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Some
war against terror His shifting stance on the issues speak for itself. He first says he has been misquoted. But when we announced we would go to print, with the full transcript of the interview, he backtracked to say that that it is possible for a reasonable person to have misunderstood him. On the face of it, what Mr. Peter Harrold has said is probably true. He says there is an un-official state under LTTE control. This is true. So why is he backtracking now? He says the Sri Lanka Government has warmed up to the LTTE, which is patent fact. He says that there needs to be a mechanism to disburse funds in the LTTE held areas. Too true, too. But yet, Peter Harrold is now in the awkward position of having to say that he never meant to say any of this. He does not fear a roasting at the hands of local nationalist forces, he says, but clearly he is hyper anxious about the wrath of his superiors in Washington for speaking out of turn. In the process of trying to rectify what is tantamount to a breach of protocol and a breach of the World Bank’s code of conduct for its senior officials, Mr. Harrold first tried to shoot his way out of trouble. Then he tried to negotiate his way out of it, and fell flat on his face trying to save face. He tries to claim he never said LTTE-controlled areas are 'an un-official state'. If we grant that’s the case, hypothetically, what has he to say regarding the rest of the contents of the interview? He says the World Bank considers the LTTE a "legitimate stakeholder" in aid flow to the north and east of the Republic of Sri Lanka, and we wonder whether this is the official position of the Bank. Apparently not, even though, of late the World Bank has been trying to get a toe-hold in the country’s peace process, very much like the UN. The LTTE may be a stakeholder, but that’s different from saying that its stakeholder status is legitimate. Mr. Harrold, even in his second press release, and his television interviews does not deny having accorded the LTTE this amount of legitimacy. This newspaper has no intention of splitting hair on the nuances of all this verbiage, and the now admitted poor diction of the World Bank country director. That’s despite the fact that he now admits to parse words, and is in a fit of remorse about what he said. All we have to say is that there has been an increasing tendency for foreign nationals such as he -- if we may say so -- to make "official statements" on internal matters which they would dare not make in most other countries. The inability on the part of Sri Lankan Governments to tell them a thing or two about diplomatic niceties when serving in other sovereign states, has allowed them to shoot their mouths off. The Government is fair game for these nobodies who want to be somebodies. Once assigned to Sri Lanka they see themselves as God’s gift to our country, and therefore they cannot act with restraint. Their ambitions get the better of them, and they are driven to burnish their CV’s with a view to receiving kudos at headquarters and better postings abroad. In the process, they fail to be sensitive to the environment that they have to work in. In the case under review, ,clearly, Mr. Peter Harrold has referred to the roasting he is getting from the National Patriotic Movement, and will continue to get, for what he said in his interview with The Sunday Times. In the process he has made the World Bank even more unpopular with a sizeable section of Sri Lanka’s population who believe he over-stepped the boundaries of protocol. Some of these czars see it fashionable to deal with terrorists, but they will do it only in Sri Lanka. Some of them do feel like czars too, as if they were dispensing their own largesse, and they do feel so because they would indeed find some fawning people massaging their egos. One must on the other hand, give credit to the LTTE for turning the tsunami disaster into diplomatic and political advantage while the Government in Colombo continues with its inability to rein in the runaway bullies of the World Bank type. How many more years of Independence do we need to get away from this colonial mind-set coupled with a funk for neo-colonialists who continue to thrive on a Divide and Rule policy in Sri Lanka? |
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