FAKE TEARS FOR DISAPPEARED

Even as we get closer to voting time in Geneva, there is an accelerated campaign on the part of the mercenary sections of civil society lobby groups to focus on an issue they think will give them maximum traction in the effort to de-legitimize the Sri Lankan regime, and by extension, the nation.

That’s the issue of wartime disappearances. The NGOs are in full ballast, issuing statements and Action Plans and producing long winded tracts for newspaper consumption on the subject.

There is absolutely no argument that kith and kin of disappeared persons want to know about what happened to their loved ones, notwithstanding the passage of time. But, when the Jehan Pereras who never spoke for over 23 years about the mass graves in this part of the country, speak now about the Matale mass grave and say we have to go as far back as 1989 to find out whose remains these are, people can feel the bluff a million miles away.

The sudden desire among the Sri Lankan NGO proxies for the LLTE-rump, to find out about who went missing – dating back to 1989 -- has nothing to do with the humane task of seeking closure on the issue of disappearances, which is something that the near and dear of the departed may legitimately yearn for.

But it has everything to do with the politically motivated goal of wielding the disappearances issue against the government as the delegations get ready to vote in Geneva on the resolution concerning Sri Lanka.

Else, why does Jehan Perera who never shed a tear or wrote one word on behalf of the disappeared Sinhalese now talk about the Matale mass graves?

Precisely because people such as ourselves ‘called out’ the Pereras and Paikiasothys with regard to their ‘un-peopling’ of the Sinhalese, in never expressing any sympathy or concern for the Sinhala majority that lost their loved ones in the war on the LTTE, and prior to that, the two JVP uprisings.

Suddenly, in the face of protests by certain groups of persons of Sinhala ethnicity to Ms. Navi Pillay to call off the hypocrisy of bringing up human rights issues with regard to one ethnic group exclusively, the Tiger-rump LTTE lobbyists here have woken up to the fact that when there is no elementary fairness in their campaigns, they have lost all credibility.

Besides the fact that Jehan and Co.’s concerns are far too little and far too late, because the people have a clearer idea of their bluff now that their tears for the Sinhalese come abruptly and 24 years too late, there is also the usual hilarious overreaching on their part, and the odious comparisons they make.

For example, there is a call to take a cue from Colombia regarding disappearances! Colombia was a country in which the paramilitary FARC and the AUC ran riot and the drug cartels got themselves involved in the most mind numbing violence.

The disappearances alone – leaving aside documented deaths -- numbered over 100,000, and Sri Lanka’s numbers are fractional in comparison. The violence was so stunningly extreme in nature that those with a weak stomach shouldn’t read beyond this point. Tongues and testicles of victims were cut off, particularly by AUC gang members. They routinely played soccer with the heads of decapitated victims.

The country’s voluble President however was able to strike some kind of a deal and get the terrorists to surrender because he was close to the Americans and were gradually giving the terrorists and the drug-runners up for trial in the United States.

Rather than face that fate, they traded their freedom for light sentences. That was Colombia whose violence was so much greater in magnitude in comparison to Sri Lanka that we are comparing chalk and cheese here – apples and oranges, really.

Sri Lanka’s dead and disappeared were those that died during conventional war essentially, and during the last phase of the fighting in which Prabhakaran massed his human shields. There are other disappeared, but there is little doubt that the disappearances of twenty or more years ago will be cases that go unsolved. In that backdrop Navi Pillay’s cry now echoed by the NGOs about the limited numbers that went missing in Sri Lanka’s last conflict begins to look very much like what it’s intended to be – a vicious political campaign, and not much else.