“The picture they paint is all rainbows and butterflies since the elections in 2015. But that’s wrong. The fear and distrust is constant.” Those words from a human rights activist in the Sri Lankan city of Jaffna, ahead of a United Nations decision on its role in the contry this week, reflects the disconnect between a global narrative of how much Sri Lanka has changed and the more unsettling reality on the ground.
This year marks the tenth anniversary of the end of Sri Lanka’s brutal 26-year civil war, in which government forces and the rebel Tamil Tigers alike committed serious war crimes. In the final stages of the war, between March and May 2009, tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were killed in just a few months. Government shelling included repeated targeting of hospitals in an area of north-east Sri Lanka which was cynically proclaimed a “no-fire zone”.
In 2015, Maithripala Sirisena was elected as Sri Lankan president, in place of Mahinda Rajapaksa, whose military victory had included what a UN report described as “an assault on the entire framework of international law”. Sirisena, by contrast, vowed to uphold human rights. Some diplomats in Colombo are still eager to take him at his word, insisting that Sri Lanka is a country reborn.
