Despite all of the pre-summit brouhaha over the Sri Lankan Government’s dubious human rights record the final communiqué issued at the end of the gathering in Colombo uttered not a word about the issue that had dominated the international headlines. That is not untypical of the Commonwealth.
The Colombo summit took its inevitable course despite the efforts of the British Prime Minister David Cameron to place the spotlight on what is widely believed to have been the atrocities of the Sri Lankan military both during and after the protracted and particularly bloody conflict with the Tamils fighting for secession.
The Prime Ministers of Canada and India, two of the Commonwealth’s most high-profile countries, stayed away. Cameron travelled to Colombia, seized, it seemed, of a Foreign and Commonwealth Office foreign policy posture that contended that Colombo would be a better vantage point from which to shine a spotlight on Sri Lanka’s human rights shortcomings. The other heads – at least most of them ‒ would have seen no reason to take their attention away from the substantive summit agenda. Business as usual: that, for the most part, has been the Commonwealth creed.
There was, perhaps, a hint of muted boisterousness to what, prior to the start of the summit, was a carefully choreographed diplomatic confrontation between President Mahinda Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Cameron. The latter had shown up for some of the pre-summit formalities after which he had taken himself off to the north of the island to meet with Tamils there and presumably to make a point about where his sympathies lay. Rajapaksa, for his part, had sustained a steady drumbeat of protest against charges that the Sri Lankan military had engaged in massacres. In the end Cameron got to make his point which was that London was affording Colombo another four months to come to some kind of reconciliatory arrangement failing which he [Cameron] would take the matter to the United Nations.
Sri Lanka managed to keep any reference to the brouhaha out of the communiqué, by no means a major diplomatic feat. It would have been unthinkable that the assembled Commonwealth heads would have dealt their hosts such a diplomatic disservice. Initially, some members had objected to Sri Lanka hosting the summit, but once that battle was lost that was far as they were prepared to go.
Whether the Commonwealth, as a grouping, will be able to sustain its avoidance of ‘awkward’ issues like the human rights records of some of its member countries without attracting the attention of the wider international community is uncertain. Sri Lanka, after all, is by no means an isolated case. The Commonwealth has, for several years, been conveniently turning a blind eye (or at best saying very little) to others of its own human rights anomalies. Kenya, arguably Africa’s most prominent Commonwealth country, comes to mind. Both that country’s President and Vice President are currently before the International Criminal Court (ICC) facing charges of crimes against humanity arising out of the violence that followed the country’s disputed 2007 elections which left a reported 1100 people dead and more than half a million displaced. Then there is the case of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, whose 33-year hold on power has been littered with accusations of targeted violence against his political opponents and in more recent times, election-rigging. South Africa too has had to face international opprobrium over allegations of human rights abuses, notably over the shooting to death by the police of 34 striking miners.
So the Commonwealth may well be close to being caught in a dilemma that may well compel it to assume a much more robust posture on matters of human rights. That posture might well witness a departure from the custom of closing of ranks around doing the accustomed thing, to recognizing that it must first be prepared to make candid calls in its own backyard if it is to qualify as a credible arbiter on the wider international stage.
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