Double Standards

PEACE EFFORTS: I had to keep in touch only through television and the internet with all the drama of last week, since I was away in Cambodia, at a conference on Public Accountability and Official Development Assistance.

It was organised by the Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats, the executive committee of which unanimously passed a resolution requesting the Tigers to return to negotiations.

They also deplored the violence and urged the international community to do the same, including violence against servicemen, which for some reason is ignored by the West, except when it is against their own.

These double standards are not of course confined only to issues of terrorism. Several speakers at the Conference pointed out the manner in which aid had been squandered in the past not on most favoured nations but rather on the governments of those nations.

Mention was made of the magnitude of flows under Suharto and Marcos, who obviously came to mind from our region, in addition to those jolly African dictators such as Mobutu and Amin who had been so useful in getting rid of Lumumba and Obote.

A sprightly Japanese, who had worked in UNCTAD with Gamini Corea, pointed out what should have been obvious, but which others still active in public life had politely glossed over, that donors had necessarily had their own strategic priorities, which in Cold War days included the containment of communism (and its opposite from the other side).

Now, though the promotion of democracy and good governance are taken much more seriously, we have obviously to remember that there will also be other priorities, some of which will take precedence.

The conflict on terror would be an obvious example of an issue that will dominate strategic thinking, though in this case we should be pleased that, at least as far as the United States is concerned, the Sri Lankan Government may benefit.

Conversely, many Europeans are still stuck in the mindset, understandable enough in the eighties but no longer tenable, that the Tamils are victims of an authoritarian state.

Ironically, it was in those days that the Europeans, with the misplaced sanctimoniousness they often sincerely manifest, privileged the Jayawardene government despite its suppression of all democratic norms and its history of violence against Tamils.

In those days Jayewardene's championing of an open economy and his opposition to communism were enough to attract oodles of aid, with no thought of democracy or good governance.

So now, given the bravery of the Tigers in resisting what is still characterised as a racist and Marxist dispensation, despite the President's assertion of his adherence to the SLFP programme of the middle path, many Europeans are not at all concerned with the suppression by the LTTE of democratic norms and its continuing violence against all who oppose it.

That Tamils suffer from this in particular, as the escalation of killings since the Ceasefire has proved, seems to concern them not a whit.

Of course during 2002 and 2003 information about all this was suppressed, so perhaps our government rather than foreigners should be held accountable for the failure to record comprehensibly the enormity of the murders that took place during what was supposed to be a Ceasefire.

But now that the Norwegians have excelled themselves in criticising - and ensuring that their criticism received the widest possible publicity - military action following the clear evidence of gratuitous attacks that would otherwise go unresisted, perhaps it is time to ensure that they provide a concise summary of all the deaths of those opposed to the Tigers that have taken place on their watch.

Monitoring after all does not simply mean recording, as they claim except when they can score brownie points against the Sri Lankan Government, it means promoting effectiveness.

That cannot happen unless we have executive summaries as it were of reports, that serve a practical purpose through raising consciousness amongst those who can remedy the situation.

This is particularly important in view of the funds that have continued to flow to the Tigers despite all talk of sanctions against terrorism.

The vast amounts of equipment brought in during 2002 and 2003, conveyed by elements in our own armed forces as well as by the Norwegians, should never have reached a body that has still not renounced violence in pursuit of its separatist goal.

Unfortunately the Tiger belief that they are equal to a sovereign state is regrettably conceded by many donors whose humanitarian instincts are kindled by Tiger reports but fade away when faced with the suffering of those killed by the Tigers.

How they will respond to the mindset that sacrificed the life in its womb is beyond me. Already stories are circulating of parallel atrocities on the part of the Sri Lankan Army, and these will doubtless dominate headlines, as did the story of the five youths shot while carrying grenades, at the expense of the nearly hundred servicemen killed during what was meant to be a Ceasefire.

Thus the prophets of doom could claim that, as they had assumed, a Rajapaksa Presidency meant a return to conflict. The fact of what happened on April 25, 'the voice of the child's blood crying yet', will as Swinburne suggested soon be forgotten by almost all.