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A public with eyes and ears understandably focused on the climactic days of the parliamentary election might have missed media reports on the arrival of former British prime minister Tony Blair and his family for a Sri Lankan holiday.

Blair is alleged to have sexed up Iraq’s WMD claims. Pic courtesy The Sun, UK

So brief was the news item and so similar and bland that one might be excused for presuming that it came from an official source disseminating some threadbare facts so as to buy a few more days time before saying what else Mr. Blair might be doing during his two weeks sojourn besides lolling on a southern beach and savouring some lobster thermidor.

Not everybody seemed content with the bare bones of the story. The Colombo Gazette which reported the Blair arrival received many responses from readers several of whom made deprecatory remarks on Blair and the Iraq invasion, about war crimes and attempts in the UK and Hong Kong to make citizen’s arrests when Mr. Blair made public appearances. One reader quite pertinently asked “what is the hidden agenda”.

That is a question better addressed to the upper echelons of our foreign ministry. They have fobbed off questions for more than a month over the Blair visit and other generally innocuous queries. Meanwhile, not so subtle leaks in London were flowing down Hyde Park Gardens with hyperbolic declarations about some hidden legal prowess of our representative that had helped steer Tony Blair’s spouse Cherie Booth to spend a holiday in our resplendent isle.

Interestingly, Colombo Gazette went further than other media in reporting Blair’s arrival pointing to an opinion piece in the website of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation which talked of religious persecution in Sri Lanka and how the situation has improved in recent days but could well return to its earlier virulence.

Absorbed in what is surely an unusual election, the public might also have missed an unfortunate coincidence. Mr. Blair arrived here the day before a commemorative meeting at the Bandaranaike Centre on the 10th death anniversary of former foreign minister Lakshman Kadirgamar.

I say unfortunate because to speak of Kadirgamar in the same breath as Blair is to dishonour the dead. Kadirgamar would hardly have countenanced Blair’s use of a dodgy intelligence dossier which misled the British parliament to support an unprovoked assault on Iraq, a member-state of the UN. The Sri Lankan minister had a healthy respect for the United Nations and its principles though he was not beyond criticising it when needed.

Addressing the UN General Assembly in 1996 he quoted what S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike had said in the same hall 40 years earlier praising the United Nations as the “one machine available to mankind” to achieve peace, and friendship and collaboration. “That remains, Mr President, our view of the United Nations today,” he said.

So when the principles that should dictate the conduct of member-states are so brazenly violated by major powers because they have the means to do so, it surely scorched the conscience of those like Lakshman Kadirgamar who believed in the legitimacy and usefulness of this international organization in the preservation of world order.

Kadirgamar was particularly appreciative of the steps taken within and without the UN to strengthen human rights and of the international legal framework established for their protection. It was perhaps inevitable that as a lawyer he believed strongly in adherence to international law and international humanitarian law.

Kadirgamar could hardly have had any respect for leaders of major powers such as Blair and Bush who brushed aside the cardinal principle that only the Security Council could authorise the use of force which it had not done in this instance with an unequivocal resolution.

But Bush and Blair are two Bs in the same poisonous pod who acted with total disregard for international law in pursuit of some dangerous evangelism the consequences of which are felt in Iraq today where a sectarianism unknown in Saddam’s days is killing people even beyond Iraq’s frontiers.

Kadirgamar’s reaction to the illegal invasion of Iraq in which Blair was a central character, is perhaps best illustrated in the Prem Bhatia ( Indian editor and diplomat), memorial lecture he delivered in New Delhi in August 2003.

With the Economist magazine’s defence of the Iraq invasion as his point of reference Kadirgamar incisively demolished the legal argument presented by Britain’s Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith and the subsequent moral argument that Blair fell back on when the legal case was widely dismissed as having no basis in international law.

Kadirgamar argued that an objective analysis of the Iraqi invasion leads him to 10 conclusions. He listed the first as the absence of a specific authorisation of war by the Security Council. Thus the unilateral use of force by the US, UK and other states was illegal.

Since the case for war was heavily based on the existence in Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, the non-discovery of such weapons deprives the case of its moral justification, he said.

That was just five months after the invasion of Iraq. Since then much more evidence has accumulated regarding the political, social and economic havoc caused not only in Iraq but also elsewhere because of the spillover effect of western military action.
Still Tony Blair defends his decision and seems to have no regrets over it though critics of Blair appear to have multiplied exponentially with some calling for his arrest for war crimes.

Jeremy Corbyn, a front runner in the current leadership contest in the Labour Party that Blair once led, was asked by the BBC the other day whether Blair should be tried for war crimes. “If he’s committed a war crime, yes. Everybody who has committed a war crime should be,” Corbyn replied.

Criticism of Blair post-Iraq is growing not just in his old party whose leadership battle he is trying to influence but elsewhere too. His role as so-called Middle East peace envoy of the ‘Quartet’ is strongly criticised for producing little in the way of helping Palestine to build its economy and improve governance during the eight years he has been at it.

Blair’s biographer Sir Anthony Seldon looking at why Blair’s standing is so low in his own party and beyond, told the BBC just a week ago that the verdict of history on all prime ministers after they leave office remains highly disputed.
But he said few in modern times had been subject to just hostility as Blair.

“To a controversial premiership, which ended in May 2007, Tony Blair has added a still more controversial post-premiership”, said Seldon who called him the “most reviled prime minister since 1945.”He says it was Blair’s foreign policy that produced the biggest controversy of his premiership.

Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry report on Britain’s role in the Iraq war has still not been made public though the inquiry ended several years ago. Still media here are certain that the Chilcot report would be highly critical of Blair. If so it might well confirm Kadirgamar’s conviction that Britain’s case was legally flawed and morally unjustified.

But here in Sri Lanka if a glib Blair has an opportunity to discuss Kadirgamar’s stewardship as foreign minister he will try to find common cause with the slain man on their fight against terrorism. That alas will not absolve Blair of his act of aggression.