery in an area in which civilians rubbed shoulders with fighters was a necessarily indiscriminate device Discrimination when targeting an adversary is one of the building blocks of the laws of war one of the cardinal rules The government knew this Which is why they gave repeated assurances to people such as UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton We're not using heavy weapons. They said Finally from January they insisted that there were barely any civilians inside Initially they conceded fifty thousand Then they said seventy thousand but never above that number as people continued to flock out In the event when the battle was done in mid-May around three hundred thousand people emerged from the siege zone to this day Those three elements Have never been satisfactorily Explained no civilian deaths no use of artillery and very few people inside That assertion that very few people were inside So there was this absurd insistence that the government of Sri Lanka forces were not responsible for a single civilian casualty Nor were they responsible for any wrongdoing in this ferociously fought battle in which around 6,000 Sinhalese soldiers were killed a huge toll This incidentally explains the rather dogged and some would say unbalanced reporting from Channel 4 UK Which has continued to deconstruct this self-evident absurdity Beginning with serious allegations around battlefield executions Reporters after all are pretty good at sniffing out when something is wrong Incidentally which army can say rationally that it is free of wrongdoing on the battlefield Australia has had a recent Incident in which we have examined the the carriage of our troops on the battlefield in Afghanistan By extension why the continual insistence by the government that it didn't use heavy weapons as you may know a UN report issued in April says that there is credible evidence to suggest that hospitals and medical points were deliberately and systematically targeted Using heavy weapons by the army of Sri Lanka That report speaks about 65 separate instant insert instances documented of hospitals and medical points that at the time were filled with civilians and Why the odd arithmetic related to the numbers? Why the insistence that so few civilians were trapped inside the siege zone when the government's own civil service knew the figures? The army had state-of-the-art iron the sky real-time intelligence delivered to it by drone and By the satellite technology of its allies China the Chinese and the Indians They also as they have frequently repeated had excellent ground intelligence. It's what contributed to the considerable victory that they eventually won So I'm often asked, but how do you know how many people were killed? One reply is that I don't know That's one reply. I won't give you the other replies, but that's one reply But we do know that we should take with a grain of salt anything the government of Sri Lanka has to say on the matter of civilian deaths This after all is a government that insists to this day that its forces Killed no civilians, and I'm aware of the report that's just been issued as well And what we do know to be rums filled in about it for a moment Is what we don't know? All those questions left unanswered by the things that the government of Sri Lanka tried to sell as the truth and Which turned out to be so patently false We do have pretty good indications That probably somewhere between 10 and 40,000 people were killed. This is not my own figure plucked from nowhere It's credible enough for the UN to have used it as part of its assessment into the available evidence Now the reason why all this matters is because it goes again to the heart of why I wrote my book describing a counter-narrative to that Rather absurd a narrative that was presented and has been stuck by by the government of Sri Lanka I Do suggest in my book that having fought the good fight and a fairly disciplined campaign over a number of years The government tripped up at the last hurdle It took a course of action that has resulted in alleged grave crimes The reasons for this are complex I won't go into them now and we don't know all the answers as to why this happened But I believe that there is enough evidence of wrongdoing out there and enough Blanket denial obfuscation and sheer bluster from the government to warrant an international judicial investigation into the final phase of the war in Sri Lanka Incidentally we know one part of the story because the government has never been shy to present the evidence We know that the Tigers were responsible for max mass executions for forcible recruitment and for keeping their own people Hostage against a full frontal assault by the government Recall that there were no independent journalists and no real presence of international humanitarian workers inside or close to the siege zone The exceptions to that were two international UN officers whose stories are detailed in my book and the International Red Cross Which maintained an in fact an evacuation point on the beach In the Northeast where where people were finally confined in the final phase of the siege Yet somehow despite the paucity of independent reports the lack of outspoken witnesses Most of us most of you were left with an impression of how this three decades old insurgency ended It was probably something along the lines of something happened probably a lot of civilians died We don't really know and probably never will on balance. It's a good thing that the Tamil Tigers were destroyed Perhaps given the vagueness of it all we haven't decided that it's best left where it is let sleeping dogs lie Indeed since the end of the war we have heard the government of Sri Lanka and its proxies advance various reasons for letting the dogs of war lie It's nobody's business, but Sri Lankans It's all smoke and mirrors the trickery of the Tamil diaspora It's an international conspiracy Although like a bad detective novel the purported motives remain rather hazy It's a human rights cabal led by self-righteous do-gooding drum-beating campaigners like vice Look at the US in Iraq or Australia's treatment of its native people or the British bombing of Dresden Why pick on us? Or but we were fighting terrorists like you guys or We in Sri Lanka don't do the Judeo-Christian reconciliation thing Sorry, or well, we do do the reconciliation thing frankly and all these accusations are spoiling our efforts at at reconciliation Which is I think what you heard a couple of weeks ago for anyone who was here at the lecture a couple of weeks ago Incidentally, I don't know if any of you have read the international crisis groups latest report Reconciliation in Sri Lanka harder than ever question mark the title says it all Incidentally, one of the things it says is that the Tamil diaspora have failed to take on board the failings of the Tamil Tigers as well But the credible allegations of gross wrongdoing of law breaking in fact are there and they are real And they have continued to emerge in the two years or so since the end of the war The problem is now that it's the government of Sri Lanka that's left to carry the burden of those Accusations because the senior Tamil Tiger leadership were all killed There's no one left to put on trial The government says that to scrutinize them is unfair and that the gains to be made from looking at what happened at The end of the war are outweighed by the benefits of peace Who can argue with that? Don't mess with our version of events. They say because you're messing with reconciliation In other words, there's an implied threat that the nosy parkers are going to spoil the peace So it doesn't matter Does the truth matter? I Happen to think that the truth always matters Not in a rankerous unbending black-and-white Legally sense, but only the truth matters in and of itself But that's not good enough because of course there are greater issues at play What's the point of truth if you can't have peace? This brings me to the timing of truth, which is important as we consider the requirements of justice versus the requirements of peace First to justice In the 1860s during the American Civil War. It was considered acceptable to take and execute civilian hostages It was an acceptable tactic of war In the siege of Leningrad during World War II It was theoretically legal for the German army to force starving civilians back into Leningrad Where a million of them died of starvation Teddy Roosevelt Was considered liberal because he had misgivings about black Americans being lynched At one stage we in Australia thought it okay to deny the franchise to the original inhabitants of our country My point is that while we as people probably Don't evolve much at our essence at our core Our means of restraining ourselves have evolved Our notions of what constitutes justice and just means evolves The course of international justice since the second world war traces this very arc However, one characteristic of justice is that as it evolves So to the fiction That justice is not temporal but is eternal And one can understand the resentment that that breeds That something considered legal one year is illegal the next But let's not kid ourselves. Let's not be blinded By today's standards the wholesale killing of civilians in pursuit of a military objective is quite simply illegal It is however for a court to decide the various thresholds proportionality distinction the relative value of the military gains And not for us this evening in relation to the war in Sri Lanka And now to touch on peace I don't know if I can do this but who here believes that one can have a peaceful future Without an acknowledgement of the past It's a pressing question A peaceful future without an acknowledgement of the past I do for one Last century Japan and Germany were surely Forced by defeat to confront their monumental crimes They rebuilt their societies beginning with war crimes trials that confronted the truth But we can't ignore the empirical evidence of a country like Spain so liberal So evolved so central to the european ideal Yet which has largely avoided any reconciliation with the truth of its murderous civil war 75 years ago It built a society based on forgetting I was living in Spain at the time when they began digging up Bodies in fields from the civil war. It was fascinating These old people who had walked past these bodies all their lives and finally it was okay to dig them up and Acknowledge their relatives. They'd never been able to acknowledge before but Spain built a society based on forgetting So as uncomfortable as I feel about saying this and although my spirit rebels against it I must say that I think it is possible for justice to be ignored in pursuit of a lasting peace If justice is not necessarily a precondition for lasting peace then surely reconciliation is I'm not so sure. I want to read you my prognosis for Sri Lanka if I may And I'm very close to being finished. I promise you Unfortunately Judging by current trends on the ground An astute soothsayer might guess that the future for Sri Lanka's Tamil citizens is bleak The emigration of Tamils from Sri Lanka will continue encouraged by political stagnation a lack of rights and ruled by fear Tens of thousands of Tamils displaced by the fighting but unable to leave will be resettled at the government's discretion Using security as a pretext for usurping private property in key areas The hitherto relatively contiguous area that has formed the basis for a Tamil claim to an historic homeland Will be broken up and interspersed with hundreds of army camps staffed by Sinhalese soldiers Incidentally for those of you who have read my book. I also take on that That notion of the historic Tamil homeland But nevertheless that is my prognosis for the future um The point is That if I were in the position of the government of Sri Lanka, I might solve my ethnic problem the very same way Europe did it for hundreds of years Even up until 1947 the founding year almost of Sri Lanka I'd like to restate what I established from the outset in my book I went to Sri Lanka as a supporter of that state's right to reclaim its sovereign territory From an insurgent group whose just cause had been hopelessly perverted by the methods it chose to use The Tamil Tigers targeted civilians ran secret prisons and torture centers and were ruthless towards even their own people Even at the very end when all was hopeless that policy appears to have been one of scant mercy The world is a better place without Velu Pillai Prabhakaran But is there peace What kind of peace is it Will it last Is it the type of peace that we would wish on other countries that face similar internal challenges? There is certainly no justice coming from the government of Sri Lanka And no real effort to provide a credible meaningful account of how they manage this final phase of the war And don't be fooled by talk of reconciliation. It's a fine word It slips easily from the tongue with those plummy english accents that you'll hear on this documentary That's just been released. But I suggest to you that reconciliation is meaningless without the truth Reconciliation allow the government the current government of Sri Lanka is a prescription to ensure that like 1956 and 1983 The year 2009 will remain just another bloody marker in Sri Lanka's history of suppression of violent suppression of political descent Not just over the Tamils, but all political descent Look to what happens this November when the government's own lessons learned and reconciliation commission hands down its findings My final point is just this The UN panel says that what appears to have happened in Sri Lanka represents a grave assault on the entire regime of international war Yet despite all the practical doubts I have outlined I remain a realist Fately drawn to the allure of liberal internationalism I think that Australia should support a credible inquiry into what happened in Sri Lanka Because we as a society uphold and believe in the rule of law And no Sri Lankan who comes and lives in Australia as my friend Naroma Desoisa has said to me can miss that distinction The protection of the rule of law And also because the rule of law has become increasingly important in the international power structure In an increasingly insecure world soft power mechanisms emanating from the rule of law matter The way that countries choose to handle their internal affairs do affect us The few Tamil refugees washing up on our shores Are a tiny example Think of the 300,000 Bosnian refugees who flowed into Germany During the wars in the former Yugoslavia I wrote I wrote my book Alone for a year without any research assistance or any financial support For the very simple reason that I think that what happened in Sri Lanka matters Pursuing justice in Sri Lanka seeing justice done Leaving aside the interests of Sri Lanka's people Is in is in Australia's own best long-term interests As Greg Sheridan wrote just weeks ago in the Australian regarding our China relationship Australia should never be afraid of speaking truth to power Thanks for your patience Yeah According to whom Well, no according to the government's version of of of of the ICRC figures Because they won't the ICRC doesn't say anything that's how they gain that privileged access to battlefields Yeah Yeah, okay. Look It's a good question. Why should there be an international investigation? But I think that's what I was saying here tonight I think there should be an international an international investigation because there has not been yet a credible explanation For so many things that happened at the end of the war But the un advisory panel No, no, no, no, please don't don't don't don't now question I understand that it's one of the tactics of the government of Sri Lanka to call it the durisman report And and and to not not actually assign it the status of an official No, that's the opinion of the government of Sri Lanka No, no, no, no Yes, well Ban Ki-moon's the secretary general of the United Nations. It does give it a certain status. Don't you agree? No, it's not just a personal opinion. It's an advisory report Given by given by three senior international jurists to the UN secretary general Well, okay fine. All right, so but but but no no no look and and I and I applaud your courage And I also applaud the courage of this gentleman even though he didn't actually give me a question You wanted to give a speech but I applaud your courage in getting up and and and challenging the stuff that I say But I but I but I still I I would still say to you that you haven't really listened to what I've said In the last 50 minutes and I apologize to people who've sat through 50 minutes of me talking. So another question Yes Disciplined yes Well, uh, as I said, I think it's complex And I think that it's not really known in one sense But I think that the army began trying to meet deadlines and I think That one indication is the large numbers of troops that began getting killed In the final phase of the war. There were some really desperate hard fought battles And I think there were some significant dates that were laid down that were according to a political timetable rather than a military timetable One of the things that I I I I describe in my book certainly as the role of the of the Indian elections Which I think were from May 13th to May 16th 2009 So I I I think that the battle itself that became an urgency to finish the war And I think that the pressure was growing from the international community as well to try and prevent the bloodshed To to prevent the impact on civilians at the end of the war. So the the Consequent pressure on the government grew and the impulse grew to finish the war very quickly I think it was concluded in a very Hurried way and in a way that was that it hadn't been fought perhaps in the previous two years As I said, I mean my impression is that they tripped up at the at the last hurdle Does that does that explain it to some extent? It's not refined perhaps, but yes Right Some action going on Yeah, well, I think it's a complicated um Paradigm, I mean the uh, you know, it's one of the things I actually talk about quite extensively in my book is that You know the reason why Sri Lanka was able to and and it was really one of those moments You know, it was a it was a moment that they that they Seized upon quite reasonably and that was You know the the advent of China Of a wealthy China and the international scene Of a somewhat weakened US and America in sorry US and India in Sri Lanka Um So they really had the gate was open and Sri Lanka was able to take advantage of investment in Sri Lanka Reasonable reasonable arms Cash and oil credit supply lines. And so there was not a lot to restrain them Um on the international scene with the protection of China There really was not a lot to restrain Sri Lanka and and ultimately, you know, Sri Lanka is a sovereign country It it it operates and makes decisions according to its own best interests Its interests were protected protected in the security council by principally China also russia Also, to a lesser extent India It was what I call a geopolitical moment In the book Regarding the the the doctrine of responsibility to protect I mean that was a developing doctrine and and and really it's a it's a doctrine that has yet to be adopted by the international community across the board and it remains a it remains a A an untested doctrine really. I seem to recall That uh professor gareth evans during the war said that Sri Lanka was in fact in his opinion And he was one of the people who worked on the doctrine to protect for the secretary general at the time Kofi Nan said that Sri Lanka was not a case for R2p But From the from the point of view of the UN and the UN's involvement Because that was another protective factor in Sri Lanka. I mean the UN had been kept very weak in Sri Lanka It didn't have a political role. It didn't have it certainly didn't have a military role It was not party to Peace talks between the parties it really only had a humanitarian role So it had a very weak role in in in Sri Lanka So there were there were very few forces to really restrain the government of Sri Lanka It was one of those sort of perfect perfect moments really and the government quite reasonably took advantage of that perfect moment To try and finish off the war. They had domestic political support. They had great credit from china and protection from china Um, it there was the transition between the bush and obama administrations You know, so there was not a lot to restrain. There was not a lot to restrain Sri Lanka And they they they took care of businesses. They saw fit I hope that's somewhere towards answering a question. Yes Okay No, it's no it's absolutely not by counting the bodies And two and a half two and a half years later the battle the battlefield has never been visited by anyone Apart from the army of Sri Lanka. So no like let me finish before me. So no one has has um Visited the the the battlefield to all to all intents and purposes. It is a closed Dare I say crime scene No one knows really But I think there was enough evidence out there to triangulate what is missing and what is unanswered So to say on one to say on one hand You don't know you weren't there. You didn't count anyone. You didn't see anything Is not to say that there is not a problem There is a problem and we know we know we know enough We know enough to say well While the government of Sri Lanka was saying that nobody died and that its forces were not responsible for any deaths Yeah, and that they were not using heavy artillery There's enough eyewitness testimony that we gathered to counter that Well, let's say that let's let's say that let's say that let's say that Yeah, that's right. That's right. 10 to 40 10 to 40 000 Well, no, no, no, no, no. I take issue with that the issue is not numbers The issue is an accountable and accountable narrative is true accountability What happened at the end of the war? It's not coming from the government of Sri Lanka If you guys stand here and say, yeah, yeah, yeah, but you don't know how many people died was a 10 or 40 How did you come up with the figures? We don't know what people have asked for is accountability And that has not come yet from the government of Sri Lanka Certainly not from the 161 page report that was released two two days ago Certainly not from the Very neat documentary that was put online yesterday And it's probably not going to come dare I say from the lessons learned and reconciliation commission But I will say this That there was a team of people who were triangulating the reports that they could get from inside the battle scene And by early april they had counted some 7 000 reports of people being killed Some 7 000 by early april now the greater part of the battle had yet to take place The toughest fighting had yet to take place that happened really between the beginning of april and mid-may So who knows how many people died We don't know and it would be foolish for anyone to say that they know but we do know what we don't know And certainly what we don't have at the moment is a reasonable A reasonable account from the government of Sri Lanka. We're still waiting for it. Tell us what happened If that's all we do know if that's all we do know and I'll tell you why the 40 000 Because the because the best population estimate or guesstimate ranges from 330 000 upwards Now I have said since january last year that I think between 10 and 40 000 people were killed The lower figure based on the actual count the upper figure based on what I choose to regard as the best population estimate Okay, now others such as the international crisis group have said actually we think it could be much higher We think it might be 80 000 and let me tell you in the Tamil diaspora they're talking about 100 000 200 000 dead And you know why? Because they're not getting a reasonable account from anyone now if the government of Sri Lanka said We killed 5 000 civilians in the effort to finish off this dreadful terrorist group and kill Prabhakaran It was terrible. We're in we're a we're a poor country. We we didn't have a refined fighting force We we we were under the gun. We thought we were going to lose him But there's been nothing that there's been no reasonable account of what happened and the efforts that were undertaken As I said and as I said in the speech, I believe it was a just cause But the method is is is really what needs accounting for And and it's not enough to say yeah, yeah, we did it. No one got killed everyone happy I don't think that's I don't think that's reasonable Sorry Just on the political side now that the war is finished, um, you mentioned, um I'm not familiar with all the names You mentioned the president and his brothers Has the of course the victory strengthened them and what's the The road forward if of course they don't have these The required or what you suggest a justice and reconciliation. What's the road forward for democracy and um, they're on the current president's Strength and political power I mean, it's a very good question. As I say, you know, um, the raja paksa, you know, hinder raja paksa is a popularly elected Um, um president He has the support of the majority of shri lankans um The likelihood is that he will go on to to to to A govern You know for many years to come the likelihood is that Prosperity will grow in shri lanka. There will be a form of peace Um, and and things will improve things have improved immensely already the security situation has improved Plenty of tamels say that plenty of tamels say well, you know Might have been worth it actually You know without really knowing what went on plenty of tamels living in shri lanka say, yeah, you know things are actually better I don't have to go through checkpoints. I'm not being harassed by soldiers as much as you know You know somewhere somewhere in there. There is a threshold There is a threshold somewhere in there and you know international law is all about establishing that threshold My essential argument is It's not good enough for a country just to say well nothing happened. Is everyone cool about that? We all right Let's get on with the tourists flocking to the beaches now. I don't think that's okay. I'm sorry I mean, I don't think that's a reasonable sort of response. I don't think that's a response of a that's a reasonable response of a of a of a you know Of a of a modern member of the international community and I don't think that a country like Australia should accept that I like to make a comment 1983 I was in the Saint Lucia's camp And the president of the country There was now come and sit in the television I was in the camp That more the single is that how much people are suffering the simple single will be happier Yes, yes That is the mindset of the people Since the British left Trammels are suffering for the last 60 years. That's a mindset of the single speed even today only exception is the grandchildren of the ex They are stability band are not Yes, I said that yeah, shame to be single is unless the mindset change of the entire humanity Nothing will change the humanity have to change that that they are that respect each other I have to tell you that coming and talking before an audience of expatriates You know if you were Turks and Armenians, I would have precisely the same problem because um You know, and I've seen it with my own father. My father is Jewish and you know came out of the Second World War Uh For me to stand up and try and make rational arguments and balance things up and talk about justice and those sorts of things You know, it's all very fine and it sounds very reasonable and blah blah But people who have been through it feel it in a way that I can't possibly feel it and that I don't do justice to And that applies to the Tamils and it applies to the Sinhalese and everyone's got their own individual story About that. Um, you know, I've tried to capture the middle ground in my book and in the talk I've just given I suspect that I fail a lot of the time because I'm just seen as a You know the Sinhalese see me as a as a member of an international conspiracy and a you know Bible thumping, you know, you know internationally a rah-rah person and the and the and the Tamils see me as a as a as a Well, you know, I've had people writing to be saying that I've written my book in the blood of Tamil children So and I write for profit Now anyone who's written a book here and I'm sure there are a number knows that you don't write books for profit You do not um so so You know, I appreciate your expression of your your your expressions there and your personal experience I I can't reflect on them. All I all I can try and reflect on is the middle ground. I've I've tried to capture. Anyway Yes Yes Can't be a counter for right. Yeah Let me tell you sir, I think 160,000 is absurd in my book. I think 100,000 is absurd Excuse me. Excuse me for excuse me for saying it. We don't know the number of people who were killed. We can only make a guess I've made the best possible guess I can make which is 10 to 40,000 Thanks very much for your patience and excuse me if I've offended offended people