Profiling problem

Sri Lanka: The government faces heat over its order to get Tamils from the North living in Colombo to re-register themselves.

in Colombo

The Americans put all citizens of Japanese origin into camps for the duration of the World War. Did you know that?

She did not say anything.

What if we place all Tamil citizens in camps for a period of one year, I asked. Wed use that year to flush out and kill all the rebels hiding in the Wanni. You cant blow up our cities when your bombers are not allowed free access to economic and civilian targets, pretending to be innocents.

That idea is barbaric. It is only a short step from there to the gas chambers, she said furiously and then brightened. But I like the idea. When you start on it, the whole world will condemn you. It will help our cause in other ways as well. Well have plenty of new recruits and funding from our expatriate community will increase immediately.

Oh, I understand that the idea is impractical but we dont have many options.

So goes the dialogue between Captain Wasantha Ratnayaka, the Sinhalese officer in the Sri Lanka Army, and Kamala Velaithan, a female cadre of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) who pretends to be an informer of the diabolical plans of the Tigers, in the much-acclaimed novel of the late Nihal de Silva titled The Road from Elephant Pass.

On September 21, the Sri Lankan government almost made real this surreal scenario with its diktat that all citizens from the five districts of the LTTE-dominated North who have been living in and around Colombo (Western Province) for the past five years re-register themselves with the police.

The professed logic of the government, or to be precise the Defence Ministry, was almost on the lines narrated by Captain Ratnayaka in the novel but with a twist. While the officer-character portrayed in the novel concurs with the illogic of its logic, the collective wisdom of the Sri Lankan establishment did not betray signs of any such reasoning. Even assuming it did, the drumbeats of war have numbed its senses to such an extent that Colombo has stopped bothering about the repercussions of its actions.

The latest move by the Mahinda Rajapaksa regime is astonishing to say the least as just over a year ago the government was condemned from within and without for a similar action. Besides, it comes at a juncture when the armed forces have driven the LTTE into wilderness in its own heartland and the entire world is lined up behind the government in its war.

On June 7, 2007, the eviction of 300-odd Tamils residing in temporary lodges in Colombo, on the grounds that they did not have a valid reason to continue to stay in the national capital, triggered uproar the world over. Fourteen months and two weeks later, the government demonstrated once again what observers say is its skill to score a self-goal, a skill it has apparently perfected since the war began in July 2006. A case of collective amnesia or damn-the-consequences mindset?

The grand idea to subject citizens from the North to police registration and verification came less than a week after Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, in an interview to the state-run English newspaper Daily News, expressed alarm over what he termed as unusual influx of outsiders into the national capital and how it posed a grave threat to the lives of innocent citizens.

The Defence Secretary, who is one of the brothers of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, told the newspaper: I prefer most of these people who had come from other areas to Colombo and [its] suburbs and who are staying here without any valid reason to go back to their areas.

He added: It is an immense problem for the security forces to provide security. The LTTE mingles with these people to infiltrate these areas. If some people have come from the East or any other place to Colombo and if they are staying here without any reason they should go back to their places. That is the most preferable thing. He called the situation abnormal and alarming and said 6,950 people had come to Colombo in August alone and were now living in lodges and houses.

How he arrived at the figure is a mystery; the September 21 figures thrown up by the police survey of citizens from the North give a completely different picture. Thanks to the war, which is now in to its third year, citizens from the North and the East need permits from multiple authorities to travel to any other part of the island. Barring the cases of those who manage to sneak out through unguarded routes, it is presumed that the government has a count of citizens on the move from the North and the East at any given point of time.

All that the government needs to do to know the exact number of outsiders, particularly from the North and the East, is dust off its own records maintained at the military and police checkpoints that dot the roads connecting the two provinces with the rest of the country. Obviously, the objective behind the headcount goes beyond just the count.

To begin with, the government order that citizens from the North turn up at designated police stations, schools or temples in and around Colombo to be counted is in contempt of the Supreme Courts verdict (see box) on the bundling out last year of Tamils from the North and the East.

Of course, the establishment could argue that the latest exercise was only a headcount and did not envisage eviction. However, a closer scrutiny of the Supreme Court judgment delivered in May would reveal that it is not merely about eviction but covers the dignity and honour of citizens and their right to live in any part of the island. The backdrop against which the judgment was pronounced and a gist of the verdict establish beyond doubt that the government has defied the courts explicit directions.

It is against this background that the governments latest decision evoked outrage even among sections of society that back it fully in its war against the LTTE and terrorism. A front-page, signed editorial in The Island (the English daily that is in the forefront of the campaign for the military defeat of the Tigers) on the eve of the headcount summed up best the sense of shock and betrayal over the police census. It read:

Having infiltrated the city and its suburbs heavily, the LTTE is carrying out terror strikes on civilian targets to force the government to relent. It is all out to provoke a backlash to open an escape route through the flames of communal violence. However, the police must not lose sight of the plight of the Tamil civilians caught in the nutcracker of terrorism and counter-terror operations. That there are terrorists among the fleeing civilians, some of whom have moved to Colombo, is no reason why each and every Tamil civilian must be treated like a terrorist. Unfortunately, in most cases, the police dont care to make this vital distinction, which is a prerequisite for preventing those men, women and children feeling that they have become aliens in their own land.

There are said to be four reasons why the police treat Tamil civilians in this manner: Callousness, racism, ignorance and corruption. How some police personnel take Tamils into custody so as to extract money for their release is only too well known. Victims choose to buy their freedom and keep mum for fear of reprisal. They also suffer humiliation at the hands of some khaki-clad pompous dregs given to lording it over civilians at checkpoints. It was only the other day that one of our readers pointed out that policemen had taken to checking even womens handbags! This undesirable practice must end the sooner, the better.

The police lack Tamil-speaking personnel and not all Tamil civilians can speak Sinhala. The opening up of the LTTE-held terrain in the North has triggered an influx of displaced people into the southern parts. How can the police cope with them without being able to speak Tamil? Ethnic profiling carries a lot of stigma. It makes one feel as if one were a social oddity held in irrational and bigoted contempt. Nothing hurts a decent citizen more than being made an object of public suspicion for no fault of his or hers. No wonder that more and more Tamils are leaving the country out of sheer frustration. It behoves the police bigwigs and government worthies to factor in these sentiments in adopting preventive measures such as the registration of civilians with police stations and subjecting them to security checks.

The All Ceylon Hindu Congress (ACHC) has appealed to the IGP that at least people who have already registered with the police, the elderly and the sick be spared the trouble of being physically present at police stations for the census. This request must be granted and alternative arrangements made, as the ACHC says.

The people who are fleeing terrorists must be able to live with dignity, free from harassment and exploitation, in the other parts of the country if it is a socialist democratic republic. Will the government take steps to ensure that?

The outcome of the re-registration exercise, conducted from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on September 21, was revealing and raised some disturbing questions. It showed that the number of people who had migrated from the five war-torn districts to Colombo and its suburbs since September 21, 2003, stood at 37,037. Of them, 2,242 were new entries. In all, 10,820 families were registered.

The police had expected 1,00,000 people to turn up. The whole basis for the exercise was the the Defence Secretarys statement that the entry of 6,950 outsiders into Colombo in August alone was a cause for alarm. Of course, the Defence Secretary did not indicate from which provinces these outsiders had come. By raising the issue of the possibility of Tiger cadre infiltrating the ranks of outsiders, he left no one in doubt that his reference was to Tamils. Or, perhaps, he was hinting at the potential of the Tigers to infiltrate the ranks of non-Tamils as well though it is a hard sell.

The figure of 37,037 registered with the police, a cumulative number of all those who have been living in and around Colombo since September 2003, would mean that on an average 617.28 outsiders migrated to the Western Province on a monthly basis. In other words, an average of 20.6 persons chose to travel down from the North on a daily basis in the past five years. This is a tiny number considering the fact that in population terms the Western Province accounts for over 10 per cent of the 19 million citizens of Sri Lanka.

It is no exaggeration to suggest that the contribution of the Western Province to the gross domestic product (GDP) is around 40 per cent. The policymakers in Colombo need to sit up and think as to how so few citizens from the North come to the Western Province, which houses the national capital, with all the economic and educational opportunities it offers. The numbers also do not square up with the well-known and much-publicised reality that 54 per cent of Tamils in Sri Lanka live outside the provinces of the North and the East.

Police spokesman Ranjith Gunasekera insisted that the re-registration was legal and peaceful. We have the sanction from the Attorney General and it has been signed by the Supreme Court, he asserted at a news conference in response to questions. The Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC) disputed this contention and raised the issue before the Supreme Court. It called the re-registration harassment of the peace-loving and said some Tamils feared they would be sent back to the North after they re-registered themselves. R. Yogarajan, CWC vice-president, accused the police of violating a court order that prohibits the summoning of people for registration.

It is high time the government considered the implications of some of its ill-conceived actions. Colombo might well be on its way to winning the war, but it is bound to lose if the gains on the battle front are not matched by the war to win the hearts and minds of the Tamil people.

The decision evoked outrage even among sections that fully back the government in its war.