ISSN: 1391 - 0531
Sunday January 20, 2008
Vol. 42 - No 34
Columns - Thoughts from London  

British MPs miss the wood for the trees

By Neville de Silva

It was another adjournment debate on Sri Lanka last Thursday. This was the second in the House of Commons since last May when the newly formed All Party Parliamentary Group for Tamils (APPG) launched a blitzkrieg on the Sri Lankan government and even caled on the British government to lift the six-year long ban on the LTTE.

Thursday’s debate was far less strident than the one last May which was led by the chairman of the APPG Keith Vaz whose somewhat unsavoury past did not stop him from climbing a moral soap box at what seemed like his second coming. This time round the speeches were more sober and more measured apparently having learnt from the battering the APPG’s leaders got from Sri Lanka even by their counterparts in the Diyawanna Oya, and by sections of the Sri Lankan media and others.In fact at some point during this debate there was a reference to the criticisms levelled after some British MPs had merely mouthed the concerns or, more correctly, the half truths and untruths uttered supposedly by their constituents.

The counter attack on the British MPs, who like MPs anywhere in the world, delude themselves into believing they are the founts of all wisdom, appears to have tempered their comments this time round. So what followed was a much more thoughtful debate underlined by a sobriety missing on the previous occasion.

One reason for this might well be that Keith Vaz did not participate. Why he kept out of this time when he will readily climb most soap boxes if it returns him to the limelight he once enjoyed as a minister for Europe, remains somewhat clouded. He faded into the sunset losing his position, one supposes, after he was investigated by the parliamentary ombudsman for conduct unbecoming of an MP and was suspended for one month.

Moreover he is said to have been questioned by the police after he spoke at the LTTE “National Heroes” commemoration last November when the Tiger leader’s speech calling for his version of a ‘jihad’ was relayed live to the audience, supposedly violating an understanding the organisers had reached with the Metropolitan Police, according to reports. It seems Mr Vaz had decided that silence is the better part of valour, especially since on the last occasion he advocated a stance on the LTTE and Sri Lanka that was not in tune with that of the British government.

Perhaps he expected to return to the spotlight when there was a change of guard at No 10 Downing Street in mid-2007 but even the new incumbent of that residence has sidelined him. So Keith Vaz is in search of new causes to satisfy his vanity and his desire for publicity. This time however he left to his deputy in the APPG, Simon Hughes, chairman of the Liberal Democrats to lead the charge. After his stridently pro-LTTE speech in the debate last year there were distinct rumblings in the higher echelons of the Lib Dems about the line that Hughes adopted. Perhaps that might have been one reason why he appeared less partisan on Thursday.

The fact that Thursday’s debate was far less acrimonious and more serious in tenor did not mean that it was more studied, logically presented or that some of those who entered the debate were armed with facts rather than conjecture. One of the carry-overs from the last debate is the moralising about the fruitlessness of war in the search for peace, on human rights and obligations to uphold international humanitarian law and violence.

If the collective voices heard in this Mother of Parliaments do sometime seem like yet another Sermon on the Mount, it would be chastening to remember that many of those voices were the very ones who actively or passively supported the military invasion of another sovereign country and the many human rights violations and breaches of humanitarian law that followed.

This war was launched on the pretext that Britain was in danger from weapons of mass destruction, an excuse that was later deceptively altered to regime change and to the benevolence of the democracy that was to be bestowed on the Iraqi people. One needs to be somewhat wary, therefore, of the announced good intentions of those who come bearing us gifts from afar. One might say that in this instance Britain feels that it has some prescriptive right as the last colonial power that was partly instrumental in creating the problem we are still trying to unravel, to give us a helping hand.

Given the seeming intractability of the problem which has got infinitely worse during our 60 years of independence, we can use all the help we get, help that is genuine and will not lead to even knottier situations and a greater chasm opening between the communities. It does not help, of course, if the problem is understood only superficially and the prescriptions offered might cure a disease but not the one that confronts us.

Let me consider here just two examples. In the course of the debate Andy Love a Labour MP who has visited Sri Lanka and takes an interest in the country, remarked that “new reasons” were being given by the Sri Lanka Government for abrogating the cease fire agreement and one was that it was seriously flawed.
Of course it is seriously flawed and it has been said by politicians, analysts and the media including this column, for quite some time. It is not a new reason. For the love of me I cannot understand why Love said this because he of all people should know that the government that signed the agreement with the LTTE is not the one in power today.

From the time the CFA was signed under some pressure from Norway, critics have pointed out that it was far more advantageous to the LTTE than it was to the elected government which has had to concede several rights and privileges. Intervening in the debate another Labour MP, Barry Gardiner, said that if there were “imperfections in the ceasefire agreement, what any party to that agreement should have done in response to those imperfections is to propose a better cease fire agreement…….. not withdraw unilaterally from the extant agreement.”

It is a pity that those like Gardiner who present themselves in the garb of the all knowing, do not do their homework. Even during the presidential election those who campaigned for Mahinda Rajapaksa said on platforms that the CFA was flawed and needed to be re-worked. After his election Rajapaksa has commented on the weakness of the CFA. Barry Gardiner blithely asks why a new CFA could not have been proposed. Surely he knows that it takes two to tango and two hands to clap. The LTTE would not have agreed , and it has said so, to any change from the CFA that would have led to a diminution f the rights and privileges they enjoyed under it, even though it was the LTTE that was hugely responsible for violating that same agreement, according to SLMM statistics.

So rewriting the CFA is easier said than done. The other point concerns Northern Ireland. The Good Friday Agreement that eventually led to a settlement of this separatist problem is dangled before us as an exemplar of successful negotiations. But those who do so forget, consciously or otherwise, that this settlement was reached through negotiations with all parties and groups who had a stake in that conflict. The CFA left out the Muslim community and other Tamil voices that needed to be heard. That was a fundamental flaw in the CFA. When Barry Gardiner talks of rewriting a more inclusive agreement he should first convince the LTTE to allow Muslim and other representation at peace negotiations.

Stephen Hammond, MP for Wimbledon made a point that this column has underlined on several occasions. A very important aspect of the Northern Ireland agreement that led to the settlement was the decommissioning of weapons which he said should be written into our All Party group’s recommendations so that decommissioning could begin as a confidence building measure. The Good Friday agreement insisted that weapons should be decommissioned- or surrendered and rendered unusable- during the negotiations and before a final agreement was reached. Prime Minister Blair said this several times in the same House of Commons and parliament went along with that. Why don’t these same MPs recommend the very thing for us, if they are so concerned about peace and non violence?

 
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