The true image of Security Forces

THE fiendish tactic is now all too familiar. The Tigers stalking the villages in the North-East, within firing range of Army camps, use the civilians in these population centres as a shield when attacking the Security Forces.

The LTTE believes that by resorting to this inhuman strategy it could maximise the number of civilian deaths and thereby, denigrate the Security Forces in the eyes of the world, as the party which caused the deaths.

This familiar pattern manifested itself in Vakarai on Wednesday too. The ploy was to get the civilians of Vakarai caught-up in the cross-fire. The LTTE's disinformation organs hope to tell the world that the Security Forces are committing bloody excesses in the North-East villages and are turning their fire on helpless civilians.

The Lankan authorities and the Security Forces may be quite alert to these blatant Tiger falsehoods but the same could not be said of the world community.

It could very well be that some sections of international community would be completely taken in by the LTTE disinformation campaign and accuse the Security Forces of human rights violations .

The Sri Lankan State needs to guard against these dangers. Those watchers of the North-East conflict over the years, would remember the sinister disinformation campaigns of the LTTE which had the impact of showing the Armed Forces in an unfavourable light. On those occasions, the State played, in the main, a reactive role.

As and when LTTE disinformation on the Security Forces was unleashed, meagre, unenthusiastic efforts were made to put the record straight. This did not help much in containing the damage.

The Lankan missions abroad, for instance, were invariably found to be sleeping on the job, because when they eventually decided to react, the LTTE disinformation ploy had worked wonders for the Tigers. The image of the Armed Forces was made to suffer terribly.

This was the result of habituating oneself to a mainly reactive role in the propaganda war unleashed by the Tigers.

This was many moons ago. There is a greater readiness and resourcefulness on the part of the State to take on Tiger disinformation and smear campaigns now, but what is most essential is a forward-thinking, proactive strategy to render the Tiger propaganda arm completely ineffective and paralytic.

What must be in place ideally is an ongoing programme handled by the State and our missions abroad to keep the world community informed about all important developments in the country including those pertaining to the military field.

We need to shun our reactive approach to the multifarious fields comprising national development and constantly keep before the world public the image of a Sri Lanka constantly on the move towards progress.

These issues are certain to have been taken-up by President Mahinda Rajapaksa with our diplomatic community recently.

We have come some distance from those times when the Lankan Armed Forces were portrayed by the Tiger media as indisciplined and volatile. Today, the Lankan Armed Forces are even selected to be part of UN Peace Keeping operations. This is a measure of the professionalism the Lankan Armed Forces have acquired over the years.

They are not only expert at giving the Tigers a run but are proactively involved in bringing relief and succour to civilians in times of need, including, of course, those in the North-East.

Sri Lanka now possesses three Armed Forces and a Police force which are militarily adept and very close to the people, wherever they may be. This portrait of the Armed Forces needs to be resplendently radiated to the world. Let's get down to it.

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