Gullible or blind by choice?

Unless the West has an insidious design to re-colonize Sri Lanka by exploiting the unsettling conditions created by the LTTE and the Tamil expatriates settled in Anglo-Saxon countries, the West should at least now open their eyes to the ingenious ways of the LTTE rumps. The recent petitions filed in the US Courts against Sri Lanka are not events prompted by the alleged ill-treatment to Tamils during the so called ‘final phase of the war’. Instead they are a part of the grand design employed over the years with remarkable success by the best organized terror outfit in the world.

It is two way strategy of earning sympathy abroad while promoting terrorism at home. It swells their numbers abroad while motivating the separatist sentiments at home; a symbiotic relationship between brutality at home and human rights abroad. Hence the Sri Lankan government, however well they handled the humanitarian crisis towards the last stages, would still not have avoided this alleged ‘atrocities’ and ‘killings with impunity’. This has made the international bonhomie and especially the universal declaration of human rights just the other side of the same coin of terrorism in the Sri Lankan conflict.

Law and order

It is a fact that the LTTE prayed to the West for moral support during their 30 year ruthless terrorist operation in Sri Lanka on the grounds of alleged ‘discrimination’. And they were able to make this allegation ever so convincing since they had cultivated enough influence with the media organizations in the Western countries. Therefore, just as they expected, their prayers were often answered by way of criticism of the government’s human rights record by international human rights agencies.

Humanitarian crisis

During crucial phase of the conflict Prabhakaran was often quoted as having said that, “the recent report by the AI (or the HRW), was encouraging”. Thus knowingly or unknowingly the net effect of the operations of human rights NGOs was to encourage terrorism and to that extent they thwarted government action to restore law and order. Therefore at the end the LTTE and its international rumps had manipulated this universal concern for human rights thereby propelling such concerns to the obverse.

Let us pause for a moment, amidst all these allegations of killing and harassing civilians, to think how this humanitarian crisis came about towards the last stages of the conflict. After the forces overpowered the LTTE up to Elephant Pass Prabhakaran issued a statement stating that Killinochchi would prove a Stalingrad for government forces; insinuating that the LTTE would turn the tide like the Russians did against the Germans during the WW2. But despite that rhetoric, Prabhakaran commanded his troops together with residents out of the area and withdrew into a sliver of land at Nanthikadal.

Now the question is why did he do this? Being the seasoned guerrilla strategist he was, he should have known that had he placed his camouflaged fighters among the civilians in Kilinochchi, which they did with commendable success all these years, they could have sandwiched the advancing forces in pockets and thwarted their advances. That was the only way LTTE could have posed a threat to the advancing forces and delayed their onslaught. Yet, strangely instead of doing that Prabhakaran choose to retreat to a lagoon surrounded by the sea and that with the civilian population who lived with him all these years. This is because he knew at the rate the forces were advancing he could not hold them back with his fighters and that the alternative before him was to perpetrate a civilian crisis and pray for international sympathy. Through experience he had developed his faith partly in the gullibility of the international community and partly in the capacity of the Tamil expatriate propaganda network. Thus he withdrew to the Nanthikadal to stage his ‘Vadamarachchi style’ salvation.

International community

From his retreat Prabhakaran with his satellite phone activated his propaganda arm to full throttle. This was just about the time so many petitions went to the international community about the plight of the Tamils in Sri Lanka and the one sent by a priest in Vanni to the UN secretary General made headline news. Prabhakaran contacted father Emanuel, KP, Rudrkumaran and the whole lot and as a result street protests were held in Canada, Britain and Australia with intense lobbying of US lawmakers. The miscalculation Prabhakaran made however was that unlike India, the West is a bit too far away from us and the crisis period was not sufficient to prompt them to a military adventure. And plus the West had no economic interest in Sri Lanka. The strategy of Prabhakaran therefore was not successful but this nevertheless made it amply clear that if there was a humanitarian crisis at the last stages of the Sri Lankan conflict, the LTTE and its apologists were the ones who created conditions for such a crisis. The paradox now is that those very people who created such conditions are petitioning against the Sri Lankan government for civilian killings.

This is against the backdrop where the government rescued nearly 300,000 civilians from the jaws of death due to hunger and deprivation. Are the Western leaders so gullible or are they blinded by their own agenda for South Asia?