On ‘acceptability’ and ‘responsibility’

Words such as acceptable are predicated on sets of rules. If there were no rules or norms then everything would be acceptable or else everything would be unacceptable. Norms are notorious for being vague and therefore amenable not just for multiple interpretation but transgression with impunity as well. Rules are less airy. When they are concretized as ‘law’ they are granted form. They become defined by line and space. This means there is less room for interpretive variation.

The Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon has used the term ‘unacceptable’. He finds it ‘unacceptable’, we are told, that Sri Lankan authorities failed to prevent the disruption of the work of UN personnel in the country. He was referring to the recent incident where some protesters stormed the UN office in Thunmulla. He is obviously drawing from some written or unwritten set of rules or norms. I will come to that later.

Wimal Weerawansa

Ban Ki-moon

First, the incident. Protest is legitimate. It could be good or bad, useful or meaningless, productive or counter-productive. That’s a different matter. Citizens have a right to air grievances. Even politicians share that right. Cabinet Ministers too. Wimal Weerawansa has the right to protest. This is ‘acceptable’. He could take ‘sauce to the goose is sauce to the gander’ line of argument, yes, but this depends on the identity of the bird and the kind of gravy relevant to the issue.

Ban Ki-moon has turned the UN into the huge joke. He’s transgressed so much and has operated as though double-standard is the constant prayer dangling from his lower lip that he cannot complain about anything. Wimal, on the other hand, cannot expect to be judged only against Ban Ki-moon’s standards.

In my opinion he lost the moral high ground when he let his troops rush into the UN offices on Bauddhaloka Mawatha. In hindsight, his fast-unto-death would have been a far more powerful political statement had it not been preceded by the act of transgression. Perhaps the decision to go on a fast was promoted by a damage-control desire, an attempt to recover some lost ground in a moral map, I don’t know. It is off-colour and this is sad.

Ill-informed

Having said all this, I believe that what preceded the decision should not blind us to the legitimacy of the protest. If only the pure-on-all-counts have protesting-legitimacy then we will not see any protests anywhere ever, not because there are no reasons to object but there are no saints or arahats in this world.

We need context here. If Wimal tripped himself then Ki-moon is now sprawled somewhere, his face lost in his own vomit, such is the ‘unacceptability’ of his admonishments and hollowness of his moral posturing. Ki-moon is a man with impaired vision. Ki-moon has chosen to be ill-informed about Sri Lanka and to be non-informed about vast swathes of the world’s territory terrorized and bloodied by the United States of America and its allies (especially Britain) and of course Israel.

Ki-moon has violated norms and rules of the United Nations, arrogated upon himself powers that are absent in his job description, turned himself into both Security Council AND General Assembly and thereby become the biggest internal thorn to the proper, dignified and effective operation of that august body.

He, more than anyone else, is not letter the UN be the UN and therefore it is surprising that he feels fit to complain that the work of his office in Colombo has been disrupted. The Sri Lankan authorities could have and should have taken necessary steps to prevent such disruption, true. I can complain about it as a citizen because I don’t want my country to be seen by anyone as being a place where people are not allowed to get about their work; Ki-moon can’t. Sorry.

Ki-moon has called upon the Government of Sri Lanka to live up to its responsibilities towards the United Nations as host country. This is something that all Sri Lankans ought to tell the Government. We have responsibilities towards the UN.

The Government cannot and should not allow and have allowed such incidents. On the other hand, Ki-moon is the last person who has the right to talk about responsibilities. He is clearly not responsible to the General Assembly of the United Nations, but appears to be a shameless mouthpiece for some of the worst perpetrators of crimes against humanity ever to walk this earth.

Ki-moon has to take responsibility for setting things in motion along this highly volatile, unproductive and utterly ridiculous road by pandering to LTTE-sympathizers and a bunch of jokers who can’t get over the fact that the sun set on their looting enterprise some decades ago and that what remained of the power-lustre has now come off and attached itself to a new set of power-players. Ki-moon was trying to rub balm on some bruised egos and got his bumped around as well.

UNDP office in Colombo

He can’t talk about acceptability. He can’t talk about responsibility. He can only talk about complicity in crimes against humanity (Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza). He can talk of puppetry (to the US, UK and Israel). He has ordered the UNDP office in Colombo to be shut. He would have achieved a lot more if he had shut up. A long time ago.

Having said all this, we should understand that in the end we are answerable to ourselves, our conscience, our sense of right, wrong, fairplay and decency. For these reasons, I will stand with Wimal because he is right to say that Ki-moon is out of order. I will, before that, as I am doing now, tell him that I can’t believe he could be so moronic in terms of methodological choice in his activism.

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