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. |