Thoughts from London

Co-chairs: The latest game in town
How many chairs make up the co-chairs? This is not a question in New Math nor Tara de Mel’s version of musical chairs with heads of schools. The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind- that is the wind blowing from the western world.

If I remember it started with the Norwegians grabbing the centre chair during the days when Professor G.L. Peiris roamed the world holding hands with Anton Balasingham who some called a doctor but was actually a rate veda.

Anyway there was this big semantic debate like in Socratic days between the professor and Kadirgamar on whether the Norwegians were “mediators” or “facilitators”. During this the Vikings being what they are, quietly pushed everybody off the main chair and sat themselves on it.
Whenever the much-loved game of cricket is played in our paradise isle with much gusto, raucous shouts of “hora umpire” are often heard. That is when the man who is supposed to control the game with magisterial portentousness takes sides, deliberately or otherwise.

This phrase is known to every Sri Lankan cricket lover. Doubtless those in the Indian subcontinent have other ways of dealing with biased umpires.
In the eyes of most Sri Lankans- except those local NGOs that are beneficiaries of Norwegian largesse in exchange for singing frequent hosannas to Oslo- the mediator/facilitator is another “hora umpire” foisted on us, like Australian umpire Darrel Hair a decade or so ago.

While our great peacemakers were yapping away hoping the Tigers would turn tail and come to the negotiating table with a more comforting tale to soothe our savage breast, they were taking the professor and his leader for a long ride.

Deluding themselves over their own intellectual power, the then peacemakers apparently called for chairs from Tokyo like Minister Mangala Samaraweera ( if media reports are to be believed) who finds that chairs from Japan are more suited to his sensitive posterior than those made in Moratuwa.

So entered Japan’s special envoy Akashi who started rushing around as though he was trying to get a permanent seat in the Security Council. While Akashi is trying to bring us peace, the land of the rising sun has still not signed a post-war peace treaty with Russia, the successor to the Soviet Union.

Nor have they extended a sincere and definite apology to the Chinese for the atrocities committed before and during the war- the massacre of some 300,000 Chinese in Nanjing, for instance.

So if special envoy Akashi pays homage to the Tigers in air-conditioned comfort in the wilds of Kilinochchii , it is perhaps because he is among kindred spirits. If he cannot always pay homage at Japan’s memorial to its war dead where convicted war criminals too are laid to rest, why he now has an equally exhilarating place.

Japan claimed a place at the main table possibly because Tokyo did not wish to leave it all to Norway and the European community at a time when it is contemplating a wider role on the international stage.

That left the sole super-power out of the game. Not for long though. The Ranil Wickremesinghe government with its subservience to the West thought by inviting more involvement by the international community in our imbroglio, he would build an international a “safety net” against the Tigers.So while Akashi was preparing for the great Tokyo meeting where the moola for peace was to be dangled as bait, Washington also decided to make its play.

Thus came the Spring-meeting in Washington, a precursor to Tokyo to which the Tigers were not invitedThe Tigers growled, bared their teeth and retired to their lair from whence they have not stepped out except to travel abroad courtesy the UNP’s travel service assured by the ceasefire or to violate that agreement through violence including numerous killings.
The trouble is that the centre stage is virtually empty. There are four chairs, an empty table and nobody to talk to. The main characters are not talking and the stagehands are shouting orders.

So what do the four co-chairs do? They play musical chairs taking turns to issue statements and sundry other threats that are patently one-sided.
The great international safety net has a big hole in the middle in the perception of many Sri Lankans who are tired of the four co-chairs behaving like the three proverbial monkeys.

Now it was Washington’s turn to issue a statement. I was yet to read it when I received an email from an eminent person who shall remain unnamed except to say that he is meticulous about the correct and logical use of language.

He posed an interesting question. How could there be co-chairs to a process? How indeed! One could have any amount of chairs at a conference or a meeting. But could one logically have chairs to a process? That probably accounts for the mess we are in right now.

The four-power statement, among other things, appealed to the government to “disarm all groups opposed to the LTTE”, and to “guarantee security to unarmed LTTE cadres in the country’s northeast.”
So disarm those who are opposed to the LTTE and leave them at the mercy of Tiger killing squads. The original thinker of this surely deserves a Nobel Prize for unadulterated rubbish.

Washington’s appeal for security is indeed rich coming from the world’s mightiest military power that cannot even provide security to the people it claimed to liberate from the evil Saddam Hussein.

According to two respected independent groups that conducted a detailed survey and published here last week, at least 24,865 civilians have been killed up to March 19 this year. Of them 37% died at the hands of American or other coalition forces including the UK.

It is an obligation of an occupying force to provide and ensure the security of the civilians. That the US and UK have failed to do. But they expect Sri Lankan’s security forces to guarantee, not simply ensure, the security of LTTE cadres when they cannot do so in Iraq or Afghanistan.Perhaps the US embassy in Colombo that issued the statement would like us to run our own Guantanamo Bay or Abu Graib where all those opposed to the LTTE could be held and tortured until they pledge undying (if a pun might be permitted) loyalty to the Wanni Nayake.

Strange it is not that the Sri Lanka government must guarantee the safety of LTTE cadres but no such guarantee is demanded from the LTTE that it will eschew violence completely and not violate the ceasefire agreement as it has done some 3000 times, even ccording to the Monitoring Mission which Sri Lankans don’t trust to tell the truth.

Why is there no demand that the Tigers give free access to an Observer Mission to visit the sites where the LTTE is said to have airstrips?
Are these not the same big powers that urged the government to sign the P-TOMS and are now saying they cannot contribute the funds they promised. If their domestic law does not permit them to do so, why in heaven’s name did they press ahead with it and create so much political division. Or was that the real intention?

If they could pee on their own TOMS why should not the Sri Lankan people some of whom are doing just that by addressing the courts on it.
Cinemagoers of an earlier vintage might remember the comic characters the Three Stooges. It seems we have to deal with four stooges.

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