A story of brotherhood and manhood

The United States of America is not bombing Libya right now.  Bombs are falling nevertheless.  But exactly five years ago, the USA was bombing Libya, as I was writing the article that follows (first published in the Daily News, March 24, 2011).  

The United States of America is bombing Libya as I write, supposedly for the benefit of Libyans. The USA bombed Iraq and killed or caused the death of over a million Iraqis, supposedly for the benefit of the victims. The USA has maimed, displaced and killed tens of thousands of Afghans (and the killers have been caught salivating over their victims) and hundreds of Pakistanis (supposedly for the benefit of Pakistanis and Afghans). Yes, they say it’s not the USA but a ‘coalition’. Yes, a ‘coalition’ that goes along with the USA, making up numbers, adding colour and legitimacy. Fools few.

This particular offensive purchased legitimacy from the Arab League which sanctioned a no-fly zone over Libya in view of Muammar Gaddafi launching air strikes against armed groups challenging him. The Arab League has since expressed misgivings after the USA and its non-Arab allies (only Qatar and the UAE have expressed support for the military action, the latter a big importer of weapons from the USA) bombed Libya and killed dozens of people. Yes, in order to save people, ie like having sex to ensure virginity.

Very soon Barack Obama will say ‘it is not enough to ensure that nothing but white flies in the no-fly zone’ and press for more. The lexicons pertaining to Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan will be dusted and perused by Hillary Clinton and others for terminology and phrase. And the Arab League will contemplate their collective navel once again.

What’s with the Arab League? Surely, these people can’t be ignorant about what Uncle Sam really wants? The answer, ironically, came from Gaddafi himself. At the annual Arab Leaders’ Summit in March 2008, Gaddafi asked, ‘Where is the Arabs’ dignity, their future, their very existence?’ and observed, ‘Everything has disappeared’.

‘Our blood and our language may be one, but there is nothing that can unite us,’ he added and is reported to have mocked a plan by the Arab League to start Arab cooperation on a joint nuclear program thus: ‘How can we do that? We hate each other, we wish ill of each other and our intelligence services conspire against each other. We are our own enemy.’

A friend of mine elaborated in an email: ‘Arab politics is all about hypocrisy. In public they kiss each other and sneer behind closed doors. As you can see, it’s not a well-kept secret. The Arabs could have united to form one great pan Arab Force but one-upmanship saw umpteen attempts and efforts being scuttled. Ghaddafi routinely castigated this hypocrisy at every Arab League meeting telling them what a farce they all are when in actuality one was spying on the other.

He challenged one Arab country to name another with whom they’re friendly - and there were no takers. He said, “in fact we are more friendly with Russia and/or America than with each other”. He also reminded them that when the US raided Iraq, on a pretense and then hanged Hussein, a leader of one of the Arab league countries, none ventured to protest but instead, thanked God it was not one of them. He finally asked them “Who will be next” not even dreaming that he’d be the one!’

The fault is not with the Arabs, though. It is with their ‘leaders’. Qatar is an absolute monarchy. The United Arab Emirates is, well, made up of regions headed by Emirs. These are not democracies. These are the countries that have supported the military action. Then there’s Saudi Arabia, Obama’s key ally in the Middle East and a despotic regime if ever there was one and one which has sent troops to Bahrain to prop a tyrannical monarchy against a people’s uprising.

These leaders are not democratically elected. They are despotic to the core. Barack Obama does not utter the word ‘democracy’ with respect to such regimes. No no-fly-zones in these countries. No sanctions. No arm-twisting. Full support instead.

Gaddafi has promised a long war. The long and short of it, though, is the fact that a revolution needs to happen in the region and not one led by Barack Obama and his pals. There’s a question that should be put to the Arab people: ‘Who do you wish to design your future, Muammar Gaddafi or Barack Obama?’ I am sure that Gaddafi will not get 100 percent backing.

I am pretty sure that Obama will get close to zero. A second question: How do we find out the true sentiments of the Arab people? Here’s the rub: we can’t, because most of the countries we are talking about are not democracies!

Gaddafi’s observations in March 2008 indicated that the Arab League was impotent. Well, someone else from another part of the world has just displayed his manhood.

He’s in fact waving his manhood at the leaders of the Arab League. Have they noticed? I doubt it. I am pretty sure they’ve reverted to their favourite pastime of navel gazing.

Gaddafi is no saint. He’s a man though. That much can be said.

Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer who contributes a weekly column titled 'Subterranean Transcripts' to the Daily Mirror.  He can be reached at malindasenevi@gmail.com

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When a war-like people got a war they liked

This was first published in the Daily News exactly 5 years ago (March 23, 2011).  It was 'Libya' back then.  Now it is 'Syria'.  Tomorrow? Who can tell.  It's an oft-performed drama and as such it is useful to know the script. 

'We like war; we are a war-like people.’ - George Carlin on trigger-happy America (of the United States)

Barack Obama and his gang of international thugs got UN clearance (Surprise! Surprise!) to impose a no-fly zone over Libya. The purpose was to prevent Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi from launching air strikes against forces opposed to him. They didn’t want civilians harmed. Well, it seems that Obama’s thugs feel that some civilians constitute ‘fair target’.

That’s not surprising, for the United States of America has for more than a century operated as though people who are not white and people who are not Christians are disposable. In the Bush years, they invented a sanitized term for these victims. ‘Collateral’ they called it. Yes, someone can ask, ‘how about Hitler’s Germans?’ Well, someone else can argue, ‘They were an exception yes, but then again, that’s only because the Germans were cutting in on the action’. That’s Uncle Sam’s ‘action’.

The Arab Coalition was taken for a ride. They didn’t mind the no-fly zone but didn’t expect Obama to destroy Gaddafi’s strike capabilities or kill civilians. Sorry, ‘generate collateral’. Only the United Arab Emirates has pledged to support this war and guess who has beefed up the UAE’s arsenal? Why, Uncle Sam of course!

Barack Obama	Hillary Clinton
Nicholas Sarkozy	Muammar Gaddafi

The Arab League is now having second thoughts, we are told. They did not expect (talk about naivete!) this kind of intense military action and certainly not the kind that would endanger civilians. War is what the USA is about. The USA needs war like you and I need to breathe. For all Nicholas Sarkozy’s grandstanding and Hillary Clinton’s assertions that the US would ‘support’ an international coalition ‘to enforce the terms of Resolution 1973’, it’s been Uncle Sam’s adventure (yet again). The US is not in the lead but conducting all military operations.

It is not about Gaddafi being a dictator. The United States supports all kinds of tyrants in all parts of the world. Obama would never rush to ‘help the people’ in Bahrain, for example. Ninety percent of Bahrain Petroleum Company’s employees went on strike last week in response to a Police crackdown on anti-government demonstrations. 

On March 15, the Bahrain Government declared a three month state of emergency to counter increasing discontent among the population, especially the Shiite Muslim majority, which is calling for democracy and civil rights in the Sunni-ruled kingdom. No, Obama will not send in the Marines, not unless he has a deal with the would-be ousters so that the US can continue to use Bahrain as a military base. Neither would he sanction military action against Yemen, which declared a state of emergency on March 18.

Ideally for Obama, ‘Libya’ would exacerbate political stability in the region to the point that his dictator pals would have to spend billions of dollars to buy US weapons. Obama, like all his predecessors who went to war, needs a distraction. If killing ‘other folks’ and getting a handful of Marines killed makes for a surge in patriotism and if this can extend his political life, he would do it. Well, he has. That’s two birds, ladies and gentlemen: threats to Obama’s political future and a sagging economy. Libya and the UN will pay for all expenses eventually. That’s the bottom line. The ‘bonus’ is what this would do to US arms sales. Some thugs are going to make bucks.

The United States of America needs something really bad. It’s called ‘civilization’. I am not betting they’ll get it any time soon.

Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer who contributes a weekly column to the Daily Mirror titled 'Subterranean Transcripts'.  He can be reached at malindasenevi@gmail.com

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The pathways from Democrazy to Ethnocrazy

It is fashionable at times to compare apples and oranges.  It is convenient to blur differences.  It is easy to use blanket terms.  For example, ‘The Arab Spring’, which implies that all Arab nations suffering political convulsions can be spoken of in one breath.  Egypt, however was not Libya and neither Saudi Arabia nor Bahrain will be allowed to be Egypt or Tunisia, let alone Libya. 

‘Libya’ was different because a degree of international approval for the NATO invasion was arm-twisted off the Arab League (which has since expressed misgivings), not to mention tacit approval by China and Russia.  Libya was different because of oil-wealth and a long history of being unbending to the will of Western thug nations.  Gaddafi didn’t do his case any good, sure, but then again, worse offenses have not provoked the same kind of invective backed by military invasion either.  The world is not fair, this we know. 

‘Libya’ has naturally invited comparisons with Sri Lanka.  Well, we don’t have oil; not yet anyway and even if we did, not in comparable quantity or quality.  Sri Lanka and Mahinda Rajapaksa are not exactly ‘unbending’ in the Gaddafiesque sense.  Neither does the tyrant-tyranny argument hold much water.  Still, when it is convenient truth can be fudged, realities manufactured and gonibillas conjured too. 

I read two comments which referred to Libya in the Midweek Review of the Island (August 31, 2011): Dayan Jayatilleka’s ‘Libyan lessons for Lanka’, and Fr. J.C. Pieris’ ‘Government lapses and the patriotic trap’.  Fr. Pieris’ chides Dr. Gunadasa Amarasekera for going easy on the lapses of the Government.  He faults Dr. Amarasekera for not going far enough with his regime criticism, pointing out that they ‘cannot be disregarded as inevitable irritants we must put up with for the sake of the country,’ i.e to stop it from being the next Iraq or Libya. 

To be fair, all those who spoke at the symposium where Dr. Amarasekera called for the defence of the President, Dr. Amarasekera included, have on numerous occasions leveled scathing criticism on the man and his government; i.e. all those associated with the particular organization, the Strategic Initiatives for the Protection of Sri Lanka.  In my short presentation at the said symposium, I did refer to issues of corruption, flaws in governance and so on (elaborated in an article titled ‘Offensives and counter offensives’, Sunday Island of August 28, 2011), for example, and that was certainly not a one-off footnote-like comment.

Fr. Peiris is right, however.  This regime knows that to the extent that it is seen as a bulwark against separatism and bullying in a country where the stronger sections of the ‘alternative’ are as compromised morally and worse, have shown themselves to be ideologically and politically as thick-as-thieves with separatism, it has the patriots in the kind of bind that Fr. Peiris describes.  If, for example, there’s any Libyanization attempt or some external attempt at illegal regime change, then for reasons or morality and the need to mitigate threats on sovereignty and territorial integrity, Mahinda Rajapaksa will not find support lacking from the nationalists.

On the other hand, as Fr. Peiris rightly says, ‘A patriot does not steal from his own disadvantaged brothers and sisters; a patriot does not waste national wealth; a patriot does not sell our land, our assets and our resources to foreigners; a patriot loves all the people of the country and is just and fair to all not nepotistic; a patriot establishes law and order in the country and lives according to it’.  It is incumbent on patriots to call for patriotism on all counts, and tell those who would conjure the threat of a Sri Lankan ‘Libya’ that warding off the devil calls for putting the house in order as a necessary prerequisite on all the counts Fr. Peiris has enumerated and others besides. 

Dayan Jayatilleka

Dayan is different.  He’s a beneficiary of regime largesse.  True, he was extremely effective as Permanent Representative at the UN in Geneva in warding off anti-Sri Lankan initiatives, but has nevertheless abused the office and the prestige of title to tout his own brand of separatism.  He does rant and rave about Tamil grievances and does champion the Chelvanayakam plan of ‘little now, more later’ by arguing for ‘resolutions’ that will in effect fix the boundaries conjured by Eelamist myth-making.  He does not rant and rave about regime flaw.  His sycophancy was quite evident in his multi-newspaper defense of his boss, G.L. Peiries at the time the latter was facing a vote of no-confidence in Parliament. 

What is most striking, however, about Dayan’s piece is that he deftly (yes, he’s good at this) throws in selective realism to inflate the threat, making the devil blacker than he/she is.  He argues ‘Libya’ was made possible by the approval obtained from the Arab League, Organization of the Islamic Conference, and Gulf Cooperation Council.  Now, are we to believe that had such approval been absent, ‘Libya’ would not have happened?  By-your-leave is not part of the culture of global thuggery, Dayan knows this.  Indeed, he knows enough world history to give his readers a lengthy list of these R2P-like operations without any such approval from regional groupings. 

So why does he bring all that into the story? Simple: India.  Sri Lanka must please India, is and has always been this political quack’s line, frilled of course with lots of Marxist mumbo-jumbo.  He contends that ‘de-stabilisation, hegemonic intervention and regime change are possible only if there is a breach in the wall of neighbourhood solidarity’ and warns, ‘already in the sub-region, comprising Sri Lanka’s ‘greater Northern’ neighbourhood, voices of redolent of ancient animosity are being raised’.  He doesn’t have to say ‘India’ any more.  The thesis is clear: surrender to India’s will and the President and the regime will be safe.

It’s not about regime or president, though. It is about sovereignty and territorial integrity with or without regime or president.  The man goes on to re-define patriotism as all those things that win support from the neighbourhood (only one neighbor counts here, India).  Fr. Peiris’ criteria for patriotism is not even footnoted.  Dayan sweeps it all away with a clean India-made, for-India broom. 

He lets it all out by claiming that there is an ‘imperative need for compromises and concessions on the secondary and the tactical, so that a strong protective ring can be reconstructed on our perimeter, i.e., our neighbourhood, thereby protecting that which is essential: Sri Lanka’s sovereignty, unity, territorial integrity and the gains of the historic military victory’.  In other words, we need to please India, and pleasing India means giving into Eelamist demands pertaining to devolution, not because it resolves any ‘grievances’ but because it is a ‘tactical imperative’.  We need to, according to Dayan, agree to a course of action that asserts a falsehood and affirm claim that cannot be substantiated in order to, marvel of marvels, ‘ensure sovereignty, unity, territorial integrity and gains of a historic military victory!’

So, we give up all that or pave the way for giving it all up and then pat ourselves on the back for having not given it all up?  The key word in his argument is ‘compromise’ and ‘concessions’.  This means, that we yield something that we should not because we believe it is wrong to give it up.  It is an admission that India is being grossly unfair and so too the Tamil chauvinists; that they don’t have a case, but that anyway, we will go along with the lie because that’s the only thing we can do to stop a Libyanization.  And to make it sweeter, we can have a celebration later for having secured ‘sovereignty’, ‘territorial integrity’ and keeping intact the gains of a historic military victory! 

Dayan says ‘the final analysis is closer than one thinks’ (Dayan’s fear-mongering has a long history) and that in this final analysis, the most durable defence (apart from groveling at India’s feet) is to repair ‘internal fragility’.  Now here he may have had a point if he was on Fr. Peiris’ page, which is far more real than that which Dayan offers, ‘discontent and disaffection of the minorities’.  He then drops some names of books and personalities (again, Classic Dayan), and says the way to go is ‘to replace or transform an ethnocracy into a modern democracy’, elaborating the latter as ‘a state in which belonging to a particular ethnic group ensures you of privileges over the other inhabitants of a country; in a democracy, all citizens, whatever their origin, language, religion or customs enjoy the same rights’.

Well, we already have that to the extent that territories containing multiple ethnicities are ‘democratic’ anywhere in the world.  Carving out one-third the land mass and offering two-thirds of the coast is not ‘democratizing’, it is pandering to land-theft and expansionist intentions of chauvinists.  If this is an ‘ethnocracy’, then what is Norway, Britain, the USA, France, Pakistan, India, Bangladhes, the Maldives, Indonesia and other countries where either ethnicity or religious faith is privileged in pernicious ways that are totally absent here in Sri Lanka?  What Dayan is offering is not ‘ethnocracy to democracy’ but ‘democrazy to ethnocrazy’.  Both don’t get the general public anywhere. 

What’s most amusing about his piece and why it contrasts so much with Fr. Peiris’ comment is that he asserts that nothing can be more patriotic than his proposition.  I’ve heard people say that patriotism is the last resort of the scoundrel.  Well, looks like the scoundrel has named himself.  I believe Fr. Peiris’ piece helps undress Dayan and it came on the same section of the same edition of the same newspaper, which, tellingly carries the name ‘The Island’!  

Courtesy: The Nation - Sunday 4 September, 2011

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Got tyrant-preferences, people?

Perhaps it is some intrinsic political tendency, genetic if you like, of the human condition, but we consistently interpret events in ways that justify our preferences or buttress our beliefs.  I am thinking of course about the recent developments (perhaps ‘development’ is too positive a term?) in Libya. 

This is supposed to be the tail-end of the so-called Arab Spring.  Those who coined the term (sections of the media that is slavishly pro-Washington) and those who orchestrated the whole operation (and let’s not kid ourselves that it was spontaneous citizens’ uprisings and nothing else!) quite happily conflate categories, use universalistic language and treat not just countries but entire continents as geographical and social monoliths.  We’ve seen crass generalizations regarding the countries and the uprisings.   

First of all, each country is unique and is uniquely constituted by class structures and other social layers.  They have different histories and have different structures of governance.  The people enjoy or suffer different benefits and deprivations respectively and live under different kinds of systems.  There are similarities, yes, but the distinctions override. 

The Washington-loving media speak of Egypt and Libya in the same breath. That’s not just shoddy journalism but indicate appalling levels of submission to the Washington View of the Word (WVW).  The disparities, corruption, dictatorial realities and assets of the two countries are starkly different.   Different too is the methodologies used by Washington to down regimes.  In Egypt a relatively more popular uprising was managed in ways that a regime was installed that could do what Mubarak had done for years.  So it was a matter of an unpopular but friendly tyrant whose use-by date had passed being nudged out and replaced by a regime that was as friendly to the USA. 

In Libya the USA and others of the Evil Axis, namely Britain and France, wrangled a UN Security Council Resolution to justify what was made out to be limited military operations ‘to prevent civilians being harmed’.  The ‘civilians’ turned out to be nothing more than a bunch of brigands funded and armed by Washington.   The Air Force of the USA and those of Britain and France have carried out over 7,000 bombing attacks since March 19, 2011.  They’ve sent special operation ground forces and commando units to direct the military operations of the so-called ‘rebels’.  It is, as Brian Becker, National Coordinator of ANSWER Coalition (‘The truth about the situation in Libya’) puts it, ‘a NATO-led army in the field’.

Dissatisfaction with the Libyan leadership is no doubt a part of the story, but impoverishment was not.  Libya, post-1969 not only cleared the nation of all foreign military presence, but put in place processes that resulted in a remarkable improvement in living standards.  The most pertinent fact is that Libyans are certainly not in charge of script-writing the rebellion nor will they be masters of the outcome.  It’s now months since anyone spoke of the Security Council resolution regarding the use and abuse of Libyan air space.  The protectors quickly became predators, perpetrating the crimes they set out to prevent. 

It’s all about oil.  Just as Iraq was and is about oil; Alan Greenspan who served as chairman of the US Federal Reserve for almost two decades, has confessed in his biography: 'I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.'  US-UK forces killed 1.2 million Iraqis for this, according to a report by the British polling agency, ORB.  So when Barack Obama goes ga-ga about Muammar Gaddafi taking pot shots at civilians, I can't but help think of kettles. 

Libya has the largest oil reserves in all of Africa and moreover her oil is particularly coveted due to its superior quality.   As Becker points out, if it was about democracy and civilization, then NATO had better start bombing Saudi Arabia right away. In fact NATO should have launched an attack against that country decades ago!

But Saudi Arabia will not be made a Libya.  Ronald Reagan insisted that the despotic, tyrannical monarchy will be protected against insurrection.  Barack Obama, for all his liberalist and outwardly enlightened rhetoric is proving to be a not-so-closeted Reaganite.  The same goes for Bahrain, where the regime has unleashed and continues to unleash violence on an agitating population that makes Gaddafi’s operations against ‘rebels’ in Libya seems like a water-pistol fight between schoolboy gangs.  But Bahrain will not be censured.  The people will not be armed. NATO will not drop arms nor send commandos to direct field operations. 

The reason is not hard to fathom. It’s about who is ‘My Kind of Tyrant’ and who is not, as far as Washington is concerned.   There are tyrannies, ladies and gentlemen, that will be suffered and celebrated and there are democracies that will be censured.  It’s about friendship. 

Did I hear someone mutter ‘integrity’ in a questioning tone?  No, that cannot be and anyway it can’t be about Barack Obama or the liars and brutes in NATO who are on his friends’ list.    It’s all very simple.  Libya is not Egypt II or Tunisia II, this we know.  Neither Bahrain nor Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, will be permitted to be Libya II.

Labouring the point seems meaningless.  There are other things to be done and I don’t have to elaborate. 

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‘Assification’ and de-assing of David Miliband and Bernard Kouchner

In April 2011, writing to ‘The Nation’ (The Ki-moon panel’s report and the strippers it spawned), I expressed surprise that David Miliband hadn’t yet joined the anti Sri Lanka, pro-LTTE, blind-to-own-crimes bandwagon: ‘I am perturbed, though, that David Miliband hasn’t joined the clown-wagon yet.  He has all the credentials to outstrip Saravanamuttu, Ganguly and Weiss.’  It took him just two months.  He’s just co-authored a letter to the New York times with (Surprise! Surprise!) his former counterpart in France, Bernard Kouchner.  Both were the Foreign Ministers of their respective countries from 2007 to 2010, during which time neither spared any pains to bail out Velupillai Prabhakaran in what can only be read as a determined effort to make Sri Lanka and Sri Lankan suffer indefinitely the horrors of terrorism.

They’ve called it ‘Silence of Sri Lanka’. They’ve confessed they wanted the fighting to stop.  That would have meant, given the long history of fight-stopping and fight-resuming by the LTTE, that we in Sri Lanka would not be enjoying the peace and the freedom from fear we have right now. Neither Miliband nor Kouchner ever expressed any need to draw attention to the human suffering, to call for humanitarian aid and workers to be allowed in, and to call for the fighting to stop,’ in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya (where NATO forces are killing civilians by the dozens in order to stop the killing of civilians; go figure THAT logic!).

Interestingly, B&D, even while claiming that those in refugee camps had related brutal and shocking stories, have not uttered a word in this communiqué about who was responsible for the brutality and shock or that Tamil life while held hostage by the LTTE was not treated as ‘fourth or fifth class’ but worse!  Nothing about Britain’s contribution to generating this kind of humanity and their own considerable efforts to perpetuate the same by giving a new lease of life to the world’s more ruthless terrorist organization.  Typical.

It was never a ‘war without witnesses’ as B&D claim, for the ICRC was present right to the very end. They applaud Ban Ki-moon for having ‘wrenched from President Rajapaksa a commitment to independent investigation of alleged human rights abuses’. No such ‘commitment’ was obtained, with or without wrenching. This is the relevant paragraph in the joined statement issued at the time: ‘objectives (of the Joint Statement) include the further fostering of reconciliation and related issues as well as reflecting the commitment by Sri Lanka to the promotion and protection of human rights and the importance of accountability in order to continue the strengthening of peace and development in that country.’

D&B then talk about a report compiled by a panel appointed by the UNSG.  They call it ‘damning’. All that the report ‘damns’ is truth, academic honesty and intellectual rigor. It is marked by slothfulness, blatant lies, unreliability of sources, unacceptable levels of myopia and mal-intent, leaving aside the neutrality-compromised composition of the panel itself.

D&B are being extremely irresponsible when they deftly treat conjecture as fact.  The panel report, compromised though it is, only makes allegations.  D&B are not quoting the report, they are taking an unsubstantiated claim, treating it as fact and writing it as such as though they actually saw what was happening. 

There is of course the by now to-be-expected tokenism of alluding to the LTTE’s (comparatively) ‘mild’ transgressions. They slip in the word ‘systematically’ to imply ‘strategy’ and that’s a nice thick layer of lie to top of a lie-heavy cake, friends.

When anyone stands on a pile of rubbish such as the above ‘panel report’, they get their feet all covered in gooey stuff. D&B are no exception. If they realize as they claim that there is error in ‘brushing wrongdoing under the carpet’, they’d be writing to all the newspapers in the world asking why Britiain and the USA have not been asked to allow ‘independent’ investigation of the war crimes perpetrated in Iraq and Afghanistan and likewise Israel not being pressured regarding Gaza, especially since Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister confessed that the invasion of Iraq was illegal, never mind the fact that Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction was not just a laughable claim but one which almost a decade of ransacking that country has not helped substantiate.

They talk of R2P, the responsibility to protect, so-called. That’s a nice term and one which many countries would love to allude to in the matter of being insulated by the nauseating and repulsive moral posturing of rubbish-dealers such as B&D and their respective governments, not to mention the horrible crimes against humanity they have and continue to perpetrate all over the globe. 

They talk of Navi Pillay calling for UN interference in Sri Lanka, but don’t mention that the lady fell on her preposterous behind when she tried that lark in 2010. They talk of ‘criminal liability’ but don’t have a shred of credible evidence of any wrongdoing warranting any multilateral action; strange, since ‘liability’ for such transgressions make the bread and butter of British, French and US foreign policy. HAVE THEY NOT HEARD OF LIBYA, I WONDER.  (That’s a whisper, by the way).

David and Bernard are correct when they say, ‘The integrity of the international system in addressing human rights abuses is rightly under scrutiny as never before’. Such integrity has been severely compromised by double-standards, selective application, gross exaggeration, bullying, lying, corruption, wrecking of procedural norms and a manifest cowardice when it comes to calling a spade a spade. David and Bernard are, sad to say, accomplices in all this.

They are right when they warn that ‘the arguments of those who want to take the law into their own hands’ should not be fuelled. B&D obviously have enough fuel, even after losing their jobs.

This is the richest part of their piece: ‘Kofi Annan has said that the international community cannot be selective in its approach to upholding the rule of law.’ Right on!  Are we to assume that the two of them are busy writing letters about the USA, Britain, France, Israel and India (among other countries not selected for regular abuse by jobless politicians and others) and demanding that the international community stop giving them the green light to butcher people?

They are absolutely right when they say ‘Reports like the one compiled for the secretary general must not stand on the shelf.’ This report should be made compulsory reading to all politicians, diplomats and academics and everyone associated with the United Nations because it has of immense educational value. It contains enough material for entire semester’s worth of discussion on the topic ‘How not to write a report’ or, ‘The pitfalls of mal-intent in report-compilation’.

They are dead wrong when they say ‘They (such reports) must be the basis of action’ for reasons stated above and elsewhere. They warn that if this (the called-for action) does not happen, ‘the law becomes an ass’. The ‘assification’ or ‘assing’ of the law happened a long time ago. It is the national pastime of Britain and the USA. These countries have a long way to go before they can de-ass.

When I wrote the article referred to at the beginning, my friend Fazli wrote to me saying her had written to Al Jazeera in response to a programme aired by that media organization. This is what he had said: "I believe it is very important for the international media to try and focus more on the misguided western democratic nations who supported the LTTE in their campaign of terror over the past 30 years in Sri Lanka and thus prevented this evil from being eliminated very early in its life cycle. If not for 911, after which these western nations woke up from their slumber, there would never have been an end to this madness. You cannot simply charge the Government of deliberate human massacre when casualties will always be an outcome of any war. One must understand that the LTTE planned and executed bombings and suicide attacks where civilian casualties were deliberately targeted. The Government never committed such atrocities deliberately and with planning. They were only after the terrorists to end the crisis. The media may claim that the international community think and believe that the LTTE have won the media war. However, every Sri Lankan national knows the truth of this horror and who the real culprits are."

It is not only about being blind to the LTTE, of course. Fazli was responding to a particular clip.  He has written to me on many aspects of the kinds of political myopia which the likes of Miliband and Kouchner have cultivated over the years are which their governments and many Western countries consider a virtue and not flaw. There’s a lot of ‘ass’ around and it’s been around for a long time, folks.

It would help if people like David Miliband and Bernard Kouchner went about acquiring the minimum levels of integrity necessary to see what kind of asses they themselves are. They need to de-ass and fast. 

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