Sri Lanka and the Commonwealth

Amnesty also says:""There has been no proper accountability for the killings that have happened in the last two years, so there is impunity for the perpetrators."" Such breaches of human rights are not acceptable. Governments must live up to the very highest codes of behaviour, but the Government of Sri Lanka are not doing so. Earlier this month, I joined protesters and other MPs, many of whom are in the Chamber, at a meeting of the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group, at which we called for Commonwealth Ministers to suspend Sri Lanka for its human rights abuses against the Tamil community. The group was established in 1995 to deal with serious or persistent violations of the Harare declaration. It is clear to me that Sri Lanka has violated the terms of the declaration, and it must be clear to everyone that it has violated the spirit of the declaration. There is now an opening for a truce. At the weekend, in an interview with Marie Colvin of The Sunday Times, Balasingham Nadesan, the political leader of the Tamil Tigers, called for an urgent ceasefire. He said that the Tigers would enter negotiations with the Sri Lankan Government "without pre-conditions" and:""We call for a ceasefire, loudly and clearly"." The Sri Lankan Government could grasp this opportunity of a ceasefire, or else face international opprobrium. If Sri Lanka does not take this opportunity, it will need to be forced to the negotiating table through diplomatic means. The British Government should simply state that Sri Lanka should be suspended from the Commonwealth, and the process of suspension should commence. That is the purpose of this debate—I hope that the Government will listen to the concerns of my constituents. I hope also that the debate will offer an opportunity to highlight on the world stage the truly appalling state of affairs there. Sadly, the media have not taken much interest in the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Sri Lanka, so it falls to us to draw attention to it. As Amnesty has said:""One of the real concerns is that this is a war without witnesses…We just don't know what's been happening"." That is why Sri Lanka is, in many ways, a forgotten crisis. As I have said, 60 people a day are dying due to army bombardment in Tamil areas, and more people have been killed in the past five weeks than died in Gaza last autumn. I do not wish to diminish the importance and horror of what has happened in Gaza, and it is quite right that the conflict was front-page news and the first item on TV and radio bulletins for weeks on end, but there has been no such coverage of Sri Lanka. That is appalling, because astonishingly cruel things have been happening there and, as the Red Cross has said, things are getting worse. The Sri Lankan Government do not allow independent monitors or members of the press into the affected areas, and journalists have been threatened or even murdered. Surely that is even more reason for the international media to report on this conflict. The media also have a hard time reporting in Zimbabwe and Gaza, but that usually hardens their resolve. When it comes to Sri Lanka, only a few notable exceptions print anything other than public relations material for the Government there. Award-winning war correspondent Marie Colvin is one such exception. She was attacked by Government forces when reporting in Sri Lanka and, as a result, suffered head and chest wounds and lost an eye. She spoke at a meeting of the all-party group on Tamils last week, and explained the dreadful conditions on the ground and the lengths to which the Government would go to wipe out their opponents. However, for every Marie Colvin, there are dozens of papers with no coverage at all. As a daily reader of The Times, I was disgusted by its article last Friday complaining about demonstrations in which people waved Tamil flags. The article said that the Sri Lankan Government were unhappy about the flags being waved at demonstrations in countries such as Britain and that the people doing so represented terrorists from the Tamil Tigers. In fact, they did not, but that is beside the point. What is going on with a paper's sense of proportion when it prints stories about flags, but not about thousands of people being killed or displaced every month? Amnesty is right to say that this is a conflict without witnesses, and it is our role, as Members of Parliament, to provide a testimony. The Sri Lankan Government have done an amazing job of repressing dissent internally, and have done a brilliant PR job around the world. They are wiping out an ethnic minority and saying that the Tamils want a bloodbath so that there will be international intervention. They have also cowed the UN, which is now apparently afraid to speak out in case it is expelled from the conflict zone.