There’s
a bill currently at the ‘Committee Stage’ in the UK’s House of Lords
which that country’s High Commissioner in Sri Lanka, Sarah Hulton,
cannot pretend to be unaware of. It’s called ‘The Overseas Operations
(Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill.’ The second reading of the Bill
was passed by Parliament last September by 331 to 77.
It
was essentially a bipartisan piece of legislation with just 18 Labor
MPs opposing it, along with the SNP and Liberal Democrats. The Labor
leadership urged Labor MPs not to vote against it. They were ordered to
abstain, warning that those voting against it would have to resign any
posts they held. MPs Olivia Blake and Beth Winter duly stepped down from
their roles. Nadi Whittome, the shadow health secretary's parliamentary
private secretary (PPS), was sacked.
The Bill is
said to be part of the UK government’s response to ’the judicialization
of war: the extension of human rights norms to overseas combat
operations and the birth of a litigation industry that has unleashed a
torrent of “vexatious claims” against British forces. ‘Lawfare’ is what
the UK wants to trump. In short, it would give British forces the
license to do whatever. Absolute or near absolute impunity is what is to
be legislated.
Now what has all this got to do with Sri
Lanka? Well, we’ve had Hulton making noises about Sri Lanka and human
rights. She tweeted, ‘UK raising human rights concerns with Sri Lanka,
including forced cremation of #COVID19 victims. UN report to be
published next week, will inform the approach to @UN_HRC.’ Meanwhile
UK’s Permanent Representative to the UN in Geneva, Julian Braithwaite,
has said that his country would be considering the new UN Human Rights
report on Sri Lanka at the upcoming session of UN Human Rights Council
(UNHRC). That’s more diplomatic, but then again both Braithwaite and
Hulton know the adage ‘charity begins at home,’ but they are far away
from their respective villages and washing dirty linen in public is not
their business. Understood.
Hulton is worried
about how dead bodies are to be disposed of, i.e. of Muslims who succumb
to Covid-19. Hulton could of course have expressed serious concern
about the blatant violation of the principle of equality and especially
the open subjugation of women embedded in several pieces of legislation
including but not limited to the Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act. The
living oppressed aren’t her concern. They don’t disturb the likes of
Braithwaite and that’s all good as far as the other interlocutor Aliana B
Teplitz, the US Ambassador, who also talks of the cremation issue and
condescendingly wants Sri Lanka to come up with a meaningful plan at the
UNHRC, the body which her government withdrew from after calling it ‘a
cesspool of bias.’
Now, in December 2020,
Fatou Bensouda, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court
concluding the preliminary examination of charges against the UK
regarding war crimes in Iraq, stated that members of the British armed
forces had indeed committed the war crimes of willful killing, torture,
inhuman/cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, and rape and/or
other forms of sexual violence. The Office has identified a confined
number of incidents which, while not exhaustive, appear to correspond to
the most serious allegations of violence against persons in UK custody.
It is no surprise that the ICC, despite all this, cited ‘the UK’s
willingness to genuinely investigate and prosecute these war crimes’ as
sufficient reason to close the examination. We don’t know how on earth
Ms Bensouda concluded ‘genuineness’ considering the deliberate moves on
the part of the UK to decriminalize war crimes through ‘anti-vexatious
claims’ legislation. Indeed her copout statement is vexatious in the
extreme.
One wonders if Ms Hulton and Ms
Teplitz ever met the UN Resident Coordinator in Sri Lanka, Ms Hanaa
Singer. Singer does meet with the leaders of Tamil political parties and
probably advises them on how to draft petitions to the UNHRC, human
rights outfits and of course submissions to the Experts’ Committee on
drafting a new constitution. It’s an old game. You script it, the script
is played and the script-writer explains, ‘what a performance, what a
script!’
If these individuals do meet it
is quite likely that they talk of (if not plot) moves against Sri Lanka.
One wonders if, say during a break or in a lighter moment, they guffaw
about US and UK war crimes. One wonders if Singer chuckles and tells
Hulton ‘isn’t it a hoot that you are planning to drag Sri Lanka over the
coals and at the same time want to legislate against lawfare,
so-called?’
Here’s a question none of them
would have considered or would wish to be put to them: ‘What if Sri
Lanka did a xerox of “The Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and
Veterans) Bill,” only expanding its relevance to include all operations
including those targeting terrorists and terrorism at home?’ What if
Foreign Minister Dinesh Gunawardena invited Ms Hulton, Ms Teplitz and Ms
Singer for tea/coffee, cookies and bibikkan, handed a copy of proposed
legislation along those lines, remarking with a chuckle, ‘we were
inspired by our former colonial rulers, the mother country, the empire
on which the sun never sets and the fact that neither the USA nor the UN
seem to find anything wrong with the bill,’ and ask, kindly, politely,
‘could you help us by tweeting warm and supporting comments?’
Could
happen, but probably won’t. At least not in this way. Still, it’s
something that the government could think of. If not for anything but to
call out the humbuggery and to drive home the point that none of these
people give a hoot about human rights and that the circus is about
persecution. Vexatious persecution, in fact.
What’s the
government’s response, is the question that we need to ask. Reactive or
proactive? It looks like the former. Typically actions against
countries, honorable and otherwise, are long-drawn affairs where the
planning begins at the conclusion of one session with all manner of
interventions carefully phased to climax at the next session. Those at
the receiving end of vexatious moves ought to do the same. We are less
than four weeks away from ‘Geneva.’ There will be other Genevas. The
balance of forces obviously is skewed against Sri Lanka and this will be
the case into the foreseeable future. All the more reason for
round-the-year work on these issues, not just to counter outrageous
claims, but to tell our story and get our house in order.
On
the other hand, as the anti-Sri Lanka lobby well knows, UNHRC
resolutions are non-binding and what teeth they have depends on
co-sponsorship. It’s at the General Assembly that things can get hot.
And that’s where we have to fight the hardest. And that’s where we have
to figure out who our friends are.
There’s talk about taking a
nonaligned stand with regard to the play of global powers in the Indian
Ocean. That’s all bunkum. There’s no such thing as neutrality. There are
no ethics. There is lawfare. There are vexatious claims. There’s
threat, as a more cost-effective arm-twister than its execution. In the
long run, countries such as Sri Lanka are best served by unity and maybe
Sri Lanka could take the lead in reviving the Non-Aligned Movement
(NAM). Of course many of the NAM members are aligned (read, subservient)
to one or more of the major powers. Some have moved on, like China,
which is set to take over the No 1 spot from the USA before the decade
is out.
A 21st Century version of ‘The
Tricontinental’ championed by Ernesto Che Guevara is an option, but
that’s a long term plan and obviously a long shot. What do we do right
now? The USA is, as pointed out, slipping. It has to hold hands with
India, Japan and Australia to counter China. The UK wants to join this
‘Quad,’ a ‘Quin’ is the shelter that country seeks. What does Sri Lanka
do? Where does Sri Lanka go?
The answer is
‘tried and tested.’ Obviously the US is not a friend. The UK? Well,
they are yet to return the loot and compensate for genocide, ethnic
cleansing, cultural erasure and other forms of vandalism and outright
theft. The UN is a creature of the USA, notwithstanding damning censure
of its ‘soft’ (arm-twisting) arm (UNHRC) as, as mentioned above, ‘a
cesspool of bias.’
China. That country has been
vilified no end by the leaders of countries that have no moral
authority to do so and of course by their lackeys. China: a country that
has always stood with Sri Lanka against vexatious
prosecution/persecution. China: never said ‘change your constitution or
else…!’
It looks like Sri Lanka will not have to choose. The choosing is being done by the likes of Teplitz, Hulton and Singer.
India?
Well, India has kindly offered to help counter the Covid-19 pandemic
via vaccine diplomacy. India decided to send a bunch of stuff, FoC. Sri
Lanka will have to pay for the rest. It’s a decent price, admittedly. We
don’t know if this ‘decency’ is the price India pays to take control of
the Colombo Port, beautifully positioning that country to obtain full
control of transshipment business in the region by a) wrecking
operations here, and b) developing a home port in South India.
The
vaccine is cheap in other ways too. In any case 99.5% of the infected
recover. No vaccine is 100% reliable. That unreliability could be less
than 0.5%, more than 0.5% or 0.5%. In other words, hardly something to
go wild about. It would, however, boost confidence in the entire public
and that’s fundamentally necessary to get life back on track. Thanks are
due to Prime Minister Modi, let us not be ungracious.
Let us also retain perspective, though.
And
perspective, right now, means we cannot drop our guard. We should not
be persuaded to roll over and die in Geneva. We are not required to
remain silent when we can and should call out the humbuggery. Vexatious
Persecution: that’s a term that the Foreign Ministry needs to learn. And
use!
malindadocs@gmail.com
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