Ms. Radhika Coomaraswamy

Asoka Weerasinghe Gloucester . Ontario . Canada

The Editor
LANKAWEB

Sir:

Ms. Radhika Coomaraswamy’s response published in Asian Tribune ( 19 Dec.2006) clarifying why she sent Ambassador Allan Rock to Sri Lanka is intriguing. It is a classic example of a bureaucratic comedy of errors which is not acceptable whether it was intentional or not.

She quite glibly reminds us that Allan Rock was Chair of the friends group of the Children and Armed Conflict cluster. So what? That does not override the fact that Allan Rock was Canada’s Minister of Justice and Attorney General who refused to ban the Tamil Tigers when other western nations banned this ruthless terrorist outfit and when the Canadian Intelligence Agency ( CSIS) recommended it, and also looked the other way when the Tamil Tiger front organizations in Canada were stuffing its war chest at the rate of two million Canadian dollars a month. These facts itself should have disqualified Allan Rock for this all important assignment. Ms. Coomarsawmy, obviously didn’t do her homework right and is guilty of that faux pas.

Ms. Coomaraswamy also covers her tracks by saying that her recommending Allan Rock “was approved by the Sri Lankan Mission here, by the foreign ministry and by the President himself.” That is interesting! And if this is indeed true, then the background researchers on Allan Rock failed in their duty by advising President Mahinda Rajapakse to approve this assignment. Someone in Sri Lanka’s UN Mission and in the Foreign Ministry should own up for having misguided the President of Sri Lanka and thereby failing the country and the President miserably. This is serious , and I hope that some heads have rolled by now

What amazes me is the very fact that the UN Mission and Foreign Ministry researchers did not have the foresight to contact the Toronto based Canadian group the ‘Sri Lanka United National Association’ (SLUNA) who has an encyclopedic knowledge of events and people who are Sri Lanka watchers, having fought the Eelam War and the Snow Tigers from the Canadian trenches since August 1983.

Ms. Coomaraswamy quite candidly says, “I sent Ambassador Rock to Sri Lanka because of a conflict of interest and because I am a Sri Lankan,” and a Tamil at that. That lily-white ethical indulgence on her part seems strange, and if she had only applied the same ethical standard on her assignee then I have difficulty to understand why she felt that Ambassador Rock was redeemed of such conflict of interest, when he was from the same tribal political family of Canada’s Liberal Party who has and still are supportive of the Tamil Tigers, having patronized a fund raising dinner in Toronto, as well as letting their Greater Toronto Area riding constituents collect two millions dollars each month to fill the Tamil Tiger war chest against the frequent advice of the RCMP and CSIS, and had the audacity to raise the Canadian national flag beside the terrorist Eelam flag at Tamil celebrations in Toronto. Thus she too has failed Sri Lanka as much as she wishes to place the blame at the very steps of the Sri Lankan Mission in the UN and the Foreign Ministry. Was this intentional? Do I smell a rat here?

In my letter to Allan Rock (Nov.18, 2006) I said, “I think you are smart enough to know that you flew into Colombo carrying all the negative baggage you hard collected being one of the Liberal parliamentarians who also happened to be the Minister of Justice and Attorney General, who favoured the Tigers and looked the other way letting the Canadian sympathizers collect two million dollars each month to stuff their war-chest.

“All that to get their 100,000 votes to elect 10 Liberals in the greater Toronto ridings, and you too depended on their votes in the Etobicoke Centre riding.”

I have my doubts that Ambassador Rock would want to challenge me on these facts.

I also said in an earlier critique (Asian Tribune Dec. 4, 2006), “I point my finger at Allan Rock’s boss Radhika Coomaraswamy, a Sri Lankan ethnic Tamil, for discarding her sensitivity on this issue, and for not being judicious to not select Allan Rock for this assignment when he was carrying so much of negative baggage of a conglomeration of his biases in favour of the Tamil Tiger terrorists.

“I equally blame the Sri Lankan Government for being foolish to feel that they are obliged by international protocol to let the two-word manthra, “UN” rule over their good governance, and let every Dick, Tom, Harry or a Jane who are sent by the UN on fact finding missions into Sri Lanka, without a background check of the individuals. And more so the letters “UN” should never be a reason to let any foreigner or a local representative of the UN to be handed the key to the “Open Sesame” syndrome so that they could walk freely meeting people in every nook and cranny of Sri Lanka without being accompanied by a designated Sri Lankan official.”

I wouldn’t have touched Ambassador Allan Rock even with a barge pole and would have refused to entertain him as a UN assignee on a fact finding mission in Sri Lanka with such a questionable background.

When Amabassador Allan Rock was all over the international airwaves in early December pointing his finger at the Sri Lankan armed forces saying that they did not check Karuna group vehicles at army check points in which he says were children abducted to be trained as their soldiers and suicide bombers. And, of course, these allegations were based on hearsay from “credible witnesses”, he hastened to add. Didn’t Ms. Coomaraswamy question this allegation in her own mind when she knew that Karuna is a smart and an intelligent terrorist, and a damn good fighter at that, who knew the placement of every grain of sand in the eastern province and that if he wanted to abduct kids that he wouldn’t be that stupid to take them through army check points as he knew enough alternative jungle paths to traverse away from the beaten tracks to take them to their training camps. I am not sure why he needed the collaboration of the army to abduct children when he was indeed a maestro of this act prior to 2004 when he was part of the Liberation Tamil Tigers of Eelam (LTTE) (aka. Tamil Tigers). That is how silly that allegation was.

With such observations I have difficulty to let Ms. Coomaraswamy off the hook as well as the personnel assigned to do background checks on Ambassador Allan Rock in Sri Lanka’s UN Mission as well as in the Foreign Ministry. Let the dice of guilt fall where it may. Someone has to be accountable for this huge faux pas, in a diplomatic world of bully-boy, dog-eat-dog environment where vulnerable little democracies are pounced upon when ever there is a human rights violation, while bully boys in the international world are let free as they are arrogant and sure of themselves not to be push over’s and refuse to roll over and pretend that they are dead, just because a UN person spoke.