Why international interventionists failed in Sri Lanka

H. L. D. Mahindapala

Failed interventionists: The history of peace-making in Sri Lanka has consolidated itself into an entirely separate segment in the chain of bloody events dragged on by the on-again-off-again war waged by the Tamil Tigers.

For students of conflict resolution there are many PhD theses waiting to be teased out from the complex skeins of this peace process. The central issue of why the peace process has failed so far, despite the inter-actions of the many well-meaning and even sinister interventionists, can be turned into a prolonged and profitable industry for academics and, of course, the hired NGO coolies digging up dirt to throw at the Sri Lankan Government.

The hidden side of the so-called peace process, not aired very much in public discourses, is the role of the key international players that rock the cradle and pinch the baby. India and the Co-chairs (representing the international community) have been two dominant actors who pretend to be the caring nannies to the Sri Lankan baby crying for help.

But a close examination reveals their manipulative, self-serving, double-dealing hands have not stopped at merely pinching the baby. They have, in fact, injected into the body politic of the baby the deadly virus of terrorism, cultured and exported from the homelands of these two international interventionists. The following three cases, picked at random, highlight the crisis exacerbated by these international interventionists:

Case 1: Staff reporter, Surya Bhattacharya of the Toronto Star (Dec. 6, 2006) reported: "Other than listing the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam as a terrorist organisation, the Canadian government has done little to curb fundraising by the banned group in Canada, Human Rights Watch says.

"Canada is home to the world's largest Tamil diaspora - an estimated 200,000, the majority of whom reside in the GTA."Street level" fundraising for the terrorist organisation continues, says Jo Becker, an advocate with the New York-based international rights monitor."

Bhattacharya adds: "Following visits by two members who identified themselves as raising funds for the organisation, Rajan Mahavalirajan called the police.

The men told Mahavalirajan, a business owner, that they were collecting money on behalf of the organisation to buy surface-to-air missiles in Sri Lanka."

Moral: It took years for Canada to ban the Tamil Tigers, despite the incontrovertible evidence produced by its own state Intelligence authorities and the prestigious Mackenzie Institute. Canada was a primary source of funding Tamil Tiger terror which targeted the dissident Tamils both in Canada and in Sri Lanka.

Now the Canadians have smugly moved into a state of denial believing that they have done their duty by banning them without taking the follow-up action necessary to make the ban effective.

Case 2: Lord Naseby (speaking in the House of Lords): My Lords, is the Minister aware that the Tamil Tigers are still recruiting child soldiers in north-east Sri Lanka; that the suicide bomber was a pregnant young woman; and that the Tamil Tigers still proclaims that it wishes to have peace in that country? Meanwhile, the Minister says that proscription is tough on those proscribed.

Is he aware, nevertheless, that there is continual money laundering in the United Kingdom; that illegal rallies take place under the flags of Tamil Eelam; that bogus charities are being set up; and that TTN is broadcasting Tamil Eelam propaganda in the UK?

He may say that the issues are dealt with toughly and rest with other government bodies, but is he aware that the proscription is being flouted? Is it not the responsibility of the Home Office and the Government in general to make sure that proscription means what it is meant to mean and that it is not just flouted almost daily?

Lord Howell of Guildford: My Lords, is the Minister aware that there is a lot of concern about the activities of this organisation (LTTE)? Is he aware-I am sure he is-that in the past 10 years there have been more suicide bombings in Sri Lanka, many of which are associated with this organisation, than anywhere else in the world? The number far exceeds that in the Israel/Palestine horror, for example.

Is he also aware of the revolting practice of planting bombs on little children, giving them flowers to present to visiting politicians and dignitaries and then detonating the bomb so that it kills the child and the dignitary at once - the most sordid and sickening practice that one can possibly imagine?

Will he therefore to take to heart the representations that he is hearing today that something very firm needs to be done to prevent these people pursuing their activities in this country or, indeed, anywhere else? (Lords Hansard, May 3, 2006)

In the House of Commons the following questions and answers were recorded: Patrick Mercer: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department (1) what checks are in place of fundraising charities associated with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in the United Kingdom; [99675] (2) which fundraising organisations in the United Kingdom have been identified as having links to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. [99679]

Mr. McNulty (Tony McNulty MP is Minister of State for policing, security and community safety) replied:

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE) were proscribed under Section 3 of the Terrorism Act 2000 in March 2001. It is an offence to be a member of the LTTE, or provide or show support for it. (House of Commons written answers for November 7, 2006)

Moral: Lord Naseby has put it succinctly: "the proscription is being flouted" and "is it not the responsibility of the Home Office and the Government in general to make sure that proscription means what it is meant to mean and that it is not just flouted almost daily?" Minister McNulty's reply amounts to this: Yes, they were banned in March 2001. It is an offence to provide or show support for it. But we let them run their show flouting our law because we are more bothered about Islamic terrorists.

The British politics of writing a law into it statute books and turning the other way when the law is flouted is typical of the Western attitude towards terrorism in Sri Lanka. For years the British hypocrisy refused to ban the LTTE saying that they had not violated any British law. Now, after banning it in March 2001, they are turning a Nelsonian eye towards the Tigers while cracking down heavily on suspected Islamic terrorists.

Case 3: TIME magazine in its first ever cover story on Sri Lanka exposed in detail the Indian RAW operations to destabilise its "friendly neighbour". Since then research scholars have documented how India trained, armed, financed Tamil terrorist groups to destabilise Sri Lanka.

The Sri Lankan Government pointed out the other day that the Tamil Tigers are ferrying explosives and ammunition using the S. Indian coastline. Recent Indian press reports too have highlighted the Tigers using India as a base to smuggle arms.

Moral: Blaming Pakistan for exporting terrorism to Kashmir without taking any responsibility for exporting it deliberately and openly to Sri Lanka is the giddy limit in India's sanctimonious humbuggery. India had no compunction in waging a proxy war in Sri Lanka to keep it under its heel.

More than any other interventionist it is India's responsibility to kill the virus it exported to its "friendly neigbhour", as it keeps telling over and over again. As usual, Indian policy is either dithering between keeping a distance or interfering on behalf of the Tamil terrorists in the name of protecting the Tamil minority.

When India send its so-called Peace-keeping force the South Bloc and RAW let their jawans rape, plunder, kill and persecute the same minority which it claims to protect now.

In summary, these three cases highlight (1) the Indian origins, (2) the Western sources of funding and the purchasing and exporting of arms under the very noses of the global coalition of fighting terrorism and (3) the abandonment of the responsibilities of these two interventionists to a democratically elected government threatened by one of the deadliest terrorist groups in the world.

Though these countries are signatories to UN Security Council Resolution 1373, which categorically bans any financing of terrorist activities in their respective countries, the three cases highlighted here establish that they prefer to play the sanctimonious role of Pontius Pilate blaming Sri Lanka.

The available evidence, going even beyond these three cases, establishes that the international community's complicity with the evil of terrorism is inexcusable and unacceptable. Washington Times (December 17, 2006) hit the nail on the head when it wrote: "A successful peace accord cannot be reached in Sri Lanka until the financial support for the terrorist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam can be altogether strangled."

Washington Times concluded by saying: "To bring the Tamil Tigers into meaningful and lasting ceasefire agreement, and stop the violence that is besieging the small nation, its fund-raising activities in the West will need to be stopped. As long as the Tamil Tigers have the support of funds flowing in from outside Sri Lanka, the group will be undeterred from pursuing its political agenda through violent methods."

This squarely and fairly places the onus of ending terrorism in Sri Lanka on the international interventionists. But like all big powers, they dodge their moral and legal responsibilities.

They take the easy way out by insisting on Sri Lanka adhering to the laws which they refuse to honour in their own homelands.

Though they avoid their basic responsibilities to international law, and their own national laws, they have no qualms in demanding that Sri Lanka should behave according to what they say and not what they do.

If, for instance, a Sri Lankan Air Force bombs a military training camp of the Tamil Tigers packed with adolescent students recruited from schools in the Vanni the Western and Indian diplomats march into the Foreign Office to lodge their protests, with Ms. Radhika Coomaraswamy, UN Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, trailing her moralistic saree behind her.

But who is there to tell the Western diplomats that their States, acting collectively as Allies in World War II, violated humanitarian laws on an unprecedented scale when they dropped 80 million incendiary bombs to blast Hitler's Germany out of the face of this earth? (Source: The Fire, The bombing of Germany, 1940 =- 1945, Jorg Friedrich, Columbia University Press, 2006).

Leaving aside Vietnam, consider the example of the American Civil War. America's greatest human sacrifice - outside the decimation of the indigenous people - was in the separatist war launched by the southerners. It is estimated nearly 550,000 Americans, from the north and the south died, in their historic battles to keep America united.

These interventionists never hesitate to use weapons of mass destruction without any inhibitions when the necessity arises to defend their States against internal or external enemies threatening their sovereignty or borders.

In recent times the Western "coalition of the willing" collectively used the UN to impose economic sanctions against Saddam's one-man regime in Iraq and starved 600,000 children to death caused by malnutrition and related illnesses, according to internal UN reports. (Will Ms. Coomaraswamy send her rock- 'n- rolling ambassadors to investigate this horrendous crime against children?).

Yet in the recent shortages of food in Jaffna the Sri Lankan Government was blamed for sending food through the sea and not through the land route controlled by the Tigers. The UN-sanctioned naval blockade prevented food and essential items going to the children of Iraq. But Sri Lanka is blamed for sending food in ships escorted by its navy to the starving people of Jaffna.

While the courageous Sri Lanka naval forces dared to challenge the Tigers the big brother in India was playing it safe not daring to test the waters with its mighty navy to feed the starving Tamil community.

Of course, they have not stopped at just moralising and using the big stick of aid to force Sri Lanka to be more ethical than what they have been throughout their history. These interventionists have gone as far as writing/dictating prescriptions for the Sri Lankan crisis.

The irony is that they can't solve their own problems - particularly of dealing with their own minorities or separatist movements - but they have the gall to tell Sri Lanka how to solve its problems with only one armed minority group who have thrived on the funding and political backing given by these interventionists.

India is a notable example. It had no compunction in using brute force to wipe out Sikh Khalistanis or Kashmiri separatists, violating all UN resolutions. But Sri Lanka, which is emerging as a classic model in combating terrorism, is told to behave like angels disregarding the fact that they behave like devils. That is Indian morality for you!

Big powers are, of course, born with a genetic condition that prevents them from deriving any intelligent conclusions from their failed experiments in the past. Their vaunted think-tanks are hardly superior to a tank full of stunned mullets or smug frogs. These interventionists have failed in the past and they have not paused to ponder why their prescriptions have failed in Sri Lanka.

Nor will they concede that one of the primary causes is the terrorist virus cultured in their own backyard and exported to Sri Lanka. Their standard response is to place all the responsibility on the shoulders of Sri Lanka as if they have nothing to do with the culture of terrorism that has been growing under their patronage in their holier-than-thou jurisdictions.

Their tendency to scapegoat the Sri Lankan Government is like Hitler blaming the Jews for the ills of Germany. The international community stood in queues to appease Hitler despite warnings of those who knew of the evil that was dehumanising Germany. Each time they came out with a piece of paper from Berlin they hailed it as a triumph for their diplomatic skills.

They repeat the same mistake in Sri Lanka. Even though the international interventionists are aware that the so-called "sole representatives of the Tamils" survive on inhuman force they are happy to deal with them like the way they dealt with Hitler's Germany in the misguided belief that they could change his ways.

Drifting into a state of denial they willingly accepted the manipulated and enforced Hitlerite jingoism as the will of the German people. Eventually, they had to manufacture, airlift and drop 80 million bombs over Germany for not reading accurately the evil signs of the times staring in their faces.