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Terror
and error How many Amirthalingams, Sambandans, Thiruchelvams, Kadirgamars and the like, will it take for the West to stop this almost nauseating sermonising about the need to fight terrorism, and at the same time call for a peaceful settlement in Sri Lanka ? How many child soldiers will it take for the United Nations to get tough? The Western nations seem to take a soft stance on the LTTE under the assumption that it will push the rebels towards peace. In the context of the time-tested political dictum which says whatever a nation does, it does it in the furtherance of its national interest and whatever a politician does he does it for his self-interest, the approach of the West is nothing surprising. President Kumaratunga addressing the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday put the aspirations of the peace-loving and terror-abhorring Sri Lankans in the right perspective when she said, "The engagement of armed groups for peace should not be done at the expense of the capability for democratic governance of a sovereign state…. We must act together as a UN system to support and strengthen States that are addressing terrorist challenges comprehensively". However, experience shows that whatever Sri Lanka, which has been at the receiving end of terrorism for the past 20 years, tells the world community, is taken with applause and forgotten thereafter. Our hopes were high when we saw in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks the international community putting its act together and vowing to make a concerted effort to end the menace of terrorism. No nation dared say then that "one's terrorist is another's freedom fighter". We thought we stood vindicated for having such a view long before the United States and the West realized that the question of terrorism could not be dealt on a case-by-case basis. The slain foreign minister Lakshman Kadirgamar used to stress in his meetings with his Western counterparts that a "terrorist is a terrorist is a terrorist" and terrorism could not be justified even if it was carried out for a just cause. Yet, in the aftermath of 9/11, the West went to war while we went to talk peace with terrorists. They hailed our peace initiative but we were given no chance to stay out of their war because the warning was "either you are with us or you are with the terrorists". Today, once again we are in a situation where terrorism is graded and treated accordingly. There are degrees of terrorism, it seems, according to the West's interpretation. They want us to join in the global war against terrorism, but what they really mean is that they want our help in the global war against Al-Qaeda. All the good work being done by the UN Working Group headed by Sri Lanka's veteran diplomat Rohan Perera, whether it is done by the Al-Qaeda types or by the LTTE is rendered useless when countries take different approaches to terrorism. Norway, for instance, is breaking its back prevailing upon EU member-states to prevent the LTTE from being declared a terrorist organisation. The move may have been made with the intention of offering one more carrot to the LTTE and propping up Sri Lanka's tottering peace process. But it was at the same time a damning indictment of the duplicity that shrouds the issue of terrorism. The end result is the world summit's final declaration will be nothing but a set of words that talk much - like the UN itself - but do not lead to much action on the issue of terrorism. It won't take an international relations expert to say that the Western world is largely concerned with the type of terrorism that terrorises them. This is shamelessly evident when the 191 members of the UN failed to arrive at a consensus on the definition of terrorism in drafting the final declaration of the world summit. Britain, for its part, came out with a Security Council resolution that called for a ban on incitement to terrorism. Though the resolution and the proposed domestic anti-terror legislation even at the cost of civil liberties appear to be a knee-jerk reaction to the July 7 London terror attacks, they are welcome moves. But the question is whether these laws will be applied selectively or in general. Experience shows that Britain was largely concerned about only two types of terrorism - the IRA type and the Al-Qaeda type. With the IRA terrorism coming to an end, it is only the Al-Qaeda that it feels it should be concerned about. As for the LTTE, its propaganda and fund-raising activities, Britain seems to take a more sympathetic view. What more proof is needed than Britain's soft-pedalling of the recent case of pro-LTTE TRO being allowed to carry on its fund-raising activities under a different name after it was blacklisted? It appears that the question of terrorism is not only mired in a problem over definition but also in duplicity and hypocrisy. |
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