The Australian March 31, 2014
Editorial
LEGITIMATE concerns exist about alleged human rights abuses in Sri Lanka. But they are unlikely to be helped by the UN Human Rights Council’s decision to launch an investigation into war crimes. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has been wise to keep Australia at arm’s length from the process. Even India, which wields enormous influence throughout the region, has abstained on the UNHRC’s resolution, declaring the move to be not in keeping with the council’s core principles and unjustifiably intrusive.
Australia has always been an active participant at UNHRC meetings and as a current Security Council member had been strongly lobbied by Tamil protagonists to go along with the US, Britain and other countries to support the move. The resolution, however, does not adequately recognise the significant progress Sri Lanka has made towards achieving intercommunal reconciliation since the end of the war and fails to focus on the appalling atrocities committed by the Tamil Tigers LTTE terrorist movement. Not that this seems to bother members of the Labor and Greens parties who have been berating Ms Bishop for her decision, with senator Lee Rhiannon predictably accusing her of betraying the Tamil community.
Neither Sri Lanka’s nor Australia’s interests will be served by the course the UNHRC has set itself on. With more ethnic strife and further destabilisation of the minority Tamil community the inevitable consequence of a process vehemently opposed by the Sri Lankan government, the emphasis should be on the reconciliation the country needs.
Australia has supported human rights around the world. That is not changed by Ms Bishop’s opposition to a resolution that could provoke more communal strife in Sri Lanka with more Tamils wanting to leave the country, possibly seeking to make the dangerous journey to Australia. After a brutal war that endured almost 30 years, what the country needs is genuine reconciliation, not the reopening of old wounds that will be the inevitable consequence of the resolution passed in Geneva.
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