Response to Gareth Evans
Asoka Weerasinghe
Ottawa, Canada
e-mail:weerasin@magma.ca
Ottawa . Ontario , K1J 6G1 . Canada
August 1, 2007
Hon. Gareth Evans
President, International Crisis Group
Brussels
Belgium
Dear Mr. Evans:
It is with great interest that I read your Neelan Tiruchelvam Lecture
titled - The Limits of State Sovereignty: The Responsibility to Protect
In the 21^st Century.
After reading it I almost wondered whether you had an overnight sing-a-long,
punch drunk and pretended to be the Australian swagman who later committed
suicide:
“Up jumped the swagman, leapt into the billabong,
“You’ll never catch me alive,” said he,
And his ghost may be heard as you pass by the billabong,
“Who’ll come a-Waltzing Matilda, with me?”
Being a swagman after retiring from Australian politics, surely I thought
that you had enough seniority in politics and with it the enormous wisdom
for you to be able to sieve what is right and what is wrong in Sri Lankan
politics to sustain as a democracy. With that lecture you certainly
committed political suicide as an international crisis manager.
*/ /*If indeed the title of your talk was respected, then your thesis
was flawed and suspicious when it came to dealing with present Sri Lanka.
Any political science student studying your thesis will tell you that
you are part of a conspiracy to destroy that democracy which was the
envy in Asia as a model democracy and the world encouraged other states
in the region to follow her example. But that envy lasted only until
Indira Gandhi’s India, the mighty neighbour, began to Tiger-claw
into that enviable democracy by taking barefooted Tamil guerillas from
several insurgent groups in the late 1983 to train them in military
warfare, funding them and sent them back after they graduated to become
terrorists in military fatigues and jackboots, cradling AK47s like babies,
hand grenades stuck in their pockets like lollypops and festoons of
bullets around their necks to fight Sri Lanka’s democratically
elected government. That was 24 years ago, when not a single western
nation, including Australia, even attempted to pretend a cough to warn
India not to intervene in Sri Lanka’s internal affairs nor bully
her.
And now the International Crisis Group has the audacity to tell Sri
Lanka when they are in the midst of whipping ass of the ‘Made in
India’ terrorists, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE aka
Tamil Tigers) that she is a “potential case for global intervention
in Sri Lanka,” and not to thrust militarily into the LTTE-held
areas in the North. This is ridiculous. You mean that the Sri Lankan
Government should not destroy the international myth that the LTTE cannot
be defeated militarily by whipping their ass in the North as well, as
they did in the East? That is a sneaky agenda isn’t it, in support
of the Tamil Tiger terrorists and terrorism? This is arrogance. This
is repugnant. This is school back yard bully-boy tactics.
The title of your talk is not nebulous – it says what it says,
the responsibility to protect a State sovereignty. That is what any
country would do, your Australia included. And Sri Lanka has not deviated
nor abdicated her responsibility to protect its sovereignty from a ‘Made
in India’ terrorist force, bravely guarding her territory and the
lives of her citizens, and that includes the Sri Lankan Tamils in the
North. A gold medal stuck on the present Sri Lanka’s government’s
lapel will certainly not be out of place for their immense bold effort
to hold back the Tamil Tiger terrorists who have indelible support from
western countries and their NGOs like yours, who surreptitiously want
to destroy Sri Lanka’s sovereignty, and create a separate, mono-ethnic,
racist Tamil state Eelam in the North, for a Tamil population of under
4% which will contain one-third of Sri Lanka’s territory bordered
by 66% of the coastline.
You suggest that Sri Lanka is a case for international intervention
by placing her into the R2P basket with the “right to protection”.
I am surprised. What is indeed your problem? If you submit to me that
it is because the international political thinkers believe that Sri
Lanka should adhere to the ‘new approach to humanitarian intervention’,
I dare you to sell your thesis to all western countries who are fighting
terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan who have been charged with human
rights violations, and the US who has threatened to march into Pakistan’s
tribal terrain chasing the al-Qaeda where undoubtedly there will be
a bloodbath.
Well, the international big players the US, UK and Russia have informed
your group that any sovereign state tough-line approach against terrorism
means combining harsh and effective temporary measures to isolate and
eliminate terrorism and its cells. Equally, Sri Lanka, although puny,
has her right to exercise the same principle to destroy Tamil Tiger
terrorism, and that includes foraying into the land held by them in
the North and liberating the Tamil people who are living under their
gun, and their children taken by force to fight an adult war.
If the concept of R2P basket arose in reference to genocide as in Cambodia,
Rwanda, Kosovo, et cetera, where mass war crimes were committed, such
as systemic rape and starvation of children, none is true in the Sri
Lankan context. And to throw Sri Lanka into that ‘genocide’
basket due to speculation is insane, is a far cry, not kosher, nor cricket.
This is why I said earlier that any political science student would
content that you are part of the conspiracy to destroy the democratic
Sri Lanka.
Having said all that, my question to you is, “What crisis expert
are you to head the International Crisis Group?” Your weakness
was opened asunder like an infested wound of intrigue and a secret agenda
with that lecture. If senility is indeed your problem where clinical
analysis of international affairs is no more your forte, you are certainly
better off retiring from politics, getting back to Australia, to sit
under a coolibah tree and serenade the hundreds of kangaroos singing
–
“Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong,
Under the shade of a coolibah tree,
And he sang as he watched and waited ‘til his billy boiled
“Who’ll come a-Waltzing Matilda, with me?”
Permit me to remind you that the present Sri Lankan government is a
civilized and a conscientious government that has spent scores of millions
of rupees to protect her territory, public and private property and
thousands of civilians including infants and pregnant mothers from unnecessary
death from the hands of the ‘Made in India’ LTTE which was
designated as an international terrorist organization by the UN Security
Council in 2001 as per her Resolution 1373. Sri Lanka should not be
penalized for that honesty by irrational NGO’s like the one that
you represent who have a proffered penchant to guard the tracks of the
marauding international terrorists, the Tamil Tigers, and pave their
tracks with Dollars, Sterling, Euros, Kroner and Paisa.
Your truly
Asoka Weerasinghe
Ottawa, Canada
e-mail:weerasin@magma.ca
|
