Editorial

21st May 2000

The new recipe

Karl Inderfurth, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State in charge of South Asia, has patted our own big brother to the North and said, "India has a legitimate interest in Sri Lankan affairs and the United States respects that.'' Mr Inderfurth told an Indian national newspaper that "the United States believes that India is the key outside power in the ongoing Sri Lankan conflict and that anything to be done by the international community must be done very much with India.''

Of course the United States is studiously advancing the concepts of Pax Americana and the New World Order, and Mr Inderfurth's statement is nothing very earthshaking in that light.

But, the emerging geopolitical consensus among the Western powers was articulated at the UN General Assembly sessions last year, and the new dispensation as spelt out here, will not accord much respect to age-old concepts such as sovereignty, which will have to move over for other countervailing notions such as human rights. This is the new millennium's concept of invasion with a human face.

It's another way of saying that any nation will be able to bulldoze itself and physically violate the borders of another, as long as an excuse may be found in terms of "human rights violations.''

That's the new Western approach towards building a new world, and India, because it is a big power (at least geographically and in terms of markets) is supportive of this new world order, particularly as it is toadying up these days to the United States for economically dictated reasons.

So India is very much a party to the initiative of the big powers, to carve out the world for themselves with a view to sharing the spoils.

Observing the developments in the last few weeks, an astute estimation would be that there is now a not so subtle attempt to drag Sri Lanka towards the vortex of this New World Order. Previous sovereign states which have been consumed by its diktat have included Iraq, Bosnia and more recently Sierra Leone, which have all been molested by the big powers who have stepped-in, in the wake of some internal situation real or imagined, while others, the darlings of these superpowers, be they oil-rich kingdoms or anti-communist banana republics have escaped their eagle eyes and bleeding hearts.

Look at the situation in Sri Lanka, if any edification is needed. The LTTE has probably killed, or got killed more Tamil civilians than anybody else, but India, despite its pretense of allegiance to the Tamils of Tamil Nadu state, prefers that Sri Lanka "stew in its own juice. ''

The Brahmins of the South bloc, the Ministry of External Affairs bureaucracy in India think they are clever in advancing these types of unprincipled coercive and ulterior foreign policy tactics, but in fact, the South bloc foreign policy has, of recent times, been a pile up of catastrophes.

All India's neighbours in the recent past have at one time or the other hated the Ugly Indian big brother in their midst.

As for Sri Lanka, the US has now peremptorily made it known that whatever the international community decides must be with India's consent, and the European Community - that emerging big brother - has recommended Norwegian mediation as Norway is one of theirs. And all this, while the United Nations wants to establish refugee camps here, in the event of a civilian backlash against Tamils!

It is in this backdrop of events that the people of Sri Lanka need to be conscious of the hidden foreign hands, who once ruled the waves and waived the rules harbouring the sadly mistaken notion that Sri Lanka is some sort of football among nations deserving to be kicked around and cowed and to relive their nostalgic past.

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