JULIE - HONEST ENOUGH TO BE A BISHOP

Australian opposition leader Julie Bishop has taught the world the abc's of diplomacy when she told categorically, the ABC television channel that Australia should encourage Commonwealth member states to attend the next Commonwealth Heads summit to be held in Colombo. Julie Bishop is the best example of persons who have seen and believed, and therefore gone against the conventional mythology on this country.

The mythical narrative about Sri Lanka is the one that is being peddled by the United Nations' adjunct bodies and fact finding missions, one of which allegedly has recently deposited yet another report with the UN Human Rights Council, stating that Sri Lanka has not conducted proper investigations on so called armed forces excesses, that may have taken place during the last phase of the hostilities in 2009.

Julie Bishop has seen it all in Sri Lanka. She has seen the rebuilding and the rehabilitation, and it is clear that her team and Ms. Bishop find it impossible to believe that the goodwill built among the Tamil population in the north would have been possible if there were excesses that resulted in the kind of civilian casualties that various outside actors estimate.

The equation is basic. If the rebuilding process has been so markedly successful that delegation after delegation gives the thumbs up to what's happening on the ground, it is not possible to equate the Sri Lankan situation with that of other countries in which there have been armed forces excesses, after which conflicted populations never could be reconciled.

People such as Julie Bishop also realize that it is bordering on the criminal to stymie the progress now taking place on the ground, with the kind of 'accountability' process that sections of the international community are hankering after.

The war was over in 2009. The Sri Lankan forces high command made their own investigations, and if there was mass dissatisfaction with what was done, there would be no way that the cooperation that is now forthcoming from the people of the north towards the development effort would materialize.

As said in these editorial spaces some time back, the Australians also have other reasons to believe in the Sri Lankans. The Australian government which earlier gave a sympathetic welcome to the so called boat people soon enough realized that these are not refugees but a pack of pretenders. To cut a long story short, the Sri Lankans had been right all along. The boat people were another way of building up a narrative of persecution, and these men, women and children were themselves victims of unscrupulous elements that aimed at exploiting their gullibility in securing for them tickets to Australia, so that they could go from budget taxi to Mercedes Benz in no time. This is a common phenomenon anywhere.

The man who has a car wants a limousine and the man who has two houses wants a mansion. That's called the pursuit of happiness; it has nothing to do with persecution which is why most of the aspirants to life in Australia are the middle class comfortably off in Colombo and cities far away from the north and the east - i.e.: pie in the sky southerners who get on boats, not because they are being persecuted but because they want a piece of a bigger pie.

The more the detractors pull out UN documents that call for investigations in Sri Lanka, the more Sri Lanka should invite politicians and other international civil society persons such as Julie Bishop to see what's happening on the ground. Those who come must do so with open minds.

Those who are sent with agendas that are preconceived and have the report written out before they hit the terra firma here in Sri Lanka, are easily identifiable. Those are the sorts of people who have written reams already about a 'lack of accountability' without coming within ten thousand kilometers of Jaffna or the Northern Province. These people are fiction writers. What Sri Lanka needs now are friends who document rather than fictionalize, so thank you Julie Bishop.