Notes for a post-LTTE drama

In February 2010, Gordon Brown was a news-maker.   David Miliband couldn't stop talking.  Especially abut Sri Lanka.  On February 27, 2010 I wrote about these gentlemen and the terrorist in cassock, Emmanuel in the Daily News.  It was titled 'Gordon, David and Emmanuel: Notes for a post-LTTE drama' Brown and Miliband have been hoofed out but their replacements are no different.  Think 'Cameron' and 'Hammond' and read this.  Same old, same old, except the names are new.  

There is a man called Gordon Brown. I have something to say to him. Here goes  Mr. Brown, your country is yet to compensate mine for crimes against humanity, genocide, plunder of resources, insults and humiliation. I know you are going through a hard time, so let me conservatively say ‘50 billion pounds’. To begin with. That would be the first instalment of a series of annual payments spread through a decade (adding to a total of 500 billion pounds, which is just a fraction of what you’ve extracted over the past two centuries).

Gordon Brown

David Miliband

This Brown, he has problems. He’s on his way out, according to opinion polls from Britain. The man is desperate. Desperate situations call for desperate responses, I know, but I really didn’t think Brown and the Labour Party were in such dire straits. And I know that Brown is a citizen of a country that really doesn’t care about the track records of those they choose to bed with. Still, I was a bit surprised to find out that things have got so bad that Brown and Miliband and the Labour Party had to go beg for political support from a bunch of terrorist-lovers.

The two had been seen crawling around a hall where a shady outfit called Global Tamil Forum was having a meeting. I am imagining the scene.

Gordon and David, all smiles, saluting terrorists and terrorism every 17 seconds. Fr. Emmanuel, a living embarrassment to the Catholic Church (or maybe not, considering that no apology has been made from that quarter about the activities of this LTTE apologist), is blessing the two:

‘May the spirit of (Sun) God bless you my sons. I know how hard you tried to save our Sun God, Velupillai Prabhakaran. I know it would not have been easy to do this since you are not showing that kind of concern to the Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.’

I must interrupt the narration, sorry: ‘Hey Gordon, 50 billion is a number you have to remember bro, ok?’

Back to Emmanuel, Father, sorry.

‘You’ve shown so much concern about Tamil people living in IDP facilities in Sri Lanka. I must applaud you for being silent on the fact that our poor Sun God, in reduced circumstances, could offer them only one glass of kunjee a day and was forced to shoot those who tried to escape. I must thank you for ignoring the fact that these IDPs enjoy better living standards than a lot of Sinhalese villagers in areas our boys had to march through, tossing grenades and waving machetes in gay abandon. I will not forget that you deliberately chose to ignore all that your government has been up to in Iraq and Afghanistan and the human consequences of acting as understudy to Uncle Sam.’

Interruption: Lordy Gordy Pudding and Pie Baby, 50 billion smackers, remember? And that’s pounds.

Over to you Father (sic):

‘I am sure people are going to ask you some questions about your culpability over Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, the torture, the illegality, the lack of due process, the inhumanity etc.., about your role in turning 250,000 people into IDPs in Pakistan during the year 2009, and of course about supporting sanctions that killed half a million children in Iraq.’

David, tell Gordon, in case he forgets, that we don’t want cheques. He can pay in hard cash or gold. And by the way, all the loot stashed away in the British Museums and other places are highly returnable, ok?

Yes, Fr. Emmanuel, you were saying?

‘Dear Gordon, My Lord Prabhakaran, wherever the hell he may be right now, will no doubt be blessing you for speaking about the people he is said to have held hostage and how now enjoy the most basic of human rights, the right to live (which, unfortunately he did not have the ability to grant them), especially because you’ve chosen to remain silent about the 4.2 million Iraqis displaced and living in areas bordering Syria and Jordan in make shift camps since 2003.’

Gordon and David are swooning with joy at this point because they’ve been told that some Tamils might consider voting for the Labour Party. They break into a chant:

‘Eelam, Eelam...Eeeeeeeelam....Eeeeeeeel...Ummmm...’

Fr. Emmanuel screams from the pulpit: ‘Let us pray!’

‘Yipee, let’s do that, let’s pray, we like praying, it’s our national pastime and the secret of the wealth we have and the power we used to enjoy until some people in Boston decided to have a tea party,’ David Miliband remembers his scholar father and becomes historical.

Gordon Brown can’t exactly be historical, he chooses to be hysterical and starts rolling on the floor.

I am not sure if this is how it happened, but if there’s a subtext to the pantomime the above would not be far off the mark.

My friend Seyed writes that Gordon’s partner in these crimes of omission and commission, Robert Blake ought to listen to Michael Jackson’s song ‘Man in the Mirror’. I think the Global Tamil Forum should consider using it as the anthem of the organization. They should make it mandatory for their membership to hang the following quote above their beds, dining tables, around their necks and plaster it across their buttocks:

‘I’m starting with the man in the mirror. I’m asking him to change his ways.’

(female members can switch ‘women’ for ‘man’, ‘her’ for ‘him’ and ‘her’ for ‘his’).

And by the way, Brown and Miliband, I was serious. Fifty billion pounds. Before you get hoofed out of office by the people in your country.

malindasenevi@gmail.com

Read more

‘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. 

Read more