By Shenali D Waduge
LankaWeb.com
December 13, 2013
We acknowledge the support of Dr. Subramaniam Swamy over the years for being the sole Indian voice against LTTE in support of Sri Lanka’s role to eliminate LTTE terrorism. We are glad he is a key member of the winning team steering Mr. Modi to take over India in 2014 as its Prime Minister. It is time India had a leader and not a puppet. The rehearsal results from the Lok Sabha elections reveal the gory truth for Congress and its posterboy candidate – he is no match for Gujarat’s nominee. In Modi, India is likely to take back India into true Indian hands and away from the foreign domination that has dragged India to function as a Western vassal state breeding Indian sepoys following to dictates of Western hegemony and taking India away from its Asian heritage and Hindu identity. In Modi, Asia would like to see India take the role of a true super power in the making, India to function as a leader helping and assisting its South Asian neighbors and not attempting to destabilize them whereby indirectly attracting destability on its own soil because of its shortsightedness and inferiority complexes. India needs to first look inward before drawing any policies at diplomatic level regional and international.
When the name of Modi emerged for candidature as India’s Prime Minister as was to be expected the negative publicity arose not from overseas but from within India. It revealed how India’s media in a country with 80% Hindus has been usurped from Hindus and is controlled by Christian or Islamic international power houses financed by their powerful international lobbies. As was to be expected Modi was branded in nomenclatures that denounced him an extremist, racist, murderer which continue unabated and is part of the campaign that is likely to be one of the weakest to overcome the mounting nationalism amongst Indians to upstage armchair leaders who cave in to pressures from even states like Tamil Nadu given that they have no policy in their policies except dance to the lobbies that fund them. We do not want to see Modi repeat that mistake even for political survival. It simply has degraded the stature of a Prime Minister.
However the powers against Modi has been such that in March 2005 the US denied him visa as Chief Minister citing 2002 riots in Gujarat and this coming from a country that sends unmanned drones that kills dozens of civilians daily the decision becomes amusing more so since US has done a u-turn now that India’s next Prime Minister is definitely likely to be Modi.
However, Modi’s visa denial to US came about not from Muslim lobbies but from US Evangelicals and Indian-expat Evangelicals. Modi’s response to the visa denial was ‘will India also consider what America has done in Iraq when it processes visa applications of Americans coming to India’. A statement unlikely to come from the incumbent PM though.
India’s foreign policy is certainly likely to see a major shift. Currently the Prime Ministers office has decided what foreign policy is and not the country’s External Affairs ministry as seen by the nuclear deal with the US. What the West cannot deny is that Modi has been given the cold shoulder despite Modi being absolved of all guilt of allegations. It is interesting how the US and EU will attempt to cuddle up to Modi now that he is persona non grata and the fact that Obama named Manmohan as one of the 5 leaders US was most close to. What is certain is that US will not quote Manmohan as America’s favorite Indian leader if Modi ends up Prime Minister and US may well have to ask Harvard to re-invite Dr. Swamy to lecture. Modi will see major shifts in reception no sooner his role changes but how true friends they are is what Modi will need to decide upon.
In Sri Lanka’s case the ordinary citizens seriously wonder whether its External Affairs Ministry has ever had a clear policy on India instead of groveling before it when India turns the heat on. We have certainly lacked a pro-active strategy to neutralize South India’s political leverage over the Central Government which has spiraled to appalling levels that has now gone beyond amusement or tolerance. In the times of the ancient Sinhalese kings we may recall that the bonds established with various dynastic rulers of the South enabled Sri Lanka to crush South Indian invaders with South Indian assistance and it showed the level of diplomacy and respect that was shared. Today’s leverage has been nothing beyond bartering Sri Lanka’s strategic assets to keep foreign nations off the hook and not giving Sri Lankas political leadership any headaches beyond which they can domestically handle whereby reducing Sri Lanka to a level that we are left with little else to barter. The people may end up the last resort.
What both India and Sri Lanka need to realize first is that India is in need of a national leader for the Hindus of India are experiencing no different a climate than what the Buddhists of Sri Lanka are currently undergoing. Both feel their heritage is being usurped and the people converting to a totally different culture. The incursions are what both India and Sri Lanka share though both have yet to openly acknowledge the links sufficient to address them. The wise words of Rajiv Malhotra is one that both Indians and Sri Lankans should spend time to listen to.
It is in realizing that Eelam is not meant to be a Hindu Eelaam that the breakthrough will come to secure better ties between both nations and sufficiently put to a close a chapter based on bogus grievances that now needs to close for people to get on with their lives.
India needs to once more belong to Asia, it must renew its ties amongst its neighbors, it must set about a new approach to discourse with Pakistan and realize that there are many nations that enjoy keeping both at loggerheads for such a relationship serves their purpose, India needs to also not get caught to feeling it has to continuously challenge China at the behest of the West. India must regain its lost stature as a nation in Asia and start building bonds with its neighbors and not antagonize them as has been done in the past.
With a new shift in approaches for both nations, the realization and strategy to directly deal with the incursions that prevail India and Sri Lanka could well be on course to a better relationship diplomatically one that will ensure that the healthy dialogue between the central governments does not get usurped by petty politics of state politicians in India and paid puppets in the northern province of Sri Lanka.
Monday, December 16, 2013
Saturday, December 14, 2013
Lest We Forget: Nelson Mandela Condemns George W. Bush and War With Iraq, January 30th, 2003
"What I am condemning is that one power, with a president who has no foresight, who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust. ... If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don't care." -- Nelson Mandela
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
TNA will bring grief, not joy to Tamils – Prof. Rohan Gunaratna
By Nadira Gunatilleke
DailyNews.lk
December 11, 2013
Today,
the TNA is radicalizing and militarizing the Tamil youth: terrorism
will emerge unless Sri Lanka takes firm action against fanatics like
Sritharan glorifying terrorist-criminals. Taking action will deter the
emergence of fanatics like Sritharan in the future! Even after a huge
loss of human lives, Sritharan continued to inflame racial passions.
Like Sritharan, a few other racist leaders in the TNA suffer from an
inferiority complex.
Incapable of transcending their racial passions, it is they who want to emulate Prabhakaran, Prof. Rohan Gunaratne told the Daily News during a recent interview.
Professor Rohan Gunaratna is Head of the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research in Singapore and he is the author of Inside Al-Qaeda (Columbia University, New York, 2002). Prof. Gunaratna is the lead author of Pakistan: Ground Zero Terrorism (Reaktion, London, 2011).
Excerpts from the interview:
Q: Sri Lanka will take part in March 2014 UNHRC session and with the HR gains that we have made and new initiatives on the diplomatic front, how can Sri Lanka ensure a better acquittal at the sessions even if it will be dominated by the Western agenda?
A: Geneva is no longer an exercise in human rights but in geopolitics and superpower politics. After the colossal loss of human lives in Afghanistan and Iraq, the West has lost their moral right to pinpoint the finger at others. British Prime Minister David Cameron did not raise human rights issues during his recent visit to China and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper during his recent visit to Indonesia. If they intended to do so, they would have not been welcomed either by China or by Indonesia. The people in those countries would have immediately labeled them hypocrites after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It was not human rights but domestic political compulsions that forced the Canadian, British, Mauritian and Indian leaders to take a certain stand at CHOGM. Except the Indian leader, all the others met with the LTTE front, cover and sympathetic groups. The Tamil vote in the UK and Canada has been mobilized by the LTTE to exercise constituency pressure on Cameron and Harper! In Mauritius and in Tamil Nadu, the LTTE pressurized the co-ethnics. Today, Sri Lanka is an easy target of the West and Sri Lanka should fight back but intelligently by exposing the duality of Western policy. Did the West raise human rights concerns about the violations in Saudi Arabia, a major oil producer and Bahrain, where the US maintains a military presence? With the shift in global power from the West to the East, the Western nations use human rights as a weapon but selectively. Nonetheless, Sri Lanka should plan meticulously for the March 2014 UNHRC session. The Sri Lankan response should focus on the progress it has made since May 2009.
Q: There is a call for the setting up of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Sri Lanka, on the lines of the one set up by the late South African leader Nelson Mandela. Is this a practical suggestion or is the work done by the LLRC enough?
A: The LLRC is comparable to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The conditions in every country are unique and one should not impose the South African TRC on Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan government and its partners should continue to implement the remaining recommendations of the LLRC. The spirit of both these commissions is similar. It is restorative justice – it is to restore life rather punitive justice – punish the perpetrators of violence. Of 12,000 terrorists, the government has rehabilitated and reintegrated 11,600 terrorists. Although they conducted border village massacres, placed bombs in public places, assassinated leaders and attacked the Security Forces, they were not imprisoned. After successful rehabilitation, they live peacefully, having returned to their families, joined university, or found government or private sector employment. The Government should continue to highlight the remarkable progress it has made to resettle in recorded time 283,000 IDPs, remove 500,000 mines, and economically develop the North and East. Although in the South, there are poorer areas as affected as the Vanni, the North grew at 22 per cent and the rest of the country at 7 per cent, but, no Sinhalese or Muslim protested.
Q: One suggestion of the LLRC was to conduct a census on the war dead, not just in the last phase but throughout the war period from 1982 onwards. How do you think this will help Sri Lanka’s cause in the international arena?
A: A census on the war dead since Velupillai Prabhakaran murdered the Mayor of Jaffna Alfred Duraiapah in 1975 should be conducted. This will help Sri Lanka to set the record straight and also ask the question what did the British government do when the LTTE attacked the Sri Maha Bodhiya in Anuradhapura and massacred the monks, nuns, pilgrims and bystanders in 1985? Did David Cameron’s predecessor close down the LTTE International Secretariat in London? One of the worst human rights violators, the former LTTE Jaffna leader Sathasivam Krishnakumar alias Kittu was head of the secretariat in London. From the UK, he engaged in extortion to providing the crucial support for the Rajiv Gandhi assassination masterminded by Prabhakaran. Although Kittu was served the quit notice, the LTTE remained in the UK and its new leaders initiated the procurement of 50 tones of TNT and 10 tones of RDX killing Sri Lankan leaders, security personnel, civilians and blowing up infrastructure, property and vehicles. The UK neglected the presence of a huge terrorist support infrastructure that led to the radicalization of Tamil migrants and eventually infiltration of the British political system. Today, the same and new LTTE leaders and activists have organized themselves into the Global Tamil Forum.
Q: Sri Lanka has been accused of dilly dallying on investigations into certain conflict-related killings. Do you think Sri Lanka needs to do more to investigate these and if necessary counter any false or evidence-less claims?
A: Sri Lanka should investigate the killings in the North and South and identify its advocates, supporters and perpetrators. How practical is it to bring the 11,600 rehabilitated terrorist criminals to justice? A third left for overseas including 3,000 now living in Australia! From the earlier migrations, over 6,000 Sri Lankan terrorists are now Canadian citizens. Nearly 800 recently migrated terrorists live in Canada. Will the British prosecute or extradite Adele Balasingham, advisor to the LTTE women’s wing ? Will the US extradite or prosecute LTTE Central Committee member Vishvanathan Rudrakumaran, TGTE leader? Will Norway extradite or prosecute Perinpanayagam Sivaparan alias Nediyawan, bodyguard of Prabhakaran and leader of the LTTE International Secretariat? Will Germany extradite or prosecute S. J. Emmanuel who justified suicide bombing, and leader of the Global Tamil Forum? Will France extradite or prosecute Vinayagam, the mastermind of the international airport attack and now leader of LTTE Headquarters’ group? Investigate, yes, bring them to justice, unlikely!
Q: The LTTE remnant leaders and lobby have shown signs of becoming stronger and their hand was clearly shown in relation to the British PM’s recent visit to the North and his call for an international probe while some others say our foreign missions need to do more. What do you think should be done to rectify this situation?
A: After the defeat of the LTTE in May of 2009, the Sri Lankan government made a monumental mistake. Like KP was brought home, government should file cases to bring the LTTE remnant leaders from overseas to Sri Lanka. It is not too late to execute international warrants against those who are still active! There is intelligence that most of those who are active internationally today are engaged in terrorist support and operational activity. As the government neglected this responsibility, the LTTE activists that funded terror and violence in Sri Lanka have persisted. Although terrorists are the world’s worst human rights violators, many terrorist activists reinvented themselves as human rights activists. As much as the LTTE was ruthless, it was deceptive. Today, the LTTE leaders wear three piece suits and parade in the corridors of power from the UN in New York to 10 Downing Street. It’s ironic but true, but, they hold meetings in the US Department of State, lobby British Parliamentarians, campaign as human rights activists in Geneva. Using votes and funds, they lure and trap politicians who really do not care for either Sri Lanka or human rights! As Wikileaks reported, David Miliband, who wanted the offensive against the LTTE halted, was driven by constituency pressure not by his concern for the Tamils! Sri Lanka’s criminal justice and prisons system should respond legally against LTTE remnants seeking to recuperate, mount a targeted strategic communications campaign in Tamil to reach out to the diasporas, and diplomatically reengage Western governments and leaders.
Q: From Sri Lanka’s side, Australia has taken a positive point of view in relation to LTTE activity and wartime incidents. At the same time, there is a notion articulated by the Opposition that Sri Lanka should warm up to the West generally, may be by taking certain HR related steps that could win their favour, given that most of these countries had banned the LTTE early on. What is your comment?
A: The former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr, a principled leader, realized Sri Lanka had defeated a brutal terrorist insurgency. Without getting carried away by constituency compulsions and joining the Western bandwagon, Senator Carr engaged Sri Lanka. Harper and Camaron can learn from the diplomacy of Carr and his successor Julie Bishop, the incumbent Australian Foreign Minister. Both Bishop and Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott built trust and has more leverage in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan Parliamentary Opposition is right in its call for government to restore its relations with the West. Rather than engage in confrontational politics, the Government and parliamentary opposition should develop a bipartisan approach on national security and foreign policy matters.
Q: The Indian factor is very important for Sri Lanka. But pro-LTTE elements seem to have taken the upper hand in Tamil Nadu, which has affected policy making at the Centre. Any views on how this situation can be rectified?
A: The relationship between New Delhi and Colombo is “excellent” according to the Indian government. Sri Lanka’s security is tied to the political developments in Tamil Nadu. Today, the deterioration of the law and order situation and the terrorist-criminal-political nexus in Tamil Nadu is affecting Sri Lanka. The LTTE led gangs in Tamil Nadu attacked Sri Lankan pilgrims, Sri Lankan Buddhist temple, and threatened the Sri Lankan mission in Chennai. The same gangs paraded huge cut outs of Prabhakaran, organized political and fund raising events, and established safe houses to manufacture IEDs. The LTTE has rebuilt a base in Tamil Nadu and are pressurizing Manmohan Singh. To politically survive, the Prime Minister of India is dancing to the tune of Tamil Nadu politicians. Sri Lanka should understand this reality and help New Delhi and not criticize Singh for his non participation in CHOGM.
The Sri Lankan President should give the highest priority to normalizing ties with Tamil Nadu leaders. Although the Tamil Nadu leaders supporting the LTTE are among the most corrupt, Sri Lanka should restore relations with and engage the state of Tamil Nadu. One must never forget that Tamil Nadu was not only the main source of virulent Tamil nationalism, but, the training base for the LTTE. Colombo should build its biggest diplomatic mission in Chennai and engage the Tamil Nadu government and civil society leaders by inviting them to visit Sri Lanka. Further, Colombo should build a capacity in Tamil language to counter the distorted picture Tamil Nadu politicians are giving its citizens about Sri Lanka.
The Sri Lankan Navy should call for joint patrolling with the Indian Navy-Coast Guard to deter Indian trawlers engaged in bottom-line trawling totally destroying Sri Lanka’s marine ecosystem and habitat. As much as Sri Lanka should get its act together of intercepting any foreign vessel that crosses into its waters, New Delhi should address this issue.
If the Indian government and Tamil Nadu state governments are genuinely interested in uplifting the quality of Sri Lankan Tamil fishermen, it must stop illegal fishing carried out by Indian fishermen in Sri Lankan waters! If India is sincere in maintaining good relations with its neighbours, it must put a stop to its fishermen in the south crossing into Sri Lankan waters and even worse, using bottom line trawling! How can India aspire to be a regional power, let alone a superpower if it cannot control a few thousand of its fishermen engaging in illicit poaching?
Q: The NPC has again called for the withdrawal of the Army from the North and the appointment of a civilian governor soon after an MP glorified Prabhakaran in Parliament. Do you think there is a revival of LTTE-inspired sentiments in Sri Lanka as well and in any case can the military presence in the North be reduced?
A: The Sri Lankan government should initiate an investigation against anyone calling for the withdrawal of the Army from the North and they will find the hidden hand of the LTTE. With the military in the North, there will be no Tamil Eelam. While the Police should engage in day-to-day law and order functions, the military should remain in strength in the North to ensure security. As long as the LTTE remains active in Tamil Nadu, operates in the West, and its proxy the TNA is in power in the North, Sri Lanka should ensure a robust security presence in the North and East. Otherwise, like terrorism reemerged in Iraq and Afghanistan after the US declared victory, terrorism will reemerge in Sri Lanka. After the defeat of the LTTE, the strategy of the LTTE remnants and TNA is identical.
The Prevention of Terrorism Act is insufficient to deal with the current wave of ideological extremism, the precursor to terrorism. Without further loss of time, the Government should pass a Harmony Act or a Sedition Act to deter as well as charge and prosecute anyone seeking to revive separatism.
Today, the TNA is radicalizing and militarizing the Tamil youth: terrorism will emerge unless Sri Lanka takes firm action against fanatics like Sritharan glorifying terrorist-criminals. Taking action will deter the emergence of fanatics like Sritharan in future! Even after a huge loss of human lives, Sritharan continued to inflame racial passions. Like Sritharan, a few other racist leaders in the TNA suffer from an inferiority complex. Incapable of transcending their racial passions, it is they who want to emulate Prabhakaran!
Q: More than 32 countries have banned the LTTE but the pro-LTTE Tamil diaspora and LTTE remnants are active in many countries four years after the war ended. They seem to be very influential and fund raising appears to go ahead under the very noses of those Governments. Should SL play a more pro-active role diplomatically and intelligence-wise in countering any threat from these elements?
A: The Sri Lankan government has won the war in the battlefield but lost the media war overseas. The Ministry of External Affairs should create a post of an Additional Secretary for Public Diplomacy and build three divisions; strategic communications, diaspora affairs and NGO engagement. It will be a mistake to staff these posts exclusively with foreign service officers. Media, security and human rights specialists should be posted to Sri Lankan missions overseas and receive support from a 24/7 Watch Centre in Colombo linked to defence, media and other ministries.
The Watch Centre should monitor mainstream and social media and correct the disinformation and misinformation creating mis-perceptions. In Canada, UK and Tamil Nadu, the Sri Lankan missions did not rebut the false propaganda and portray the ground reality. The government also neglected NGOs: Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and International Crisis Group gave a one sided view of Sri Lanka. The new capability should expose the LTTE activists who have overnight turned human rights activists; file cases against irresponsible media; track LTTE funding and its proxies, including the TNA and investigate how the TNA is brainwashing the youth with LTTE sentiments.
Q: Channel 4 has produced yet another ‘documentary’ which apparently portrays the execution of a LTTE female journalist by the Security Forces. In a significant victory, Sri Lanka could also screen a counter film at the European Parliament. What are the ways and means through which Sri Lanka could counter these threats?
A: Sri Lanka, recovering from 30 years of brutal terrorism, should focus on twin pillars: economic development and security. Sri Lanka should not over react to threats made by its detractors. With not a single act of terrorism since May 2009, Sri Lanka is today one of the safest countries in the world. In contrast, after Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan, India is the most affected by terrorism. The number one destination for global tourism, Sri Lanka should continue to improve its service sector from investment to finance. Colombo is also the cleanest city in South Asia: Sri Lanka is earning a reputation as the Garden City of Asia. Instead of taking peace for granted, Sri Lanka should change its electoral system, not permit ethnic or religious segregation, and create the Sri Lankan identity. To counter racist politicians ethnicizing its communities, Sri Lanka should ethnically and religiously mix its schools, create a national pledge, and seed Harmony clubs in every school to enhance interaction across ethnic and religious lines.
Q: How should the government deal with the TNA?
A: The LTTE cut the mainstream Tamil political leadership tree not from the branches but from the trunk. To fill the vacuum, the LTTE created the TNA, a racist party to breakup Sri Lanka. After the LTTE was defeated, the government should have proscribed the TNA, a party akin to the Nazi Party. The Sri Lankan government made a mistake by not proscribing the TNA, charging and prosecuting its leaders, members and supporters with ideological and operational links to the LTTE. They too should have been sent to the rehabilitation centres: some of them were more radicalized and militarized than hardcore LTTE leaders and members.
Although the TNA consist largely of separatists who legitimized the brutal violence and ideology of the LTTE, it has a few mainstream leaders such as Dharmalingam Sitharthan. Today, the TNA is fed by the LTTE front, cover and sympathetic organizations overseas and they are spreading the LTTE ideology in the north and east. Those with links to terrorism should never be permitted to campaign or stand for office. If future unity must be preserved, Sri Lanka should not tolerate ethnic and religious based parties but promote multi-ethnic and multi-religious parties.
Ethnicizing and religizing communities to win votes should be outlawed. If government does not take this bold step now, ideological extremism will once again poison the ground to a threshold leading to another wave of terrorism. Laws against incitement and hatred should be developed by the Attorney General’s Department and law enforcement authorities must take firm action against racism and separatist ideologies spread by individuals and groups by arresting them and confiscating their properties. The Tamil media, the main platform for disseminating racist ideas, should be closely monitored, and influenced to embrace Sri Lankan nationhood. The ruling party and UNP should recruit respectable Tamils to the national parties and government should phase out racist parties like the TNA and the SLMC by outlawing them permanently.
Q: What is the future of politics in the North and East?
A: In Sri Lanka, there is social harmony between communities until politicians interfere! Most Sri Lankans are not racists. It is the politicians that turn them to think along communal and sectarian lines! Sri Lanka is recovering and recuperating from 30 years of conflict. With the end of conflict and greater North-South interaction, I am confident that the North will produce visionary Tamil leaders that will think and act for all Sri Lankans. Coming out of racism is like coming out of a drug! I am less confident in the older generation of Tamil leaders who must share the tragedy they brought upon their community and Sri Lanka!
To rebuild inter – ethnic relations, the Sri Lankan government should invest time and energy in mainstream Tamil attitudes and opinions. The government should continue to create education and job opportunities in the North and East and build bridges with the South and West. To secure Sri Lanka’s future, the Government should recruit more Tamils and Muslims to its Security Forces, so that Tamils will feel that they have earned the trust of the other communities once more. To get rid of the suspicion and prejudice, the Government should create harmony platforms in every province, district, town and village to link all communities together through culture, education, employment, recreation etc. The government should reach out and work with Secretary General of the TULF V. Anandasangaree and other mainstream Tamil leaders who understand that like the LTTE, the TNA will never bring any joy to the Tamils, only grief.
With the return to normalcy, we are witnessing the rise of commerce in the North and tourism in the East. With infrastructure development, we are witnessing the making of a vibrant economy in the North and East. In parallel with economic development, government should link the North and South creating understanding and trust.
When the people to people contact, school to school contact, youth club to youth club contact is fostered, the Tamils will understand that the same problems they are facing in the North, the Sinhalese are also facing in the South and that there is no state or institutionalized discrimination. The visionary politicians from the South should invest resources and spend time in the North grooming a young generation of Tamils and leaders who believe in moderation, toleration and coexistence.
Incapable of transcending their racial passions, it is they who want to emulate Prabhakaran, Prof. Rohan Gunaratne told the Daily News during a recent interview.
Professor Rohan Gunaratna is Head of the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research in Singapore and he is the author of Inside Al-Qaeda (Columbia University, New York, 2002). Prof. Gunaratna is the lead author of Pakistan: Ground Zero Terrorism (Reaktion, London, 2011).
Excerpts from the interview:
Q: Sri Lanka will take part in March 2014 UNHRC session and with the HR gains that we have made and new initiatives on the diplomatic front, how can Sri Lanka ensure a better acquittal at the sessions even if it will be dominated by the Western agenda?
A: Geneva is no longer an exercise in human rights but in geopolitics and superpower politics. After the colossal loss of human lives in Afghanistan and Iraq, the West has lost their moral right to pinpoint the finger at others. British Prime Minister David Cameron did not raise human rights issues during his recent visit to China and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper during his recent visit to Indonesia. If they intended to do so, they would have not been welcomed either by China or by Indonesia. The people in those countries would have immediately labeled them hypocrites after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It was not human rights but domestic political compulsions that forced the Canadian, British, Mauritian and Indian leaders to take a certain stand at CHOGM. Except the Indian leader, all the others met with the LTTE front, cover and sympathetic groups. The Tamil vote in the UK and Canada has been mobilized by the LTTE to exercise constituency pressure on Cameron and Harper! In Mauritius and in Tamil Nadu, the LTTE pressurized the co-ethnics. Today, Sri Lanka is an easy target of the West and Sri Lanka should fight back but intelligently by exposing the duality of Western policy. Did the West raise human rights concerns about the violations in Saudi Arabia, a major oil producer and Bahrain, where the US maintains a military presence? With the shift in global power from the West to the East, the Western nations use human rights as a weapon but selectively. Nonetheless, Sri Lanka should plan meticulously for the March 2014 UNHRC session. The Sri Lankan response should focus on the progress it has made since May 2009.
Q: There is a call for the setting up of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Sri Lanka, on the lines of the one set up by the late South African leader Nelson Mandela. Is this a practical suggestion or is the work done by the LLRC enough?
A: The LLRC is comparable to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The conditions in every country are unique and one should not impose the South African TRC on Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan government and its partners should continue to implement the remaining recommendations of the LLRC. The spirit of both these commissions is similar. It is restorative justice – it is to restore life rather punitive justice – punish the perpetrators of violence. Of 12,000 terrorists, the government has rehabilitated and reintegrated 11,600 terrorists. Although they conducted border village massacres, placed bombs in public places, assassinated leaders and attacked the Security Forces, they were not imprisoned. After successful rehabilitation, they live peacefully, having returned to their families, joined university, or found government or private sector employment. The Government should continue to highlight the remarkable progress it has made to resettle in recorded time 283,000 IDPs, remove 500,000 mines, and economically develop the North and East. Although in the South, there are poorer areas as affected as the Vanni, the North grew at 22 per cent and the rest of the country at 7 per cent, but, no Sinhalese or Muslim protested.
Q: One suggestion of the LLRC was to conduct a census on the war dead, not just in the last phase but throughout the war period from 1982 onwards. How do you think this will help Sri Lanka’s cause in the international arena?
A: A census on the war dead since Velupillai Prabhakaran murdered the Mayor of Jaffna Alfred Duraiapah in 1975 should be conducted. This will help Sri Lanka to set the record straight and also ask the question what did the British government do when the LTTE attacked the Sri Maha Bodhiya in Anuradhapura and massacred the monks, nuns, pilgrims and bystanders in 1985? Did David Cameron’s predecessor close down the LTTE International Secretariat in London? One of the worst human rights violators, the former LTTE Jaffna leader Sathasivam Krishnakumar alias Kittu was head of the secretariat in London. From the UK, he engaged in extortion to providing the crucial support for the Rajiv Gandhi assassination masterminded by Prabhakaran. Although Kittu was served the quit notice, the LTTE remained in the UK and its new leaders initiated the procurement of 50 tones of TNT and 10 tones of RDX killing Sri Lankan leaders, security personnel, civilians and blowing up infrastructure, property and vehicles. The UK neglected the presence of a huge terrorist support infrastructure that led to the radicalization of Tamil migrants and eventually infiltration of the British political system. Today, the same and new LTTE leaders and activists have organized themselves into the Global Tamil Forum.
Q: Sri Lanka has been accused of dilly dallying on investigations into certain conflict-related killings. Do you think Sri Lanka needs to do more to investigate these and if necessary counter any false or evidence-less claims?
A: Sri Lanka should investigate the killings in the North and South and identify its advocates, supporters and perpetrators. How practical is it to bring the 11,600 rehabilitated terrorist criminals to justice? A third left for overseas including 3,000 now living in Australia! From the earlier migrations, over 6,000 Sri Lankan terrorists are now Canadian citizens. Nearly 800 recently migrated terrorists live in Canada. Will the British prosecute or extradite Adele Balasingham, advisor to the LTTE women’s wing ? Will the US extradite or prosecute LTTE Central Committee member Vishvanathan Rudrakumaran, TGTE leader? Will Norway extradite or prosecute Perinpanayagam Sivaparan alias Nediyawan, bodyguard of Prabhakaran and leader of the LTTE International Secretariat? Will Germany extradite or prosecute S. J. Emmanuel who justified suicide bombing, and leader of the Global Tamil Forum? Will France extradite or prosecute Vinayagam, the mastermind of the international airport attack and now leader of LTTE Headquarters’ group? Investigate, yes, bring them to justice, unlikely!
Q: The LTTE remnant leaders and lobby have shown signs of becoming stronger and their hand was clearly shown in relation to the British PM’s recent visit to the North and his call for an international probe while some others say our foreign missions need to do more. What do you think should be done to rectify this situation?
A: After the defeat of the LTTE in May of 2009, the Sri Lankan government made a monumental mistake. Like KP was brought home, government should file cases to bring the LTTE remnant leaders from overseas to Sri Lanka. It is not too late to execute international warrants against those who are still active! There is intelligence that most of those who are active internationally today are engaged in terrorist support and operational activity. As the government neglected this responsibility, the LTTE activists that funded terror and violence in Sri Lanka have persisted. Although terrorists are the world’s worst human rights violators, many terrorist activists reinvented themselves as human rights activists. As much as the LTTE was ruthless, it was deceptive. Today, the LTTE leaders wear three piece suits and parade in the corridors of power from the UN in New York to 10 Downing Street. It’s ironic but true, but, they hold meetings in the US Department of State, lobby British Parliamentarians, campaign as human rights activists in Geneva. Using votes and funds, they lure and trap politicians who really do not care for either Sri Lanka or human rights! As Wikileaks reported, David Miliband, who wanted the offensive against the LTTE halted, was driven by constituency pressure not by his concern for the Tamils! Sri Lanka’s criminal justice and prisons system should respond legally against LTTE remnants seeking to recuperate, mount a targeted strategic communications campaign in Tamil to reach out to the diasporas, and diplomatically reengage Western governments and leaders.
Q: From Sri Lanka’s side, Australia has taken a positive point of view in relation to LTTE activity and wartime incidents. At the same time, there is a notion articulated by the Opposition that Sri Lanka should warm up to the West generally, may be by taking certain HR related steps that could win their favour, given that most of these countries had banned the LTTE early on. What is your comment?
A: The former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr, a principled leader, realized Sri Lanka had defeated a brutal terrorist insurgency. Without getting carried away by constituency compulsions and joining the Western bandwagon, Senator Carr engaged Sri Lanka. Harper and Camaron can learn from the diplomacy of Carr and his successor Julie Bishop, the incumbent Australian Foreign Minister. Both Bishop and Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott built trust and has more leverage in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan Parliamentary Opposition is right in its call for government to restore its relations with the West. Rather than engage in confrontational politics, the Government and parliamentary opposition should develop a bipartisan approach on national security and foreign policy matters.
Q: The Indian factor is very important for Sri Lanka. But pro-LTTE elements seem to have taken the upper hand in Tamil Nadu, which has affected policy making at the Centre. Any views on how this situation can be rectified?
A: The relationship between New Delhi and Colombo is “excellent” according to the Indian government. Sri Lanka’s security is tied to the political developments in Tamil Nadu. Today, the deterioration of the law and order situation and the terrorist-criminal-political nexus in Tamil Nadu is affecting Sri Lanka. The LTTE led gangs in Tamil Nadu attacked Sri Lankan pilgrims, Sri Lankan Buddhist temple, and threatened the Sri Lankan mission in Chennai. The same gangs paraded huge cut outs of Prabhakaran, organized political and fund raising events, and established safe houses to manufacture IEDs. The LTTE has rebuilt a base in Tamil Nadu and are pressurizing Manmohan Singh. To politically survive, the Prime Minister of India is dancing to the tune of Tamil Nadu politicians. Sri Lanka should understand this reality and help New Delhi and not criticize Singh for his non participation in CHOGM.
The Sri Lankan President should give the highest priority to normalizing ties with Tamil Nadu leaders. Although the Tamil Nadu leaders supporting the LTTE are among the most corrupt, Sri Lanka should restore relations with and engage the state of Tamil Nadu. One must never forget that Tamil Nadu was not only the main source of virulent Tamil nationalism, but, the training base for the LTTE. Colombo should build its biggest diplomatic mission in Chennai and engage the Tamil Nadu government and civil society leaders by inviting them to visit Sri Lanka. Further, Colombo should build a capacity in Tamil language to counter the distorted picture Tamil Nadu politicians are giving its citizens about Sri Lanka.
The Sri Lankan Navy should call for joint patrolling with the Indian Navy-Coast Guard to deter Indian trawlers engaged in bottom-line trawling totally destroying Sri Lanka’s marine ecosystem and habitat. As much as Sri Lanka should get its act together of intercepting any foreign vessel that crosses into its waters, New Delhi should address this issue.
If the Indian government and Tamil Nadu state governments are genuinely interested in uplifting the quality of Sri Lankan Tamil fishermen, it must stop illegal fishing carried out by Indian fishermen in Sri Lankan waters! If India is sincere in maintaining good relations with its neighbours, it must put a stop to its fishermen in the south crossing into Sri Lankan waters and even worse, using bottom line trawling! How can India aspire to be a regional power, let alone a superpower if it cannot control a few thousand of its fishermen engaging in illicit poaching?
Q: The NPC has again called for the withdrawal of the Army from the North and the appointment of a civilian governor soon after an MP glorified Prabhakaran in Parliament. Do you think there is a revival of LTTE-inspired sentiments in Sri Lanka as well and in any case can the military presence in the North be reduced?
A: The Sri Lankan government should initiate an investigation against anyone calling for the withdrawal of the Army from the North and they will find the hidden hand of the LTTE. With the military in the North, there will be no Tamil Eelam. While the Police should engage in day-to-day law and order functions, the military should remain in strength in the North to ensure security. As long as the LTTE remains active in Tamil Nadu, operates in the West, and its proxy the TNA is in power in the North, Sri Lanka should ensure a robust security presence in the North and East. Otherwise, like terrorism reemerged in Iraq and Afghanistan after the US declared victory, terrorism will reemerge in Sri Lanka. After the defeat of the LTTE, the strategy of the LTTE remnants and TNA is identical.
The Prevention of Terrorism Act is insufficient to deal with the current wave of ideological extremism, the precursor to terrorism. Without further loss of time, the Government should pass a Harmony Act or a Sedition Act to deter as well as charge and prosecute anyone seeking to revive separatism.
Today, the TNA is radicalizing and militarizing the Tamil youth: terrorism will emerge unless Sri Lanka takes firm action against fanatics like Sritharan glorifying terrorist-criminals. Taking action will deter the emergence of fanatics like Sritharan in future! Even after a huge loss of human lives, Sritharan continued to inflame racial passions. Like Sritharan, a few other racist leaders in the TNA suffer from an inferiority complex. Incapable of transcending their racial passions, it is they who want to emulate Prabhakaran!
Q: More than 32 countries have banned the LTTE but the pro-LTTE Tamil diaspora and LTTE remnants are active in many countries four years after the war ended. They seem to be very influential and fund raising appears to go ahead under the very noses of those Governments. Should SL play a more pro-active role diplomatically and intelligence-wise in countering any threat from these elements?
A: The Sri Lankan government has won the war in the battlefield but lost the media war overseas. The Ministry of External Affairs should create a post of an Additional Secretary for Public Diplomacy and build three divisions; strategic communications, diaspora affairs and NGO engagement. It will be a mistake to staff these posts exclusively with foreign service officers. Media, security and human rights specialists should be posted to Sri Lankan missions overseas and receive support from a 24/7 Watch Centre in Colombo linked to defence, media and other ministries.
The Watch Centre should monitor mainstream and social media and correct the disinformation and misinformation creating mis-perceptions. In Canada, UK and Tamil Nadu, the Sri Lankan missions did not rebut the false propaganda and portray the ground reality. The government also neglected NGOs: Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and International Crisis Group gave a one sided view of Sri Lanka. The new capability should expose the LTTE activists who have overnight turned human rights activists; file cases against irresponsible media; track LTTE funding and its proxies, including the TNA and investigate how the TNA is brainwashing the youth with LTTE sentiments.
Q: Channel 4 has produced yet another ‘documentary’ which apparently portrays the execution of a LTTE female journalist by the Security Forces. In a significant victory, Sri Lanka could also screen a counter film at the European Parliament. What are the ways and means through which Sri Lanka could counter these threats?
A: Sri Lanka, recovering from 30 years of brutal terrorism, should focus on twin pillars: economic development and security. Sri Lanka should not over react to threats made by its detractors. With not a single act of terrorism since May 2009, Sri Lanka is today one of the safest countries in the world. In contrast, after Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan, India is the most affected by terrorism. The number one destination for global tourism, Sri Lanka should continue to improve its service sector from investment to finance. Colombo is also the cleanest city in South Asia: Sri Lanka is earning a reputation as the Garden City of Asia. Instead of taking peace for granted, Sri Lanka should change its electoral system, not permit ethnic or religious segregation, and create the Sri Lankan identity. To counter racist politicians ethnicizing its communities, Sri Lanka should ethnically and religiously mix its schools, create a national pledge, and seed Harmony clubs in every school to enhance interaction across ethnic and religious lines.
Q: How should the government deal with the TNA?
A: The LTTE cut the mainstream Tamil political leadership tree not from the branches but from the trunk. To fill the vacuum, the LTTE created the TNA, a racist party to breakup Sri Lanka. After the LTTE was defeated, the government should have proscribed the TNA, a party akin to the Nazi Party. The Sri Lankan government made a mistake by not proscribing the TNA, charging and prosecuting its leaders, members and supporters with ideological and operational links to the LTTE. They too should have been sent to the rehabilitation centres: some of them were more radicalized and militarized than hardcore LTTE leaders and members.
Although the TNA consist largely of separatists who legitimized the brutal violence and ideology of the LTTE, it has a few mainstream leaders such as Dharmalingam Sitharthan. Today, the TNA is fed by the LTTE front, cover and sympathetic organizations overseas and they are spreading the LTTE ideology in the north and east. Those with links to terrorism should never be permitted to campaign or stand for office. If future unity must be preserved, Sri Lanka should not tolerate ethnic and religious based parties but promote multi-ethnic and multi-religious parties.
Ethnicizing and religizing communities to win votes should be outlawed. If government does not take this bold step now, ideological extremism will once again poison the ground to a threshold leading to another wave of terrorism. Laws against incitement and hatred should be developed by the Attorney General’s Department and law enforcement authorities must take firm action against racism and separatist ideologies spread by individuals and groups by arresting them and confiscating their properties. The Tamil media, the main platform for disseminating racist ideas, should be closely monitored, and influenced to embrace Sri Lankan nationhood. The ruling party and UNP should recruit respectable Tamils to the national parties and government should phase out racist parties like the TNA and the SLMC by outlawing them permanently.
Q: What is the future of politics in the North and East?
A: In Sri Lanka, there is social harmony between communities until politicians interfere! Most Sri Lankans are not racists. It is the politicians that turn them to think along communal and sectarian lines! Sri Lanka is recovering and recuperating from 30 years of conflict. With the end of conflict and greater North-South interaction, I am confident that the North will produce visionary Tamil leaders that will think and act for all Sri Lankans. Coming out of racism is like coming out of a drug! I am less confident in the older generation of Tamil leaders who must share the tragedy they brought upon their community and Sri Lanka!
To rebuild inter – ethnic relations, the Sri Lankan government should invest time and energy in mainstream Tamil attitudes and opinions. The government should continue to create education and job opportunities in the North and East and build bridges with the South and West. To secure Sri Lanka’s future, the Government should recruit more Tamils and Muslims to its Security Forces, so that Tamils will feel that they have earned the trust of the other communities once more. To get rid of the suspicion and prejudice, the Government should create harmony platforms in every province, district, town and village to link all communities together through culture, education, employment, recreation etc. The government should reach out and work with Secretary General of the TULF V. Anandasangaree and other mainstream Tamil leaders who understand that like the LTTE, the TNA will never bring any joy to the Tamils, only grief.
With the return to normalcy, we are witnessing the rise of commerce in the North and tourism in the East. With infrastructure development, we are witnessing the making of a vibrant economy in the North and East. In parallel with economic development, government should link the North and South creating understanding and trust.
When the people to people contact, school to school contact, youth club to youth club contact is fostered, the Tamils will understand that the same problems they are facing in the North, the Sinhalese are also facing in the South and that there is no state or institutionalized discrimination. The visionary politicians from the South should invest resources and spend time in the North grooming a young generation of Tamils and leaders who believe in moderation, toleration and coexistence.
Culpability of states which have subscribed to terrorism
By Shamindra Ferdinando
December 2013
Island.lk
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry swears in Nisha Desai Biswal as Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., on November 21, 2013. [State Department photo]
Having succeeded Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Robert O’ Blake recently, an American of Indian origin Nisha Desai Biswal declared that the US and its friends across the international community had underscored the need for Sri Lanka to make progress on issues of reconciliation, on issues of accountability and issues of human rights or face the consequences.
Blake was America’s wartime ambassador in Colombo (Sept 2006 –May 2009). He moved to Colombo from New Delhi where he was No. 2 at the diplomatic mission.
Ms Biswal was addressing the media in Washington on Dec. 4.
The first ever Indian-American to hold the post, Ms Biswal didn’t mince her words when she warned the Sri Lankan government that unless real progress was made, particularly on the issues of accountability, the patience of the international community would start to wear thin.
Addressing a distinguished gathering at the Foggy Bottom headquarters of the State Department on Nov. 21, 2013 after the swearing in of Ms Desai as Robert O’Blake’s successor, US Secretary of State John Kerry said, “Think about the message that we’re sending today, which I’m excited about: The story of a woman who left a small town in India at the age six, to come to America and now as become one of the most important leaders in the Department of State.”
Instead of vowing in both in and outside parliament that the government wouldn’t bow down to international pressure, those responsible for formulating Sri Lanka’s response to war crimes allegations should closely examine the issue of ACCOUNTABILITY. The government needs to remind those pushing for an international war crimes tribunal that ACCOUNTABILUTY issues couldn’t be examined in isolation. It would a grave mistake on the part of the government to scrutinize the entire range of issues in the run-up to the next session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva. For want of cohesive strategy and negligence, the country had been overwhelmed by a relentless international propaganda campaign. Had Sri Lanka failed on the war front, none of those demanding that President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government addressed ACCOUNTABILITY issues would have bothered to take up the separatist eelam war at international forums. That is the bottom line.
Before discussing the war crimes issue further, it would be pertinent to mention that Sri Lanka wouldn’t have been able to bring the war to a successful conclusion in two years and nine months (Sept 2006-May 2009) without the US helping the SLN to locate four LTTE floating arsenals on the high seas. The US offered tangible help following the then Navy Chief Vice Admiral Wasantha Karannagoda briefing Blake regarding the need for urgent action against the LTTE. The LTTE never recovered from the loss of four ships loaded with arms, ammunition and equipment in September and Oct 2007.
Shocking failure to exploit Dhanapala’s advice
One of the most prominent international diplomats produced by Sri Lanka, Dr. Jayantha Dhanapala discussed the issue of ACCOUNTABILITY when he appeared before the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission on Aug. 25, 2010. The correspondent was fortunate to be present at the Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute of International Relations and Strategic Studies where Dhanapala made his presentation (Intl. laws shouldn’t apply to conflicts between States and terrorist groups with strap line …calls for a review of Rules of War-The Island August 26, 2010). Although it was perhaps the most important submission made before the LLRC, the government didn’t make use of Dhanapala’s effort. Western and the civil society organizations couldn’t have ignored the statement attributed to Dhanapala on the issue of the controversial Responsibility to Protect (R2P) concept. Let me reproduce verbatim what one-time head of the SCOPP (Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process) Dhanapala told the LLRC headed by former Attorney General C.R. de Silva. Having recollected the circumstances under which the United Nations General Assembly adopted the R2P concept at its 60th summit in September 2005, Dhanapala emphasized the pivotal importance to expand that concept with regard to the issue of ACCOUNTABILITY.
The former UN under Secretary General said: “Now I think it is important for us to expand that concept to bring in the culpability of those members of the international community who have subscribed to the situation that has caused injury to the civilians of a nation. I talk about the way terrorist groups are given sanctuary; are harbored, ; are supplied with arms and training by some countries with regard to neighbors or with regard to other countries. We know that in our case, this has happened, and I don’t want to name countries, but even countries who have allowed their financial procedures and systems to be abused in such a way that money can flow from their countries in order to buy arms and ammunition that caused the deaths, maiming and the destruction of property in Sri Lanka are to blame and there is therefore a responsibility to our civilians and the civilians of other nation states from that kind of behavior on the part of members of the international community …” Dhanapala went to the extent of calling for a new set of rules as the IHL didn’t address a situation a conventional army had to battle terrorists (Dhanapala calls for a new set of rules with strap line The rules of war as they exist do not meet today’s requirements-The Island September 6, 2010).
Unprecedented case of Charles Taylor
The government needs to revisit Dhanapala’s submissions especially in the backdrop of former Liberian President Charles Taylor being sentenced to serve a 50-year jail term for sponsoring terrorism in neighboring Sierra Leone, a long standing member of the Commonwealth. The 65-year-old Taylor was sentenced by the UN backed Special Court for Sierra Leone. The verdict was upheld in The Hague. He was sentenced on 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The court declared that Taylor in his capacity as President of Liberia from 1997 to 2003, provided arms and ammunition to terrorists in neighboring Sierra Leone.
During proceedings, much to the embarrassment of the US, Taylor revealed his close relationship with US security authorities and his extraordinary escape from the maximum security Plymouth Country Correctional Facility in Massachusetts in November 1985 with the help of US agents. The revelation was made in July 2009. The escape took place several days before an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the then Liberian government was made with the support of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Taylor told the tribunal.
Dixit on Indian intervention in Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka could never have finished off the LTTE during eelam war IV (Sept 2006 to May 2009) without India’s blessings. Although India made a desperate attempt to arrange a ceasefire as the Sri Lankan Army (SLA was closing in on the LTTE formation’ on the Vanni east front, the government couldn’t have brought the ground offensive to that stage if India intervened much earlier. But Sri Lanka would never have been plagued by terrorism if not for Indian intervention. Shoojit Sircar’s ‘Madras Café’ discussed the Indian intervention here leading to the assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi at Sriperumbudur near Chennai by an LTTE suicide woman cadre on May 21, 1991.
Former Indian High Commissioner in Colombo J.N. Dixit who retired with the rank of Foreign Secretary, faulted former Premier Indira Gandhi for intervening in Sri Lanka. Dixit in his memoirs titled ‘Makers of India’s Foreign Policy: Raja Ram Mohun Roy to Yashwant Sinha’, asserted that Indian intervention here was one of two foreign policy blunders made by Premier Indira Gandhi.
Dixit said, “The two foreign policy decisions on which she could be faulted are: “her ambiguous response to the Russian intrusion into Afghanistan and her giving active support to Sri Lankan Tamil militants. Whatever the criticisms of these decisions, it cannot be denied that she took them on the basis of her assessments about India’s national interests. Her logic was that she couldn’t openly alienate the former Soviet Union when India was so dependent on that country for defence supplies and technologies. Similarly, she could not afford the emergence of Tamil separatism in India by refusing to support the aspirations of Sri Lankan Tamils. These aspirations were legitimate in the context of nearly fifty years of Sinhalese discrimination against Sri Lankan Tamils. In both cases, her decisions were relevant at the point of time they were taken. History will judge her as a political leader who safeguarded Indian national interests with determination and farsightedness.”
With the next Geneva session scheduled for March 2014, it would be necessary for decisions makers here to peruse Dixit’s memoirs. Perhaps make one available to the new Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, Ms Biswal to help her understand the crisis caused by the then Indian political leadership. She should be able to comprehend the catastrophe caused by India, the country of her birth.
Perhaps Sri Lanka’s policy makers never really understood India’s decision to intervene here. Sri Lanka will have to pay an extremely heavy price for the failure of those in authority to have a cohesive defence in the face of mounting international pressure. India sponsored over a half a dozen terrorist groups targeting the then President JRJ’s government in accordance with its security policy. The Indian operation was meant to thwart the US project involving Pakistan and Israel. Unfortunately, successive governments had failed to examine the logic in India fomenting terrorism here, and hence failed to counter anti-Sri Lanka propaganda. Those wanting to haul Sri Lanka up before an international war crimes tribunal unless President Rajapaksa addressed human rights, ACCOUNTABILITY and reconciliation issues had conveniently forgotten the Indian role. India, due to domestic political compulsions, threw its weight behind a US sponsored resolution against Sri Lanka in Geneva. Recent electoral losses suffered by the incumbent Congress administration at the hands of the BJP will compel it to appease Tamil Nadu further.
Dixit explained lucidly New Delhi’s decision to destabilize Sri Lanka. The outspoken diplomat said that India had no option but to take measures due to Sri Lanka’s evolving security connections with the US, Pakistan and Israel. Dixit stressed that India’s motivations as well as actions Vis-a-Vis Sri Lanka should be analysed in the context of the regional as well as global political, security and economic environment during the 1980-1984 period. Dixit went on to allege that the US and Pakistan exploited the rise of Tamil militancy to create what he called a politico-strategic pressure point against India in the island nation.
Need for a Truth Commission
Sri Lanka is now under pressure to accept a South African proposal to establish a Truth Commission to inquire into the conflict. Those backing the SA move are of the opinion that an agreement on the establishment of a truth Commission can subdue the push for an international war crimes tribunal. Perhaps a Truth Commission or whatever one calls such a mechanism, can help Sri Lanka to prove the culpability of those who had sponsored terrorism here. In case Sri Lanka and South Africa can reach agreement on the proposed Truth Commission, it should be given a mandate to fully investigate the national issue leading to eelam war IV. Such a commission can help prove that Sri Lanka would never have had to transform its ceremonial army to a lethal fighting force if not for the LTTE wiping out a routine army patrol made of troops of the first battalion of the Sri Lanka Light Infantry (1 SLLI) in Jaffna in July 1983.With Dixit publicly admitting Premier Gandhi had authorized ‘active support to Sri Lankan Tamil militants’those interested in establishing ACCOUNTABILITY should seek to establish the circumstances leading to the unprecedented coordinated attack on the 1 SLLI. The LTTE operation was meant to provoke the poorly trained army as well as the Sinhalese. India and LTTE succeeded in their attempt. The rest is history.
December 2013
Island.lk
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry swears in Nisha Desai Biswal as Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., on November 21, 2013. [State Department photo]
Having succeeded Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Robert O’ Blake recently, an American of Indian origin Nisha Desai Biswal declared that the US and its friends across the international community had underscored the need for Sri Lanka to make progress on issues of reconciliation, on issues of accountability and issues of human rights or face the consequences.
Blake was America’s wartime ambassador in Colombo (Sept 2006 –May 2009). He moved to Colombo from New Delhi where he was No. 2 at the diplomatic mission.
Ms Biswal was addressing the media in Washington on Dec. 4.
The first ever Indian-American to hold the post, Ms Biswal didn’t mince her words when she warned the Sri Lankan government that unless real progress was made, particularly on the issues of accountability, the patience of the international community would start to wear thin.
Addressing a distinguished gathering at the Foggy Bottom headquarters of the State Department on Nov. 21, 2013 after the swearing in of Ms Desai as Robert O’Blake’s successor, US Secretary of State John Kerry said, “Think about the message that we’re sending today, which I’m excited about: The story of a woman who left a small town in India at the age six, to come to America and now as become one of the most important leaders in the Department of State.”
Instead of vowing in both in and outside parliament that the government wouldn’t bow down to international pressure, those responsible for formulating Sri Lanka’s response to war crimes allegations should closely examine the issue of ACCOUNTABILITY. The government needs to remind those pushing for an international war crimes tribunal that ACCOUNTABILUTY issues couldn’t be examined in isolation. It would a grave mistake on the part of the government to scrutinize the entire range of issues in the run-up to the next session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva. For want of cohesive strategy and negligence, the country had been overwhelmed by a relentless international propaganda campaign. Had Sri Lanka failed on the war front, none of those demanding that President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government addressed ACCOUNTABILITY issues would have bothered to take up the separatist eelam war at international forums. That is the bottom line.
Before discussing the war crimes issue further, it would be pertinent to mention that Sri Lanka wouldn’t have been able to bring the war to a successful conclusion in two years and nine months (Sept 2006-May 2009) without the US helping the SLN to locate four LTTE floating arsenals on the high seas. The US offered tangible help following the then Navy Chief Vice Admiral Wasantha Karannagoda briefing Blake regarding the need for urgent action against the LTTE. The LTTE never recovered from the loss of four ships loaded with arms, ammunition and equipment in September and Oct 2007.
Shocking failure to exploit Dhanapala’s advice
One of the most prominent international diplomats produced by Sri Lanka, Dr. Jayantha Dhanapala discussed the issue of ACCOUNTABILITY when he appeared before the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission on Aug. 25, 2010. The correspondent was fortunate to be present at the Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute of International Relations and Strategic Studies where Dhanapala made his presentation (Intl. laws shouldn’t apply to conflicts between States and terrorist groups with strap line …calls for a review of Rules of War-The Island August 26, 2010). Although it was perhaps the most important submission made before the LLRC, the government didn’t make use of Dhanapala’s effort. Western and the civil society organizations couldn’t have ignored the statement attributed to Dhanapala on the issue of the controversial Responsibility to Protect (R2P) concept. Let me reproduce verbatim what one-time head of the SCOPP (Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process) Dhanapala told the LLRC headed by former Attorney General C.R. de Silva. Having recollected the circumstances under which the United Nations General Assembly adopted the R2P concept at its 60th summit in September 2005, Dhanapala emphasized the pivotal importance to expand that concept with regard to the issue of ACCOUNTABILITY.
The former UN under Secretary General said: “Now I think it is important for us to expand that concept to bring in the culpability of those members of the international community who have subscribed to the situation that has caused injury to the civilians of a nation. I talk about the way terrorist groups are given sanctuary; are harbored, ; are supplied with arms and training by some countries with regard to neighbors or with regard to other countries. We know that in our case, this has happened, and I don’t want to name countries, but even countries who have allowed their financial procedures and systems to be abused in such a way that money can flow from their countries in order to buy arms and ammunition that caused the deaths, maiming and the destruction of property in Sri Lanka are to blame and there is therefore a responsibility to our civilians and the civilians of other nation states from that kind of behavior on the part of members of the international community …” Dhanapala went to the extent of calling for a new set of rules as the IHL didn’t address a situation a conventional army had to battle terrorists (Dhanapala calls for a new set of rules with strap line The rules of war as they exist do not meet today’s requirements-The Island September 6, 2010).
Unprecedented case of Charles Taylor
The government needs to revisit Dhanapala’s submissions especially in the backdrop of former Liberian President Charles Taylor being sentenced to serve a 50-year jail term for sponsoring terrorism in neighboring Sierra Leone, a long standing member of the Commonwealth. The 65-year-old Taylor was sentenced by the UN backed Special Court for Sierra Leone. The verdict was upheld in The Hague. He was sentenced on 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The court declared that Taylor in his capacity as President of Liberia from 1997 to 2003, provided arms and ammunition to terrorists in neighboring Sierra Leone.
During proceedings, much to the embarrassment of the US, Taylor revealed his close relationship with US security authorities and his extraordinary escape from the maximum security Plymouth Country Correctional Facility in Massachusetts in November 1985 with the help of US agents. The revelation was made in July 2009. The escape took place several days before an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the then Liberian government was made with the support of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Taylor told the tribunal.
Dixit on Indian intervention in Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka could never have finished off the LTTE during eelam war IV (Sept 2006 to May 2009) without India’s blessings. Although India made a desperate attempt to arrange a ceasefire as the Sri Lankan Army (SLA was closing in on the LTTE formation’ on the Vanni east front, the government couldn’t have brought the ground offensive to that stage if India intervened much earlier. But Sri Lanka would never have been plagued by terrorism if not for Indian intervention. Shoojit Sircar’s ‘Madras Café’ discussed the Indian intervention here leading to the assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi at Sriperumbudur near Chennai by an LTTE suicide woman cadre on May 21, 1991.
Former Indian High Commissioner in Colombo J.N. Dixit who retired with the rank of Foreign Secretary, faulted former Premier Indira Gandhi for intervening in Sri Lanka. Dixit in his memoirs titled ‘Makers of India’s Foreign Policy: Raja Ram Mohun Roy to Yashwant Sinha’, asserted that Indian intervention here was one of two foreign policy blunders made by Premier Indira Gandhi.
Dixit said, “The two foreign policy decisions on which she could be faulted are: “her ambiguous response to the Russian intrusion into Afghanistan and her giving active support to Sri Lankan Tamil militants. Whatever the criticisms of these decisions, it cannot be denied that she took them on the basis of her assessments about India’s national interests. Her logic was that she couldn’t openly alienate the former Soviet Union when India was so dependent on that country for defence supplies and technologies. Similarly, she could not afford the emergence of Tamil separatism in India by refusing to support the aspirations of Sri Lankan Tamils. These aspirations were legitimate in the context of nearly fifty years of Sinhalese discrimination against Sri Lankan Tamils. In both cases, her decisions were relevant at the point of time they were taken. History will judge her as a political leader who safeguarded Indian national interests with determination and farsightedness.”
With the next Geneva session scheduled for March 2014, it would be necessary for decisions makers here to peruse Dixit’s memoirs. Perhaps make one available to the new Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, Ms Biswal to help her understand the crisis caused by the then Indian political leadership. She should be able to comprehend the catastrophe caused by India, the country of her birth.
Perhaps Sri Lanka’s policy makers never really understood India’s decision to intervene here. Sri Lanka will have to pay an extremely heavy price for the failure of those in authority to have a cohesive defence in the face of mounting international pressure. India sponsored over a half a dozen terrorist groups targeting the then President JRJ’s government in accordance with its security policy. The Indian operation was meant to thwart the US project involving Pakistan and Israel. Unfortunately, successive governments had failed to examine the logic in India fomenting terrorism here, and hence failed to counter anti-Sri Lanka propaganda. Those wanting to haul Sri Lanka up before an international war crimes tribunal unless President Rajapaksa addressed human rights, ACCOUNTABILITY and reconciliation issues had conveniently forgotten the Indian role. India, due to domestic political compulsions, threw its weight behind a US sponsored resolution against Sri Lanka in Geneva. Recent electoral losses suffered by the incumbent Congress administration at the hands of the BJP will compel it to appease Tamil Nadu further.
Dixit explained lucidly New Delhi’s decision to destabilize Sri Lanka. The outspoken diplomat said that India had no option but to take measures due to Sri Lanka’s evolving security connections with the US, Pakistan and Israel. Dixit stressed that India’s motivations as well as actions Vis-a-Vis Sri Lanka should be analysed in the context of the regional as well as global political, security and economic environment during the 1980-1984 period. Dixit went on to allege that the US and Pakistan exploited the rise of Tamil militancy to create what he called a politico-strategic pressure point against India in the island nation.
Need for a Truth Commission
Sri Lanka is now under pressure to accept a South African proposal to establish a Truth Commission to inquire into the conflict. Those backing the SA move are of the opinion that an agreement on the establishment of a truth Commission can subdue the push for an international war crimes tribunal. Perhaps a Truth Commission or whatever one calls such a mechanism, can help Sri Lanka to prove the culpability of those who had sponsored terrorism here. In case Sri Lanka and South Africa can reach agreement on the proposed Truth Commission, it should be given a mandate to fully investigate the national issue leading to eelam war IV. Such a commission can help prove that Sri Lanka would never have had to transform its ceremonial army to a lethal fighting force if not for the LTTE wiping out a routine army patrol made of troops of the first battalion of the Sri Lanka Light Infantry (1 SLLI) in Jaffna in July 1983.With Dixit publicly admitting Premier Gandhi had authorized ‘active support to Sri Lankan Tamil militants’those interested in establishing ACCOUNTABILITY should seek to establish the circumstances leading to the unprecedented coordinated attack on the 1 SLLI. The LTTE operation was meant to provoke the poorly trained army as well as the Sinhalese. India and LTTE succeeded in their attempt. The rest is history.
Sunday, December 8, 2013
Radhika Coomaraswamy & the International Justice System
Island.lk
December 7, 2013
Last Tuesday, Radhika Coomaraswamy delivered a public lecture on ‘the Rule of Law and the Enlightenment’ at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies auditorium where she spoke in glowing terms of the Western enlightenment which upheld reason, universal truth and universal rights applicable to all societies and cultures. She bemoaned the fact that a ‘toxic mix’ of ideas including nationalism was leading to the death of enlightenment values in Sri Lanka. Speaking of the UN and the international human rights regime, she said that while some African leaders may be against the International Criminal Court (ICC), every African she spoke to was in favour of it and that ‘impunity is a terrible thing’ which point she illustrated by saying that she had come across situations where women who had been raped had to watch the perpetrators walking about freely due to amnesties given in the name of conflict resolution.
When asked what she thinks of introducing a South African style Truth and Reconciliation process in Sri Lanka, she said she was in favour of it. This writer who was in the audience pointed out that there was an inherent contradiction in deeming the international human rights regime to be ‘enlightened humanism’, deploring impunity, praising the punitive justice of bodies like the ICC on the one hand and at the same time favouring a truth and reconciliation process in Sri Lanka. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission was one part of an indemnity law which sought to wipe the slate clean and start a new journey. In response what Radhika said was that the ICC process is not possible in Sri Lanka because SL is not a member of the ICC and therefore the only process possible here was that of a South African style truth and reconciliation process.
In other words, she favours punitive justice but would be willing to settle for restorative justice if the former is not possible. She mentioned an instance where she too had worked to apply ‘instrumental justice’ to child soldiers in Sierra Leone to ‘punish, discipline and rehabilitate’ them. Radhika Coomaraswamy has for decades been a member of the Sri Lankan academic glitterati. When she expresses confidence in the international human rights regime, and says that the ‘enlightened’ West stands for reason, universal truths and universal rights many people may be convinced that it is indeed so. This writer has known Radhika for a long time and means no disrespect, but there is another side to this story which needs to be told.
Over the decades, instead of retaining the UN as a skeleton organisation to maintain a line of communication between sovereign nations, and a meeting place for the global human family, the Western powers have taken the lead in piling more and more tasks on the UN system bringing about two results – a shortfall in money to meet those commitments and increasing dependency of the UN on voluntary contributions from ten to fifteen Western nations. The West has for their part turned this financial dependency into a handle to make this global organisation an instrument to further their foreign policy interests.
According to the 2011 Whitehouse Report to Congress on US contributions to the UN system, the US made voluntary contributions in excess of 7 billion to the UN system in 2010. The State Dept was the biggest spender accounting for 5.4 billion, but all departments of the US government were doling out money to various UN agencies. A 2007 UN Joint Inspection Unit (UN-JIU) Report titled “Voluntary Contributions on United Nations System Organisations: Impact on Programme Delivery and Resource Mobilisation Strategies” admitted that when voluntary contributions come only from a few ‘donor’ countries, the conditions that are invariably attached to these voluntary contributions distort the priorities of the UN agencies.
So dependent is the UN system on voluntary contributions from Western countries that the UN-JIU report observed that various organisations within the UN have ‘internal guidelines and procedures for interaction with donor governments’. One can only imagine how such a process will impact on the even handedness of the UN. There are two categories of nations involved in the UN – ‘members’ and ‘donors’. Guess who calls the shots! The UN-JIU report further observes that these voluntary contributions had the potential not only to distort programme priorities but even the mandates of UN system organizations and that the outcome may be a concentration on themes that correspond to donor preferences and not priorities defined at the national or international levels. The UN-JIU report admitted that such dependency is inimical to the very concept of multilateralism.
So we have to realise that everybody in the UN system from Secretary General Ban Ki Moon downwards is committed to pleasing the western donor nations who keep the UN funded. This is why Ban Ki Moon went out of his way to compile a report on Sri Lanka outside the standard procedure of the UN and send it around in the guise of an official UN report. He gave assurances to Sri Lanka that the committee of inquiry he appointed was only to advice him but he sent the report to the UN Human Rights Council ignoring the protests of Sri Lanka. The reason why even a high official like Ban Ki Moon would stoop so low as to dishonour his word given personally to the head of a member state, is because donors are more important than members to the UN.
It’s the same when it comes to the various international criminal tribunals that have been established. The International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) were set up under a mandate from the UN Security Council hence UN member states including Sri Lanka have to fork out assessed contributions for the upkeep of these tribunals. (Since Sri Lanka is not a member of the ICC, we do not have to pay any money for its upkeep.) The ICTY and ICTR also cannot be maintained with the assessed contributions levied on UN members and these tribunals are as dependent on voluntary contributions as the rest of the UN system.
The Foreign Affairs and National Defence Division of the US Congressional Research Service said in a 1998 paper that when the ICTY was set up, the Netherlands helped by reconstructing the tribunal premises. The European Union seconded 22 legal assistants and Britain gave money for the construction of a courtroom. The Americans also provided personnel in the form of prosecutors, investigators and other experts from the Department of Defence, the Department of Justice, the FBI and the State Department. This was in addition to the millions provided as voluntary cash donations by the Western powers. The 2007 UN-JIU report which we mentioned earlier, stated that “in most UN organisations, there was a preponderance of personnel from developed Western countries and that that there should be a more balanced geographical representation”. This is the subject of ongoing debate even within the UN Human Rights Council, where at one point over two thirds of the staff were from Western countries. This led to an outcry from the underdog member states and under relentless criticism, the UNHRC has been reducing the number of white Caucasian staff. But it should be remembered that so long as the money for the salaries of the staff is provided by Western donors, those whom they recruit even from the third world, will be western funded NGO types who will continue to toe the Western line.
The USA was the biggest voluntary contributor of money, material and personnel to the ICTY. The same applies to the tribunal on Rwanda. When the ICC commenced operations in The Hague, the Netherlands waived rent for ten years from 2002 to 2012. They were also given computers, and the utility bills were paid for by the Netherlands government for the first year. A cable sent to Washington by the US Embassy in The Hague on July 6 2004, and made public by Wikileaks shows how closely the ICTY worked with the US. The Chief Prosecutor and Registrar of the ICTY had asked the American Embassy to use their influence with the UN headquarters to allow the ICTY to extend the employment contracts of their staff to prevent staff from leaving and joining the ICC! They also wanted the Americans to do something about the moratorium on hiring new staff to the ICTY which had been imposed by UN headquarters. That was how closely the ICTY worked with the USA. All Sri Lankans know that a UN job is one of the best jobs that anyone can have. Those high salaries and perks have been made possible because of the ‘voluntary contributions’ coming from Western countries and no UN official will ever do anything to anger their benefactors.
The Americans went one step further to ensure that no international criminal tribunal ever dares to even dream of indicting an American or an American ally. Afghanistan is a member of the International Criminal Court, so American troops can be hauled before the ICC for crimes committed in that country – including the drone strikes. (Iraq is not a member.) In 2002, the US Congress passed into law the American Service Members’ Protection Act which is specifically designed to prevent American citizens from being hauled before the ICC. Not only does it expressly prohibit the ICC from exercising jurisdiction over Americans and their allies, it gives the president the authority to apply military force if necessary to free any Americans or American allies who have been taken into custody by the ICC! So if anybody is wondering why no American has ever been hauled before the ICC despite Afghanistan being within the jurisdiction of the ICC for the past decade, it’s because nobody in The Hague wants to die.
If we go by what Radhika Coomaraswamy said last Tuesday, in her books there is nothing wrong in the Western powers giving voluntary contributions to the UN and the war crimes tribunals because they are doing it for an altruistic purpose. If these voluntary contributions with strings attached, gives the western powers leverage over the international agenda, that too is not a problem because the Western powers are the purveyors of ‘enlightenment’ and of ‘universal truths and rights’ to the world and they should have this dominance for the greater good of mankind. It is also OK for them to exempt themselves from the jurisdiction of the international criminal tribunals because the Western powers can do no wrong.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia was the first latter day international criminal tribunal set up in 1993 and the rules of procedure applicable to the ICTY applied in equal measure to the ICTR which was set up in 1994. Rule 89 of the ICTY rules of procedure stipulated that the judges of these tribunals ‘will not be bound by national rules of evidence’ and that they can apply rules of evidence which will best favour a fair determination of the matter before it and that they may admit any relevant evidence which they deem to have probative value. The ICTY was the first international criminal tribunal set up after the Nuremburg and Tokyo trials to try Nazi and Japanese war criminals in the wake of the Second World War. The above quoted Rule 89 of the ICTY rules of procedure was borrowed from Article 19 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal which carried out the Nuremburg trials, which went as follows “The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence. It shall adopt and apply to the greatest possible extent expeditious and non-technical procedure, and shall admit any evidence which it deems to be of probative value.”
The emphasis in the Nuremburg trials was to finish things off expeditiously. As Bishop Desmond Tutu said in his report on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Nuremburg trials administered the victor’s justice on the vanquished. Justice Robert H.Jackson, the Chief US Prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials said on August 12, 1945 – “I have not seen fit to insist that these prisoners have the benefit of all of the protections which our legal and constitutional system throws around defendants.” And indeed, due process was not the main concern of the victorious allied powers. Both Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin wanted to simply bump off the captured Nazi leaders and it was on the insistence of US President Harry Truman that even this rudimentary trial process was instituted. (The Americans always loved litigation.) It need not be stressed that the Nuremburg attitude is wholly inappropriate for an international criminal tribunal that seeks to dispense justice the way national courts of justice would.
However, as we pointed out earlier, the purpose of the western powers was to set up an international criminal justice system which would apply only to others and not to themselves. These were instruments to shock, overawe and subjugate the rest of the world to the West. Like Gods, they make rules for others but not for themselves. So much for the ‘rule of law’ that Radhika was talking about last Tuesday! In this, the ICC followed the same trajectory as the ICTY and the ICTR. The Americans and other Western powers are well aware that what they have set up are in fact international Kangaroo courts which is why they do not want any Americans to submit to its jurisdiction. Furthermore, these international tribunals have set precedents that are weighted against the defendant. For example, witness testimonies need not be corroborated to be admitted. Thus, the evidence of a single person with no corroboration whatsoever is deemed sufficient to convict an accused. The ICTY actually argued in one case that Article 96 of the ICTY Rules of Procedure stipulates that in the case of rape victims no corroboration of testimony is necessary and that if the testimony of a single witness is deemed to be reliable enough for a criminal conviction in such cases, the testimony of witnesses in other criminal cases has to be endowed with the same authority. Furthermore, precedents have been set where hearsay (what a witness has heard from someone else) evidence too has been admitted. This is why the USA would rather bomb The Hague than allow an American citizen to be hauled before the ICC.
But what we can do is to borrow what we can from the American Servicemen’s Protection Act and insert in our constitution a schedule (which cannot be changed without both a two thirds majority in parliament and a referendum) making it a treasonous offence carrying the concomitant penalties (death, confiscation of property etc), for any elected or unelected public official, judicial officer, policeman or ordinary citizen who takes part in handing over or extraditing any citizen of Sri Lanka to any international criminal tribunal or to any other country which claims ‘universal jurisdiction’ over Sri Lankan citizens.
Nelson Mandela died last Thursday. The whole world salutes him. What made Mandela a man revered by all nations is the way he steered South Africa from a situation of conflict into a democratic nation at peace. There are many lessons that we have to learn from South Africa and foremost among them is their ‘Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act of 1995’. This was in effect an indemnity law under which amnesties were granted to both sides of the conflict, wiping the slate clean so that a new South Africa could emerge. The much spoken about Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) chaired by Bishop Desmond Tutu was a creation of that Act. The purpose of the TRC was to deal with cases where untoward incidents had already come to light. Those involved could go before the TRC, make a confession and immediately be granted an amnesty with which all civil and criminal liability for the deed ceases. Those who had done deeds that had not come to light could allow things to die a natural death. There will of course be people in Sri Lanka as well as overseas who will not like the idea of an amnesty for both sides, and will instead be insisting on punishing the victors for having won. The legislation suggested in the previous paragraph will provide a bulwark against such elements.
December 7, 2013
Last Tuesday, Radhika Coomaraswamy delivered a public lecture on ‘the Rule of Law and the Enlightenment’ at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies auditorium where she spoke in glowing terms of the Western enlightenment which upheld reason, universal truth and universal rights applicable to all societies and cultures. She bemoaned the fact that a ‘toxic mix’ of ideas including nationalism was leading to the death of enlightenment values in Sri Lanka. Speaking of the UN and the international human rights regime, she said that while some African leaders may be against the International Criminal Court (ICC), every African she spoke to was in favour of it and that ‘impunity is a terrible thing’ which point she illustrated by saying that she had come across situations where women who had been raped had to watch the perpetrators walking about freely due to amnesties given in the name of conflict resolution.
When asked what she thinks of introducing a South African style Truth and Reconciliation process in Sri Lanka, she said she was in favour of it. This writer who was in the audience pointed out that there was an inherent contradiction in deeming the international human rights regime to be ‘enlightened humanism’, deploring impunity, praising the punitive justice of bodies like the ICC on the one hand and at the same time favouring a truth and reconciliation process in Sri Lanka. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission was one part of an indemnity law which sought to wipe the slate clean and start a new journey. In response what Radhika said was that the ICC process is not possible in Sri Lanka because SL is not a member of the ICC and therefore the only process possible here was that of a South African style truth and reconciliation process.
In other words, she favours punitive justice but would be willing to settle for restorative justice if the former is not possible. She mentioned an instance where she too had worked to apply ‘instrumental justice’ to child soldiers in Sierra Leone to ‘punish, discipline and rehabilitate’ them. Radhika Coomaraswamy has for decades been a member of the Sri Lankan academic glitterati. When she expresses confidence in the international human rights regime, and says that the ‘enlightened’ West stands for reason, universal truths and universal rights many people may be convinced that it is indeed so. This writer has known Radhika for a long time and means no disrespect, but there is another side to this story which needs to be told.
Multilateralism stood on its head
Radhika spoke of her work in the United Nations Organisation in words that left no doubt about her conviction that the UN was bringing justice and enlightenment to the world. Many people see the UN as a multilateral body that brings together the global community of nations. That is the tree. What then is the wood that we seem to be missing? Technically, every member of the United Nations is equal. But in reality, those who spend money are more equal than others. The old adage ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune’ applies to the UN as much as to any other organisation. The UN is supposed to be funded by the contributions of member states which is assessed on the per capita income, and other economic indicators of a member nation’s ability to pay. On this basis, Sri Lanka’s membership contribution to the UN for the year 2013 was 702,819 USD and for the United States of America, it was 618,481,182 USD. The ‘membership fee’ collection forms the ‘core budget’ of the UN. But this money does not cover the expenses of the UN which is heavily dependent on voluntary contributions.Over the decades, instead of retaining the UN as a skeleton organisation to maintain a line of communication between sovereign nations, and a meeting place for the global human family, the Western powers have taken the lead in piling more and more tasks on the UN system bringing about two results – a shortfall in money to meet those commitments and increasing dependency of the UN on voluntary contributions from ten to fifteen Western nations. The West has for their part turned this financial dependency into a handle to make this global organisation an instrument to further their foreign policy interests.
According to the 2011 Whitehouse Report to Congress on US contributions to the UN system, the US made voluntary contributions in excess of 7 billion to the UN system in 2010. The State Dept was the biggest spender accounting for 5.4 billion, but all departments of the US government were doling out money to various UN agencies. A 2007 UN Joint Inspection Unit (UN-JIU) Report titled “Voluntary Contributions on United Nations System Organisations: Impact on Programme Delivery and Resource Mobilisation Strategies” admitted that when voluntary contributions come only from a few ‘donor’ countries, the conditions that are invariably attached to these voluntary contributions distort the priorities of the UN agencies.
So dependent is the UN system on voluntary contributions from Western countries that the UN-JIU report observed that various organisations within the UN have ‘internal guidelines and procedures for interaction with donor governments’. One can only imagine how such a process will impact on the even handedness of the UN. There are two categories of nations involved in the UN – ‘members’ and ‘donors’. Guess who calls the shots! The UN-JIU report further observes that these voluntary contributions had the potential not only to distort programme priorities but even the mandates of UN system organizations and that the outcome may be a concentration on themes that correspond to donor preferences and not priorities defined at the national or international levels. The UN-JIU report admitted that such dependency is inimical to the very concept of multilateralism.
So we have to realise that everybody in the UN system from Secretary General Ban Ki Moon downwards is committed to pleasing the western donor nations who keep the UN funded. This is why Ban Ki Moon went out of his way to compile a report on Sri Lanka outside the standard procedure of the UN and send it around in the guise of an official UN report. He gave assurances to Sri Lanka that the committee of inquiry he appointed was only to advice him but he sent the report to the UN Human Rights Council ignoring the protests of Sri Lanka. The reason why even a high official like Ban Ki Moon would stoop so low as to dishonour his word given personally to the head of a member state, is because donors are more important than members to the UN.
Justice for the highest bidder
The situation is no different when it comes to the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) with which Sri Lanka has been having so many problems. Only one third of the UNHRC budget is covered by the money allocated to them from the UN core budget. The other two thirds come from voluntary contributions from the Western powers including the USA, Canada, Norway and the European Union. Sri Lanka is being hounded within the UNHRC by the very countries that keep the organisation funded. It’s hardly a wonder that Navi Pillay is unable to find anything positive to say about Sri Lanka! Voluntary contributions to the UN system come not only in the form of money, but as donations of goods and even more insidiously, of personnel who are seconded by the donor countries to serve in the various agencies of the UN. These are government servants of the donor countries who are under obligation to promote the national interest of their countries no matter where they serve.It’s the same when it comes to the various international criminal tribunals that have been established. The International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) were set up under a mandate from the UN Security Council hence UN member states including Sri Lanka have to fork out assessed contributions for the upkeep of these tribunals. (Since Sri Lanka is not a member of the ICC, we do not have to pay any money for its upkeep.) The ICTY and ICTR also cannot be maintained with the assessed contributions levied on UN members and these tribunals are as dependent on voluntary contributions as the rest of the UN system.
The Foreign Affairs and National Defence Division of the US Congressional Research Service said in a 1998 paper that when the ICTY was set up, the Netherlands helped by reconstructing the tribunal premises. The European Union seconded 22 legal assistants and Britain gave money for the construction of a courtroom. The Americans also provided personnel in the form of prosecutors, investigators and other experts from the Department of Defence, the Department of Justice, the FBI and the State Department. This was in addition to the millions provided as voluntary cash donations by the Western powers. The 2007 UN-JIU report which we mentioned earlier, stated that “in most UN organisations, there was a preponderance of personnel from developed Western countries and that that there should be a more balanced geographical representation”. This is the subject of ongoing debate even within the UN Human Rights Council, where at one point over two thirds of the staff were from Western countries. This led to an outcry from the underdog member states and under relentless criticism, the UNHRC has been reducing the number of white Caucasian staff. But it should be remembered that so long as the money for the salaries of the staff is provided by Western donors, those whom they recruit even from the third world, will be western funded NGO types who will continue to toe the Western line.
The USA was the biggest voluntary contributor of money, material and personnel to the ICTY. The same applies to the tribunal on Rwanda. When the ICC commenced operations in The Hague, the Netherlands waived rent for ten years from 2002 to 2012. They were also given computers, and the utility bills were paid for by the Netherlands government for the first year. A cable sent to Washington by the US Embassy in The Hague on July 6 2004, and made public by Wikileaks shows how closely the ICTY worked with the US. The Chief Prosecutor and Registrar of the ICTY had asked the American Embassy to use their influence with the UN headquarters to allow the ICTY to extend the employment contracts of their staff to prevent staff from leaving and joining the ICC! They also wanted the Americans to do something about the moratorium on hiring new staff to the ICTY which had been imposed by UN headquarters. That was how closely the ICTY worked with the USA. All Sri Lankans know that a UN job is one of the best jobs that anyone can have. Those high salaries and perks have been made possible because of the ‘voluntary contributions’ coming from Western countries and no UN official will ever do anything to anger their benefactors.
Apartheid in international justice
Even though the USA and the Western powers played a major role in setting up international criminal tribunals to try others, US and other Western leaders have been quite emphatic that such tribunals were only for blacks and poor white trash, and not for them. According to a (Woodrow) Wilson Centre document, the National Post of Canada had reported on 22 May 1999 that when Congressman Lester Munson, spokesman for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, was asked if he was concerned that the ICTY might attempt to prosecute NATO officers for attacking civilian targets in Serbia, Munson told them: “You’re more likely to see the UN building dismantled brick-by-brick and thrown into the Atlantic than to see NATO pilots go before a UN tribunal.” Similar sentiments were expressed to the BBC by Robin Cook the former British Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary when asked if the UK government did not fear that some of its officials would be dragged to the International Criminal Court for their unjustified invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent murders of tens of thousands of citizens of those countries. Cook’s angry answer had been “If I may say so, this is not a court set up to bring to book Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom or Presidents of the United States.” In a subsequent interview on the same BBC programme (Newsnight) John Laughland the author ‘The International Criminal Tribunal’ said “any structure like The Hague court, which is tilted only to third world dictators and not to people in the West, must be unfair and unjust.”The Americans went one step further to ensure that no international criminal tribunal ever dares to even dream of indicting an American or an American ally. Afghanistan is a member of the International Criminal Court, so American troops can be hauled before the ICC for crimes committed in that country – including the drone strikes. (Iraq is not a member.) In 2002, the US Congress passed into law the American Service Members’ Protection Act which is specifically designed to prevent American citizens from being hauled before the ICC. Not only does it expressly prohibit the ICC from exercising jurisdiction over Americans and their allies, it gives the president the authority to apply military force if necessary to free any Americans or American allies who have been taken into custody by the ICC! So if anybody is wondering why no American has ever been hauled before the ICC despite Afghanistan being within the jurisdiction of the ICC for the past decade, it’s because nobody in The Hague wants to die.
If we go by what Radhika Coomaraswamy said last Tuesday, in her books there is nothing wrong in the Western powers giving voluntary contributions to the UN and the war crimes tribunals because they are doing it for an altruistic purpose. If these voluntary contributions with strings attached, gives the western powers leverage over the international agenda, that too is not a problem because the Western powers are the purveyors of ‘enlightenment’ and of ‘universal truths and rights’ to the world and they should have this dominance for the greater good of mankind. It is also OK for them to exempt themselves from the jurisdiction of the international criminal tribunals because the Western powers can do no wrong.
Perverted international laws
One of the main reasons why the US government is so vehemently opposed to submitting to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court is because as the preamble to the American Servicemen’s Protection Act said, “Any American prosecuted by the International Criminal Court will, under the Rome Statute, be denied procedural protections to which all Americans are entitled under the Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution, such as the right to trial by jury.” When Navi Pillai was in Sri Lanka recently, this writer pointed out that when she was a judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda she had contributed to turning these international tribunals into Kangaroo courts by perverting the law that had evolved in Western nations over centuries. The first to be thrown overboard were the rules of evidence that would apply to any criminal case at the national level in any country – even countries like Sri Lanka and India which freely adopt the best criminal justice practices evolved in Western countries.The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia was the first latter day international criminal tribunal set up in 1993 and the rules of procedure applicable to the ICTY applied in equal measure to the ICTR which was set up in 1994. Rule 89 of the ICTY rules of procedure stipulated that the judges of these tribunals ‘will not be bound by national rules of evidence’ and that they can apply rules of evidence which will best favour a fair determination of the matter before it and that they may admit any relevant evidence which they deem to have probative value. The ICTY was the first international criminal tribunal set up after the Nuremburg and Tokyo trials to try Nazi and Japanese war criminals in the wake of the Second World War. The above quoted Rule 89 of the ICTY rules of procedure was borrowed from Article 19 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal which carried out the Nuremburg trials, which went as follows “The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence. It shall adopt and apply to the greatest possible extent expeditious and non-technical procedure, and shall admit any evidence which it deems to be of probative value.”
The emphasis in the Nuremburg trials was to finish things off expeditiously. As Bishop Desmond Tutu said in his report on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Nuremburg trials administered the victor’s justice on the vanquished. Justice Robert H.Jackson, the Chief US Prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials said on August 12, 1945 – “I have not seen fit to insist that these prisoners have the benefit of all of the protections which our legal and constitutional system throws around defendants.” And indeed, due process was not the main concern of the victorious allied powers. Both Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin wanted to simply bump off the captured Nazi leaders and it was on the insistence of US President Harry Truman that even this rudimentary trial process was instituted. (The Americans always loved litigation.) It need not be stressed that the Nuremburg attitude is wholly inappropriate for an international criminal tribunal that seeks to dispense justice the way national courts of justice would.
However, as we pointed out earlier, the purpose of the western powers was to set up an international criminal justice system which would apply only to others and not to themselves. These were instruments to shock, overawe and subjugate the rest of the world to the West. Like Gods, they make rules for others but not for themselves. So much for the ‘rule of law’ that Radhika was talking about last Tuesday! In this, the ICC followed the same trajectory as the ICTY and the ICTR. The Americans and other Western powers are well aware that what they have set up are in fact international Kangaroo courts which is why they do not want any Americans to submit to its jurisdiction. Furthermore, these international tribunals have set precedents that are weighted against the defendant. For example, witness testimonies need not be corroborated to be admitted. Thus, the evidence of a single person with no corroboration whatsoever is deemed sufficient to convict an accused. The ICTY actually argued in one case that Article 96 of the ICTY Rules of Procedure stipulates that in the case of rape victims no corroboration of testimony is necessary and that if the testimony of a single witness is deemed to be reliable enough for a criminal conviction in such cases, the testimony of witnesses in other criminal cases has to be endowed with the same authority. Furthermore, precedents have been set where hearsay (what a witness has heard from someone else) evidence too has been admitted. This is why the USA would rather bomb The Hague than allow an American citizen to be hauled before the ICC.
Protecting our rear ends
Sri Lanka should take good note of this. Unlike the Americans we are in no position to threaten to bomb The Hague.But what we can do is to borrow what we can from the American Servicemen’s Protection Act and insert in our constitution a schedule (which cannot be changed without both a two thirds majority in parliament and a referendum) making it a treasonous offence carrying the concomitant penalties (death, confiscation of property etc), for any elected or unelected public official, judicial officer, policeman or ordinary citizen who takes part in handing over or extraditing any citizen of Sri Lanka to any international criminal tribunal or to any other country which claims ‘universal jurisdiction’ over Sri Lankan citizens.
Nelson Mandela died last Thursday. The whole world salutes him. What made Mandela a man revered by all nations is the way he steered South Africa from a situation of conflict into a democratic nation at peace. There are many lessons that we have to learn from South Africa and foremost among them is their ‘Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act of 1995’. This was in effect an indemnity law under which amnesties were granted to both sides of the conflict, wiping the slate clean so that a new South Africa could emerge. The much spoken about Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) chaired by Bishop Desmond Tutu was a creation of that Act. The purpose of the TRC was to deal with cases where untoward incidents had already come to light. Those involved could go before the TRC, make a confession and immediately be granted an amnesty with which all civil and criminal liability for the deed ceases. Those who had done deeds that had not come to light could allow things to die a natural death. There will of course be people in Sri Lanka as well as overseas who will not like the idea of an amnesty for both sides, and will instead be insisting on punishing the victors for having won. The legislation suggested in the previous paragraph will provide a bulwark against such elements.
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
The Blood Spattered Legacy of Crimes Against Humanity of the British Empire
By Ananda-USA
November 18, 2013
If Sri Lanka is hauled up by the United Kingdom in front of the UNHRC meeting in Geneva next March as UK Premier David Cameron has threatened to do, Sri Lanka’s UNHRC team should ENTER INTO THE PERMANENT UNHRC RECORD a FULL LIST of the global WAR CRIMES and HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS by the United Kingdom, and DEMAND EQUAL ACCOUNTABILITY from the United Kingdom.
So far, the United Kingdom, has gotten away scot-free with war-mongering and killing innocents all over the world with absolute IMPUNITY, with a slap on the wrist by the captive puppet United Nations and the International Criminal Court. Let us now shine a bright light on the war crimes skeleton’s stacked to the ceiling in the historical cupboard of this self-appointed holier-than-thou HYPOCRITICAL COUNTRY, immersed up to the neck in far greater war crimes, waging a global war against other distant nations to preserve its Imperialist hegemony and accusing sovereign nations defending their own people against foreign sponsored terrorism on their own territory.
A PARTIAL list of these British CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY, culled from sources on the Web, is given below:
…. The ILLEGAL unpunished war in Iraq without UN sanction and based on false fabricated allegations of WMD production by the Iraqis, extinguished over 1.5 million Iraqi lives as estimated by the British Medical Association’s Lancet journal staff. During the first years of British rule in Iraq, numerous attacks on civilians were carried out, including village burning and indiscriminate bombing.
…. Raping of local German women was a common feature among British troops in post-WWII occupation of Germany. Even elderly women were targeted. The Royal Military Police tended to turn a blind eye towards abuse of German prisoners and civilians but rape was a major issue for them.
….The indiscriminate carpet bombing of Dresden, Germany that created a firestorm that killed over 100,000 people. While “no agreement, treaty, convention or any other instrument governing the protection of the civilian population or civilian property” from aerial attack was adopted before the war, the Hague Conventions did prohibit the bombardment of undefended towns. Allied forces inquiry concluded that an air attack on Dresden was militarily justified on the grounds the city was defended.
…. The summary execution of 7 captured Argentine soldiers by British soldiers in the Falklands war. In 1993, Argentine president Carlos Menem ordered an investigation into allegations that Argentine soldiers captured during the Battle of Mount Longdon had been executed by British paratroopers. The statements were said to confirm seven executions.
…. The GENOCIDE in Sri Lanka in the Uva-Welassa uprising of 1818. Tens of thousands of innocent villagers were slaughtered by marauding British troops, thousands of women raped, thousands of children decapitated, hundreds of thousands of homes burned, all cattle and other live stock killed, fruit trees cut down, rice fields and irrigation systems destroyed, and the land and the means of livelihood of the people laid waste, just as Gen. Tecumseh Sherman did fifty years later in his march from Atlanta to the Sea in the US Civil War.
…. The suppression of India’s 1857 Sepoy Mutiny including widespread summary executions across the countryside, particularly by forces under the command of Neill and Renaud; indiscriminate murder of civilians during the capture of Delhi; and the summary execution of the princes of Delhi and other Indian leaders,
….. The abuse and murder of Boer civilians in the Second Boer War, when the British Empire ordered the civilian internment of the Afrikaner population into concentration camps, killing around 34,000 people. A later Prime Minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, declared in the British Parliament on 14 June 1901: “When is a war not a war? When it is waged in South Africa by methods of barbarism.”
…. The murder of German naval prisoners from two German submarines, U-27 and U-41, which were sunk by the British Q-ship HMS Baralong between August and September 1915. In the first case, a number of survivors were summarily executed by Baralong´s crew members under orders of Lieutenant Godfrey Herbert on 19 August 1915. The massacre was reported to a newspaper by American citizens on board Nicosia, a British freighter loaded with war supplies which was stopped by U-27 just minutes before the incident. On 24 September, Baralong destroyed U-41, which was in the process of sinking the cargo ship Urbino. According to Karl Goetz, the U-41′s commander, the British vessel continued flying the U.S. flag after opening fire on the submarine, and the lifeboat carrying the German survivors was rammed and sunk by the British Q-ship.
…. The use of chemical weapons in WW-I. Poison gas was introduced by Imperial Germany, and was subsequently used by all major belligerents (including Britain) in the war against enemy soldiers, in violation of the 1899 Hague Declaration Concerning Asphyxiating Gases and the 1907 Hague Convention on Land Warfare, which prohibited the use of “poison or poisoned weapons” in warfare.
….. The killing of Irish civilians in retaliation for Bloody Sunday violence in Dublin on 21 November 1920 in which the IRA assassinated 13 British intelligence agents. That same afternoon, a joint force of British soldiers, policemen, and paramilitaries opened fire in retaliation on a crowd attending a Gaelic football match in Croke Park, killing 14 civilians and wounding 68. The British are responsible for many other atrocities in Ireland, including engineering the Potato famine that killed tens of thousands of Irishmen.
…. The greatest genocide of the 20-th century was not the Holocaust in German death camps during WW-II, but the Bengal famine in India as late as 1943, caused due to English atrocities and food shipments to the UK from India. Mass stockpile of food grain harvested in the state of Bengal, were taken away and hoarded by the English in anticipation of Japanese attack. Very seldom has this genocide been mentioned in historical records. More than 3 million people perished. Never has England acknowledged this fact, and never will they include this in their historical records. It is an absolute shame. This aspect places England not much better than some of the merciless regimes of the modern era that have absolutely no remorse for the crimes they have committed.
…. The mass murder by engineered famines in Colonial India. In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, published in 2001, Mike Davis tells the story of the famines which killed between 12 and 29 million Indians. These people were, he demonstrates, murdered by British state policy.
When an El Nino drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, government officials were ordered “to discourage relief works in every possible way”. The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited “at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices.” The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. Within the labour camps, the workers were given less food than the inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.
As millions died, the imperial government launched “a militarized campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought.” The money, which ruined those who might otherwise have survived the famine, was used by Lytton to fund his war in Afghanistan. Even in places which had produced a crop surplus, the government’s export policies, like Stalin’s in the Ukraine, manufactured hunger. In the North-western provinces, Oud and the Punjab, which had brought in record harvests in the preceding three years, at least 1.25m died.
….. The slaughter of 100,000 people by violence and engineered famine in Kenya. Three recent books – Britain’s Gulag by Caroline Elkins, Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson and Web of Deceit by Mark Curtis – show how white settlers and British troops suppressed the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s. Thrown off their best land and deprived of political rights, the Kikuyu started to organise – some of them violently – against colonial rule. The British responded by driving up to 320,000 of them into concentration camps. Most of the remainder – over a million – were held in “enclosed villages”. Prisoners were questioned with the help of “slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight, and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes.” British soldiers used a “metal castrating instrument” to cut off testicles and fingers. “By the time I cut his balls off,” one settler boasted, “he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket”. The soldiers were told they could shoot anyone they liked “provided they were black”. Elkins’s evidence suggests that over 100,000 Kikuyu were either killed by the British or died of disease and starvation in the camps. David Anderson documents the hanging of 1090 suspected rebels: far more than the French executed in Algeria. Thousands more were summarily executed by soldiers, who claimed they had “failed to halt” when challenged.
…. At least twenty more atrocities were overseen and organised by the British government or British colonial settlers. They include, for example, the Tasmanian genocide, the use of collective punishment in Malaya, the bombing of villages in Oman, the dirty war in North Yemen, the evacuation of Diego Garcia. Some of them might trigger a vague, brainstem memory in a few thousand readers, but most people would have no idea what I’m talking about. Max Hastings, in the Guardian today, laments our “relative lack of interest in Stalin and Mao’s crimes.” But at least we are aware that they happened.
…. The enslavement of whole Indian villages and transporting them as bonded laborers to work in other British colonies in Asia, Africa and the West Indies. This is how many of the Indian communities in other colonized countries were created.
…. The production of Opium in India and its sale under military threats (i.e., the Opium Wars) to the people of Imperial China to convert them wholesale into drug addicts.
Seeing little to gain from trade with European countries, the Chinese Qing emperor permitted Europeans to trade only at the port of Canton, and only through licensed Chinese merchants. For years, foreign merchants accepted Chinese rules—but by 1839 the British, who were the dominant trading group, were ready to flex their muscles.
They had found a drug that the Chinese would buy: opium. Grown legally in British India, opium was smuggled into China, where its use and sale became illegal after the damaging effects it had on the Chinese people.
With its control of the seas, the British easily shut down key Chinese ports and forced the Chinese to negotiate—marking the beginning of what is known as the “one hundred years of humiliation” for the Chinese. Dissatisfied with the resulting agreement, the British sent a second and larger force that took even more coastal cities, including Shanghai. The ensuing Opium War was settled at gunpoint; the resulting Treaty of Nanjing opened five ports to international trade, fixed the tariff on imported goods at five percent, imposed an indemnity of twenty-one million ounces of silver on China to cover Britain’s war expenses, and ceded the island of Hong Kong to Great Britain.
This treaty satisfied neither side. Between 1856 and 1860, Britain and France renewed hostilities with China. Seventeen thousand British and French troops occupied Beijing and set the Imperial Palace on fire. Another round of harsh treaties gave European merchants and missionaries greater privileges, and forced the Chinese to open several more cities to foreign trade and opium sales.
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Australia Gifts two Bay-Class patrol boats to Sri Lanka Navy for Anti-Human Smuggling Effort.
Monday, November 18, 2013
National Unity Charter created to Free Sri Lanka from Sectarianism & Discrimination
National Unity Charter
For Freedom from Sectarianism and Discrimination
Whereas Sri Lanka gained independence from British domination in 1948, established a parliamentary system of governance, and had governed itself since independence as a vibrant democracy under the leadership of different political party groupings, and
Whereas the ruling parties have changed national policies to suit their short term advantages, and such changes have led to degradation of the body politic of the country by parochial and sectarian forces inviting political instability and destructive terrorism, and
Despite the eventual defeat of the last terrorist rampage lasting three decades by the armed forces of the country under the leadership of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, the international diaspora of the terrorists and separatists, funded and nurtured by foreign forces and a neo-conservative mafia, acting under the guise of human rights champions, continue to disrupt national development,
We, the members of diverse political parties of different political views, join together to declare that the scourge of sectarianism haunting the country should be eliminated, and call upon the Government of Sri Lanka to
A. Do away with sectarianism
perpetuated by segregation of
students in schools, and open the doors
of all schools for all children to be
taught Sinhala, Tamil and English at primary level, irrespective of ethnicity, and to adopt
English as the medium of secondary and higher education unifying all
ethnic student groups, as advocated by Dr C. W. W. Kannangara when he set up the
Central College System, by Anagarika Dharmapala through the BTS
Schools, and by Denominational Schools,
in order to guarantee Equality of Opportunity to all students in their future careers, and
B. Discourage ethnic, religious, and regional sectarianism in politics, as in violation of the fundamental rights of the people as a whole, and
C. Promote economic development on the basis of long term planning, good
governance, social integration, and cultural harmony by setting up a National
Planning Council giving priority to scientific investigation and
adaptation of technology, thereby liberating the people of this nation from sectarianism.
The National Unity Charter
was adopted on November 9, 2013 at the Organization of Professional Associations (OPA) Professional Center in Colombo, as the symbolic declaration
of the common interest and desire of all people of Sri Lanka to BE FREE FROM SECTARIANISM and DISCRIMINATION.
Invitation to the Inaguration
The founders
invite all fellow citizens of Sri Lanka, community organizations, political parties, trade unions, and all other civic bodies, to unite to press for equal rights in education, to be free from discrimination in all
respects under the National Unity
Charter, and to safeguard
the future of our nation from Sectarianism and Discrimination.
Those interested
in contributing to this effort should indicate their interest by November 30, 2013 to be invited for the Inauguration of the National Unity Movement
scheduled to be held in December 2013 to pursue the adoption of the National Unity
Charter.
Inquiries should be mailed to The Convenor, National Unity Movement, Room 7, OPA Center , 275/75, Stanley Wijesundera Mawatha, Colombo 7, Sri Lanka, or sent by email to NathAmarakone@gmail.com .
Please give your Name, Address, and Age, Phone Number (optional), and Email Address (optional), and in case of students also the Name of the School/Educational Institution.
Inquiries should be mailed to The Convenor, National Unity Movement, Room 7, OPA Center , 275/75, Stanley Wijesundera Mawatha, Colombo 7, Sri Lanka, or sent by email to NathAmarakone@gmail.com .
Please give your Name, Address, and Age, Phone Number (optional), and Email Address (optional), and in case of students also the Name of the School/Educational Institution.
Founders of the National Unity Movement
Dr. Nath Amarakone (Convenor), Jayantha Kulatunga, P.G. Dayananda. H.A.K.L.Peiris,
Gerry Hidelarachchi, W.B.A. Jayasekera, R.D. Abeysekera G.D.C. Weerasinghe, K.A.M.C Rodrigo,
Sanjeewa Kumara, Nicholas Hart, Ranjan
Athukorale, and Kishani Jayawickrema,
(This announcement was
published in the Daily News newspaper on November 15, 2013)
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