by Rajasingham Jayadevan
‘Our guns were not fired at a single civilian’
‘Our troops went to the battlefront carrying a gun in one hand, the Human Rights Charter in the other’
Wow! Wow!! Wow!!!
What impudence!
(May 29, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) We Tamils in Sri Lanka and in the Diaspora must continue to sing, dance and celebrate if this is how the criminal war was conducted by the President and how our brethrens were spared in the war by his forces. We should have hugged each other, kissed and danced in the streets all over the world for the wonderful work done by the leader of the armed forces for carrying out such a humane war.
This is what Adolph Hitler said before the universal Human Rights Charter was adopted after the end of the Second World War.
‘People have been killed only when they could not achieve their aim in other ways ... there is a broadened strategy, with intellectual weapons ... why should I demoralize the enemy by military means if I can do so better and more cheaply in other ways?’
‘Whatever goal, man has reached is due to his originality plus his brutality’
‘The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.’
‘Who says I am not under the special protection of God?’
President Mahinda Rajapakse is repeatedly asserting that his soldiers fought the Tigers ‘holding the Human Rights Charter in one hand’ and that they did not kill a single civilian. If the soldiers fought the battle with one hand tied behind the back respecting the fundamentals of human rights when firing their bullets and rockets, why there is so much evidence based international outcry which the President is determinedly resisting?
If what the President saying is true, why there is opposition to an independent investigation. Let an independent international investigation tell us, what the President saying is truth and nothing but the truth. Let them assert that the soldiers were holding the Human Rights Charter in one hand and that they did not kill a single civilian.
Does the President know the basics of the Human Rights Charter, when he is referring to it in his speeches? A link is provided to the UN’s Human Rights Charter www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml that Sri Lanka has subscribed to as a member state of the United Nations.
Since the President is ardently and arrogantly portraying a humane image of the armed forces that carried out the brutal war to vanquish the LTTE by killing and bulldozing the Tamil civilian population, we need to understand his psyche as the head of the armed forces who has to ultimately take the responsibility for the crimes committed by his subordinates down the line to the gun wielding soldiers.
Unfortunately, the brutal war was carried out as a family effort of Rajapakse & Co., and the time will only tell what direction the snail paced process of the UN effort will lead to the perpetrators of war crimes being rewarded with due justice.
The politics in Sri Lanka is such that President Rajapakse too has to keep up the southern momentum of defeating the Tamils by rallying on the historical warfare’s between the communities. The slogan of LTTE and Tamil Tigers are just sidetracks used to hide the historical animosities between the communities.
Sadly, President Rajapakse failed to show the compassion even the Sinhala King Dutugemunu showed when he slain the Tamil king Ellalan in a face to face battle. Criminality in the warfare of the President Rajapakse will be even regretted, if King Dutugemunu is reborn on this earth again.
It is the same President who claims to be the leader of all the communities and said that ‘our guns were not fired at a single civilian’ to his Sinhala support base and to subdue the international pressure. If a single civilian was not killed, how come Tamil victims living under the regimentation of the state forces and government backed paramilitaries in the north and east flocked to the much discredited Lesson Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) to give evidence about deaths and destructions? Are the people or the head of the armed forces telling the truth?
Soldiers are soldiers and guns are guns with the triggers. When racial hatred and tensions are added to the war effort, it turns into trigger happy unjust warfare. This is what happened since 1983 that ended with the sheer brutality in 2009.
The president, in his Hero’s Day speech said ‘Terrorism in a country begins with shooting down the truth’. But he failed to say the truth of ‘who is the mother of terrorism’ in Sri Lanka and how state terrorism is now shooting down the very truth of the war that is being destroyed systematically by the state machinery.
The very president who headed the warfare against the so-called terrorism conducted the war in a manner to propagate his own version of the truth to the world. Truth became the first victim of his war effort like any other wars but disgracefully a diabolical fib machine in Sri Lanka.
Hindu poojas, Buddhist pinkamas, dalsalas and large kiribath cutting ceremonies will not barricade the truth finally nailing the criminals.
Wars are always unjust and in this, what happened in Sri Lanka is burial of truth and nothing of consequence and strenuous efforts are being made to give a holy image of pious war being fought in the battle front.
The President lost all his senses when he disembarked from the plane in the Colombo airport on his return from Libya soon after the war ended. He kneeled on the tarmac and prayed the ground over the brutal victory that he headed. The person who is privy to the brutality perpetrated against the Tamils civilians, did not have any remorse for the civilian victims and failed to say a word of ‘sorry’ to the innocent victims. He is continuing to celebrate his brutal victory annually without any feelings for the thousands of Tamil civilians killed.
What Hitler said: ‘the victor will never be asked if he told the truth’ has to be merited in the coming days, weeks, months and years as Hitler’s writ was in the bygone era and even one of those who committed war crimes under his command is sentenced to five years imprisonment by the War Crimes Tribunal at the age of 91 just a week ago.
The LTTE is the baby of the failures of Sri Lanka and the very same failures are still accumulating systematically with the calculated effort of the state machinery. The war weary Tamil civilian in the island has become the fodders of the victor and its agents and the wider Tamil Diaspora has become the new recipe of LTTE for the government to forward its marginalisation march against the Tamils.
The President by his comments and conduct has created the room for international investigations and it is expected due process will follow on its inhuman conduct.
Desperate person will do desperate things. The post war conduct of the government is an act of sheer desperation of the government and its agents who are running around the world to win sympathy to prevent the horror reaching the War Crimes Tribunal.
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