I'm very concerned about the damage that will be done to the Commonwealth by what is going on, by the fact that Sri Lanka is chairing it. It is an almost breathtakingly contradictory situation. You have a country that is appalling in its record on freedom of expression allegedly chairing an organization committed to freedom of expression.
It is incumbent upon members of the Commonwealth, and particularly through CMAG, the ministerial action group, to put continuous pressure on Sri Lanka. Unfortunately, of course, that committee is now chaired by Sri Lanka. Also, considerable pressure has to be put on the secretary-general of the Commonwealth, who I believe has played a deeply unhelpful role and has in a sense enabled this to happen.
One of the problems is that when the Sri Lankan government committed their final offensive, they used very much the language of the war on terror to justify what was happening, and to buy silence. The Tigers, leaving aside the ethics of what they did, also played into that by their continuous use of terrorist tactics. This has allowed the Sri Lankan government to represent what was going on as part of the war on terror.
At the end of all this, the president made a very clever speech to the United Nations in 2010, in which he basically claimed to have solved the terror problem and then demanded that everyone back off and let Sri Lanka come up with a culturally legitimate, homegrown solution. Ironically, that speech was written by a British public relations company, Bell Pottinger, which is run by a Conservative supporter. There was indeed a kind of irony that they were adopting this almost anti-imperialist rhetoric.
The thing is, it does ring true with a lot of non-aligned nations. It rings true with many nations in the Commonwealth, Asian and African countries. At the same time, other countries on the United Nations Human Rights Council, including North American countries, grow suspicious when the west lectures a small independent nation on human rights.
Getting the word out within the Commonwealth could be hugely important to these countries. It's important to make people understand that this is not a question of the west ganging up on a small independent nation. It is in fact a question of fundamental international humanitarian law and human rights. This is a process of discussion and argument, constant vigilance, and raising the issue within the Commonwealth and the Human Rights Council.
I'm not sure that's a particularly useful answer, but this is an important issue with a context that has to be taken into account.