Evidence of meeting #7 for Subcommittee on International Human Rights in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was lanka.
A video is available from Parliament.
Professor, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
On this issue, frankly, working behind the scenes may be an effective way to build such a coalition in Geneva.
Conservative
Gary Schellenberger Conservative Perth—Wellington, ON
Thank you very much.
I found your presentation quite interesting.
You've written and answered in part that Sri Lanka can rely on its growing relationship with trading partners like China and that it does not rely on the west, so it becomes hard to pressure the Sri Lankan government to address human rights abuses. However, many western countries currently are major trading partners of Sri Lanka—the United States, the U.K., Germany, Belgium, to name a few—all of which are vocal on human rights issues in the world. Similarly, India has been a major supplier to Sri Lanka and recently boycotted the Commonwealth summit.
How difficult would it be to implement sanctions against Sri Lanka?
Professor, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
On a bilateral level, not so difficult. At the United Nations level, it would be impossible. But, no, Canada could take economic measures against Sri Lanka. Because of the human rights situation in Sri Lanka, the European Union has already taken certain measures. These things are impactful. On the other hand, they're also offset by Sri Lanka's growing economic relationship with China. So the declining European or American investment may be offset by rising Chinese and other Asian investment in the country.
So the leverage of the economic stick hasn't... Let's put it this way, Sri Lanka hasn't shown enough concern about the European Union measures that it would be willing to take steps to keep preferential access to European markets, which in some respects—I don't know the technical details—it lost as a result of its human rights record.
Conservative
Gary Schellenberger Conservative Perth—Wellington, ON
Okay.
You mentioned earlier that there are many cranes and that type of thing, that building is going on around Colombo.
Is it fact or fiction that great investment is going into Sri Lanka?
Professor, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
I don't want to mislead you, and I don't have the details, but there is real investment. Whether it's going into productive sectors of the economy, I can't say. There's an awful lot of investment in tourism and new hotels and condominium construction in Colombo, but the amount and how significant it is to the broader economic progress of the country, I'm not well positioned to judge, I'm sorry.
Conservative
Professor, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
A lot of it's coming from Asia, but there is significant investment as well from diaspora communities.
Conservative
Gary Schellenberger Conservative Perth—Wellington, ON
Religion usually comes into so many things when we talk around this table. Is this a religious situation? You mentioned the Buddhists and Muslims, but has the conflict resulted from a religious situation during the war, and one that continues after the war?
Professor, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
No. People like to portray some of these sectarian conflicts in religious terms. Insofar as religion's relevant, it's because it's been manipulated. The Tigers essentially invented the technique of suicide bombing. Up until about 2003, pre-Iraq war, most of the people who had been killed by suicide bombers had been killed by the Tigers not by Islamist suicide bombers. But the Tigers who did this were Hindus, atheists, or Christians. They were all pursuing the same technique.
So, no, there's a manipulation of religion in the conflict.
Conservative
Gary Schellenberger Conservative Perth—Wellington, ON
So the main party in the conflict, then, is family?
Professor, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
The main problem right now is the increasing monopolization of political power in a very small group of people centred around the president.
Conservative
Conservative
Liberal
Sean Casey Liberal Charlottetown, PE
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Professor Petrasek.
I'm filling in for Irwin Cotler, but only in the physical sense. To be sure, there's absolutely no way that in terms of his experience on matters of international human rights I would be able to fill in.
You have written that the decision of Canada's Prime Minister to not attend the heads of Commonwealth meeting changed the way other leaders engaged. You also talked here about it being a PR disaster for the Government of Sri Lanka. Are there similar things or other things our Prime Minister or our country can be doing that will have a similar impact in terms of changing the way others engage with Sri Lanka?
I know that you talked about the UN Human Rights Council. It seems to me that this action by our Prime Minister in this case was, if you will, symbolic. It didn't necessarily involve other countries. Are there other things along these lines that we could do and that would have the same impact?
Professor, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
Well, maybe there's one suggestion. Sri Lanka contributes about 1,000 troops a year to UN peacekeeping. Most of them are in Haiti. That's important to the Sri Lankan military. It's important for their prestige. It's not just an income earner. It's important to their sense of who they are as a military, and it's important to the country.
Were someone to raise questions about the appropriateness of the UN relying on such peacekeeping troops, some of whose commanders may be implicated in human rights abuses in Sri Lanka, that would be a very significant, high-profile, kind of antagonistic approach that might get a lot of attention.
I think the point I was trying to make in the piece you refer to was that to effect human rights change in a country that has dug its heels in and that has support from other powerful countries—in this case, China—is no easy matter. It's a little bit the combination of the carrot and the stick.
I'm not sure whether or not—I have no way of knowing—when the Prime Minister made his decision to boycott the meeting, he expected that it would create the dynamic in Colombo that played out. I just don't know. Maybe he did and maybe he didn't. I won't speculate. But others who chose to go had to engage in a different way.
The boycott was perceived as the hard measure, and attending the meeting, the engagement, seemed like the soft measure, but in the way it played out, actually, the boycott seemed much less important than what David Cameron was doing in Colombo. But the two were interlinked. That was my point.
I think what you need is a bit more strategizing. My advice to the government.... Again, I do not know, so I don't want to speculate here. When the Prime Minister made a statement almost two years that he would not attend the meeting unless certain reforms happened in Sri Lanka, I wrote a piece saying that it was the right decision, but that the government needed to build an international coalition so the action couldn't be dismissed as just being by the Canadian government. I understand that some efforts were made, but my view would be that greater efforts could have been made to build an international coalition around that position. I would urge the government, going forward, to think about positions that are taken in coalition with others, ideally cross-regionally. The more you do it with support from countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the more you undermine the Sri Lankan government's argument that this is just about diaspora politics, or just about the west beating up on the poor developing countries, or something else.
The peacekeeping issue is one. I think the high-profile visits.... I don't think President Rajapaksa is going to be suggesting a visit to Canada any time soon, but people like him like to travel, and there might be other countries he proposes to visit. To countries we have relations with, maybe we could indicate that we don't think such a visit is deserved—or earned, as it were—in the absence of some serious effort to address the human rights situation in the country.
Liberal
Sean Casey Liberal Charlottetown, PE
You may or may not be aware that there was a bill introduced in Parliament today to devolve powers from party leaders down to members of Parliament. Trust me, the timing of this question with the introduction of that bill is purely coincidental, but if we move from the leadership level down to my level, if you will, to the level of an ordinary parliamentarian here in the Parliament of Canada, what can we do, individually or as a group?
Professor, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
That's a good question, and I hadn't anticipated it.
Do you mean in terms of pushing legislation forward?
Professor, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
If I were a parliamentarian now in Sri Lanka, there's not be much that can happen in terms of the big picture.
But I did make recommendations about where Canada could engage with the Northern Provincial Council and with the Tamil National Alliance. I would be thinking about potentially engaging, as parliamentarians, with some of these politicians in the north who are trying to establish a local government of sorts. It has long been the aspiration of the people there to have their own police force and their own government in the areas where they form a majority. It's going to be a long hard slog to do it, and they're not going to get much support from their government.
Those are areas where parliamentarians can engage legitimately to provide much needed advice and support, but also potentially provide introductions to international assistance to help these politicians who are emerging in the north engage with and receive the help and support of the international community. That would be one area. I know it's not a big picture one, but our business interests in the country aren't sufficient to give Canada economic leverage.
As to my answer to the other question, when the European Union removed some trade preferences, even that didn't help much with Sri Lanka.
In Sri Lanka, the government is really not that worried about the economic steps that we might take; they can offset those. They're worried about prestige: it's the things that deny them visits, that deny them access to the symbols they think they are entitled to as a democratically elected government. Those are the things they're sensitive to.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Scott Reid
Thank you, Mr. Casey.
Before we turn to Mr. Sweet, I had a question of my own.
You mentioned peacekeeping. I want to ask what Sri Lanka's reputation is as a peacekeeper, looking at it not from the view of what goes on domestically in Sri Lanka but how its military performs in its peacekeeping role.
Professor, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
I'm not aware of any controversy about that.
Conservative
Professor, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
As far as I know, it's satisfactory. But there is a precedent. The Nepalese government contributes a lot more troops to peacekeeping. Actually, it's a prestige thing for the Nepalese army, but it's also a significant income earner. I think it's not a significant income earner for the Sri Lankan government.
In the Nepalese case, there was an attempt or a sense back in 2006 when there was agitation and mass street protests to have the king resign that the army would be called on to the street. It looked like it was really going south, as they say. There was a small human rights office that was run by the UN in the country, and they wrote to the Secretary General of the United Nations, with a copy to the Nepalese army, indicating that any officers implicated in that.... Of course, that would then affect the Nepalese army's standing as legitimate troops to use on UN peacekeeping missions.
The perception from those close to that event suggested that this had an enormous impact on the Nepalese army. It had a big impact. They actually saw that this was going to affect their prestige internationally, but also affect something they looked forward to doing, because there are thousands of Nepalese troops deployed.
So this might be one area to consider. The further down the road we go of any lack of accountability for the abuses that did happen, somebody might want to look at this issue.
