Anil Kalhan

The civil war in Sri Lanka has attracted greater international scrutiny within the past week, with UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay suggesting that both the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) may have committed war crimes:

Warning that the loss of life may reach “catastrophic levels,” [Pillay] urged the government and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebels to halt hostilities to allow the evacuation of civilians trapped on the northeastern coast.

Pillay said the government had repeatedly shelled the designated “no-fire” zones for civilians and also cited reports the separatist
guerrillas were holding civilians as human shields and had shot some as they tried to flee.

“Certain actions being undertaken by the Sri Lankan military and by the LTTE may constitute violations of international human rights and humanitarian law,” Pillay said in a statement.

“The world today is ever sensitive about such acts that could amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity,” added the former
U.N. war crimes judge, who is a member of the Tamil ethnic group and grew up in South Africa.

Pillay called on Sri Lanka’s government to grant full access to U.N. and other aid agencies to monitor human rights and humanitarian conditions amid reports of “severe malnutrition” among those trapped. [link]

Pillay stated that as many as 2,800 civilians have been killed and over 7,000 injured since January, and that as many as 180,000 civilians may be trapped in the conflict zone.

Others in the international community have raised similar concerns. According to the International Committee for the Red Cross, the humanitarian situation faced by civilians in the conflict zone is “deteriorating by the day.” Former special advisor to the UN Secretary General Lakhdar Brahimi says that the humanitarian crisis places Sri Lanka “on the brink of catastrophe.” In a phone call to to Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapaksa, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed “deep concern” about escalating civilian deaths and urged the Sri Lankan Army “not [to] fire into the civilian areas of the conflict zone.” The European Union has also called for a cease fire to permit trapped civilians to escape the fighting.

Sri Lanka disputes the UN’s figures — the LTTE, the government asserts, has “infiltrated certain personalities into these agencies” — and has rejected calls for a cease fire. More details are available in two stories from the BBC World Service’s Evening Report, linked above (and here and here). However, according to the Christian Science Monitor:

[T]he sensitive data aired by Ms. Pillay were based on firsthand daily reporting by UN national staff and aid workers trapped in the no-fire zone. A copy of a recent UN briefing paper that was obtained by the Monitor listed similar casualty figures and described mounting casualties in the squalid, densely packed coastal strip. “Daily incoming artillery and mortar fire has caused large number of casualties with a noted increase since 26 Feb,” it said.

The briefing paper said several weeks of food and medicine shortages had led to deaths from malnutrition and from preventable diseases. [link]

Meanwhile, SAJAer Angilee Shah has published a feature article in the Far Eastern Economic Review (which was reported from Colombo, Singapore, and Los Angeles with the support of a SAJA Reporting Fellowship) critically examining the consequences of the Rajapaksa government’s aggressive approach to prosecuting the civil war:

Continue reading at SAJAforum….

Journalists from across all services of the BBC have resolved to hold two one-day strikes next month, prompted in large part by plans to “offshore” operations for the BBC World Service’s Hindi, Nepali, and Urdu language programming to Delhi, Kathmandu, and Islamabad. From the Guardian:

TV, radio and online news will be disrupted on Friday 3 April and Thursday 9 April after nearly 800 members of the National Union of Journalists chapel at the BBC today voted in favour of industrial action in a national ballot.

More than 1,100 of the union’s nearly 4,000 members at the corporation took part in the vote, 77% of whom voted in favour of a strike.

The most urgent threat of compulsory cuts is at the World Service’s South Asian section, where up to 20 members are at risk, the union has said. Staff in Scotland are also understood to be under threat.

The NUJ general secretary, Jeremy Dear, said: “Journalists at the South Asian services have been fighting a heroic struggle against the outsourcing of their jobs … now they have the weight of thousands of NUJ members at the BBC behind them.” [link]

In late February, journalists within the South Asia services held their own one-day strike to protest the proposed restructuring. In addition to worrying about lost jobs in London, the journalists fear that shifting operations to the subcontinent would compromise the quality and independence of the BBC’s coverage:

Staff are concerned that moving production of these BBC language services abroad will result in poorer output and a loss of independence which is integral to the BBC World Service.

One member commented: “If the BBC’s succeeds in imposing change, the tendency will be for the output to become more and more India-centric, in the case of the India service, as they try to compete with local FM broadcasters.

“This moves away from the World Service’s USP: impartial news with a global perspective. Why should the British taxpayer end up paying for a local Indian radio station?” [link]

The International Federation of Journalists has echoed these concerns, asserting that “the BBC management’s off-shoring plans will put at risk seventy years of first-class journalism and expose their journalists to political and commercial pressures beyond their control.” On the eve of last month’s one-day strike, John McDonnell, a Labour MP for west London, elaborated upon these concerns even further:

Continue reading at SAJAforum….

Via Reuters (and Sadia Abbas), some breaking news from Pakistan:

The Pakistan government agreed on Monday to reinstate Iftikhar Chaudhry as Supreme Court chief justice to end a political crisis that has gripped the Muslim nation, a government official said.

The official added that a constitutional package would also be presented.

President Asif Ali Zardari had hitherto stonewalled calls from the opposition led by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and a lawyers’ movement to restore the judge.

Chaudhry was dismissed in late 2007 by then-president and army chief
Pervez Musharraf, but Zardari regarded the judge as too politicized and
feared he could pose a threat to his own presidency if restored. [link]

No solid confirmation as yet, but Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani is scheduled to address the nation shortly.

Continue reading at SAJAforum….

Everything old appears to be new again in Pakistan. The latest: government bans on independent television news coverage.

On the heels of an emergency crackdown earlier this week, in which the government of President Asif Ali Zardari responded to the “Long March” organized by the lawyers movement by banning public gatherings and reportedly detained hundreds of opposition lawyers and political workers, Zardari has also moved to block transmission of Geo TV throughout the country:

On the direct order of President Asif Ali Zardari, the transmission of the Geo News was blocked by cable operators in various parts of the country on Friday, which drew flak from across the country.

The transmission was blocked in some parts of Karachi, Hyderabad,
Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore, Quetta, Multan, Rawalakot, Muzaffarabad, Deepalpur, Sargodha, Nawabshah, Faisalabad, Gujranwala and Dera Murad Jamali. [link]

Geo and other TV news channels were previously blocked — for much the same reasons as the present ban by Zardari — by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, first as the lawyers’ movement was gaining momentum in the spring of 2007 and later after Musharraf declared a state of “emergency” in November 2007.

The Geo ban has apparently prompted the resignation of Information Minister Sherry Rehman, a leading member of the Pakistan People’s Party and close confidante of the late former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto:

Continue reading at SAJAforum….

In recent weeks, human rights violations in India have slowly been seeping into the mainstream Western consciousness — and not just because of Sergeant Srinivas. A flurry of media stories and human rights reports draws attention not only to particular extrajudicial killings, disappearances, and incidents involving torture at the hands of Indian police and security forces, but also to the prospect that such incidents may be part of more systematic patterns of abuse than is typically assumed.

Both the New York Times and Time have published stories within the past month discussing the prevalence of so-called “encounter killings” in India:

Numbering in the thousands every year, “encounters” or “encounter killings” are shootouts between the Indian police or army and any criminal element, from terrorists to petty thieves. Many Indians believe that at least some are stage-managed — with, say, a police officer placing a gun in the hands of a dead person — leading to the popular phrase, “fake encounter killing.”…

In almost all, India’s limited forensics capabilities make investigating the claims of either side hard to verify. But the national news media often accept the police’s version,which puts them in harmony with many in their middle-class audience who fear rising crime and terrorism. Meanwhile, Bollywood and Indian media lionize “encounter specialists” — soldiers or policemen who, like Dirty Harry, specialize in shootouts. [NYT]

* * *

Human rights activists have for years protested the growing incidence of encounters, some of them allegedly staged. “Encounters have become the norm,” says Vrinda Grover, lawyer and human rights activist. “They have become the police’s preferred method to deal with not just terrorists, but criminals of all kinds.” Legends of “encounter specialist” cops abound, and one of them was even the subject of the Bollywood film Ab Tak Chhappan (“So far 56″, implying the number of people he had killed).

Activists allege that in numerous instances, evidence has been planted after a shooting in order to justify police claims that officers had acted in self defense. Encounters are meant to be probed by a magistrate following a post-mortem, but critics point out that the investigative work in such probes is undertaken by the police themselves. They also allege that such tactics enjoy tacit approval from the authorities in areas plagued by insurgencies. [Time]

Continue reading at SAJAforum….

(Posted at Dorf on Law)

Perhaps it’s fitting that Pakistan’s latest crisis has come just as the television series Battlestar Galactica (whose final episode airs next week) is drawing to a close. Between the Musharraf Supreme Court’s controversial decision to declare Pakistan Muslim League-N leaders Nawaz Sharif and Shahbaz Sharif ineligible to hold public office, President Asif Ali Zardari’s decision to crack down on the lawyers’ movement and other opponents, and the State Department’s apparent decision, at least initially, to respond to the crisis somewhat tepidly, one is left, wearily, with the irresistible sense that all of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.

To refresh our collective recollection, Zardari’s ascent to power last September came on the heels of an unprecedented movement in which Pakistan’s lawyers and ultimately its electorate decisively rejected then-General-cum-President Pervez Musharraf’s interference with the independence of Pakistan’s judiciary and his authoritarian, martial law-like crackdown on his opponents in the guise of “Emergency.” Like Benazir Bhutto before him, Zardari pledged on many occasions after the election to fulfill the key demands that stirred this mass movement to action: restoration of the judges unlawfully ousted by Musharraf, and in particular, restoration of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. Zardari also promised to roll back the powers accumulated in the presidency by Musharraf, restoring the supremacy of Pakistan’s parliament. Well over a year has passed since Pakistan’s electorate delivered that mandate. However, Zardari’s government has neither restored Chaudhry to his position, nor rolled back any of the other extraconstitutional actions taken by Musharraf during the Emergency, nor repealed the sweeping executive powers instituted by Musharraf.

Now, with Musharraf’s still-lingering Supreme Court declaring Zardari’s PML-N rivals ineligible to hold office, Zardari’s government has dismissed the PML-N government in Punjab and imposed Governor’s Rule, leading to civil and political unrest throughout the province. In response to this week’s second anniversary of Chaudhry’s suspension by Musharraf, the lawyers’ movement already had planned a second “Long March” on Islamabad, from March 12 to 16, seeking restoration of Pakistan’s pre-November 2007 constitution and reinstatement of all judges ousted during the Emergency.

Apparently feeling the political heat, Zardari then discovered his inner Musharraf — not on the golf course, as he previously had told the world he would have preferred, but rather in the authoritarian laws inherited from the British:

[P]olice and intelligence officials carried out early-morning raids across Punjab and Sindh, arresting more than 300 lawyers and political activists…. The crackdown began late Tuesday night, with the government invoking Section 144 of the 1860 Penal Code, a law from the British colonial era that forbids public gatherings of four or more people. As whispers of imminent arrests gathered momentum and local television channels exhibited lengthy lists of intended targets, many prominent lawyers and politicians went into hiding, just as they did during a crackdown operated by former President Pervez Musharraf….

Indeed, many of the people allegedly on the lists were last arrested in late 2007, when Musharraf imposed emergency rule….

Athar Minallah, a prominent lawyer, maneuvered himself out of being arrested from the driver’s seat of his car. “I locked myself in the car, and the police didn’t know how to get me,” he said. “So I called the television cameras who were only two minutes away. I began giving live interviews from the car, addressing the Interior Minister, Rehman Malik, directly. After a while, Mr. Malik came down himself and shouted the police officers away.” [link]

Perhaps seeking to out-Musharraf Musharraf, Zardari’s government has even played the terrorism card.

During the 2008 campaign, President Obama sharply criticized the Bush administration’s approach to Pakistan, asserting that by

coddl[ing] Musharraf, we alienated the Pakistani population, because we were anti-democratic. We had a 20th-century mindset that basically said, ‘Well, you know, he may be a dictator, but he’s our dictator.”….

That’s going to change when I’m president of the United States. [link]

So how has the new administration responded to this week’s events? State Department spokesperson Robert Wood’s initial response did not go all that smoothly:

‘You haven’t been clear at all about where the US stands on what’s going on in Pakistan,’ said a journalist.

‘I have given you what our position is. I can’t give you an assessment of what’s taking place right at this moment on the ground,’ said Wood.

‘That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking, what is your position on reinstatement of the chief judge,’ the journalist asked.

‘That’s something that’s going to have to be determined by the Pakistanis in accordance with their laws and their constitution. I can’t go beyond that,’ said Wood.

‘But when President Musharraf installed a state of emergency to avoid the reinstatement of the judges, you had called for the reinstatement of the judges,’ the journalist reminded him.

‘Look, I’m giving you what the policy is right now. And as I’ve said, this is something that needs to be worked out within Pakistan’s political sphere in accordance with its laws. That’s about the best I can give you,’ said Wood. [link]

Still, to their credit, Wood and other diplomats, including special envoy Richard Holbrooke, have publicly expressed concern about Zardari’s restrictions on freedom of assembly and freedom of speech, and have urged Pakistan to act in accordance to the rule of law. Will it make any difference? As when the crisis over the judiciary first began, hum dekhenge. Again, and still.