Sri Lanka is on the front page again and once more for the wrong reasons. @TherealNihal tweeted earlier in the week asking what Sri Lankans thought about David Cameron’s visit to Colombo for the Commonwealth summit. I saw his tweet a few hours after he posted it and in Twitter terms a late reply is as useful as a judge who won’t vote on the X Factor. So having missed the moment, I’ve brought my views here.
I should say from the outset that I'm sceptical as to the sincerity of any politician who now claims to be interested in the tens of thousands who were used as a human shield, then massacred by the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE (Tamil Tigers) in 2009. The time for action was then but there wasn't any outside intervention. Everyone was glad for an end to terrorism in the North so even decent and reputable people dismissed the poor and the nameless who were sacrificed so others could live a better life. Thankfully there are organisations and individuals like Amnesty International and journalists who want the Sri Lankan government to be accountable for the right reasons.
If Cameron is genuinely interested in the Sri Lankan people, he was right to attend the summit and bring up the subject of the 2009 genocide, because dialogue achieves more than a refusal to negotiate ever will. Canada, India and Mauritius’ absence from the summit isn't really much of a protest. But rather than engaging in discussions, Cameron publicly threatened Rajapaksa with UN sanctions, which leaves him open to criticisms of hypocrisy as there is still a question mark the size of a banker’s bonus hanging over Tony Blair’s conduct in starting the Iraq war. As an indication of the scale in the two wars, the lowest reported killings that I've found is 100,000 in Iraq over 6 years and 20,000 in Sri Lanka in the final few months of the hostilities, which is the basis of the allegations of war crimes against Rajapaksa. Different timescales, different statistics but you get the drift. They're similar so warrant the same action. (I should point out that both of these estimates vary widely, which is why I've picked the lowest, rather than risk overstating the issue.)
As for the effectiveness of any UN investigation, Russia and China have been dipping their hands into Sri Lanka since the end of WWII and are a strong force there. They’d veto any UN initiative, making the whole process less than useless. Similarly, if the unlikely happened and there was an UN investigation of Blair and Bush for the Iraq war, it would be stymied by USA. After all, Obama did recently try to block legal action against Bush.
So whether or not Cameron issues warnings in Colombo is irrelevant. He is only an irritant for Rajapaksa who has the well-known human rights activists, the Chinese, Russian and the Japanese on his side. If our Prime Minister wants to increase his global presence, he’d be better off trying peace initiatives, as were used to end the civil war in Northern Ireland, although the Rajapaksa dynasty is in a much stronger position than the IRA were.
In the words of Rohini: If you let your children be naughty, you can’t show off and scold other people’s kids when they do something bad.
I should say from the outset that I'm sceptical as to the sincerity of any politician who now claims to be interested in the tens of thousands who were used as a human shield, then massacred by the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE (Tamil Tigers) in 2009. The time for action was then but there wasn't any outside intervention. Everyone was glad for an end to terrorism in the North so even decent and reputable people dismissed the poor and the nameless who were sacrificed so others could live a better life. Thankfully there are organisations and individuals like Amnesty International and journalists who want the Sri Lankan government to be accountable for the right reasons.
If Cameron is genuinely interested in the Sri Lankan people, he was right to attend the summit and bring up the subject of the 2009 genocide, because dialogue achieves more than a refusal to negotiate ever will. Canada, India and Mauritius’ absence from the summit isn't really much of a protest. But rather than engaging in discussions, Cameron publicly threatened Rajapaksa with UN sanctions, which leaves him open to criticisms of hypocrisy as there is still a question mark the size of a banker’s bonus hanging over Tony Blair’s conduct in starting the Iraq war. As an indication of the scale in the two wars, the lowest reported killings that I've found is 100,000 in Iraq over 6 years and 20,000 in Sri Lanka in the final few months of the hostilities, which is the basis of the allegations of war crimes against Rajapaksa. Different timescales, different statistics but you get the drift. They're similar so warrant the same action. (I should point out that both of these estimates vary widely, which is why I've picked the lowest, rather than risk overstating the issue.)
As for the effectiveness of any UN investigation, Russia and China have been dipping their hands into Sri Lanka since the end of WWII and are a strong force there. They’d veto any UN initiative, making the whole process less than useless. Similarly, if the unlikely happened and there was an UN investigation of Blair and Bush for the Iraq war, it would be stymied by USA. After all, Obama did recently try to block legal action against Bush.
So whether or not Cameron issues warnings in Colombo is irrelevant. He is only an irritant for Rajapaksa who has the well-known human rights activists, the Chinese, Russian and the Japanese on his side. If our Prime Minister wants to increase his global presence, he’d be better off trying peace initiatives, as were used to end the civil war in Northern Ireland, although the Rajapaksa dynasty is in a much stronger position than the IRA were.
In the words of Rohini: If you let your children be naughty, you can’t show off and scold other people’s kids when they do something bad.
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