National Sovereignty and UN baloney?!

By Janaka Perera
"A Gallup Poll conducted from February 9-12 of this year, found that 65% of Americans believe that the UN is doing a poor job. Under his tenure as Secretary-General, Kofi Annan was blamed for many of the UN's problems and failures. Unfortunately, under the leadership of Ban Ki-moon, nothing has changed. He did promise reforms with a new era of transparency, accountability and better governance. The UN cannot be truly reformed as it is rotten to its very core. It is a bureaucratic nightmare, a cesspool of waste, mismanagement and corruption. More importantly is the danger it poses to American sovereignty." - OpEdNews.com
What about Sri Lanka’s sovereignty? This is what really concerns us. A thug has no sense of shame because he is a thug. However much you insult him citing his past and present global criminal records he does cares not a hoot.
"What I do in any part of the world is my business. But when it comes to you, I am the arbiter. You have no right to challenge me. This is the message that Western governments and their bootlicking Asians have been conveying to us mostly through the UN since the last days of the LTTE."
Despite Sri Lankan Government repeatedly rejecting calls for probing alleged human rights violations and war crimes in the process of crushing the Tiger terrorists the suave, neat dressed thugs keep on coming back to us like bouncing rubber balls – all the while turning a blind eye to the endless human rights violations being committed in Afghanistan, the Afghan-Pakistan border and in Iraq.
Assisting these international hoodlums are Sri Lanka's spineless cowards and traitors to whom what matters is garment export quotas given to us by Europe not the nation’s dignity or sovereignty. The many countries that backed us on the UN human rights issue and militarily helped us to win the war against the LTTE is not their concern. Their political mentors worshipped the former colonial powers even years after 1948. Their latter-day political heirs are now repeating the same in a different form – not recognizable at a first glance. They will continue to repeat it for another 50 years if possible. To them the 'international community' is only USA, Canada and Europe. Please note it is this kind of shameless mentality that led the J.R. Jayewardene Government to support Britain in the Falklands (Malvinas) issue in 1982 involving Argentina when virtually all other Asian countries, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe treated the British action as a crude imperial military adventure. The reason for Sri Lanka's support was British aid to Mahaweli Development Scheme and the Victoria Dam.
Regardless of the antics of the so-called international community Sri Lanka’s Environment and Natural Resources Minister Patali Champika Ranawaka told the country’s national broadcasting corporation (SLBC) last week that the island’s military victory over LTTE had inspired South Asian countries in dealing with terrorism.
"Today Pakistan is fearlessly waging successful campaign against the Taliban terrorists," he said an interview with the SLBC’s Subharathi programme.
According to press reports it was Pakistan which warned Sri Lanka that UN member states – especially the Afro-Asian countries - were being pressured to vote against Sri Lanka’s proposal at last month’s special session of the United Nation’s Human Rights Council.
This recalls that it was only the Pakistani Defence Attaché in Sri Lanka who had the guts and honesty out of the seven Defence Attaches who visited the Wanni battle front on December 15, 2008 to boldly congratulate Sri Lankan troops and, wish them all success in defeating the LTTE. The others, especially the Attaches from the United Kingdom, the USA and Japan had remained largely 'neutral' and focused mainly on humanitarian issues and internally displaced people (IDP).
Why they were deafeningly silent over the velour of armed forces is revealed in the West’s condemnation of the Sri Lankan Government after its military victory. It may be summed up thus.
"You did not stop the war when we told you to do so. You ignored our requests to allow the Tiger leaders to surrender to a third party (so they can live to fight another day). Now you have to pay a heavy price for disobeying us."
Responding to a question on arm twisting by these sanctimonious hypocrites over alleged human rights violations during the anti-LTTE offensive, Minister Ranawaka asked why should Sri Lanka having sacrificed the lives of thousands of her soldiers, sailors and airmen to free the country of Tiger terrorism, should listen to the dictates of Western Embassies and Tamil Nadu politicians.
Sri Lanka’s military victory confirms the myths and half-truths about successful insurgencies and terrorist movements in the world that people have been clinging to for decades. One myth is that overwhelming public support alone was their springboard to victory.
The Tigers and their sympathizers had been assiduously fostering this fiction for over 25 years to justify LTTE‘s claim of being the Tamils’ sole representatives, whereas in fact they were intimidating many ordinary Sri Lankan Tamils and holding them hostage.
The other myth is that the emergence of terrorism and separatist violence everywhere was always the result of socio-economic injustices and/or failure to devolve power.
It is therefore necessary to examine fact and fiction in the context of global events in order to have a proper perspective of the Sri Lankan situation.
In former Malaya (now Malaysia) the British were able to crush within 12 years a communist guerilla movement comprising mainly ethnic Chinese, who had virtually no assistance from any foreign government, except perhaps moral support. They were never able to terrorize the government, despite having killed thousands of civilians, police and military personnel.
The same fate befell Sri Lanka’s two JVP uprisings of 1971 and 1987-89, although the issues were not linked to ethnicity. In both instances, the JVP had neither strong material nor moral support from any foreign government or a Sinhala Diaspora. The North Korean connection with the uprising had little impact. The only arms these Sinhala guerillas had were some crude homemade bombs, shotguns, pistols and (especially in 1988-90) stolen automatic weapons.
No NGO or foreign power urged the then Sri Lankan governments to stop fighting the JVP, come to the negotiating table and conclude ceasefire agreements. There were no calls for foreign peace facilitators and ceasefire monitors. No one urged peace talks in Colombo, Thimpu, Geneva or elsewhere. Instead in 1971, India even sent warships and an Army (Gurkha) unit to help the Sirima Bandaranaike Government if the need arose.
So it was only a matter of time before the Sri Lankan State crushed the two Southern insurgencies. Few foreign governments (if any) or organizations raised a hue and cry over the human rights violations that occurred in the process. It was mostly local rights groups that took up the issue.
Contrast this with the endless allegations of human rights violations made against Sri Lanka every time she used military force against the LTTE. The global media paid little or no attention to the atrocities that the Tigers committed in the course of their so-called liberation war, no matter that among their victims were many Tamils.
In Afghanistan and Pakistan, Washington and London wants military solutions to terrorism. In Sri Lanka they wanted the government to go for a ‘political solution’ despite the Tigers being hell-bent on a military solution. Why this duplicity? The only plausible answer is that all this is part of an international double game.
In Pakistan we do not hear UK and US governments expressing concern over the plight of civilians caught in the West's war on terror in Afghanistan – a war that has spilled over to Pakistan. The reason, according to Peter Hopkirk, author of The Great Game, Washington sees the (Central-South Asia) region as an extension of the Middle-East.
These antics repeatedly remind us that in contrast to the 'insignificant' Sinhalas the Tamils are a convenient political tool for the dubious `peace’ makers to impose their will on a small nation like Sri Lanka. The covert military assistance and training that India gave the LTTE to become the world’s most dreaded terrorist organization clearly proves it. Delhi had no other reason to intervene and prevent the Sri Lankan Army from giving a military solution to the LTTE terrorist problem at Vadamarachchi in 1987 when the Tigers were mere cubs.
However when Sri Lanka twice found military solutions to the Southern rebellion in the short term, the world was least concerned since the insurgents and their sympathizers were belonged to community that mattered little to the big powers and had virtually no political clout in the international sphere. It is only when the rebels became Tamil Tigers the call for military solutions really perturbed some big powers and their NGO lackeys. They were desperate to project the LTTE as politically superior to the JVP. Yet it is the latter that entered the political mainstream and faced several elections. Obviously Prabhakaran and his thugs had neither confidence nor courage to do so. They imagined that the bullet and not the ballot would be their only means of survival.
Tiger sympathizers often defended LTTE actions with the hackneyed praise "one man’s terrorist is another’s hero" or "there’s no clear definition of the term terrorism." Whether or not a terrorist is somebody’s hero, the fact is that the deliberate and well-calculated killing of non-combatants, civilians and even military personnel (in non-military situations), holding such persons hostage and intentionally depriving a population of their basic needs are without question terrorism. It always thrives on foreign funding and international arms smuggling networks. (The Provisional IRA’s terrorism in Northern Ireland was considerably weakened when funds from Irish-Americans dried up).
It is for this very reason that the LTTE leadership was desperately trying to get into the good books of India and the West, even during their last hours on this earth.
Since independence India has devolved administrative power in fair measure while safeguarding its territorial integrity. Yet this devolution did not prevent a section of the Sikh community from trying to create a Khalistan out of the Punjab - one of India’s most prosperous states. But Sikh separatist terrorism received no foreign backing. So, not surprisingly the Indian armed forces were able to quell the rebellion in a few years, although it cost Prime Minister Indira Gandhi her life. It also proved to the world that federalism based on ethnicity does not necessarily prevent separatist terrorism.
The worst example of this is former Yugoslavia.
After 1945 the Federal Republic of Germany built a model democracy that bestowed political freedom and economic well being upon its people. Their standards of living nearly surpassed even that of the United States. Yet it did not prevent the creation of anti-establishment terrorist cells such as the Baader-Meinhof gang though their life span was short.
In Japan, post-World War II economic miracles and prosperity could not stop the formation of the Sekigun or the Japanese Red Army, which served as hired guns for several Middle-Eastern terrorist gangs. However Japan’s healthy balance of payments, smoothly humming industries and bountiful life style helped to virtually isolate this group of fanatics, who are no longer active. Italy’s Red Brigade terrorists too ended up the same way. It was easy for governments to seal their fate since they had no NGO 'peace' humbugs to inject lifeblood to them.
Such groups, like the LTTE, can never be pacified with a solution that may sound very reasonable to everyone else. Peace will always have to be on their own terms since they can no longer be part of civilized society.