OF MAD DOGS, AND …
John Rankin UK High Commissioner in Sri Lanka, can
maintain a stiff upper lip but how he or his country’s
representative at the UNHRC can show a straight face and say
that there are continuing assaults on the media in Sri Lanka is,
well, rather comic if not absolutely uproarious. There haven’t
been any assaults on media personnel in Sri Lanka in the last
year or so and since the war on the LTTE was terminated, so is
Rankin and his posse of global policemen hallucinating, or have
they recently smoked something they haven’t yet exhaled? (If so
what are they on – and can we please have some of it …?)
That within parenthesis above, was obviously in lighter vein,
but the other issue taken up by the British government at the
UPR is about the ‘assaults on members of the judiciary’ in our
country. How one assault on the Judicial Services Commission
secretary, now being investigated, can translate as ‘continuing
attacks on legal personnel’ is rather puzzling, but then, with
regular tales of misbehaviour by British army personnel in
Afghanistan for instance reverberating in their ears, Rankin and
his men on the global beat must be finding it difficult to focus
their minds on anything real, we wager?
We here in Sri Lanka have heard of one assault recently on a
key member of the judicial hierarchy, but we do not hear of
Lankan troops misbehaving in other countries, requiring regular
inquiries such as those conducted by the British army -- which
have not been of any help to victims of such misbehaving British
troops in countries far apart as Afghanistan or Iraq.
What’s also hilarious is the British tendency towards
hyperbole.
A local daily reported yesterday that ‘While noting that Sri
Lankans were now free from what the British government called
scourges of terrorism and war, the permanent mission for Great
Britain and Northern Ireland in Geneva, accused the government
of attacks and intimidation of journalists, human rights
defenders and legal professionals.’
There have been no attacks of any significance on journalists
at least in the last one year period in Sri Lanka, and human
rights defenders have largely had carte blanche to do as they
please. For instance, none of the human rights activists who
participated in the UNHRC sessions in Geneva in March this year,
were subject to any kind of intimidation though most of them
voiced their loudly held ‘apprehensions’ that they will be
attacked when they return home!
As for attacks on legal professionals, there were some goon
tactics – short of actual physical injury --- used on the
Puttalam magistrate, for which a Minister was hauled up on
contempt of court charges. On the other hand, the recent assault
on the JSC secretary is a one-off incident, which is now being
investigated. A weekend private newspaper of repute has
editorialized that there is some apprehension that an interested
third party had been behind the attack, due to some sort of
private concern, and therefore the least that can be said is
that this is a crime that’s so far unresolved.
The Englishmen’s proclivity to exaggerate therefore is
telling, and it appears that the witch hunt against this country
never ended after the sessions closed in Geneva, at the UNHRC in
March.
What has been set out in the preceding paragraphs shows that
there are obvious mala fides in the British government’s
singling out Sri Lanka for human rights violations with regard
to ‘journalists, legal professionals and human rights workers.’
All these charges are so trumped up that it is almost
needless for us to point out here and say that there is no basis
for them. The Paikiasothys and the Nimalkas and the Pereras
operate here with impunity, unfairly at most times, targeting
the state apparatus, but there is nobody that has laid a finger
on these people.
One local daily rather cynically observes that the UK team at
the current UPR sessions in Geneva made the allegations of
‘continuing attacks’ on these above mentioned categories of
people in the wake of the impeachment motion against the Chief
Justice that is due any time to be taken up by a Parliamentary
Select Committee here in Colombo!
Going by these words, are the impeachment proceedings also to
be regarded as some sort of a physical assault on judicial
personnel?! Well, unlike the British, we have a written
constitution here in this country, and what is constitutional
here is almost written in stone, and therefore it is not
difficult to see that there is nothing illegal about the
impeachment motion now before the legislature. So therefore for
anybody, be it in Sri Lankan newspapers or at the UNHRC sessions
to conflate alleged ‘continuing attacks on legal professionals’
with the move to impeach the Chief Justice is such a flight of
fancy that one wonders whether all these people, like the mad
dogs and Englishmen of colonial lore, have been out too many
times lately, in our scorching noonday sun?!
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