THE BAITING GAME

The LTTE-rump Tamil community in some Western capitals are attempting to give a new twist to the careless comparison made by that other Sri Lanka baiter, Navi Pillay the UN Human Rights Commissioner, between this country and Rwanda. What she said had something to do with the way a report on Rwanda was treated by the international community and the UN, and the way a report on Sri Lanka was responded to -- and that too according to her.

This fact is now loosely bandied about by some self-styled analysts and commentators to mean that Navi Pillay somehow compared Sri Lanka to Rwanda, meaning that there is somehow some similarity between the numbers killed in the Rwandan genocide and the collateral civilian casualties during the last phase of the 2009 hostilities.

This is the way that the pro-Tiger lobby is known to distort and eke maximum advantage out of stray comments and observations by so called international civil servants. As astute columnist H. L. D. Mahindapala observes in the leader page contribution to this newspaper below, there is something fundamentally wrong with signaling out the last phase of the hostilities alone, and asking for an account of these figures on the assumption that the Sri Lankan forces were responsible for all the dead, when, as he says Prabhakaran killed more Tamils than anybody else, including the Sri Lankan forces and the IPKF put together.

Navi Pillay’s Rwandan comparison, though confined to a procedural aspect of a UN report, was nevertheless unwarranted. Nothing about Rwanda remotely resembles what happened in Sri Lanka during the last stages of war in 2009. The Rwandan situation was a machete welding genocide by tribal toughs gone mad, and by contrast the war dead in Sri Lanka perished as a result of stray artillery shellfire, even if one were to hypothetically accept the flawed version of some persons who have come to that conclusion on the 2009 events by the Nandikadal, and in Putthikuddiarripu.

It seems to be clear now however that some of the Western led nations that led unseeingly attacks on Sri Lanka are fast losing steam.

This is why the local partners of some of these inimical forces in the NGO community here are whining that the resolution against Sri Lanka is ‘only procedural.’ Meanwhile the Sri Lankan forces have completed an inquiry into the last phase of the 2009 hostilities, and concluded that any civilian casualties in that phase were the result of the LTTE’s attacks on the people.

Ms. Navi Pillay’s words about the Petrie report being credible are also shocking, and in view of what was said about the weakening campaigns of some of the Western powers regarding Sri Lanka, her words can be seen as a final desperate push in isolation to corner the wartime leadership of this country on trumped up human rights charges.

She has very few allies in this pursuit however. The local NGOs are there, but if the big picture is taken into account, they count for nothing. Then there are the international NGOs such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International for instance, but their copybooks are so blotted that not even Western governments or the UN go by what their lounge suited gadabouts say anymore.

In the above context, what Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa has had to say about the Palali High Security Zone is blunt but informative. Ranil Wickremesinghe is as usual enacting a political tele-drama in Jaffna in pursuit of the mirage of a UNP government ‘next year.’ In the process he has called for the de-militarization of Palali and Gotabhaya Rajapaksa has told him exactly where and how he should get-off.

He has pointed to the necessity of a High Security Zone in Palali, and said quite correctly that four years ago Wickremesinghe would not have been able to dream of going to Palali leave alone playing a political role there, if not for the exertions of our armed forces. Calling for a reversal to a distant status quo ante before the LTTE was formed in the 1970s, is obviously another cunning stratagem of the wound-licking Tiger rump to destabilize the north, and Mr. Rajapaksa should stick to his guns.