CLASSIFIED | POLITICS | TERRORISM | OPINION | VIEWS

Blair’s offer to do a Solheim

The Island Editorial Courtesy The Island 19-06-2007

Sri Lanka has many friends. They are of many kinds. With some of them, she needs no enemies. Look at her ‘best friend’ across the Palk Straits. India never misses an opportunity to call her little neighbour a close friend. She boasts of historical relations dating back to times immemorial between the two nations. Paradoxically, India won’t help her bosom pal to clear the mess she herself created. She also doesn’t want little Lanka to reach out to other friends over and above her head to procure the urgently needed military equipment. Like a good friend, she offers military assistance to her friend in trouble. But, in the same breadth, she refuses to give weapons with offensive capability. It is like a quack putting a patient on a placebo and denying him or her access to a physician!

Now Sri Lanka has another friend offering to come all the way from the Occident to help her achieve peace. The peace maker is none other than the beleaguered British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Why has Mr. Blair woken up to Sri Lanka’s plight all of a sudden? Why didn’t he care a tinker’s damn about her conflict when he was ensconced in power and had the clout? Now that he has been rejected by his own party, his own government and his own people, what kind of contribution is he capable of making to the resolution of Sri Lanka’s problem?

Before Mr. Blair, a former US President reportedly offered to help usher in peace in this country. That offer, too, came after his retirement. President Bill Clinton could have made a meaningful intervention to help Sri Lanka, if he had wanted to do so when he was in power. Why should world leaders wait till they are long in the tooth and become spent forces to offer their services to Sri Lanka?

Mr. Blair, to his credit, has a wealth of experience in conflict resolution due to his involvement in the Good Friday Agreement. But, Sri Lanka and Northern Ireland are, as is obvious, poles apart. The IRA has had a strong political wing, Sinn Fein, which was amenable to a negotiated settlement. Still, it may be recalled, the fledgling Northern Ireland Assembly was suspended and Direct Rule imposed over the question of decommissioning. Such was the stress the British government placed on disarming, upon which the peace deal was contingent.

Time was when even BBC, which is liberal with publicity to terrorist outfits all over the world, chose to black out IRA leaders. Prime Minister John Major was so perturbed when the US government issued Sinn Fein Leader Gerry Adams with visa to attend a fund raiser that he boycotted the White House for a week or so. That is how the British leaders safeguard their national interest vis-à-vis terrorism. They, no doubt, act as true leaders. But, the question is why they don’t allow the leaders of other countries to do likewise?

Mr. Blair has enough and more problems on the home front. And all his trouble has resulted from the blind plunge he took into the so-called war on terror, lured by US President George W. Bush. The invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq dented his credentials as a peace maker irreparably. He couldn’t at least carry his own party with him when he wanted to go to war with Saddam Hussein. But, his rivals supported him to the hilt and their support manifestly went the wrong way. The draconian measures he adopted out of his desperation to battle terrorism at home following the London attacks, the cash for honours scandal and the like have laid bare his true face. Today, he stands exposed for what he really is—a fallible politician who went places thanks to his stars and the imbecility of his political opponents. It is ‘Blair the Rejected’ who is offering to help Sri Lanka with peace making.

However, he is not without ways and means of helping weaken international terrorism, which poses the biggest threat to global peace. The great wen is a den of terrorists of all hues. It is a haven for the scum of the earth distributing terrorism to the four corners of the earth. Some of those organisations have been proscribed in Britain by Mr. Blair’s government. But, they are operating openly raising as they do millions of pounds to finance terrorist wars around the world.

Mr. Blair doesn’t have to exert himself to assist in peace making in any particular country. All he has to do to achieve that end is to launch a campaign to ensure that bans on terror outfits in Britain are given full cry and screws tightened on them until they become flexible enough to negotiate with the states they strive to destroy.

It was only the other day that Mr. Blair unleashed a scathing attack on the British media, which he accused of behaving like a ‘feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits’. He called for new curbs on the media warning that increasingly sensational news coverage threatened politicians’ capacity to take the right decisions for the country. His consternation is understandable, given the nasty experience he has had with the press in the recent years. But, unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to be bothered by the leniency with which successive British governments have chosen to handle terrorist organisations ‘behaving like feral beasts’ and tearing global democracy ‘to bits’. If only he evinced the same interest in imposing ‘curbs on’ terrorist groups operating on British soil, many conflicts around the world would become far less intractable. That way, he can make a substantial contribution to peace making in this country as well.

As for his reported offer to assist in resolving the conflict here to the neglect of what he should really be doing at home, President Rajapakse should say, "No, thanks!"

The bane of Sri Lanka’s ‘peace process’ is not lack of facilitators but the refusal by one party to abandon its separatist terror. What needs to be done is to pressure it to give up violence, as the US reiterates every so often.

Why should Mr. Blair waste his time and energy to do a Solheim?

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