Your Honour: Your message is irrelevant and extraneous

Response to Justice Krishna Iyer from the Editors of Sri Lanka Guardian

(April 11, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Shri V R Krishna Iyer is one of India’s much acclaimed legal luminaries and very well known for his fearless straight talk. We are privileged to publish a message from him press-released by Dr V Suresh, the President of Peoples Union for Civil Liberties, Tamilnadu and Puducherry (PUCTP) (rightstn@yahoo.com). His statement, as Justice Krishna Iyer claims, is regarding the humanitarian crisis and mass deaths of civilians in the Vanni Region on April 9, 2009. We presume Justice Iyer obliged the PUCTP with such a message.

A vastly experienced and much respected former judge of India’s Supreme Court straightaway claims in this message, that he is not taking sides in this message either with the LTTE or the Sri Lankan Government. After that he treads on a number of tragic issues that has affected this beautiful island of Sri Lanka; and he zeroes only on the Government of Sri Lanka having said he is not taking sides.

If his message is pointed on the humanitarian crisis and mass deaths of civilians in the Vanni Region on April 9, 2009 then whatever else he seeks to comment on are irrelevant, immaterial and extraneous to the issue he has taken up. If lawyers in his court would have done this, he would have chided them and overruled them altogether.

His point of contention is as follows:

“Currently claiming victory the State Government in Colombo is inflicting untold slaughter tragedies, killing daily bleeding lives and indescribable human suffering. International law, so far as the Tamils are concerned, is the vanishing point of humanist jurisprudence. Sovereignty does not authorize internal atrocity and incalculable casualty.”

Nowhere in his message has Justice Iyer made reference to the fundamental and pivotal issue of the current issue and that is the LTTE holding thousands of innocent Vanni civilians as human shields and the immense patience the Armed Forces are showing when they could have ploughed through all LTTE opposition with great ease.

He has overlooked the reality that the Tigers are a terrorist contraption who have now become a threat to India as well as to the rest of the world.

Furthermore, the Government of Sri Lanka has a governance responsibility and ironically today and in a country where the Tamils suffered discrimination, it is the majority Sinhalese people who have come to help liberate the Tamils from the claws of the LTTE terrorists.

The message of this venerable justice is most unfortunate and extremely uncharacteristic of a person who has held such an eminent position in India. Justice Krishna Iyer could be contacted by email: Krishna Iyer: satgamaya@dataone.in

The Message from Justice V R Krishna Iyer

I do not take sides in this message with the LTTE or the Sri Lankan Government although there have been violent excesses on both sides resulting huge loss of life, property and tremendous suffering which I hate as one who stands for human rights. I pity the beautiful island of Sri Lanka which has now been a criminal field of carnage and butchery and savagery.

Day after day, the Sri Lankan Government since the days of its Independence been guilty of discrimination against Tamils as a class and the fuel for this fury and extremism and terrorism by the LTTE was the terrible discrimination in many dimensions against the Tamil Minority.

A fair federal system would have been perhaps the finest political, solution where justice, social, economic and political evenly managed, would have created a highly developed and prosperous island but that was not to be. Even now statesmanship of Sri Lankan Government should have declared a glorious federal state unilaterally.

Currently claiming victory the State Government in Colombo is inflicting untold slaughter tragedies, killing daily bleeding lives and indescribable human suffering. International law, so far as the Tamils are concerned, is the vanishing point of humanist jurisprudence. Sovereignty does not authorize internal atrocity and incalculable casualty.

I plead with moral indignation with the Buddhist Colombo Cabinet in power that militarized torture of a minority in Jafna will never be lasting if Rome and Greece and London have fallen, Colombo cannot survive by brute force. Please declare immediate cessation of military operation under international supervision. Humanity, not legality, is the process of Buddhism and Shaivism. The world around should intervene to see that justice is done.

The most satisfactory ideal I have ever been able to form of justice is embodied in the picture of a judge courageous enough “to give the devil his due,” whether he be in the right or in the wrong.- John F Dillon -Sri Lanka Guardian