Elizabeth writes to Stephen Harper*

Dear Stephen,

It is not often that I write to my subjects, especially those who live a considerable distance from our fair shores.  I make this exception today because I wish to express my undying gratitude to you.  As you would probably surmise, this is about your decision to suspect Canada’s funding to the Commonwealth. 

I applaud your self-righteousness in this matter.  It is good that Canada has placed this much importance on human rights issues.  It is, as you would agree, rather late in the day, but as a subject who knows the niceties about the English language you would agree with the adage ‘better late than never’. 

I write because it is now incumbent on you to ‘go the whole hog’ (another of those English lines you would have grown up with).  There is a lot to be done.  ‘Charity begins at home,’ is another line you can draw inspiration from, I believe.  I am sure you know what I am talking about. 

‘Home’ to you must mean Canada of course, even though you are still one of my subjects.  A loyal one, may I add?  But ‘home’ to you, is/was ‘home’ to a lot of people and most of all to the descendents of the native peoples that your ancestors (and mine) slaughtered, infected with smallpox and in other ways treated in appallingly inhuman ways.  I am sure you are happy that the UNHRC didn’t exist back then.  But I hear that those descendents don’t exactly feel ‘at home’ in Canada on account of crimes of omission and commission perpetrated by the government you head and its predecessors. 

Now Stephen, it is quite charitable of you to announce that funds denied the Commonwealth Secretariat will be channeled to other Commonwealth programmes.  This would help dismiss charges of stinginess.  However, I urge you to reconsider this decision.  It would be more appropriate and it would most certainly improve your stature if you were to redirect those funds to those who have been and remain dispossessed within the boundaries of the crown territories you have stewardship over.

I would have expected you, Stephen, to be more astute in this matter of pointing fingers.  Rightfully, the finger should have been directed to me.  I would of course use the fact of my reduced circumstances to take that finger and turn it towards David (that’s Cameron by the way).  David talks of turning the spotlight on Sri Lanka.  That’s a neat but cheap way of getting out of the spotlight for crimes against humanity perpetrated in my name by David and his predecessors.  If you whisper the name Chagos Islands, David might flinch, but then again he’s developed quite a thick skin, necessary I suppose for one with so much colonial and post colonial baggage to deal with.  You would know of course that the invasion of Iraq was illegal. You would know of the crimes against humanity committed by British troops or else approved by successive British governments.  That’s not the past Stephen, that’s the present.

But you want to look to the future, clearly.  It is good therefore to get the monkey called ‘The Past’ off your back. 

I know that you can’t leave the Commonwealth.  Imagine a smiley right there.  This side of securing the independence to thumb your nose at me, however, there’s a lot you can do. 

Do it Stephen.  I don’t want anyone to call any of my subjects a hypocrite.  Or a wimp.  Right now, though, you are in danger of being called both. 

Warm regards,

Elizabeth Alexandra Mary (that’s ‘Queen’ to you, Stephen).

*In a parallel universe

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How big is CHOGM anyway?

Canada will not send a high level delegation to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), Prime Minister Stephen Harper has announced. Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, regurgitating the anti-Sri Lanka noises emanating from Canada, has explained why.  The Sri Lankan Government, for its part, has conveyed disappointment, pointing out that Canada was isolated in its decision ‘as the majority of Commonwealth countries were siding with Sri Lanka’. 

Canada’s logic shows its abysmal understanding of Sri Lanka and betrays myopia and selectivity in censure as well as a shocking readiness to let domestic electoral issues determine approach to multilateral affairs. That country has a long and sordid history of human rights violation and has been complicit in multiple crimes against humanity, aiding and abetting the regional ‘big brother’, the United States of America as well as its ‘mother country’, Britain, to whose Queen, Harper, Baird and the rest of Canada genuflect as per constitutional requirement. 

Although Minister of External Affairs G.L. Peiris has stated that in the Commonwealth, a voluntary association of sovereign states, no country had the right to sit in judgment of others.  The legality and niceties aside, assessment and judgment are part and parcel of CHOGM politics. Indeed, if ‘judgment’ is taken away from things associated with the Commonwealth it would amount to an erasure of the plunder and genocide that is the history common to the member states. It pre-empts, one could argue, moves to secure reparations.  Worse, Peiris’ statement implies that Sri Lanka has to stop short of criticizing Canada (or anyone else), on judgements and other things. So let Canada criticize and be duly taken to task. 

What is more disturbing is the readiness on the part of the Government to read participation as ‘siding with Sri Lanka’.  That would be myopic too. 

Agreement on a venue for a gathering such as CHOGM in no way suggests that participants, by the act of presence, sides with host country on all issues relevant as well as irrelevant to the confab.  Indeed if every country were to work their way through a check list of the much talked of ‘core values’ of the Commonwealth and assessed all other members against it, we would not have a CHOGM, not in Colombo and not anywhere else either. The flip side has also got to be understood; participation does not amount to a support for the particular country on all counts by other participating country.

The fact of the matter is that the only commonality is the fact of invasion and attendant violence and theft.  The meeting itself amounts to recognition and celebration of a one-time global thug. There’s no economic cooperation scripted into CHOGM and in a global context where such arrangement make sense only regionally and not on account of shared suffering the Commonwealth is nothing more nothing less than an event or moment for verbal sparring, before, during and after such meetings.

If Peiris or anyone else believes that the countries taking part in CHOGM will side with Sri Lanka when small-minded, ill-informed rogue states of the international community point fingers, they are dead wrong.  Harper may believe that boycotting will yield returns in elections, but that would be a long shot, given the stronger claims that his opponents have when it comes to ‘listening’ to pro-LTTE or anti-Sri Lanka Tamil voters in that country.  If, as Peiris says, the rest of the Commonwealth turns up in Sri Lanka, it will be an international snub for Canada.  Sri Lanka can crow about it, but crowing will not secure votes in Geneva or elsewhere when judgment is passed on this country. 

So what does one make of this CHOGM, then?  Well, when Prince Charles married Lady Diana, someone wrote to the editor of a newspaper something on the following lines: ‘I heard that a few years ago Prince Charles had chosen to sleep on the plane during a brief stopover in Colombo; all things considered, I think I will sleep through the Royal Wedding.’

CHOGM, then, is ‘one of those things’ that does very little; so little that it would be folly to make too much out of it. Either way.

 

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Accountability queries: legitimate and laughable*

Accountability is an issue that’s talked about a lot with respect to Sri Lanka’s efforts to eliminate the terrorist menace.  There’s been a lot of self-righteousness in the demands.  A lot of double-tongue too.  The entire discourse of accusation, sadly, has been marked by the word ‘allegation’, which in turn appears, again sadly, to have been constructed from claims made by the most dubious of sources.

It is in this context that one has to consider the Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister’s comments to MPs recently.  Minister John Baird stated, ‘Sri Lanka needs to take accountability for the serious allegations of war crimes committed’.  One notes that it is downright silly to ask anyone to account for ‘allegations’, except of course the accusers whose burden it is to offer tangible proof of systemic and unacceptable levels of transgressions that warrant the use of the terms ‘war crimes’ and ‘crimes against humanity’. 

Baird offers by way of rant-justification a report put together by a panel appointed by the UN Secretary General, a report fraught with inaccuracies, heavily reliant on claims made by people whose integrity is questionable and woefully lacking in substantiation. 

Any member of the international community (with all its many flaws and crimes of myopia and selective vilification) has the moral right to call out nations with respect to rights abuse and other transgressions, such umbrage should be founded on hard evidence and not conjecture.  If this were not the case, the UN would have nothing else to do than investigate each and every member state because some ill-intentioned members level charges, using the correct language of indignation.

It is strange that neither Baird nor the man whose words he echoes, Prime Minster Stephen Harper, have thought fit to castigate Canada’s neighbor, the United States of America for proven (not alleged) crimes against humanity. They have not found it disturbing when top US officials routinely brush aside accountability queries with ‘had to be done, did it, let’s not talk about it’. 

More disturbing however is Canada’s own ‘human rights’ track record and not just in the matter of routinely endorsing US aggression in all parts of the word and indeed acting like international cheer-leaders at these global power games that have nothing to do with democracy or civilization.

There’s worse to come.  Prime Minister Harper, even as he harps on alleged Canadian values (freedom, democracy and human rights), insisting that those who do not share these values are considered a threat and adding for good measure that Canada ‘will have no truck with dictators’, seeing nothing wrong with making deals with a man who carried out a coup.  As for ‘freedom’, it is strange that Baird does not object to Canada’s new electronic surveillance laws which according to Jennifer Stoddart, Privacy Commissioner of Canada ‘substantially diminish the privacy rights of Canadians by enhancing the capacity of the state to conduct surveillance and access private information while reducing the frequency and vigour of judicial scrutiny’. Just to keep thing in perspective and domestic, the life expectancy of those who belong to the first nations in Canada, i.e. descendants of those whose lands were robbed by ‘settlers’ and were massacred brutally (some by way of the ‘gift’ of Smallpox), is just 27.  Canada is not a democracy, technically, but a constitutional monarchy, a fact which makes these noises even more odious. 

Baird may have forgotten that Tom Flanagan, one of Harper’s senior advisor and strategists, called for the assassination of Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange. He even wanted Obama to put out a (murder) contract on Assange and said he would not be unhappy if Assange ‘disappeared’. This too is relevant.

Accountability queries from Canada or other locations and polities which have sad track records of self-accounting can therefore be dismissed as the utterances of international bullies.  If Canada does boycott the 2013 Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Sri Lanka, sad to say, that country will hardly be missed. 

Accountability, however, remains on the Sri Lankan political table for reasons other than those enumerated by the myopic and mischievous Baird.  It is an integral element of good governance, corporate and public and a vital aspect of political wellbeing. 

With respect to the conflict, the LLRC (Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission) has concluded sittings and compiled a comprehensive report.  While it is ridiculous for US Ambassador Patricia Butenis to demand a ‘preview’, it is imperative that the citizens of the country get to view the contents at the earliest.  The findings and recommendations can only boost the process of reconciliation that began with the defeat of the LTTE, rescuing of some 300,000 Tamil civilians held hostage by that organization (whose foreign representatives are routinely sought by the likes of Baird for comment), release of all child combatants (some 500 plus) and rehabilitation and reintegration of thousands of ex-LTTE cadres (a ‘favour’ that the US, for instance, has not granted to hundreds if not thousands of captured Al Qaeda and Taliban ‘suspects’). 

Accountability has other dimensions.  It is very clear that constitutional provisions for accountability and transparency are woefully inadequate.  It is also known that the absence of checks and balances have made for political interference that compromises the rule of law.  The recent controversies regarding share market regulations also indicate that accountability queries are as relevant to the private sector as to the public.  A lot of people appear to have been consuming free lunches for years and years.  

The conspicuous sloth in the matter of correcting these flaws in fact empowers those mischief-makers who demand accountability in matters where none are warranted.  It is easy to mutter ‘double-standards’ and ‘tendentious’ when someone like Baird does the foot-in-mouth number, but these dismissives do not work or else should not be expected to work forever when it comes to the citizens of this country. 

In other words, Baird (and Harper) are eminently ‘forgettable; not so the people of this country.

*The Nation editorial, December 4, 2011 

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Stephen Harper and necessary commiseration

Does Canada deserve this embarrassment?

Politicians must continuously shape and reshape word to fit exigency.  They often don’t realize that when the expedient door is opened those outside get to see some of their insides.  Most often there are no half-way measures.  The door has to be fully opened or kept shut. Open it and it’s like dropping your pants.  It’s not always a beautiful sight.  I am thinking of poor Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada. 

Harper is reported to be campaigning aggressively ‘to pressure Sri Lanka on human rights and political reconciliation’.  He’s stated that he will boycott the 2013 Commonwealth Summit in Sri Lanka if Sri Lanka’s government ‘does not show accountability for human rights abuses and take steps to reconcile with the Tamil minority’ and has wanted others to follow suit.  His Foreign Minister, John Baird, has complained (!) that ‘Sri Lanka barred UN investigators, showed a lack of accountability and used heavy-handed tactics since the war’.  He wants to see ‘action’, his spokesman, Chris Day, has said. 

These are times where mouth-shooting is the order of the day.  There is no necessity, especially after George W Bush’s WMD-related lies justifying monumental crimes against the people of Iraq, for anyone to support contention with evidence.  All that is required, Bush and Blair showed (and Obama, Brown, Sarkozy and their minions such as Susan Rice, Robert O Blake and Hillary Clinton as well as ‘tag-alongers’ like Navi Pillai and Louis Arbour have affirmed), is to have big mouths, big bucks and big guns. 

Just to put the record straight, though, let’s state the facts.  Sri Lanka never barred UN investigators.  The issue of accountability is adequately addressed and anyway the parameters of such exercises should not be determined by some meddling and ill-informed foreigner fed by terrorist proxies.  Most importantly, while the international community (with all its many flaws and crimes of myopia and selective vilification) has the moral right to call out nations with respect to rights abuse and other transgressions, such umbrage should be founded on hard evidence and not conjecture.  If this were not the case, the UN would have nothing else to do than investigating each and every member state because some ill-intentioned members level charges, using the correct language of indignation.

As for reconciliation with the Tamil community, let Harper be informed that the Sri Lankan security forces rescued close to 300,000 Tamils held hostage by the LTTE.  Now that’s a big favour (if indeed saving lives of fellow citizens is not responsibility but favour on the part of the state) he would agree. Of some 11,000 LTTE cadres captured or surrendered, more than 8000 have been reintegrated with society, something that Harper might find impossible to imagine if it happened to be Al Qaeda fighters held in torture chambers, sorry ‘detention centres’ by the USA and its NATO allies.  More than 98% of those displaced have been resettled, and not just in landmine-ridden plots of land but areas where important infrastructure has been restored with all complementary facilities to make for normalcy provided.   If he’s upset about ‘political solutions’, then let’s hear the man enumerate the grievances, especially since his heart bleeds so profusely for the Tamils. 

Enough of ‘record’.  Let’s move to pots and kettles and the colour black, and the assessment of blackness in the relevant utensils. 

First the righteousness. Harper outlined Canadian values: ‘freedom, democracy and human rights’.  For good measure, Harper said that those who do not share these values are considered a threat.  Nice words, but when it comes to application, all I know is that a few weeks after Harper said he will have no truck with dictators, he was making deals with a man who carried out a coup.  Makes me wonder what he means by ‘democracy’.

Freedom.  Harper’s government is trying to push through a new set of electronic surveillance laws that will make privacy history in Canada.  Jennifer Stoddart, Privacy Commissioner of Canada sums it all up: ‘Read together, the provisions of [these bills] would substantially diminish the privacy rights of Canadians. They do so by enhancing the capacity of the state to conduct surveillance and access private information while reducing the frequency and vigour of judicial scrutiny. In essence, they make it easier for the state to subject more individuals to surveillance and scrutiny.’

Human rights.  My fellow Yaka has a comment.  Well, more than one.

‘Tell me the basis on which Harper or any Canadian derives claim to discuss human rights with anyone or anything other than their off-pink navels!  Can they tell us how to take the asbestos they exported to us from our roof and out of our lungs, knowing well that it causes the worst and most painful carcinomas?  And how can we resolve his concern for humanity when an original aka aboriginal aka red indian aka first nations aka native person’s average mortality is 27 years?  Yes, now, in 2011.  Where is he speaking from? Windstruck in Prairie Winnipeg? Mounted on a war horse overlooking the Beaufort Sea? Under the Queen of England’s Hanoverian underwear?’ 

I would be less harsh, but we can’t get around the fact that my Yak friend makes: ‘Canada is NOT as it claims a parliamentary democracy but a constitutional monarchy!’  In fact Harper’s proposals have been backed by the UK, Australian and New Zealand.  ‘Who,’ asks me friend, ‘are these countries?’ and proceeds to answer: ‘Constitutional monarchies! Settler states!’  He puts it well, so I will continue with quote: ‘New Zealand? Give me a fokkin break…..let’s speak directly to the Maoris and the originals!’  Canada recently changed her colonial department from Indian Affairs to Aboriginal Affairs.  Now is that ‘reconciliation’ with the ‘originals’, forget minorities in Sri Lanka who have it better than Canadian minorities have and moreover has no evidence to buttress claims to territory? 

Finally, myopia.  If democracy, human rights and freedom is what count and if these things are what help distinguish friends from enemies as per Harper’s conceptualization, should he not immediately break off all diplomatic ties with his neighbor, the United States of America which led NATO’s massive gun-burst on democracy, human right and freedom in Libya (and of course Iraq and Afghanistan before, where their work is yet to end!)?   The attack on Libya, just like the invasion of Iraq was based on well-crafted lies and the process mimic, tragically, the very transgressions (purported of course) that was used to legitimate the invasion.

More myopia and unpardonable religious fanaticism.  Harper claimed ‘Canada is safer than when al-Qaeda attacked the U.S. (the jury is still out on the architects of that attack, just for the record), but that the major threat is still Islamicism.  ‘Islamic radicals’ are the biggest threat, in other words.  I don’t know.  All I know is that if we were to go by the claimed faith of those who have killed, sanctioned killing, applauded killing and are killing as we speak then Harper would have to conclude that the biggest threat to the world’s pace is ‘Chritianism’.  I personally think that it is corporate greed, but if Harper wants to be religious about it, this is where we have to go.  Only shows the man’s really got something twisted and I am not sure my friend was altogether wrong about Hanoverian underwear. 

There are Canadians and Canadians, fortunately.  Lovely people, at least those I know, have dined with, shared stories with.  Both in Canada and Sri Lanka.  I don’t know Bruce Levy, the Canadian High Commissioner in Sri Lanka.  If I do meet him someday (unlikely of course), I will ask him to convey my best wishes to Canadian citizens, especially those whose lands were stolen and now can expect only to live up to the age of 27.  I will ask him to convey my sympathies to Stephen Harper. 

[an edited version of this article appeared in the Daily Mirror, October 6, 2011]

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Why lament when we can still laugh?

There are moves in Geneva, we hear.  Documents authored by politically compromised and intellectually inept people who lack integrity and have horrendous writing skills have been tabled for discussion in forums chaired by people who have axes to grind and suffer from partial myopia.  Al Jazeera interviewed me a short while ago, asking me for my thoughts.  My response could be summarized as ‘not surprised!’

The commissioning of a panel, appointment of those appointed, scandalous refusal to recognize the malice and incompetence evidenced in the report, and acceptance of tall tales manufactured by politically motivated individuals and organizations who have been as thick as thieves with terrorists all add up to one thing: witch-hunt.  It was not for purposes of securing entertaining toilet-read, clearly. 

Around the same time, the prime minister of a western monarchy called for a boycott of the Commonwealth heads’ confab in Sri Lanka.  Let’s leave aside the fact that there was never a commonwealth but just a common-thief interested only in passing around a common-welt.  The same premier once claimed he had no truck with dictators (re-claimed, I should say) but not too long afterwards was making deals with the man who carried out a military coup against a democratically elected leader in a Latin American country. 

This self-righteous premier stated ‘the kind of values [he and his country] have in the world: freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law’ and added, “those societies that promote those values tend to share our interests, and those that do not tend to, on occasion, if not frequently, become threats to us.”

My friend, who sent me these tidbits observed wryly: ‘I wonder why we get excited about this kinda news…as if we expect something different...as if they can do anything different considering their way of life.’

That’s what I had to tell Al Jazeera. 

So what do we do in this land called ‘damned if we do, damned if we don’t’ that we are living in?  Weep? Submit? I don’t know.  I just laugh. 

I can’t remember where I heard this first, but after some horrendous right-wing crime, there was a slogan some radical had coined that stayed with me: ‘don’t lament; organize!’ 

In the end, we need to be pragmatic.  We need to have a decent assessment of relative strengths.  We need to factor in friend and enemy, their relative strengths and the possible shifts in degrees of support.  I returned again and again to words penned by my father 27 years ago in a boy scout souvenir: ‘…So, if it is not prudent to stand ramrod straight in the face of storms beyond your strength, you must let them pass over you.  Stand firm if you can, retreat if you must; above all, never panic!’ 

There is no need to lament.  No need to get emotional.  What is required is sobriety.  What is required is assessment of strength, correction of flaw, enhancing overall abilities on all fronts, respecting the enemy, treating things with equanimity, figuring out the correct compassion-wisdom mix and doing the best we can without compromising integrity. Our foundation is strong and even if bombardment takes away the walls, rebuilding will not be impossible. 

Time is longer than life.  Empires are born, thrive, decay and die.  The flame burns brightest before it goes out.  I see a bright western flame and I come to conclusions.  It is darkest before the dawn.  I see darkness and I anticipate light. 

[Courtesy, Daily News, September 15, 2011]

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