Navi Pillay must lay down her office immediately

Since 1983 the Tigers are the predators of the Tamils

By Satchi Sithananthan in Frankfurt

(March 26, Frnakfurt, Sri Lanka Guardian ) When the galloping legs of the steed have lost their sure-footedness, the charger becomes food for the carnivores of the circus company; they are soon digested.

The South African of South Indian descent, a lawyer by profession who was very privileged to be appointed to an extremely responsible and sensitive position as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Srimati Navaneetham Pillay has lost her sure-footedness on the Sri Lankan issue. This is a colossal error that has misrepresented the ground realities in Sri Lanka to such an extent that it is terrorism that has received comfort as a result.

Her contention that from January 20 onwards 2800 civilians were killed and 7,000 more injured in the No Fire Zone (NFZ) have been, as admitted by the United Nations Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs Sir John Holmes, found to be unacceptable. This has also been concurred by the UN Resident Coordinator and Humanitarian Coordinator in Sri Lanka Neil Buhne.

Madame Pillay’s figures have very strange and mysterious compatibility with those publicized by pro-LTTE media especially the widely recognized Tiger news-constructor Tamilnet based in the USA. Obviously, she had not done her homework or did not want to do her homework or had it done for her and the fact that she is South African and of South Indian descent unfortunately challenges her integrity.

She has certainly betrayed the trust placed in her by the United Nations and such being the intensity of her failure and indeed betrayal, she is left with no option but to resign her position. She just cannot hold this position anymore.

Just for the record and not in any way an attempt to attribute it to her, South Africa unfortunately is recognized as a haven for the LTTE. Arms were illicitly obtained in South Africa by the LTTE and while being transported illegally to North and East Sri Lanka was intercepted by the Sri Lankan Navy and destroyed.

There were even speculations the LTTE leader Prabhakaran and his family and even some other leaders would eventually seek refuge in South Africa. In other words Madame Navaneetham Pillay’s ethnicity and the LTTE links to South Africa do raise serious concerns. Unless she is incompetent or too naïve to be misled what prevents people to presume that she had played dirty?

Since 1983 when the Tamils were really threatened with genocide by the Junius Jayawardene Government, they have been a safe community among the majority Sinhalese. In fact a major part of the Tamil community in Sri Lanka lives in the traditionally Sinhala regions. It is now over twenty-five years since that terrible July 1983 tragic events.

The rich and middle class Tamils who had the wherewithal – resources and connections - to flee to countries like Canada, USA, UK, and some European countries and also Australia and New Zealand made much hay out of this chance. They either had the qualifications or the funds to create comfortable lifestyles for themselves and become the world’s first generation refugees even earlier than the rich Uganda-based Indians, to achieve upper class stability in their new world. The real refugees are still living in camps in Rameshwaram, South India and the conditions there are appalling.

The Rameshwaram refugees are even neglected by the mini-political noisemakers of Tamilnadu who have been extremely fanatical in their support for the Tigers. The poor and the privileged are poles apart and politicians like Gopalaswamy, Thirumavalavan, Nedumaran and Ramadoss are experts at milking the convenient cash cow.

However now that the LTTE is on the wane it has deflated these political opportunists. There is a growing feeling that Gopalaswamy and Nedumaran may have been privy to the assassination of India’s former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and even other murders committed by Prabhakaran.

Countries like Canada and Denmark were particularly generous to those who knocked at their doors as refugees, nearly all of them reporting as fleeing from the LTTE, and enabled them to settle down comfortably in what became their new homelands. They not only settled down well but some of them rapidly became a part of a vicious LTTE network of industries from alien smuggling to drugs and numerous other illegal operations and this reflected the dog eats dog mentality of the Tiger movement.

The “Refugee Claim” was exploited to the maximum with bogus associations formed to farm funds allotted for community projects. In Canada, if only the government will order an inquiry into how the Tamil Eelam Society conducted its affairs, not only evidence of large scale corruption will emerge but also how it operated as a powerful front of the LTTE.

Significantly the very people who claimed refuge away from Tiger terror in Sri Lanka are the people who are advocating the cause of the LTTE in the streets of Toronto, New York, Washington, London, Brussels and Paris. Sydney where the Tamil community lives in luxury style will have their pro-LTTE demonstration next week. These are desperate efforts to save the Tigers from extinction and not in anyway to demand that they free the civilians held in their destructive claws.

Unfortunately the pro-LTTE Tamil Diaspora has become time-warped or time-struck on 1983 and all that, and a situation that also gives it a kind of status accorded to a brave freedom fighter. Using the image of a brutal killer, this Diaspora is holding on to a mirage of something to be proud of and also as a guilt-extinguisher for people to whom another person’s wellbeing does not count.

This Diaspora represents the totality of the selfish and the arrogant and finds comfort in the company of people of like minds. It is not a bond but a wild herd that cares not for realities and rushes headstrong nourishing its own sense of the self using another to advantage. Hardly any of them understand political ideologies and they cannot be expected to understand what liberation struggles mean or who really is a freedom fighter.

Just like the Tamils who went westwards, since July 1983 the Tamils in Sri Lanka are running away only from the Tigers. During the last twenty-six years the LTTE has decimated all the community’s moderate political leaders sans one or two, most of its intellectuals and some professionals too. It has totally devastated Sri Lanka’s richest rice producing region and converted a stable society into dependents on handouts and also as slaves building bunkers, luxury houses for LTTE leaders, arsenals, military barracks, airstrips and prisons and fortifications of terror.

Young people were forcibly snatched away and many have been sacrificed as gun fodder. Young girls have been ravished of whatever is precious to them and inducted as suicide bombers. Human life has been treated with scant respect. The language of communication is excessively dotted and phrased with nothing but the base and the vulgar and it is rule of terror that prevails. The people are forced to march as human shields, major weaponry of the LTTE as much as the suicide bomber.

Establishing a No Fire Zone (NFZ) in circumstances of civil war is not known anywhere in the world. But the Government of Sri Lanka determined to protect the civilians held as human shield made this extraordinary humanitarian move to save their lives. But the LTTE audaciously ignored this and used this zone to build bunkers forcing the civilians to undertake this task and began to fire at the Armed Forces.

The Armed Forces were advised “to take extra-ordinary precautions to avoid causing civilian casualties, including exercising maximum restraint in not resorting to retaliatory fire at the LTTE, which has brazenly violated International Humanitarian Law by directing fire at the Government troops from artillery guns and heavy weapons that it had deliberately positioned among the civilians within the NFZ.”

This is a fire of intense provocation to cause the deaths of civilians from retaliatory action. The Tigers not only use them as human shield but also mercilessly as sitting ducks. How could this have escaped Madame Navaneetham Pillay?

Had she, as obligated by the office she holds, analyzed the entire situation thoroughly and also the measures taken by the Government of Sri Lanka to virtually restrain the forces to a considerable extent, the discipline of the forces and the total dedication of their medical personnel, and to delay their victory over the Tiger terror would have surely indicated to her that she should have come heavily down on the LTTE. She would have also made reference to the 1983-time warped pro-LTTE Tamil Diaspora who are making much noise in the city streets of some of the rich countries in the world.

She should have also recognized how the Tiger underworld is operating in the west as a vicious network and the signs are that terrorism will be helped to prosper. Of what use is an executive at the level of the United Nations committed to global peace, if she could not see through the ominous realities of a terror movement geared to genocide against it own people in Sri Lanka and is arrogantly portentous and perturbing on the global stage?

Since 1983 the Tamils in Sri Lanka have been living under the threat of Prabhakaran and his gangs. And today, he seems determined to take a revenge of his failed mafia mission by causing the slaughter of thousands he holds as human shields. The view of this writer is that Madame Navaneetham Pillay has given comfort to this terrorist.

ENDS

-Sri Lanka Guardian