Pax Americana, the EU and Tamils' struggle

by IRTAG Media | April 1, 2008 at 09:22 am | 284 views | 1 comment

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The European Union banned the Liberation Tigers of Tamileelam (LTTE) a party to the ceasefire agreement and peace process in May 2006. The move is largely seen as coercive tactic to make progress in the peace process. However the move badly back fired with the exit of monitoring mission members belonging to the EU member states. This weakened the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) mandated to observed and document the 2002 ceasefire agreement violations on the ground. Emboldened by the international humiliation and isolation of one party to the ceasefire agreement, the other party Government of Sri Lanka embarked on a “Humanitarian” war to ouster LTTE from most parts of the East of Sri Lanka in violation of the 2002 ceasefire agreement. The rest is history including the unilateral decision by the Government of Sri Lanka to exit the ceasefire agreement in January 2008 and the scrapping of the entire peace effort brokered by Norway with the backing of a co-chair of leading donor nations, namely USA, EU and Japan.

In an International Seminar on the Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka took place on 22-23 March at the premises of the Eastern University's Docklands Campus in London, UK Professor Peter Schalk of Uppsala University, Sweden looks at the recent role of EU in Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict.

A realistic analysis – considering both sides’ unsuccessful negotiations for decades – should end up in a recommendation for a two state solution enforced by UN forces, the sooner the better, facing a possible genocide, said Professor Peter Schalk in a paper presented at a Seminar on Sri Lanka, in London in March. A Humanitarian Military intervention should focus first on the victims by using deterrence and compellence against the Lankan forces and defence of the Tamil speakers, and then – if necessary focus on the perpetrator by defeating him through military offence. In East Timor many thousands of lives were saved through humanitarian military intervention, he concluded in his paper.

The complete paper in pdf.

Event photo courtesy of TamilNet.