Panel Report opts for selective amnesia -Manila Times
‘What hurts me is that the panel has
failed to recognize the immense steps the government has taken to bring
peace and reconciliation, matched with development, to the north and
north-east of the country that not too long ago was controlled with an
armed fist by the LTTE. Within the first 12 months of the war ending we
even resettled over 350,00 displaced Tamils, an achievement that was
applauded by Secretary General Ban ki-Moon himself and several
international humanitarian organizations. But instead of acknowledging
any of this the controversial Darusman report has painted a wrong
picture that there is an enduring legacy of bitterness still prevailing
in these areas’, Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa stated in an
interview with the Manila Times on April 26, 2011
Here is the text of the Manila Times
report:
As the man universally credited with having played a key role in
marshalling the Sri Lankan military into a disciplined, focused and
well-equipped fighting force to deliver the final crushing blow to the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) - the world’s most brutal and
feared terrorist outfit - and end three decades of bloody conflict, Sri
Lankan Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa had more interest than most
in the report submitted early last week to United Nations Secretary
General Ban ki-Moon by his ad hoc (considering it had no mandate from
the Security Council or any other UN body for that matter) panel made up
of a Canadian, a South African and an Indonesian tasked with examining
and advising him on any alleged violations of human rights during the
final stages of battle.
So as he sits at his desk thumbing through the weighty tome, pausing
every now and then to study some particular paragraph, Rajapaksa’s tone
shifts from exasperation to hurt to controlled fury.
Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa |
He throws his head back in utter bewilderment when noting that in the
opening pages of the report the panel refers to the murderous Tamil
Tigers (who, lest we forget, invented and perfected the genre of the
suicide bomber and thought nothing of butchering innocent school
children, young Buddhist monks and even members of the Tamil community
who refused to give up their children to serve as child soldiers in its
killing machine) as a ‘disciplined organization’- that very description
giving one an early hint as to where the sentiments of the panel are
heading.
Peace and reconciliation
Reading aloud another section where the panel spends several
sentences agonizing over ‘wide spread shelling’ Rajapaksa explodes: ‘Of
course, there was shelling. Didn’t the panel realise that there was a
fierce war going on?’
After scanning a few more pages he closes the document and calmly
says: ‘What hurts me is that the panel has failed to recognize the
immense steps the government has taken to bring peace and
reconciliation, matched with development, to the north and north-east of
the country that not too long ago was controlled with an armed fist by
the LTTE. Within the first 12 months of the war ending we even resettled
over 350,000 displaced Tamils, an achievement that was applauded by
Secretary General Ban ki-Moon himself and several international
humanitarian organizations. But instead of acknowledging any of this the
panel has painted a wrong picture that there is an enduring legacy of
bitterness still prevailing in these areas’.
He goes on: ‘Sri Lanka has always been a responsible and
accommodating member of the United Nations. We have never failed to
respond to UN requests for Sri Lankan troops to participate in
peace-keeping missions or humanitarian missions such as in Haiti.
On some occasions we agreed to the request even when we were
stretched to the limit during the various stages of our own conflict. So
for the Secretary General to pick on Sri Lanka for this sort of
arbitrary treatment is very unfair.
In fact appointing the panel, which in turn comes out with a report
that goes far beyond its original mandate, is a brazen violation of our
country’s sovereignty. The Secretary General is needlessly pushing us
against the wall and forcing us to seek the help of our friends in the
UN Security Council like Russia and China’.
Sovereign state
Indeed, Russia-a veto-weilding permanent member of the Security
Council - was not waiting for any formal request for help from the Sri
Lankan government.
Within two days of the report coming out, Russian Ambassador to Sri
Lanka Vladmir Mikhaylov pointed out in Colombo that ‘Sri Lanka had every
right and obligation to do everything within its means to protect its
people from terrorism. Unfortunately it seems the panel of experts went
beyond its task as had been made known to our representative in New
York.’
Ambassador Mikhaylov added:
‘The Secretary General should have asked the opinion of the Security
Council or the General Assembly on this matter.
However, rather than doing so, a panel was appointed.
‘This makes us cautious since the decision to appoint this panel was
a personal initiative of the Secretary General and taken without
regarding the position of Sri Lanka as a sovereign state and a member of
the UN.’
The Manila Times had the opportunity to review excerpts from the
controversial Darusman report and by our reckoning it seems that rather
than contributing to the on-going climate of peace and reconciliation
the panel has opened up old wounds.
And instead of offering sound advice it has put forward band-aid
remedies.
For sure this report will give sustenance to the dwindling, but
vocal, elements of the Tamil Diaspora still reeling from the realization
that with the LTTE defeated their hopes for Eelam (a separate state)
have been shattered beyond recall.
In perhaps, the most glaring indictment of its submissions, the panel
appears to have opted for selective amnesia when it came to discussing
the atrocities committed by the Tamil Tigers, while going into lengthy
anguish made over the perceived sins of the Sri Lankan military.
In effect, rather than acting as a trio of advisers offering sound
counsel to Ban ki-Moon, the panel comes across like three stooges
offering succor to remnants of the LTTE scattered across Western
capitals.
The panel has steered so recklessly from its original brief that one
can’t help thinking somewhat cynically that had the feared leader of the
Tamil Tigers, Velupillai Prabhakaran, who was killed while fleeing the
battlefield in the closing stages of the war, lived on in defeat to
fight another day some of the contents of this report might well have
provided the sort of deluded scenario he would have come up with for a
post-war Sri Lanka.
Strife-ridden areas
In the past week we have had the opportunity to travel to the former
strife-ridden areas in the north of Sri Lanka, and the clear impression
in inter-acting with the citizenry there is that the people have moved
on. One is greeted with smiling happy faces and, unlike before, there is
no indication of tension in the air. Small and medium enterprises can be
seen springing up everywhere as the resourceful Tamil community strives
to catch up on the lost and wasted years. In an interesting fact of how
fast things have changed, much of the fish, fruit and vegetables to
sustain the whole country now come from the north - a clear indication
that peace and security have returned to Sri Lanka.
That salient point has even been picked up on the global front.
Just as the panel’s report was making its awkward journey from New
York to Colombo, Sri Lanka Tourism welcomed a Dutch citizen and his
family as the 250, 000 tourist arrival in just over the first three
months of 2011- a record that many other countries in the Asia-Pacific
region would envy.
There is, of course, a significant piece to the advisory panel
jigsaw.
Going against better judgement, Ban ki-Moon went ahead and appointed
this panel to appease (as is suspected in some corridors of the UN
headquarters) certain Western countries whose help and undoubted clout
he would need in the coming months to secure a second five year term as
Secretary General.
But in playing his cards every which way in order to be all things to
some people, Ban ki-Moon may have seriously miscalculated on this one. |