And yet, come ‘Geneva Time’ we hear these words a lot. Reconciliation. Truth.
Justice. Accountability. All articles of faith. For some. Like Tamil National Alliance Member of
Parliament M Sumanthiran. He wants all
of it. A few teaspoons of
reconciliation, a dash of truth, a sprinkling of justice, a tablespoon of
accountability and you’ve got it made. A
good speech that is, there’s no denying that.
But then again Sumanthiran doesn’s own any of these,
separately or together. Others are smart
too. They too pencil in a liberal dose of the said goodies for, as I said, they
make for good speeches. ‘Others’ meaning people like Ananthi Sasitharan, for
example.
They say certain towns are too small for two big
persons. Geneva is small and
small-minded though both Sumanthiran and Ananthi are it looks like they both
think the other is too big to share stage with.
So there was a spat.
Now this could have been because of upstaging-need, we don’t
know, and we really don’t know why Ananthi was upset with Sumanthiran. Perhaps
she felt a pinch on her ego. We
can guess why Sumanthiran was not in a spotlight sharing frame of mind
though. She has the potential, he might
have thought, of wrecking his speech; not on account of using the same
vocabulary but, in fact, for the very ‘problem’ of using the same terms.
See, Ananthi Sasitharan is not cool. Not for people who take human rights and
human wrongs seriously. Sumanthiran is
smart enough to know she’s a liability. There’s
a story she says and a story she would rather no one talks about. She will talk of a missing husband but will
not talk about the husband and what he did.
Sumanthiran is Colombo, Ananthi is not. Sumanthiran heard of depravation, Ananthi saw
it. Sumanthiran knew that Tamil
civilians were used as a human shield, Ananthi knows who the humans
shielded. Sumanthiran knows that those
Tamils held hostage by the LTTE tried to flee into areas controlled by the Sri
Lankan security forces, Ananthi knows who tried to stop them and how. For Sumanthiran it was nameless, faceless ‘Butcher-Boys’,
for Ananthi it was her ‘Butcher-Boy’.
Ananthi’s husband, Elilan, was one of the butcher-boys and
he played the part to perfection. He was
seen brandishing a sword with blood dripping from the blade, threatening those
who would flee with dismemberment. Some
had obviously defied the order and paid the price, the relevant exchange marked
on a blade-ledger with the blood of the defiant.
Sumanthiran knows that the West doesn’t like hearing about
blood, about the swipe of sword and the ‘un-limbing’ it produces. Sumanthiran probably didn’t want those ‘specificities’
brought into the Geneva discussion because it would spoil Ananthi’s case as
well as the TNA’s case. ‘Spoil’ would
not have meant the US-led resolution would have lost out. No, it would have
made some people squirm in their seats.
People notice squirms. People
comment. It’s loss of face to lose
composure.
Winning the vote is one thing, but losing credibility and
sympathy is quite another. In the long run, sympathy counts. Even the biggest hypocrites would be happier
if they don’t have to field tough questions about the credibility of ‘victims’
especially if these ‘victims’ are providers of ‘evidence’ used to lengthen
charge-sheets.
The problem with all this is that it throws ‘the truth’ out
of the equation. Is
Ananthi ready to be truthful about her husband?
Isn’t the truth of what he did, who he killed, who he ordered killed,
the grief thus engendered, the doubts and lack of closure it all resulted in
less worth investigation and comment than the truth about her husband’s
fate? Is Sumanthiran ready to talk about
Elilan-truth? How about the other fellow
travelers, people like Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, Jehan Perera, J.C. Weliamuna
and Nimalka Fernando? How about Frances
Harrison and Callum Macrae? Would David
Cameron be interested? How about a
whispered query from Navi Pillay to Ananthi?
Would Al Jazeera ‘explore’? Would Channel 4 give us an exposé and air it on the sidelines of
the next session of the UNHRC?
Or are they not interested in ‘the truth, the WHOLE truth
and NOTHING BUT the truth’? And if that’s the case, are we to conclude
that they are not interested in justice either?
Can we all agree, thereafter, that this reconciliation talk is just a lot
of hot air and that no one really cares about peace, harmony, holding-hands,
singing the national anthem in 157 dialects?
A final question: can
we just move on now?
1 comments:
Yep, let's get ready for the 4th resolution which will be moved by the US at the next UNHRC. The show must go on....otherwise the clowns will miss out on a piece of action.
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