What the West does not say
Prof. Rajiva WIJESINHA
For many years we indulged the LTTE, in part because we felt sorry
for the Tamils of Sri Lanka and believed the LTTE slogan that Tigers
were Tamils and Tamils were Tigers, in part because we thought the
Tigers would win out and would provide us with a useful base to extend
our influence in South Asia.
Even though present in profusion in Tiger controlled areas, we kept
quiet about their forced recruitment of one person per family. This was
recorded in several internal UN documents, back in 2007 and earlier, but
these were documents that none of us leaked. Leaks occur only when we
want them to occur. We also kept quiet when in 2008 they raised the
level of forced conscription to two per family.
Child soldiers
We connived at their refusal to release child soldiers, and were
grateful when, in 2007, five years after the Ceasefire Agreement, long
after we had given them a million dollars for the purpose, they said
they would finally release and rehabilitate. We accepted their
explanation that they could not release those over 17 since their
legislation provided for such recruitment.
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LTTE child soldiers |
While officially representing the UN we repeated their use of such
terms, even though we knew that national and international law forbade
this practice, and that terrorists could not legislate.
For many years we spent millions of dollars of taxpayer money in LTTE
controlled areas on projects with no identifiable outcomes.
When asked for examples of the capacity we had developed, we claimed
that we had taught the people to boil water before they drank it. When
the LTTE was corralling people into ever smaller areas, though we
granted that the health situation was under control, we predicted that
there would soon be epidemics. These monthly predictions were widely
publicized in our media outlets.
Sri Lankan Forces
When the predicted epidemics did not take place, we gave no credit to
the health services which had been maintained by government for years in
the LTTE controlled areas, but rather declared that the reason was our
having taught the peasants to boil water before drinking it.
We kept quiet right through 2008 when the Tigers were forcing people
to flee along with them. We heard the Sri Lankan Government asking us to
condemn this and demand that the Tigers let their people go, but we said
and did nothing, in part because we did not want to damage our relations
with the Tigers, in part because we thought this a very clever tactic
which would help us at the end to halt the advance of the Sri Lankan
Forces.
We continued to say nothing even when our own workers were forbidden
to leave with their families, and we realized that they too would be
held hostage by the Tigers in the endgame that was planned.
It was only when the trap had been set and escape was difficult that,
towards the end of 2008, a few of us started asking the Tigers to
release the civilians.
From the beginning of 2009 we started making up figures of killed
civilians. We used the term extrapolate, and came up with figures far in
excess of those for which we had our own witnesses, much in excess of
those for which we had reports from Tiger sources. We agreed the figures
in our reports were uncertain, but we managed regularly to leak these
reports, at crucial moments which we thought essential to slow the
advance of the Sri Lankan Forces. On the first day on which there were
reports of many civilian deaths, which we initially attributed to the
Government, we later found that most were attributable to the LTTE.
Though we put this on record to the Government, which is the closest
we will ever come to an apology, we made sure that we did not do this
publicly.
Secreted weapons
We arranged for what we felt was evidence against the Government to
appear on a website and called up journalists to make sure they saw
this, and we made sure there was no inquiry into what we claimed was an
accident, nor into any leaks. We know that several of our employees have
carried or secreted weapons, but this does not take away from our right
to insist that none of us be searched, and we can only hope that some
things will not be found.
We use large gas guzzling vehicles, travelling in convoy, often with
only one driver in them, but we are spending all this money only on
behalf of the poor suffering Sri Lankan people.
We have used these vehicles to secrete LTTE personnel, most recently
getting some of them out of the camps in Vavuniya in which they have
been so unfairly confined, because they are really freedom fighters and
we believe in freedom of expression, and the freedom to express oneself
violently should not be circumscribed provided the victims are not us.
Authority
We know that not many of us do anything improper, and that the vast
majority behave very well, have never done anything that might give
strength to terrorists, and have never sought to undermine the
democratically elected government of this country which is such a
comfortable place to live in if you are well off.
However we know that to admit that any of us has done anything wrong
would undermine the whole mystique which allows us to function with such
authority, and therefore we will deny most things, and simply apologize
when we cannot deny, but never in writing, since that leaves things
vague enough and liable to be forgotten soon. We will not have any
inquiries into anything that might be wrong, and certainly never make
public the results of such inquiries if by chance they do occur.
Double standards
We know that in general Sri Lankan officials do not do anything very
wrong, and only a few might err, but we have to point the finger
generally to ensure that wrongdoing does not recur, and insist that full
responsibility be taken for any error by the State as a whole, through
inquiries which can preferably be run by us.
If people accuse us of double standards with regard to this or
anything else they should understand that by any standard we are richer
and control the international media, and by God, who lives somewhere in
the West, we will keep it that way.
The writer is the Secretary General, Secretariat for Coordinating the
Peace Process. |