STRONGLY RECOMMENDED: NOBEL PEACE PRIZE FOR LANKAN ARMY

Out of 435 Grama Niladhari divisions in the Northern Province, a mere 17 are occupied today by the Armed Forces for security purposes. Yet, it’s about this proportion of lands that have not been re-vested in their owners, that the TNA and the non-governmental organization lobbyists are making a song and a dance, which they hope will be visible all the way to Geneva.

It’s a small miracle in fact that it is such a minor proportion of the originally occupied lands that continue to be in the possession of the military, after a vicious war that certainly wasn’t a walk in the park. The quoted statistics which incidentally were given to us by Mr. S.B. Divaratne, Secretary Presidential Task Force for Resettlement, give the lie to the big lie that the military in Jaffna and the rest of the North is an ‘occupational force.’

It is strongly suspected therefore, that it is the continued good work done in the rehabilitation and resettlement sector and the highly disciplined and conscientious nature of the Sri Lankan army, that is the thorn in the flesh of the ever teary eyed NGO crowd, and their choir boys in political outfits such as the TNA.

If the army was in fact undisciplined and intrusive, there would have been real issues that the dissenting pack would have been able to pick on. But when the Sri Lankan fighting forces have a close to a sterling record -- under the circumstances of a no quarter given or granted war that is – it has become the sad lot of some of the raucous propagandists to in fact invent stories about the Forces.

But the imaginations of fiction writers often run riot -- particularly the new and uninitiated variety, that are propagandists primarily, before they are novelists.

So, that is the backcloth to all of these horror movie plots about the Sri Lankan army going on a rape spree, (Human Rights Watch) and the other charges about the army maintaining a thought-police, and all of this type of amateur fiction.

It is also in this backdrop that there are startling suggestions about the Burmese military junta being somehow more of a ‘reformist’ bent, compared to the Sri Lankan army which is portrayed as being ghoulish, disruptive and undisciplined.

This is another case of the angel being asked to learn scripture from the devil’s copybook. In Myanmar, we have an incorrigible junta that after going rogue for decades and laying the country fallow due to tone-deaf military methods, having to turn the page and wear the garb of democrats in order to avoid sanctions, and survive.

Our intellectual cretins however, have held up the Myanmar junta as a model for the disciplined Sri Lankan army to follow, when we have a military force here that has kept scrupulously out of civilian politics since the grant of independence!

The odious comparison between Myanmar ‘reform’ and Sri Lanka is symptomatic of how false narratives are floated, and the oppressive and despicable is made to look good before the admirable and conscientious.

The success story of the Sri Lankan army is not confined to issues of good discipline and victorious ways. The fact is that having literally rescued thousands of Tamil civilians from a terrorist who was keeping them hostage, the army, as Major General Hathurusinghe stated in an interview in these pages yesterday, has gone on to do unprecedented reconstruction work in the North, and this has mostly been for the benefit of the civilian population that suffered under Prabhakaran’s jackboot for decades.

War crimes? The Sri Lankan army deserves a Nobel Peace Prize nomination for peacetime successes and for winning hearts and minds. Is this hyperbole? It wouldn’t sound so in the least, if the reader visits the north, and gets a first hand account of civilian life there from men and women who are beginning to rebuild their lives. They sound much more authentic too, in comparison to our regular lounge lizard lobbyists.