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Preachers ignore their own prayer books
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Ever since the LTTE seemed headed for military defeat despite the grandiose claims of some foreign military experts of Tiger invincibility, Western powers led by the United States, the UK keeping pace at its master’s feet, have been trying to burn Sri Lanka at the stake.
Any occasion seemed good enough and any international platform worthy to castigate Sri Lanka for alleged war crimes, violations of international law and the absence of credible inquiry and accountability.
CIA torture: Does the US have moral authority to champion human rights?
Had so much wood pulp not gone to record the utmost condemnation of this country for not having observed laws governing war and human rights conventions, we might have saved enough forests to delay climate change by a few years at least.
I have heard some in the House of Commons, House of Lords, international human rights bodies and that notorious Channel 4 which has just been reported by a senior UK judge to the attorney-general for possible contempt, pontificate on Sri Lanka’s sins, that one had perforce to believe they all had clean hands and were endowed with angelic qualities.
But reading portions of the US Senate report on the disgraceful conduct of the CIA — and its pet poodle the UK — in their treatment and torture of terrorist suspects and innocents, one wonders whether all the perfumes of Arabia will sweeten their tainted hands.
The Shakespearean reference to Arabia is not without relevance today. Only the other day Britain’s Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond said the UK would establish a base in Bahrain thus marking its presence east of Suez once more since the end of empire.
It has been publicly suspected for decades and actually documented in books and other writings, that the CIA had engaged in nefarious activities including direct involvement in coups or engineering them, toppling democratic governments, torture, covert wars, arming and training insurgents and assorted skullduggery that would make what Sri Lanka is alleged to have done seem like the work of boy scouts.
The British cannot pretend to be clean as the Senate Committee’s summary report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Programme does implicate the UK which, as Seumas Milne, a respected Guardian journalist described it “has been up to its neck in the CIA’s savagery, colluding in kidnapping and torture from Bagram to Guantanamo while dishing out its own in Iraq and Afghanistan.’
Much more of Britain’s disgraceful and inhuman treatment of suspects and prisoners would have been exposed had sections of the report not been redacted, probably at the request of British authorities just as they denied the Chilcott inquiry on Britain’s role in the Iraq war, reports of the communications between then prime minister Tony Blair and US President George Bush in the lead up to the war.
What is so galling is that the US-UK duo that led the charge against Sri Lanka at the UN Human Rights Council calling for independent investigations into Sri Lanka’s conduct of the war in the guise of global sentinels of civilised conduct and international behaviour, are the very Western powers that need to be put in the dock and prosecuted for violating a number of international conventions.
We have been aware that since Washington launched its war on terror that it has engaged in despicable activities such as torture in the Abu Ghraib detention centre in Iraq and at the special detention centre in Guantanamo Bay.
There are also several reports, including investigations by Swiss Senator Dick Marty for the Council of Europe and by Italian MEP Claudio Fava for the European Parliament that established without any doubt the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” whereby terrorism suspects were held in secret detention centres in some European countries where the detainees were tortured and secretly flown from one jurisdiction to another to avoid legal action.
Two of the European countries named in the reports dated 2005 and 2007 are Poland and Romania, who, if I remember correctly, voted in favour of the US sponsored resolution against Sri Lanka.
They are among the shameless nations that parade before the world as the greatest protectors of humanity when their own records, often hidden from their own people, should guarantee them permanent places alongside Hades.
Settle the debate once and for all
The Senate Committee’s report which was completed in 2012 and withheld from public scrutiny all this time and only recently released, that too in heavily censored form, still reports the cruel and inhuman treatment meted out to those who are unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of the CIA and the slaves from other western and central European countries who abide by the dictates of the US torturers for a few dollars more.
It is not necessary to mention here some of the methods used by the CIA to extract information which the Americans think these detainees have. It would be repulsive to do so.
Instead one might quote the words of the Senate Committee chairman Dianne Feinstein who said back in 2012 that the report would “settle the debate once and for all over whether our nation should ever employ coercive interrogation techniques such as those detailed in the report.”
Both the European Convention on Human Rights (Art. 3) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Art. 7) forbid the use of torture in any circumstance. This article forbidding the use of torture is absolute.
Then there is the 1987 UN Convention Against Torture which the US, the main culprit in this case, ratified in 1994.
Yet the US-led western powers whose history of violations of international law and human rights over the years would be as long as the Missisippi itself, is hardly in any position to lecture others and wave the red card.
How American diplomats, not to mention those of colluding nations such as the UK, could appear in public as though nothing has happened to blacken even further the disgraceful history of their countries, must mean they have hides as tough as those of bison.
But let me add this. At least there are functioning institutions powerful enough not to be cowed into submission by presidential fiats or the coercive ways of intelligence agencies.
Will Sri Lanka ever have such institutions with strong provisions of oversight and to make any perpetrators of such degrading and inhuman treatment accountable for their actions?