Insensitive acts that blacken our already tarred image

By Neville de Silva

They must be incredibly naïve or supremely confident that whatever the world thinks about them makes not an iota of a difference. How else does one account for the insensitive if not unpardonable happenings in Colombo early on Thursday morning. Those who sanctioned this exercise and others who conducted it probably did not anticipate that the news media would splash it across the world.

So media from Azerbaijan to the United States, Sri Lanka has now been portrayed as the latest ethnic cleanser, a charge which we had levelled at the LTTE for cleansing the north of thousands of Muslims over 10 years ago.

Were we so puerile that we did not anticipate this? Or is it simply that we could not care less what the world thought of us.
Soon this will become, if it is not so already, a cause celebre for the media and human rights activists who have their knife into Sri Lanka and this government in particular.

Had they even a superficial understanding of the world around them, they would have been more wary of acting when the spotlight has just fallen and is about to fall again, on Sri Lanka. Just last week we squeaked through the European Parliament’s Development Committee hearings still standing (but not entirely unscathed) despite the BBC Sinhala Service’s one-sided reportage which was another instance of poor journalism it has become identified with in recent years.

Now when Sri Lanka is due to figure again at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva this week, this government, true to form, provides the fodder for critics to lovingly chew on. The UNHRC might now be packed with like-minded people who will possibly gloss over the recent developments and once more Sri Lanka might escape with a few battle wounds to show for it.

But the world will not forget. The so-called advisers (and they are as many as ministers) this government depends upon seem not to realise that the world is moving surely away from state actors to non-state actors, that donor countries are increasingly funding civil society organisations both at home and abroad to take the slack from governments and become the voice of society in order to strengthen calls for good governance.

Our advisers do not seem to realise the significance of this power shift and believe that if they are castigated by civil society organisations instead of foreign governments, they have passed the litmus test of good and acceptable governance. Was it pure coincidence that having emerged from the European Parliament Committee hearing with tolerable bruises and “collateral damage”, government agencies acted so quickly thereafter as they did in the early hours of Thursday?

I was as usual doing to my daily shopping that morning when I was approached by a Sri Lankan Tamil shop assistant at my regular supermarket. He asked me whether I had heard that Tamil residents in Colombo had been rounded up by the security forces and transported in buses out of the city.

I had read of it earlier that morning in BBC and other media reports out of Colombo. “How can the government be so stupid?” he asked. That was not a difficult question to answer. The next one was. This young man is hoping to go on holiday to Colombo in the summer as he does now and then. He uses Colombo as his base when he goes to Sri Lanka and then travels around.

How can I go now and be sure I’ll be safe there, he asked. That I could not answer. Who could give such an assurance even though I know that he is a normal young Tamil man with no political affiliations who wants to make something of his life here but still hankers after his home country and enjoys a week or two during a journey into the past.

One does not need an elastic imagination to see in the mind’s eye how this particular act in theatre noir will be played out in the LTTE, Tamil and other media. We need to remember that though we might have escaped the European Parliamentary hearing and will probably do so officially at the UNHRC session, that will not end the microscopic scrutiny Sri Lanka will be under in the coming months and years.

The European nations singly and collectively will continue to be concerned at what happens in the country. However tenuous the analogy might be, Europe has not forgotten, because history and modern governmental actions keep reminding their peoples, how the Jews were transported to concentration camps and death by Hitler’s Nazi troops.

The European Human Rights Convention of 1950 was Western Europe’s reaction to the kind of abuse, inhuman and degrading treatment that European Jews and some other groups suffered under Hitler’s ethnic cleansing. So anything that savours of similar treatment will immediately revive memories of that dreaded era in Europe’s history. If it does not, propagandists will make sure that Europe is reminded of it.

Moreover this forcible movement of Tamils from Colombo happened while Japanese special envoy Yasushi Akashi was in the country. Even if it escaped his attention the Japanese embassy and others would have enlightened him. This is what makes it so difficult to understand the action of the police. One does not, of course, expect the police to appreciate global happenings or timetables. That is why there are advisers, and a plethora of them from what one hears. Were those of them who are supposed to keep their eyes open and advise the president unaware the police were going to move and what was happening in the world outside?

Undoubtedly it will be argued – and one would be hard put to deny it – that there are LTTE cadres who have moved into Colombo and its suburbs or moles planted years earlier awaiting orders to create mayhem among civilians. Admittedly security precautions need to be taken because it is the prime duty of a state to protect its citizens. News reports indicate some 370 men and women were moved out back to the north-east. Is it being suggested that all of them were suspect of belonging to the LTTE or had LTTE connections?

Is it then suggested that the police questioned all of them meticulously and none of them had an explanation that passed muster? A senior Colombo police officer is quoted by Reuters as saying “they have been requested to leave and told they had better get back to their own villages.” That would seem to suggest they were politely asked to leave. But most reports suggest otherwise. Recently I read government spokesmen denying charges of discrimination and telling the world that 54 % of Tamils lived outside LTTE controlled areas and among other ethnic groups, mainly the Sinhala people.

It has also been said in another context that 39% of the population of Colombo are Tamils. But having presented that proudly as evidence of Sinhala-Tamil amity, we are now creating a climate of fear where Tamils who do not wish to live under the LTTE or in the Jaffna peninsula or other conflict zones have virtually nowhere to go but back to the areas they left.

However justified the security services might be in rooting out potential terrorists, it would be difficult to convince the world that there is more to this act than that. Here in the UK, security services are searching for jihadists, foreign or home grown. But they would never dare move large group of Muslims out of London because they cannot explain their presence in the city.