Rock casts the first stone but is he without sin

By Neville de Silva

The days when nations could act with impunity and turn a Nelsonian eye on the rest of the world are long gone.

That is, unless, a country has a geo-strategic advantage or has a big and powerful patron that brooks no interference. North Korea, an economically impoverished country can act menacingly to keep even the United States at bay because it is possibly a nuclear power and is a potential threat to a region that is of geo-strategic importance to Washington.

What the US and UK did to Iraq cannot be replicated in North Korea without encountering dangers too serious to contemplate.

Myanmar, or Burma as it was once called, can continue to thumb its nose at the world not because it is powerful in its own right but because it has the political and diplomatic backing of China, a permanent member of the Security Council and a potential super power in the not too distant future.

‘Given the limited time he spent in the East, Allan Rock (above) seems to be accepting as reliable and credible what he has been told’

Israel acts with impunity and the European Union and the west only whimper because it basks in the giant shadow of Washington.

Nobody, not even the only super power today, wishes to challenge Beijing diplomatically over Myanmar. So Myanmar's military junta that has discarded with disdain the democratic verdict of its people continues to survive despite it being labelled a "pariah" state.

But Sri Lanka is not a potential nuclear power, nor does it have, like Myanmar or Israel, the backing of a major world power. Nor is it geographically strategic enough for world powers to fight over.

Lacking those attributes, it is doubly ludicrous, not to mention dangerous, for a vulnerable nation such as we are to think, as some politicians in Sri Lanka do, that she could ignore, if not reject, world opinion and not suffer the consequences of such foolhardiness.

Still this is precisely what Sri Lanka is doing, particularly at a time when it could ill afford to do so.

One of the strongest cards in the hands of the Sri Lanka state is that it had been clearly established by international organisations and human rights groups that the LTTE was, and still is, recruiting child soldiers into its military ranks.

This continuing recruitment by whatever means and despite undertakings given to the UN that it would desist from doing so, has served the Sri Lankan state well in the past in international forums and in pressing the international community to ostracise the LTTE.

Only the other day our ambassador to the US told an important Washington audience that the recruitment of under-aged children into LTTE ranks is one reason why the world should act against the Tamil Tigers.

This surely was one major cause for the European Union banning the LTTE. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child prohibits the use of children in war.

Sri Lanka has not only squandered this advantage but by leaving itself open to the kind of criticism recently levelled at her by Allan Rock, the UN special adviser, the Sri Lankan state is fast accumulating black marks against it like politicians who gather air miles by constantly taking wing.

Acts of impunity and violation of human rights, by omission or commission, are compounded in the perception of those at home and abroad, by the seeming lack of official deeds to enhance official promises of speedy action to contain the ethos of violence and fear.

Such inaction in the face of mounting criminality has had serious consequences at various levels.

It has certainly made the task of Sri Lanka's front line troops abroad, her diplomats, extremely difficult and certainly unenviable. While they are being called upon to brush up their act on behalf of the country, those who run the country make it impossible for them to do so since it is well nigh impossible to credibly defend the indefensible in the face of searching questions asked in host capitals.

They are being asked to storm the bastille. But in fact their task would be as futile as the charge of the light brigade. In the light of the Allan Rock report that had rocked us out of our complacency, our Europe-based diplomats are likely to face a torrid time when the Finland-led draft decision of the European Union is taken up at the November sessions of the UN Human Rights Council.
While the draft decision itself seems mild enough and was deferred for discussion, the EU is now likely to press for a debate on it and use the occasion to chastise Sri Lanka.

Without really stepping into the breach with serious damage control, the government has thought it fit to condemn sections of the media for what the presidential secretariat calls "many distorted media reports" on some of Rock's observations.

But how on earth is the public at home or abroad expected to independently judge whether these media reports were indeed distorted unless the secretariat actually names the reports and what the distortions are.

This intrinsic task is conveniently avoided. Is this because there were no distorted reports and it exists only in the minds of these officials? Surely this would be the question that any intelligent reader would ask.

Where is the evidence of distortion? Evidence is also the basic problem with the Allan Rock observations. Rock charges "certain elements of the government security forces" of "supporting and sometimes participating in the abductions and forced recruitment of children by the Karuna faction."

Now this is a very serious charge. Rock claims he has "strong and credible evidence." So far the public have not been shown an iota of this and until that is made publicly available one should surely suspend judgment.

But yet many, including international organisations and human rights activists, have already jumped to conclusions on the basis of the Rock allegations. Would they not have been demanding greater credence had the government made similar charges?

This is not to say that Allan Rock is wrong. But one would surely like to know more about his anecdotal evidence and "eye witness" reports as in the case of Ulf Henriccson's flawed last report that seriously tested his impartiality.

Given the limited time he spent in the East, Rock seems to be accepting as reliable and credible what he has been told. In short he is relying on hearsay and not subjected it to the scrutiny that is surely required before reaching such serious conclusions.

So far he has not provided any public evidence of that and objective judgement must await the report he will be submitting to the UN in January.

In the meantime he has done terrible damage to the image of Sri Lanka which will no doubt be exploited by those keen to discredit the country.

Yet one must be cautious of reports submitted by international groups and even the UN which sometimes have their own agendas and do not necessarily coincide with the truth.

Readers would be interested to know that last week experts cast serious doubts about the veracity of a UN report that claimed 720 (such astonishing accuracy!) fighters from Somalia's Islamic courts fought side by side with the Hizbollah during the recent war with Israel in Lebanon.

The report was compiled by the Monitoring Group on Somalia and was to be presented to the UN Security Council just as Rock's report would be. The report also claimed that Iran sought to buy uranium in exchange for weapons from the Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia. While such allegations would warm the hearts of western critics of Islam, analysts specialising on the Horn of Africa believe the report is exaggerated and is lacking in evidence.

A diplomatic source who studies Somalia is quoted in The Guardian newspaper as saying he feared the 80-paged report could become a "very useful propaganda tool" for western hawks. The newspaper also cites another expert Matt Bryden, a regional consultant of the International Crisis Group as expressing similar reservations and saying "We need to treat many of these claims with caution until we see firm evidence."

Claims in the UN report of Somalia's battlefield support for the Hizbollah are said to have raised widespread scepticism. "To me it's completely counter-intuitive," Ken Menkhaus, a professor of political science and Somalia expert at Davidson College, US is quoted by The Guardian as saying dismissively.

So far Allan Rock has provided no rock hard evidence for his claims. If and when he does, let us hope it is not conjecture based on anecdotal evidence or witness statements that have not been verified independently or cannot be.

Would such evidence stand in a Canadian court of law or any court where the rule of law prevails?