| by Pearl Thevanayagam
(March 22, 2013, London Sri Lanka Guardian) A letter from the US to Sri Lanka:
“Tch, tch, you naughty boy Sri Lanka, those pesky Tamils are braying for your blood. We provided you with weapons to eradicate Tamil terrorists and so did UK, India, Pakistan, China and Russia among others. Yet, you could not keep your big gob shut. You went on bleating that no civilians were killed in the last throes of war. Some 40,000 innocent civilians (conservative estimate) were killed by your forces.
Lying should be done in a manner so you do not get caught with your pants down. Those snoopy Channel 4 media and Human Rights NGOs showed tangible evidence that you tortured and killed surrendering civilians with White Flags, raped and plundered homes of fleeing civilians. You cooped up survivors in detention camps, sent youth to rehabilitation camps, forced them to give up their allegiance to Tamil Tigers and ordered them to keep shtum about wanting a separate state.
You murdered and abducted journalists and as a result the surviving war reporters fled to the West and started providing eye-witness accounts of mass murders in Wanni. You should have known these hacks cannot keep their mouths shut for toffee.
Then you set up a farcical commission called the LLRC (Lessons Learn and Reconciliation Commission) modelled on South Africa’s TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) and gathered evidence from anyone but victims and witnesses to the war. Now you want grace period until 2017 to fulfil recommendations made by the LLRC.
We wanted you to show some diplomacy but you sent in jokers to the UNHRC. How long can we mollycoddle you? You brought this onto yourselves.
We diluted the draft resolution to appease India. India sheds no tears for Sri Lanka. It is just like us. It will sell arms and diplomacy to anyone who bids highest. After all, did we not emerge as a super-power against British Empire and we are just a few centuries old.
Otherwise, who knows, we will end up like old blighty with only history to call it a ‘has been’ an empire.
Ok; ok. So we managed to show the world we care about human rights and UNHRC passed the resolution with more countries voting for it against your abysmal record on human rights than last year. Now don’t come on to us and start all that nonsense about our invasion into Iraq, Afghanistan and meddling into Middle-East Affairs.
Those Bedouins needed to be taught a lesson and we should make sure Uncle Sam looks after its populace without depleting its oil reserves in Texas and North America. They are for our future generation. We need all the oil we can get and the Bedouins can give up their limousines, get on their camels once more and ride off into the sunset like they did in the 1930s before oil was discovered in the deserts.
Don’t get us wrong. We are colour-blind and what more proof there is than our electing Barack Obama as President. True, he is just a puppet of the Bush administration be he Democrat or otherwise; but he is such a law abiding citizen who will not question Bush policy. He is but a born-again Republican Black and just a figurehead who would be etched in Mt. Rushmore as the first Black President of USA. Power to the Blacks.
One piece of consolation is this resolution too will blow over. Your highways, tin-pot airports, golf courses and casinos generously funded by the Chinese should bring in more tourism revenue. Just look at all those Chinese, Russian and Thai damsels descending on your beautiful isle like a flock of flamingos to appease your politicians’ sexual proclivities and play host to visiting VIPs.
If you played your cards right and pretended to develop the war-ravaged Wanni, North and East, your horrendous war crimes could be shelved for another year.
But watch out for those Tamils abroad. They are made of sterner stuff than you think and memories of the war are bound to remain raw as long as you continue to run detention camps and Sinhalify names of places which had been Tamil areas for centuries. Then you have those pesky international human rights advocates. So do not rest easy and lie on your laurels or lotuses. You must take credit for being one of the most violent nations despite Lord Buddha’s preaching of non-violence. You even get the Buddhist monks to bless your warriors to go and kill at will. Now they are pitting against Muslims from the unfounded fear they might outnumber your Sinhalese as majority. What paranoia.
Hague has good facilities for your President and his cohorts. Charles Taylor of Liberia is there among others to keep you company. No-one is indispensable. We nurtured Taylor as much as Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden. But when they turned against us we sent our boys to assassinate them. They were proving to be more meddlesome and dictatorial despite our benevolence.
Now that should send a warning signal to your President. Scoffing at our resolution and denying war crimes were committed are not helping this regime of yours. Then most recently you hauled up the Chief Justice for not pandering to your whims. The ICJ (International Commission for Jurists) is calling on you to show cause for her summary dismissal from her post.
Hell, the accusations against your President’s governance makes Idi Amin a saint and Bin Laden a minor offender although we believe the Twin Towers demolishing was masterminded by him with the connivance of CIA which gave him the ammo to do so.
The list is endless. UNHRC with that intrepid champion of human rights as its head, Ms Navi Pillai, is not someone you toy with. She is going nowhere and investigating war crimes is topmost on her agenda. She will move heaven and earth to mete out punishment and justice. Take it or leave it at your own peril.”
(The writer has been a journalist for 23 years and worked at Weekend, The Daily News, Sunday Leader and Weekend Express in Sri Lanka as sub-editor, news reporter and news editor. She was Colombo Correspondent for Times of India and has contributed to Wall Street Journal; Washington Bureau, where she was on work experience from The Graduate School of Journalism, UC Berkeley, California. Currently residing in UK she is also co-founder of EJN (Exiled Journalists Network) UK in 2005 the membership of which is 200 from 40 countries. She can be reached at pearltheva@hotmail.com)
 A letter from the US to Sri Lanka: “Tch, tch, you naughty b...){kind=link}