LTTE terror: Silence of global community evidence for double standards - SCOPP Chief

COLOMBO: Rajiva Wijesinha, Secretary General, Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process (SCOPP) has charged that Human Rights Watch had adopted an insidious agenda against Sri Lanka.

In a letter to Brad Adams, HRW’s Asia Division Director, Wijesinha said HRW’s carefully targeted press release coincided with recent attempts by both the LTTE and the main opposition leadership to destabilise the Government by inviting criticism and threats from Western governments.

“The stunning public silence of the international community at large about the outrageous goings on in Kilinochchi is ample evidence of the double standards they are determined to enforce in Sri Lanka, from which the elected government has an obligation to protect all its citizens,” he added.

The letter: “Thank you for your letter sent in response to my fax expressing my disappointment at the Human Rights Watch report and your press release.

I am sorry that you have not really answered the criticisms I made. Your letter is full of generalizations which, if less pointed than those in your release with its tendentious quotations, are not really substantiated by the facts.

To cite one simple example, you now claim that there is evidence of improper resettlement in the period up to May 2007.

Apart from the paucity of evidence for this according to the Report itself, this confirms my suggestion that you are talking about the past while insinuating that such improprieties are going on now.

I am sure you can distinguish between the past tense and the present, and I believe this knowledge should be actively employed when you comment on important issues.

Your lapse in this regard only substantiates my suspicion that you began this exercise with a particular agenda, which is sadly that of the LTTE and the main opposition party in Sri Lanka.

You were obviously determined to demand external intervention, and for this purpose you blithely ignore the evidence you yourself provide that, even were your thinly substantiated allegations about the past true, the Sri Lankan Government has itself remedied the situation.

I attach too a release regarding yet another of your excesses that this Secretariat released last week.

I hope you will realise that the record of the Sri Lankan army in recent operations in the East is, contrary to your emotional outburst, far better than that of many countries engaged in the war against terrorism that you would not dare to criticize so intemperately.

At the risk of wasting my time in dealing with someone whose insidious agenda cannot be changed by facts or reason, let me hope that you are in fact concerned with human rights rather than selective manipulation of truth.

If the latter, I should point out to you that your carefully targeted press release is of a piece with recent attempts by both the LTTE and the main opposition leadership to destabilize the government by inviting criticism and threats from Western governments.

Most recently this campaign has been extended to Japan, through a round robin e-mail that talks of genocide and other grave charges insinuated by Gareth Evans, without specifying that it is Tamils who have suffered most from the LTTE, both before and after the Ceasefire.

I hope I am wrong, for your earlier work certainly suggests understanding of the full horror of the LTTE approach to political questions.

But I suspect that, perhaps because of the insidious campaign carried on by many of those who supply you with information, you have lost sight of the final goal of the campaign in which you have got involved.

To put it at its simplest, the LTTE has now realised that its refusal to return to negotiations - while turning instead last year, even more openly than before, to terrorist activity and military assaults - has backfired.

Amongst the options left to it now, the one it is least inclined to pursue is that of returning to talks.

Sadly the international community is doing nothing to influence it to this course, and has indeed turned a blind eye to the ruthless recruitment that is now going on in the Wanni.

You must be aware of the callous silence of international agencies regarding the pressures on ordinary families to sacrifice their children, simply to buy immunity for their own workers, a practice that has now backfired as you may have seen from recent reports which record their anguish at what is happening now to their own.

Whilst we share this anguish, it would have been more in accordance with basic humanitarian decency to have shared also - and taken measures to reduce - the anguish of ordinary citizens who have suffered for so long.

Thankfully, in this respect the SLMM has now taken on the task of investigating such abuses, as may be seen at last in one of its weekly reports. When the UN family follows suit, there may at least be some hope for the oppressed persons of Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu.

Without such pressures on it, as opposed to generalizations such as yours that do not address present excesses, the LTTE has felt free to threaten attacks not only on military targets but also on economic ones.

Not a word has been said by anyone about this obvious threat of terrorist activity, nor indeed of the attempts to transport massive explosives that have seriously upset the efforts of those of us who have suggested relaxing security measures in the interests of for instance the fishermen of the North and East.

But, apart from terrorism, there is yet another string to the LTTE bow, and this is to increase pressure on the Government. Indeed attacks on economic targets is one aspect of this, while another is to call for UN monitoring and attempt to portray Sri Lanka as a failed state.

As you are doubtless aware, this strategy is ably seconded by the major opposition party in Sri Lanka, which is trying to blacken the country’s name in the commercial world while also calling for UN monitoring along with organizations such as yours.

Unfortunately this campaign is pushed also by various youngsters who have found in Sri Lanka employment at a level they could not dream of in their own countries.

The shoddy performance by Gareth Evans, when it transpired that he had not even read reports on which his lecture on ‘The Responsibility to Protect’ was supposed to be based, is typical of the misinformation practised by youngsters on whom supposedly distinguished statesmen rely.

I have no doubt you do not belong to the former category, but since you are at risk of falling into the latter, I believe you should study your facts more carefully and use language more precisely, distinguishing without muddling things between present and past.

In conclusion, you must realize that these attempts to destabilize the government, to compare the President to Saddam Hussein, are part and parcel of a desperate hope that the West will here too push for regime change and ensure for the LTTE a government under the same leader who allowed it to violate the Ceasefire so blatantly for two years, and to extend its territorial control whilst eliminating Tamils who opposed it.

I do not think Western governments are quite so silly but since you doubtless know their predilections better than me, I am deeply worried by the consistent campaign in which you and others like you seem to be now engaged.”