Drawing the wrong lessons from Gaza

As the human toll of the Gaza conflict mounted, with daily atrocities being reported because of Israel’s disproportionate and indiscriminate strikes against targets in the beleaguered Palestinian territory, President Ranil Wickremesinghe has inserted himself and the country into an unwarranted comparison with Sri Lanka’s own history of violations of human rights and humanitarian law violations. 

At a function last week, the President accused Western nations of “double standards” in addressing human rights concerns in Gaza and in Sri Lanka. “Last year in October, at the Human Rights Council, they all got together and passed a resolution against Sri Lanka,” he said, referring to the international accountability process that was triggered due to years of inaction by the Sri Lankan State to address alleged gross violations in the final phase of the war.  

The President’s lament about the double standards of the West has much merit. Today, the West, especially those countries that espouse to human rights and democracy, have a moment of reckoning due to their stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Mostly driven by their collective memories and burden of history, Western nations have for long years disproportionately supported Israel, from its formation, expansion to the continuous conflicts with its neighbours and indigenous Palestinian population. 

The current conflict has already killed over 9,000 Palestinian citizens in Gaza alone. The indiscriminate attacks on hospitals, refugee camps and schools are nothing short of war crimes. These atrocities, carried out with overt support of Western nations have created a clear divide among nations of the global North and South while also dividing public opinion in the West.

While the double standards are glaring and the President is correct to point them out, his demand should be that universal principles, standards and international law be applied to Israel as it is correctly applied to others, including Sri Lanka. Instead, the President laments that Sri Lanka is held accountable for the alleged crimes committed by the State, especially in the final stages of the war in 2009, while Israel is getting away with impunity for similar crimes.

All that President Wickremesinghe has done in his rather amateur analysis of what is going on in the Middle East is draw unnecessary attention and parallels between the atrocities carried out by Israel and the alleged war crimes committed by the Sri Lankan security forces in the final phase of the war. Herding over 300,000 civilians to a designated ‘No Fire Zone’ only to use heavy weapons to attack the region, and bombings of hospitals and places of shelter for the internally displaced are some of the crimes that are alleged to have been committed by the security forces. These crimes, committed against Sri Lankan citizens not only should have been investigated but those who violated humanitarian law during an armed conflict prosecuted. It is the very failure to do so that has now resulted in international action against Sri Lanka.

There are many lessons for Sri Lanka to learn from the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. How there could never be security while discriminating and traumatising a population within its territory is definitely one of them. Assuming that a State can get away with mass atrocities, committed even while supposedly fighting terrorism, is definitely not a lesson to take away from this conflict. President Wickremesinghe who is supposedly wiser on international relations than his Predecessors should surely have the acumen to comprehend this.