Columns
Will India do a Crimea on Lanka?
View(s):No ray of hope lights to lift the brooding pall of Geneva’s gloom and a desolate air of uncertainty hangs heavy as the countdown to the crucial vote begins; and Lanka can do no more but clasp her hands in Confucian prayer and, banging her head on wood, hope for the best and expect the worst in this unfolding drama of which she, having played her role and cast her last card, is now a sorry spectator of her own portending tragedy.
But at this hour, when the distant Geneva bell tolls, our fears should not focus on whether it sounds the call for an international war crimes probe. In the current field of play that singular demand maybe a mere red herring floated to concentrate our energies whilst a more serious shark lurks insidious beneath the unfathomable deep of international politics.
External Minister G.L. Peiris was upbeat this week and assured us that the Pillay report has no legal basis, that Pillay is biased, that her report is akin to the clairvoyance of a thief’s mother, that she had already formed an opinion moments after Tamil terrorism was defeated. Unfortunately, to make this claim stick and appear credible, he did not present any motives on her part as to why she, this senior UN official, should possess this prejudice.
But then the United Nations Human Right Commission is not a court of justice. It is like the United Nations itself a court of vested interest, nothing more, nothing else. A mere cursory glance at the track record of some of the members of the council would suffice to reveal that what had earned them their place was their military and economic power. If it were not some of its members will not be occupying seats on the Commission but space in its’ dock.
Here in this august sanctum where human right are regarded supreme, no laws govern, no case is decided on its merits; and to expect justice from such a pretentious body is to be naïve to the utmost, to bear an almost childish innocence when faced with the ruthless reality of the world and the imperialistic way its affairs are conducted.
For all the slick portrayal that the United Nations is the final arbiter, the last resort where justice will be found, the composition of its supreme council reveal the true nature of this so called democratic club of civilised nations. It is a club where all members are equal but where some are more equal than others. And the rot is at the top where five nations, namely, the US, the UK, France, Russia and China, each empowered with the vote of veto to determine the course of history and the fate of the world, sit permanently at the Security Council with ten picked from the other 193 nations for show to serve temporarily for an insignificant two year period .The rest of the nations can only clap or boo the action but the Security Council holds sway and the veto rules.
The injustice caused by the Security Council’s composition is revealed when one considers that former colonial power France, with a population of a mere sixty five million and status as the European Union’s pet poodle compared to UNSC non member Germany’s work-horse rank in Europe, has a permanent seat with the all deciding veto power whilst India with a population of over thousand two hundred million and a gigantic land mass five times the size of France, has none.
Now consider the worst case scenario which may, God forbid, possibly transpire:
Firstly, with the UN, behind the façade of international equality and fair play, run on the national interests of superpower nations, Lanka cannot depend on such a body for the merits of her case or the justice of her position to prevail nor can she expect that international law will operate fairly to her advantage. It is no longer the policeman of the world. That role has been usurped by America. Secondly, the Tamil Diaspora is active as ever and, as disclosed by the President’s Secretary himself, has managed through the hiring of a top lobbying firm to inveigle her influence into the Oval Office at the White House.
Thirdly Tamil Nad Chief Minister Jayalalithaa and her opposition leader Karunanidhi are both united against Lanka and have their daggers drawn screaming for their pound of Lanka’s northern flesh and are demanding the UN and India to have a referendum amongst Lanka’s Tamils to determine whether they wish for a separate Tamil state on Lankan soil.
Fourthly, India chills her relations with Lanka. She has already adopted a cold war attitude towards Lanka and has publicly decried being referred to as Lanka’s ‘big brother’, preferring the more impersonal term ‘partner’ instead. She also remains extremely tight lipped on all matters and keeps everything concerning Lanka safely tucked under Manmohan Singh’s turban.
Fifthly, the elected northern provincial council renews its calls for international intervention and makes a specific appeal to India to save the Tamils from Sinhalese suppression as Ananthi Sashitharan did last Sunday.
Sixthly, Channel 4 comes out with a new video cataloguing more alleged atrocities committed by Lankan Forces. World opinion is mobilized against us. The international call for intervention climaxes. Seventhly, the scene is set and this time India obliges and demands the Lankan Government to hold a referendum in the north and east to determine whether the Tamils want to separate from Lanka. The Government refuses. India sends in her army with the declared purpose of overseeing the holding of a referendum. Like the Russian people of Crimea did last week voting overwhelming in the Russian sponsored referendum to reunite with Russia, the Lankan Tamils vote overwhelmingly for a separate state.
Eighthly, to prevent Sinhala retaliation and to protect the northern and eastern Tamils the Indian army stays put. The Northern Provincial Council, like the Crimea Government did last week to Russia, appeals to India, fifty times the size of Lanka, to be unified with her as, another pranth of India, as her 29th state in the Indian Union of States or as the 8th Union Territory of India.
Ninthly, Lanka, even as she now expects with the utmost confidence for China to veto any resolution brought against her at the UN Security Council, appeals to China to bring forth a resolution against India; and China obliges and brings a resolution but both the US and Britain veto it, even as Russia vetoed and China abstained from the resolution brought against Russia over the Crimea by the US last week.
Finally, Lanka is partitioned on the lines of Eelam. The Indian Army refuses to leave Lanka in the same manner as the Turkish Army refuses to leave partitioned Cyprus (See Sunday Punch last Sunday) even after thirty years, claiming at the UN when responding to every resolution brought against her occupation of 40 per cent of Cyprus to satisfy a Turkish Cypriot minority of 18 per cent, with the stock answer that to do so would result in unprecedented bloodshed.
The writing on the wall for Lanka is slowly becoming legible. The question is whether we can read it and, more importantly, whether we can shrewdly decipher its true import: Whether we have the resilience to revert to reality, the pluck to dismount from our high horse, the resolve to exercise with tact, aplomb, and diplomacy, the art of compromise or, sticking fast to an intransigent stance, take on the might of the world and with all mental systems disabled, let happen the bifurcation of Lanka.
Ananthi struts her sobs while Sinhala despair is silent – Sunday Punch 2
Armed with a cachet of well rehearsed tears to be shed on cue if need be, the wife of a missing Tamil terrorist leader, and now the second highest polling member of the Northern Provincial Council Ananthi Sashitharan struts her sobs and spews her venom before UN’s Human Rights Commission in Geneva; and, taking the floor and commandeering the attention of that international gallery last Sunday, launches a devastating tirade against the Lankan Government telling the world “the Eelam Tamil children face continued war with genocidal intent”.
Ananthi at the UNHRC renews the cry for war crimes probe
Addressing the UNHRC on borrowed time, generously lent to her by a Belgian and a West Bengali nongovernmental organisation she accuses the government of forcing children to work, berates the military of directing systematic sexual violence against Tamil women, renews the call for an international war crimes probe and demands immediate international intervention to save the Tamil people from suppression and subjection to military rule in the north of Lanka.
Tear jerker Ananthi whose sister joined the EPRLF terrorist group and was killed by the LTTE, whose younger brother was a Tiger terrorist who died in combat says that she is speaking not as the voice of an NGO but as a mother of three daughters who are still searching for their father, taken away, she alleges, by the army.
Their father, Ananthi’s husband, Ezhilan happens to be the man who visited her school as a Tiger lecturer to indoctrinate school children, with whom she fell instantly in love, who rebuffed her many a time, who refused her proffered love and offer of marriage claiming he was already wedded to ‘Tamil Eelam’ and only relented, melted and married her after three years of being hotly pursued by her. Upon top Tiger leader Tamilselven recommending him and Prabhakaran anointing him with his blessings, Ezhilan was appointed as the LTTE political head of Wanni and thereafter as Tiger Political Commissar of Trincomalee.
While she rants and rages and extends her claws to rip and flay the Lankan Government , while her smooching sympathisers of the same tongue and lip try to whitewash her husband as having been only involved in the Tigers’ propaganda machine and try to drape spotless white Kashmir lamb’s wool over him to cover his Tiger stripes, what is the earthly difference between the Tiger who sprays with words and massacres with black propaganda the Sinhala race and justifies every Tiger carnage committed and the Tiger who riddles with bullets or exterminates wholesale unarmed Sinhala civilians? The tools they use, the pen or the gun are interchangeable at a moment’s whim: the message is the same: Terror without relent and murder without pause till the avowed aim is achieved to keep their tryst in some god forsaken Eelam.
In her bellicose speech thereat she referred to ‘Eelam’ children facing a genocidal war, revealing instantly that though the Northern Chief Minister Wigneswaran and TNA leader Sampanthan had both declared that the Tamils had given up their demand for Eelam and were seeking a political solution to their grievances within ‘the framework of a united, undivided Lanka’, she, the new firebrand 43 year old Eelam die-hard, the next in line hopeful to the chief ministerial post held by 73 year old Wigneswaran, remained fanatically committed to the establishment of the utopian Tamil Eelam and, even though now denied its shade, would doggedly pursue to the ends of the earth her dream state, in the same zealous manner she had studiously stalked and coveted her dream man, Ezhilan, and would persevere and use every possible means to convey to the world the continued oppression of the Tamils.
But where was the figure of a single Sinhalese who escaped from slaughter when the Tigers whom Ananthi’s husband represented hacked unarmed Sinhalese men, women, and children in border villages? Where, on this international stage that allows a Tamil terrorist’s wife to monopolise the platform with impunity and heap calumny after calumny unopposed, was the figure of a single Sinhalese wife, a Sinhalese mother, a Sinhalese widow to reveal to the world the long litany of Tiger massacres and recall the suppression endured and the fear borne in every Sinhala breast in having terrorists in their midst, not in uniform but incognito in civil clothes, free to roam the broad acres of the land and free to drench the soil with blood .
Neither the Foreign Ministry nor any organisation deemed it fit to present any outraged Sinhalese to tell the world the other side of the gory tale. Where was that resounding voice to echo the carnage, to reverberate the horrors inflicted repeatedly without mercy upon innocent civilians by psychopathic Tigers? Where indeed was that strident voice to beam to the world the brutish ways of those now welcomed in velvet, whose besmirched blood stained hands now pampered and powdered in fine grained talc? Or is the Sinhala voice, a voice banned and the Sinhalese ‘persona non grata’ at Pillay’s Court? Is the UN stage now hired only for the use of one party to a conflict?
No flowers bloom in these foreign fields for Lanka’s majority and the Sinhalese must cover the unkempt graves of their slaughtered dead with nothing but their silent tears and brace themselves for that which they are about to receive for sins not of their own making.