My dear Alistair Burt,
I thought I must write to you even though I must confess I didn’t even know who you were just one week ago! After all, you are not among the famous British men we are familiar with like William Shakespeare or Winston Churchill-or more recently, Chris Tremlett-are you? And even your official position is that of being the Junior Minister of something isn’t it?
I suppose you became famous overnight here in Sri Lanka after that infamous video was aired on your Channel 4. I heard that you had told our government in the most stern tone possible that we ought to clean up our act and investigate these so called ‘war crimes’ allegations using what you call ‘thorough and independent means’.
And not satisfied with just that, you go on to set a deadline too! Do it by the end of this year, or else you British will make sure the matter is taken up at an international level, you say. And all because some television network broadcast a documentary!
Of course, you don’t really bother about the fact that this video contains footage supplied mostly by the Tigers-and that is acknowledged in the video itself. And the rest of it is just a series of images of torture, with some dialogue in Sinhalese to make it look authentic!
Quite apart from the issues over the video, Alistair, what makes you believe, you being only the Junior Minister of something-or to be more precise, the Parliamentary Undersecretary of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office –could demand that another country should do what you want it to do?
Well, to put this in a better perspective Alistair, how would you feel if our Deputy Minister of Land and Development, Siripala Gamlath demanded from Queen Elizabeth that she should withdraw the 9000 British troops stationed in Afghanistan who, we could argue, are engaged in helping the Americans to kill innocent civilians there?
Alistair, I think it is really time that you, your country and other countries that think like you should really come to terms with the fact that we, even though we are a small nation, have fought and won the battle against terrorism.
We do remember that your country, even in those dark days towards the end of war, didn’t quite like the idea of the war coming to an end. That is why your then Foreign Secretary David Miliband came knocking on our doorstep with his French counterpart to tell us to call off the war at the eleventh hour.
Had we taken his advice, there would still be bombs exploding on our streets and dozens of lives would have been lost daily. I do feel sorry for the poor chap though; I heard he was voted out of office and then lost the job in his party to his own brother!
If we try to be objective here, Alistair, what we did was to defeat the world’s most ruthless terrorist organisation. It was an organisation that pioneered the art of suicide bombing and the only terrorist organisation in the world that could boast of an air force! And yet we defeated them although at a cost of thousands of lives on both sides.
Then, why don’t you ever talk about the more than three hundred thousand civilians who were trapped in a stretch of land and kept there as a human shield by the Tigers, Alistair? They all saved their lives because of what the military did, didn’t they?
Now, if you were to sit in your armchair and start criticizing us while sipping the tea we send you, you should also criticize Osama being killed by the Americans when he could have been captured unarmed, and in somebody else’s country at that! Now you Brits were falling over each other to congratulate Obama on that weren’t you?
And if your country is such a stickler for human rights, Alistair, why did your then Prime Minister Tony Blair follow orders from his master, George Bush and send thousands of troops to Iraq on the pretext of looking for weapons of mass destruction there? All they did was kill Saddam and get control over that country’s oil and in the process of doing that, kill hundreds of thousands of civilians too. Maybe we should propose an ‘independent and thorough’ international inquiry for that as well!
So, let us stop this nonsense, Alistair. We have beaten terrorism in our backyard and we are proud of that because that is something that not even America has been able to achieve. You can call for your inquiries and set your deadlines but as they say in the movies, frankly me dear, we don’t give a damn!
Yours truly,
Punchi Putha
PS-And if you really want to talk about human rights violations, how about starting at the beginning and compensating us for a hundred and thirty three years of subjugation and colonial rule? And how about an ‘independent and thorough’ international inquiry into the lives lost at the ‘Wellasey kerella’?
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