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Government Gazette

Arbitrary execution by Prof Philip Alston

The Sri Lankan Government is saddened by a contumacious press release issued late in the afternoon of August 28 by UN Special Rapporteur Prof. Philip Alston on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.

Though Prof Alston had seemed an honourable man, he has recently fallen prey to the unfortunate practice of launching missiles at the Sri Lankan Government without giving it a chance to respond.

The press release

Prof. Philip Alston

When he was upbraided about this before, he asserted that he did give time for such responses, and had indeed once altered a press release on the strength of a response he had received.

Sri Lanka does not benefit from such generosity. Prof Alston sent at 14.45 on that Friday a letter addressed to the Charge d’Affaires of the Sri Lankan Mission to Geneva with a series of leading questions based on a video that had been shown on Channel 4 (though he makes no reference to the provenance of this video in his letter). The carelessness with which the letter was signed is evident from the fact that it begins with the phrase ‘In this connection’, with no clue as to what the particular connection is that the worthy professor means.

The reason for this unseemly haste is apparent from the fact that he followed up this missive with a press release that was sent to the Mission at 15.37, with a covering letter indicating that the release had been issued. In his release, Prof Alston regrets that he has not been invited to visit Sri Lanka. Obviously no country is likely to invite a man who sanctimoniously claims to follow decent practice and then blatantly violates this at the first possible opportunity.

It should also be noted that Prof Alston has sedulously refused to answer letters sent to him from the Sri Lankan Government, and has claimed on at least one occasion that he refrained from responding because he did not want any response to be used publicly. It is this same sanctimonious professor however who now, contrary to his express assurance about press statements, sets himself at the heart of a terrorist media campaign against the Sri Lankan Government.

Justifying his call

Prof Alston’s penchant for seizing any opportunity that fulfils his predilections, even at the cost of seeming childish, is apparent in one of the arguments he uses to justify his call for an independent investigation into the authenticity of the video he privileges. He is asserted to have said that ‘There is no justification for not moving ahead with such an investigation in view of the Government’s confidence that such atrocities were never perpetrated by its Armed Forces.” If he actually uttered such a convoluted sentence, it is understandable that he should have signed an incoherent letter, but in his saner moments he must surely realize that in the adult world justification requires a positive reason, and that ordinary people do not go to vast extremes simply because there is no reason not to.

But Prof Alston, along with several of his peers, is rather like the boy who cried wolf. They have been calling for an independent investigation for so long, and with such shrillness, on the basis of general allegations, that it is no wonder that their standard bearer pounces with relish on what seems a particular allegation. Having been soundly rebuked by the Human Rights Council for their pertinacity, they must have been so delighted at what seemed real evidence, that the most emotional of them fell over himself in glee, and obviously assumed that the Sri Lankan Government would make the connection between this letter and his earlier missives.

Illusory

But in actual fact the light he has found at the end of the tunnel he dug for himself turns out to be equally illusory. The Sri Lankan Foreign Secretary has said very clearly that a detailed allegation would be investigated, and this continues to be the position of the Sri Lankan Government. But it is really too much to expect an investigation to be set in motion on the strength of a video clip shown on a television channel that had previously engaged in bizarre inaccuracies.

Shadowy organization

The apparently high resolution video clip is claimed to have originated on a mobile telephone in January, but only reached a shadowy organization called Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka in the past few days. It had to be smuggled out of Sri Lanka, it seems, suggesting that these journalists and their sources are without access to modern technology. Neither the journalists nor Channel 4 seem able to say when or where precisely the incident happened.

Prof Alston may remember some material published in the English Daily Mirror, which led to the resignation of its editor, Piers Morgan.

He may also recall that, after the death of Prabhakaran in May, footage was circulating both of what was claimed to have been his horrendous execution (to use an adjective that Prof Alston fancies), and also of him alive and well and watching television reports of his death. Prof Alston did not leap on these pictures with similar glee, sadly since he would have been delightfully suited to lead an investigation into what he could have described as the extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary execution of a terrorist who miraculously survived.

Prof. Alston has forgotten, in his zeal to make himself useful, that allegations must be based on evidence.

Attempt to find out

He may believe, as some people of his generation and mine still do, that cameras cannot lie, but he must realize that a man in his position should at least have made an attempt to find out, from Channel 4 or from Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka, the circumstances under which this video was made and purveyed, before he went public with his pompous pronouncements.

The Sri Lankan Government will, in its response to his letter, seek clarification as to whether he proceeded judiciously after he saw his chance to pounce.

It will do so expeditiously, because once before it was argued by Special Rapporteurs that they were entitled to issue press releases timed to precipitate a Special Session against Sri Lanka because the Government had taken more than a week (including four holidays) to respond. But this time sending a response without a lapse of working time will serve no purpose for the Sri Lankan Government, given the intensity of the forces ranged against it.

Call for investigation

Realizing that the Government was wise to the tricks of special Mandate Holders, Prof Alston seems to have made sure he wrote on a Friday afternoon and issued his press release with less than an hour to spare.

In his letter he refers to the obligation of the Sri Lankan Government to conduct an investigation, less than an hour later he is publicly calling for what he terms an independent investigation. Thus, wholly predictably, TamilNet was able to highlight his pronouncements just a few hours afterwards, along with a pretty picture of the Professor, when Sri Lanka was sleeping.

True, the evidence is circumstantial, but it seems more convincing to a thinking mind than allegations based on videos, when doctoring of videos is known to be a common practice of the terrorist Tigers: a dispassionate observer could readily conclude that this incident shows that the Professor, perhaps carried away by idealism, and memories of Conrad’s deadly Professor, has found a lethal weapon to engage in an extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary attack on an elected Government. He must be congratulated for his ingenuity, if not his moral sense.

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