The dishonesty with this book begins with the title. Norway’s “peace engagement” in Sri Lanka was not intended to end the civil war but to get the two sides to sign a piece of paper that the Norwegians could then take credit for. Their model was the Oslo Accords they brokered between Israel and the PLO in the early 1990s, in which they took great pride according to this very book (p. 44-5). As the rest of us know, the Norwegian-brokered Accords legitimized Israeli hegemony over the Palestinians and paved the way for the Second Intifada that featured an unprecedented level of violence and acts of terror.
Salter’s book deserves a failing grade because it pushes a false narrative, primarily in the introduction, that Norway came close to facilitating a peaceful end to the Sri Lankan civil war only for the Sri Lankans to derail its efforts and resume hostilities with disregard for Accountability (capitalized as it is a well-worn buzzword that Western commentators invoke with Sri Lanka) and many civilian deaths. Salter acknowledges up front that he intended to give Norway’s perspective, as requested by Erik Solheim and Vidar Helgesen (p. 8-9). However, only about 140 of the book’s 427 pages cover the height of Norway’s peace engagement from the late 1990s through 2003 (Ch. 1-5), compared to 108 pages describing the subsequent war where Norway’s role was marginal, and postwar Sri Lankan politics which were wholly irrelevant to the topic (Ch. 10-11, Epilogue, Postscript). The overwhelming bulk of Salter’s book is a dump of information lacking critical analysis, as he adopted the American FOX News “we report, you decide” approach while actively omitting anything that could threaten his anti-Sri Lanka narrative.
Implicit in Salter’s narrative is that Accountability disappeared with the Mahinda Rajapakse’s election as President in November 2005. In reality, the Norwegians, with tacit Western approval, hard-wired a lack of Accountability into the peace process which produced the conditions that led to the Rajapakses’ rise. Salter’s audience may not be aware of this because he took great pains to omit from his book the most articulate critique of the Norwegians’ efforts: the University Teachers for Human Rights-Jaffna (UTHR-J) which produced five Special Reports, seven Bulletins, and two Statements encompassing hundreds of pages between 1 February 2002 and 21 December 2003. Of these publications, Salter felt only one Statement was worth mentioning, *in a single endnote*, as “a scathing indictment of government, Norwegian facilitators and SLMM monitors’ perceived indifference to the Tigers’ relentless campaign of assassinations against their Tamil opponents” (would Salter similarly be ok with describing the Rajapakses’ treatment of human rights as “perceived indifference?”).
UTHR-J’s problem with the Norwegians was their eagerness to sweep the LTTE’s ceasefire transgressions under the rug to keep the LTTE from dumping the peace process. One of the heads of the Nordic Sri Lankan Monitoring Mission (SLMM) responsible for tracking ceasefire violations actually told Salter that the SLMM had to ensure its work would not cause the end of the peace process, contradicting his claim two sentences earlier that the SLMM was an independent entity (p. 293)! As UTHR-J stated in Special Report #14 quite early in the peace process in July 2002:
In October 2003- two years before Rajapakse became President- UTHR-J predicted how Westerners like Salter would later explain the death of the peace process (Special Report #17):
“To defend their LTTE-centred appeasement and dismissive attitude towards other ‘disruptive’ interests, they will blame this or that ‘extremist’ group or the President. But that would be to confuse secondary with primary phenomena.”
Salter must have gone to extreme lengths to ignore such reporting, given how extensively he cited UTHR-J’s later condemnations of the Rajapakses’ 2006-9 military campaign. The UTHR-J reports he neglected inconveniently show how the West in 2002-3 viewed Accountability as an obstacle to Norway’s success. For example, Bulletin #36 showed how two weeks after President Kumaratunga took constitutionally-sanctioned action in November 2003 against the UNF government that was capitulating to the LTTE, the EU issued a resolution warning her against disrupting the peace process.
UTHR-J warned early that allowing the LTTE impunity would undermine the credibility of the peace process among the Sinhala electorate, but there is nothing to indicate the Norwegians considered the Sinhala population to be a factor. They blamed rivalries between the Sinhala parties for disrupting the process, not caring to understand that these parties could not take action without support from their electorate. The Norwegians believed they should have made a stronger media effort to the Sinhalese, but what would their message have been? What could they possibly say that would overcome Sinhala distrust with their *actions?*
Elsewhere the Norwegians expressed outright contempt for Sri Lanka’s democratic institutions and implicit admiration for the LTTE’s totalitarianism. When the Sri Lankan Supreme Court in 2005 ruled against a proposed mechanism that would have given the LTTE control over tsunami relief funds, Vidar Helgesen railed against the Kumaratunga government for being “obsessed with Colombo political considerations,” i.e. a popular mandate which the LTTE was not burdened with. Similarly he cursed the government’s “attendant corruption,” undoubtedly believing the LTTE would better spend the funds out of its boundless compassion for tsunami victims. Helgesen made the incredibly contradictory statement “National sovereignty is clearly there to be respected, but we didn’t see much mobilisation by the international community to engage with the LTTE and put real pressure on the Sri Lankan government to obtain access to them.” (p. 213)
Salter’s own book continued to show Norwegian opposition to Accountability when they pushed back against the EU proscribing the LTTE for attacking a Sri Lankan ship carrying a SLMM monitor in May 2006. SLMM head Henricsson somehow felt the government was to blame for the LTTE’s actions, while Kristine Hoglund apparently felt that the LTTE should be able to get away with anything to keep it in the peace process, including attacking Europeans. (p. 255-7)
One might argue all of this would be too much for a single book to explore. Yet, Salter’s book has no shortage of irrelevant information such as Karuna’s problems with British authorities or the fact that a minister killed in a LTTE attack was a thug. He spent a number of pages on the conspiracy theory that the Rajapakses bribed the LTTE into preventing the Tamils from voting in the 2005 election, even though Solheim himself debunked it (p. 236). There are some useful nuggets, particularly European observations of Prabhakaran, but they’re buried and not easily accessible.
In the Lessons Learned chapter, Salter compares the end of the Sri Lankan civil war with the war in Syria and the Rwandan genocide, ignoring the vast differences in the numbers of civilian deaths. However he does not mention Israel which also has an ethnic conflict characterized by disputes over land and human rights violations. Would bringing up a pro-Western country have been too controversial? At the end, Helgesen paints a “West vs the Rest” picture by claiming Sri Lanka was able to flout Western human rights standards (and was worse than Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Burma, seemingly attempting to outdo Salter’s silly analogies) by winning support from Restern powers such as China. (p. 414)
The fundamental Lesson Learned unmentioned by Salter is that Sri Lanka is a key example of how the West’s Double Standard with human rights undermines its credibility with the Rest. The Salters of this world who fume in outrage that the democratically-elected Rajapakse government wouldn’t negotiate with an armed group that conscripts child soldiers and systematically eliminates dissent would somehow support a “military solution” against Boko Haram. The same Norwegians who preach dialogue in Sri Lanka glorify their expeditionary military operations against Afghans in TV miniseries (you can watch “Nobel” on Netflix). The same Brits who refuse to acknowledge their massacre of the male adult population in a Sri Lankan province in 1818 lecture the victims’ descendants on the need for justice.
This book might be appealing to university students tasked with writing a 5-10 page political science or conflict resolution paper and who are looking for a one-stop-shop for sources. Those who actually want to know where the peace process went wrong should instead consult the UTHR-J publications that Salter strenuously ignored.
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