The Death and Rebirth of the Sri Lanka Model

29/07/2015
In the early part of this decade the phrase the Sri Lanka model gained popularity
among both Sri Lanka watchers and influential figures in the security forces of
nefarious regimes. It doesnt get thrown around as much these days, but nor has it
entirely disappeared. Meanwhile the ideas that inspired the term have certainly not
gone away. In fact, they have developed in an unsavoury direction.
The Sri Lanka model is a powerful and dangerous template for counter-insurgency
and conflict resolution, the profound wrongness of which has very serious
consequences for human rights, peace, and security far beyond Sri Lankas borders.

Defining the Sri Lanka model

The Sri Lanka model was most clearly defined by V.K. Shashikumar in an article in the
Indian Defence Review, but various other formulations also exist. At its heart is the
idea of using purely military means to defeat an armed insurgency, without any attempt
at dialogue or a parallel track political process. It also approves of ruthlessness in the
pursuit of that goal: the utter destruction of an armed opponent regardless of the cost
to civilian life. In this respect the Sri Lanka model is neither new nor particularly
sophisticated Arnaud Amalric dealt with the Cathars in broadly the same fashion.

However what differentiates the Sri Lanka model is that it seeks to accomplish this end
whilst simultaneously escaping the opprobrium of the international community.
This is no easy task, and explaining how the Rajapaksa regime achieved it is beyond
the scope of this article. In brief some of the aspects of the model included: co-opting
the language of and Western sympathy for the war on terror; exploiting antiWestern feeling among sympathetic partners in the global South; demonising and delegitimising the opponent (with an opponent who made that job easy); blurring the
boundaries between armed combatants and the civilian population; ruthlessly
controlling information and suppressing the media; and above all an astute public
relations campaign based around the idea that Sri Lanka, a popular cultural and
holiday destination to this day, just wasnt that sort of a place.

The Sri Lanka model was sold in a number of ways: in visits and briefings to
representatives of countries such as Burma, Libya, Bangladesh, Thailand, Turkey,
Nepal, Indonesia, and the Philippines, as well as via a series of defence seminars held
in Galle and Colombo from 2011 onwards. These events would involve delegates from
up to fifty countries. Much of the western world sent delegates. Those invited included
the United States Defence Attach in Colombo Lawrence Smith who used the
occasion to give a speech about how the fog of war might excuse war crimes.
This was the most concerning facet of the Sri Lanka model. It did not consist entirely
of geopolitical black sheep looking to touch up their reputation but also of those with a
reputation to protect looking for tips on how to tackle insurgencies more robustly
without taking the accompanying reputational hit. In other words, looking for a way in

which they could behave more as the pariah states do, but without becoming pariah
themselves.
The waning of the Sri Lanka model
The classic Sri Lanka model took three heavy blows over the last three years.
The first was a consequence of the series of documentary films by Channel 4
News (and later by filmmaker Callum Macrae in an independent capacity) which
exposed to a global public the scale and nature of the mass atrocities perpetrated by
the Sri Lankan Government. These films also derailed Sri Lankas public relations
campaign. Hubris and miscalculation led the Sri Lankan Government to believe they
could win a reputational slugging match with Channel 4. This also meant that they
brought in the sluggers: the spotlight moved away from the Governments urbane and
sophisticated advocates, such as Dayan Jayatilleka, Chris Nonis, and Mahinda
Samarasinghe with their nuanced (and mendacious) approach to public relations, and
in their place thugs such as Sajin Vaas, Bandula Jayasekara and Rajpal
Abeynayake were allowed free rein to use their bully tactics.
This went about as well as one would expect and led to the public relations disaster of
the Commonwealth Summit. And the Government did not change course. Indeed,
perhaps taking the view that public relations no longer mattered they started to
develop a seeming blindness to public perception. They impeached the Chief Justice
of the Sri Lankan Supreme Court on the day of Sri Lankas peer review at the UN
Human Rights Council, and they arrested human rights activists in the middle of a
session which was to discuss Sri Lanka.
The end result is that the public perception of Sri Lanka, which remained relatively
favourable in the immediate aftermath of the war, has degraded considerably over the
last few years.
The second blow was more subtle. It was driven by the UN Internal Review into Sri
Lanka, the Petrie report, and continued in the many conversations that it triggered.

The United Nations realised, belatedly, that it had fallen short in their handling of the

final stages of Sri Lankas civil war. In an eventually futile attempt to maintain agency
access to the war-zone, most parts of the UN system held back on any significant
criticism of the Sri Lankan Governments conduct to the point where they became
complicit in the tragedies that followed. This error was acknowledged in the report
which led to the Secretary-General launching the Human Rights Up Front initiative.
Sri Lanka has become one of the watchwords in the organisation for what not to do in
conflict situations.
Of course it was not just the UN that sacrificed principle for access (and eventually
ended up losing both). Some non-governmental and humanitarian organisations active
in northern Sri Lanka made similar tradeoffs. There is evidence to suggest that here
too Sri Lanka has become the case study for the pitfalls this can create.
Finally, while the path to justice for victims of war crimes has been slow and tortuous
with no certainty that there is any end in sight, the Sri Lankan Government has been
under a degree of international scrutiny for the last several years. From the report of
Ban Ki-moons Panel of Experts, through three contested resolutions at the United
Nations Human Rights Council (and the three subsequent High Commissioners
reports), through to the UN OISL investigation into war crimes in Sri Lanka, which will
report in September, Sri Lanka has been pretty much constantly battling credible
allegations of war crimes for over four years. Thus far it has avoided serious
consequences for its actions, but the constant international scrutiny has started to
have an effect on Sri Lankas international reputation.

A new Sri Lanka model

As a result some of the sheen has been taken off the Sri Lanka model. Sri Lanka still
runs its defence seminars, but after a number of high profile campaigns they have
become low key affairs, barely advertised and sparsely attended. The Sri Lankan
military in general has adopted a far less rambunctious approach to public relations,
and as very few bashful missionaries attract converts this has limited the further
spread of the Sri Lanka model.

Occasionally the classic Sri Lanka model still rears its head. In a truly dreadful article
for The Diplomat in April of this year Peter Layton, a former Group Captain in the
Australian Air Force, rehashed Shashikumars argument, and went further still: arguing
that utilitarian arguments can be invoked to permit war crimes and crimes against
humanity.
However this piece was the exception. What is far more common is to see a new
formulation of the model. The purpose now is no longer attempting to get away with
human rights violations completely in the court of international public opinion, but
rather to blur the lines of international human rights law to the point where the
consequences lack bite and do not extend to legal action.
The main facet of this model is a fuzzing of the distinction between civilians and
combatants, and a plea for a greater tolerance of collateral damage in the context of a
messy asymmetric war against an enemy willing to use human shields. The doctrine of
proportionality comes under particularly concentrated attack with an attempt to claim
less and less proportional actions as being acceptable.

This appeared to be the objective of a series of reports allegedly written by

international legal experts and leaked by the Island newspaper early this year.
Lawyers who have looked at these reports have been scathing of the arguments
within, and were they ever to be published openly they would doubtless be torn apart
by the academic legal community. But the aim of these arguments is not necessarily to

convince entirely, certainly not to convince lawyers, but simply to muddy the waters a
little. For, as we have seen on previous occasions, even the slightest lack of clarity will
be eagerly seized upon as an excuse for inaction by an audience desperate for a
reason not to act.
The future Sri Lanka model

This is very bad news anyone who has the misfortune to live in close proximity to an
armed insurgency. The first 15 years of the 21st century suggest that this will be an
era of many highly dispersed and fragmented wars. If these wars are fought with no
regard for the distinction between civilian and combatant, and with an anything goes
approach to proportionality, then it will be a bloody century indeed.
But this new Sri Lanka Model could well end up doing sovereign nations no favours
either. We have yet to touch on the manner in which the Sri Lanka model has been
applied to peacetime, and the Orwellian re-appropriation of terms such as
reconciliation (with or without an accompanying truth and). However, few objective
observers could listen to the views of the survivors of Sri Lankas civil war and
conclude that Sri Lanka has found a sustainable peace.
The bloodshed of 2009 sits within a cyclical pattern of violence within Sri Lankan
society with mass atrocities committed in 1958, 1971, 1977, 1983, 1987,
and 1990 (twice), sitting alongside the four distinct stages of the Government-LTTE
war. Nothing about what has happened since 2009 suggest that these cycles of
violence have been broken, or that the root causes have been addressed.
The question of how long Sri Lankas conflict can remain frozen remains unanswered
and we must hope the timespan will be measured in decades rather than years but
when we have an answer, we may then know when to expect recurring explosions of
violence in any other country self destructive enough to emulate the Sri Lanka Model.