Ban ki Moon’s dangerous liaisons and then there’s the rub

(July 16, Colombo, Sri Lank Guardian) We have in this column, more than on one occasion, warned the UN Secretary General, Ban ki Moon to view the Tamil position in the campaign of the racist war, waged by President Mahinda Rajapakse, his government and the Sinhala polity on the Tamil people, with fairness and justice. We did not ask for favours in so doing. We wanted him to look at both sides and hear them out. Now, when Moon is under pressure to take an impartial stand on the question of violations of the relevant aspects international law there begins the rub. As the Eskimos would say: “You never really know your friends along with whom you walk until the ice breaks”. The ice has now broken, with the Sri Lankan polity which has always been quick to demonise the Tamil resistance, refusing to yield themselves alongside the Tamils to be accounted for similar offences perpetrated on the Tamil civilians.

Ban ki Moon’s love affair with the Sri Lankan establishment began when in his capacity as South Korea’s foreign minister, he donated on behalf of his government monies for the December 2004 Tsunami relief handed personally to a top Sri Lankan politician. As to where and how they were expended was none of his concern for he was more interested in soliciting Sri Lanka‘s vote for his election as Secretary General of the UN although there was a Sri Lankan vying for the position. Having come from a culture of corrupt politics with his president (of South Korea) committing suicide in shame to recompense his much publicised corrupt behaviour, Ban ki Moon was in familiar territory when it came to dealing with Sri Lankan authorities. Little would Ban ki moon have anticipated that his honeymoon with the Sri Lankan polity would end in such disaster to himself and to the cause of international justice.

While the Tamils were being massacred at home, Moon was being met with by Rajapakse’s brother in Geneva to be assured that the racist war against the Tamils was an humanitarian operation which Moon liked to believe for his own convenience when all the while during the massacre of the innocent Tamils between February and May 2009 he was being briefed by his own representative in Sri Lanka, Gordon Weiss, that the figure of the Tamil civilians being killed was amounting to 35,000 to 40,000. Giving the impression to the world that he was in Rajapakses’ pocket, as it were, Moon chose not to give credence to Weiss’ figure setting an arbitrary figure of 7000 which is now the UN official figure, because according to them they were not interested in counting the dead bodies of the Tamils. Ban ki Moon, it would be recalled toured the Vanni area by air soon after the completion of the war along with his honest broker from India Vijay Nambiar. After that was met in the hill capital of Kandy and was feasted by the Rajapakse brothers to a sumptuous dinner before he left Sri Lanka. Apparently on their advice, he avoided meeting a delegation of Tamils led by the TNA the principal Tamil party in parliament wanting to meet him before he left, failing in his duty to hear their side thus denying them even the basic element of natural justice.

Subsequently, Moon was to state to the CNN at an interview on what he saw on the ground on his inspection flight immediately after the war: “I was so sad and I was so humbled by what I have seen”. When asked whether heavy weapons had been used his doctored view was that he had no clear evidence of it.

Sri Lanka, instead of using the proposed UN inquiry /investigation to help Ban ki Moon to vindicate to the world that they fought a just war against the most ruthless terrorist organisation with all their war crimes , human rights abuses and other crimes against humanity, as made out, have on the other hand, now desperately succeeded in convincing the right thinking sections of the world that the Tamil people had to resist the actions of a ruthless terrorist State and had to perish in the process. The militants rightly or wrongly believed that terrorism under the circumstances had to be met with terrorism. Political analysts within the international community would be confused as to who the protagonist and the antagonist in this episode are.

On the basis of the much flogged and now an archaic western concept of sovereignty, often the refuge of tyrants to which State criminals and rogues like Suharto and Marcos clung to, the Sri Lankan media, political analysts, and intellectuals of the Sinhala polity have all been defending the government’s stand adducing all kinds of convoluted rationale and far-fetched excuses defending the Sri Lankan government’s stand in persistently refusing an inquiry. Sri Lanka is a signatory to the provisions of the relevant international law. The question is whether they alone have the God given right to commit war crimes and other similar crimes against humanity killing thousands of innocent Tamils and get away with impunity.

The recent march against the UN establishment in Colombo, the disbanding of police protection to the threatened UN staff, the behaviour of the Buddhist monks, Minister Weerawansa fasting unto death between short snacks, a quack administering saline to the “dying” minister for doing just what the doctor ordered and President Rajapakse offering him water to break the fast is a spectacle more comical and deceptive than the fasts unto death undertaken by Karunanidhi and Nedumaran of Tamil Nadu.

In reality, what the UN is now confronted with, is a facet of the reflection of the attitude of the Sinhala polity towards the Tamil people representing an unfortunate bitterness, fanned and harboured for more than 2000 years and released periodically expressed in frenzied pogroms, acts of discrimination and the denial of justice, thanks to the Mahavamsa a chronicle written by a Buddhist monk in the sixth century AD. Take the case of the police protection to the UN officials in Colombo being disbanded by the defence secretary at the request of the nationalist cabinet minister Weerawansa, who both effectively and effortlessly managed to make a clown of himself. If this was the plight of the UN officials, one can imagine the plight of the Tamil people whenever they faced the wrath of State sponsored race riots when the security forces were either participants or on lookers where the Tamil people stood absolutely no chance of any survival unless protected by the well meaning Sinhalese people.

Instead of welcoming the idea as the means of exposing the much talked about atrocities of the LTTE and their human rights abuses to justify the war as being part of the war against global terrorism, the Sri Lankan government has made it obvious as to why they should resist the UN inquiry and whom they are trying to protect.

Once again we are not asking Ban ki Moon and his team to do any favours to the Tamil people and their grievances but to go about their assignment with justice and fairness.

(The writer,editor of the Eelam Nation, an online journal)