Columns

As Lanka stands indicted before the international court of inquisition, focus your gaze on one glaring example of the blatant double standards adopted by the ‘bleeding heart’ sympathisers and sponsors of terrorism. A great deal of hue and cry was raised, without an iota of proof, by our accusers that when Tamil terrorists, facing abject defeat, surrendered in the heat of battle to Government Forces during the last days of the war, they were allegedly shot. The outcry still persists.

But was one voice of concern raised by these same accusers, was even one phony tear shed to at least appear impartial, when more than 600 Sinhalese policemen in the Eastern Provincce, on the orders of President Premadasa who was given the assurance by international mediators that no harm will befall them, laid down their weapons and, with white flags raised,

LTTE terrorism: The scene of destruction after the blast at the Dalada Maligawa in January 1998

surrendered to the Tamil terrorists on June 11th, 1990 and were slaughtered. They were first seperated from the Tamil police officers, then taken to the jungles of Trincomaleee, forced to kneel down and, with their arms tied behind their backs, shot dead, one by one, in a premeditated, cold blooded carnage that shocked the nation but scarce moved the world to mourn or condemn.

That was the tragic result, the unforgivable folly of trusting the barbarous Tamil terrorists and their international mentors masquerading as mediators. The LTTE’s delegation which was in Colombo for peace talks during this massacre and at whose behest this order to surrender was given by the Lankan President, urged as he was by the international mediators to do so as a unilateral gesture of trust and goodwill, were thereafter taken by the Government from the Cololmno Hilton where they were living it up and given safe escort back to their northern lair, signed sealed and delivered without even a pinch in retaliation.
Lankan Government and her people have been denounced as racists, even charged with genocide during the long drawn war waged against us by a group of terrorists who commandeered to themselves the role of being the sole voice of the Tamil people by systematically exterminating democratic Tamil leaders.

Our accusers have set in motion a concerted campaign of disinformation, of misinterpretation, of gross vilification with the singular aim of exiling Lanka from the League of Civilised Nations. The resilience of this nation has been tested to the last strand. Our patience extended to its utmost limits.

Yet, throughout the 30-year terrorist war, we did not crack; we did not flag or falter even whilst facing a continent of hate and abuse, with terror on our doorstep. We bore with fortitude the challenges hurled and emerged resurgent with a stronger national identity, which does not delineate racial divisions on the country’s canvas. Consider the record of atrocities committed against Lanka to the applause of a biased world.

When terrorist suicide bombers claimed the life of President Premadasa and an eye of President Kumaratunga, when the Temple of the Tooth which holds our greatest treasure the Sri Dalada was stormed, when the offshoot of the tree that gave shelter to the Buddha, the Sri Maha Bodhi was attacked, when Buddhist monks were massacred on the road in Aranthalawa, when Sinhala people, women and children included, living in border villagers were hacked mercilessly, when Muslims were driven at the point of the terrorist sword from the North, when hundreds of innocent civilians were killed in many bomb blasts in Colombo, when schools had to be closed, when offices were disrupted, when two Air Lanka planes were destroyed by explosives, when violence seeped into every nook and cranny and fear stalked the streets and stormed the hearts and minds of an entire populace, when a terror stricken nation was rendered comatose and indiscriminate violence fell upon all, neither did the Government, nor the Armed Forces nor the people go berserk and vent their frustrated fury in revenge upon the hapless Tamil community that lived throughout the war peaceably in each and every part of the island.

Instead the terrorists’ attacks and threats were met with a disciplined response which concentrated on identified terrorist targets with emphasis placed on minimising civilian casualty levels. Many times we sued for peace but received only the phony peace that Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain received from Hitler: a truce merely for the enemy to prepare for war. When the futility of peace had been vividly displayed by the terrorists on countless occasions, it became transparently clear that the final push must be made to end, once and for all, the ogre of terror. The peace loving citizens of Lanka, of all races, had come to the end of their tether.

That momentous decision was taken not to save the regime: But to save this Nation’s sovereignty; to prevent the dismemberment of Lanka. To free our people from the long night of deathly wails, to triumph accursed twilight’s grim fate, to wake to the dawn of peace, burnished with the lambent warming flame of a new sun’s shining hope.

As a result of that decision, today from the North’s Point Pedro to the South’s Dondra Head, the Lankan people, irrespective of race, live without fear, live in peace, live in harmony. Once more the famed Lankan smile lights their faces. We have discharged the first duty of any responsible Government: to maintain law and order; to safeguard the nation’s unitary, sovereign status. And today, sardonically, the world has put us in the pillory for it.

And what is our crime? Is it finally exercising the military option having exhausted all other possible avenues and ending a 30-year war of ruthless terror with the minimum of civilian casualties?

Even a just war, as the world’s superpowers have amply demonstrated in Iraq and Afghanistan, has its innocent civilian casualties.

Before you come to judgment, ponder what has been said. Consider the facts. Reflect upon the insidious motives of our accusers, the hypocritical, sinister stances they have taken, the sordid truth behind their facades of pristine purity and how they use Lanka as a convenient doormat to wipe their conscience free of the grime of remorse and soot of shame.

While Canada is still to conclude its inquiry which has taken over five years now over the atrocities commited against its own minority aboriginals under the Canadian Government ‘sponsored ‘Residential School’ policy and thus is still to receive any recommendations from its ‘Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Committee’, ‘morally righteous’ India has hardly even thought of establishing a commission to probe and recommend meaningful ways of ending the horrendous historically institutionalised discrimination of 160 million of her own people, the ‘slum dog’ Harijans.

Contrast this seeming inertia of these two nations, whose leaders are conspicuous by their absence at this week’s summit, glossing over and soft-pedaling the abject sufferings of their own discriminated and traumatised minorities, warding off world attention by turning the spotlight on the other nations, with the prompt action that Lanka has taken. One year after the war ended, a commission (LLRC) was appointed in May 2010, which issued an internationally approved comprehensive report exactly two years ago, containing 35 recommendations, some of which have already been implemented.

If the bone of Canadian and Indian contention is that lanka has delayed implementing all of it, then, it must be borne in mind that merely because a commission makes a series of recommendations it cannot be implemented in toto instantly. Each must be considered, the interests of the different communities that comprise the multial racial society of Lanka must be taken into account and the national interest must be satisfied before it can be given effect. We have not tarried like Canada whose feet remain bogged in one place or like India who hasn’t even moved a muscle.

Remember, too, as members of the Commonwealth of Nations, the ideals and purposes contained in its Charter. The biennial summits should not to be used as courtrooms where accusations are hurled, defences produced, adjudications made and sentences given. It is not a pillory of punishment. Not a rack of torture. Not an open pit, with members as spit jacks to oversee one of their own skewered Rotisserie style and spit roasted alive over a slow fire. Instead, it should be a conclave of cooperation, a tabernacle of understanding where ‘country specifics’ are bravely addressed, frankly discussed with sympathy and understanding; and solutions striven to be achieved through consensus and compromise. It must be the hand that offers succor, that proffers the sacrament of grace; not the hand that lashes the whip or spurs and feeds internecine feuds.

This salient qualities must be its raison d’être. Mere adulatory orations glorifying the Seven Commandments of the Commonwealth Charter will not suffice to ensure its survival. The precepts must be practised and ideals must be translated into action, if it is to achieve its declared aims, if it is to have a meaningful role to play on the world’s stage. It must be realised that the Commonwealth has no divine right to exist merely by being born British.

Or else, through the mist of its regal past, I can see its doomed future, can see its epitaph writ, can hear its death knell rung. If that be the case, if that be its chosen fate, then how apt it is that we are all gathered here today on the Ides of November, in the All Souls Month for the Dead, provided with the opportunity to not only participate in the twenty third summit of the Commonwealth but also to celebrate in advance the Requiem Mass for the repose of the Commonwealth soul of a Commonwealth of Nations that will soon be dead.”