OUR FRIENDS WERE RIGHT
The post-mortems are in, and we are told that our
friends who voted with us in Geneva are misguided. Those who are
of this view could ask themselves whether they can in good
conscience say that the U.S and E.U led pressure on Sri Lanka is
more likely to retard conflict and confrontation in this
country, or aggravate it?
This forced process of post-war Kumbaya singing is in fact
aggravating tensions in Sri Lanka, and pitting people and
ethnicities against each other.
That is why the stand of our friends from diverse continents
can be taken as being principled. The Kumbaya singing is not
bringing people together – it’s keeping them apart. It’s
prolonging a crisis whose natural time-run is at an end.
But this has always been the ugly face of foreign
interference. It was how it happened during the so-called war,
before 2009.
Trumped up issues were magnified and projected as those of
enormous consequence, a case in point being the P-TOMS
arrangement for instance, that proposed a post-tsunami power
sharing structure ostensibly for the purposes of tsunami relief.
Nobody talks about P-TOMS now as it has become obvious with time
that an interim arrangement with the Tamil Tigers for tsunami
relief would have complicated rather than ameliorated the
situation.
The dynamic was the same when various interested parties
recommended negotiations with Prabhakaran and his Killinochchi
brigands. It was reasoned that anything other than negotiations
would result in a major calamity as the Sri Lankan forces, we
were constantly told, had no capability of defeating a guerrilla
outfit that engaged in asymmetrical warfare.
Routing a motley outfit of vicious terrorists proved to be
relatively simple however, after the necessary application was
shown by the political and military establishments in unison.
Today the columnists and the international experts tell us
that calamity hides around the corner, if the medication
prescribed for the country is not administered.
Déjà vu – if anything is certain, it’s that we have been here
before. It is an almost exact repeat of the wartime tactic of
keeping the cauldron on the boil through the device of this
bogey or that. No P-TOMS spells disaster, they said. No
negotiations with Prabhakaran is assured disaster, they advised.
Now they say ‘no LLRC’ is calamity, ‘no independent
investigation’ means Armageddon. The more shrill and banshee
sounding the cry the more it is assured that the advice is not
sincere or well meaning, as past experience tells us.
But the era of armed confrontation ended with a thorough
defeat for the scare mongers and the Megaphone Cassandras. This
seems to have rankled them to the bone. Sri Lanka has to be
mindful of the fact that the real importance of the issues being
talked of are in inverse proportion to the decibel level of the
sounds being made.
This time the experts say that their prescriptions come with
the official stamp of the majority of the world’s countries. It
’s true that P-TOMS was not prescribed by the UN Human Rights
Council, and the LLRC is. But the principle of scare mongering
through the device of a slogan is essentially the same, be it
P-TOMS or LLRC or anything else. In the end, ‘implement your own
LLRC’, or ‘conduct a credible investigation’, are all slogans.
They are slogans all the more, because there is no commitment
in those quarters that make so much noise about the ‘suffering
people of Sri Lanka’ to better our lot by the slightest.
In this context, it’s best to stick to our guns as the
President does. He is a past-master at calling this huge bluff
by the busybody do-gooder gang of the global club that do not
care about Sri Lankans because normally they would have trouble
locating Sri Lanka on the map.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. The political
establishment needs to be aware of the repeat performance of the
international U.N theatre group, their drama being directed and
produced by you know who that leads the cast. It is worth
expanding on this subject in editorials to follow, but for the
moment, let us eschew the repeat P-TOM performance, and remember
that this country is run by none other than her people’s elected
government …
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