POLITICAL FOOTBALLS &
HUMAN RIGHTS
HOT-AIR BALLOONS
Secretary General The Secretariat
for Coordinating the Peace Process (SCOPP)
19th October 2007
When I wrote last week about the manner in which Louise Arbour was being
made use of, I little thought that, when she failed to come up to scratch,
she would soon enough be kicked to touch, to be replaced on the field
by a series of hot air balloons. But today, Thursday October 18th, we
had another barrage of falsehoods and inconsequentialities, based loosely
on her visit, that made it clear that what she had in fact said was
of little interest to the Human Rights industry.
The most inflated of the balloons were our old friends, Sunila Abeysekera,
Nimalka Fernando, Rohan Edrisinha and Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, now
elevated into members of the Sri Lankan Human Rights Commission. One
electronic news service claims that they have resigned from the Commission
in high dudgeon, thus proving Louise Arbour's point that the Commission
was ineffective.
The real story is very different. More than a year ago they accepted
appointment to a committee set up by the Ministry of Disaster Management
and Human Rights to recommend reforms. They rarely attended meetings
of the Committee, according to the attendance records of the Ministry.
When one of them did the usual feather dance in Geneva about the wicked
Sri Lankan government, a Director at the Peace Secretariat pointed out
that she could have made these points at the committee.
This evidently precipitated the resignation of all four, because of
the three reasons given in various news items, the criticism figured
in two. One was that SCOPP had criticized them, another was that the
government was trying to muzzle them by putting them on the committee.
The third was that the committees were not serious. If it took them,
the cutting edge as it were of the HR industry, more than a year to
recognize this, and then resign after attention was drawn to their membership,
which they seemed to have long forgotten given their poor attendance,
it is not surprising that progress on reforms is so slow.
The fact that the resignations coincided with Louise Arbour's report,
that they have obtained wide publicity internationally, that they are
now claimed to be resignations from the Human Rights Commission itself,
may all be entirely coincidental. But the whole business would have
seemed very funny, were Human Rights not a serious business, warranting
attendance and attention at any institution one agreed to serve in,
however small, that sought to address issues.
So much for the highest floating balloon. Meanwhile a host of journalists
engage in detailed critiques that are not especially logical. One takes
off from Louise Arbour reference to reports about the TMVP and other
armed groups to go into paroxysms about the Karuna faction, without
registering that her criticism was muted compared with her categorical
condemnation of the LTTE. Interestingly, senior UN officials, such as
Ms Arbour and Mr Alston and Ms Coomaraswamy and the Secretary General
in extrapolating from the Allan Rock Report, do not mince their words
about the LTTE, in marked contrast to their junior colleagues resident
in Sri Lanka who have yet to issue public condemnations of the LTTE's
current campaign of forced recruitment and its refusal to commit to
demobilizing all child soldiers.
Given that Ms Arbour complained that she was not allowed to go to Kilinochchi,
where she would have liked to convey direct to the LTTE her deep concern
about their violations of human rights, the fact that - despite the
government, and indeed the President himself, urging her to go East
- she said that she had no time to do that indicates that she could
not have thought the complaints in that regard so serious.
Or is it that the journalist believed yesterday's reports that the
government had not allowed Louise Arbour to visit the East? Last week
saw an American blog that passes for high powered and intelligent claiming
that the fact that the government had not allowed her to go to Kilinochchi
proved it had something to hide. LTTE websites continue to claim that
she was not allowed to go to Kilinochchi because the government feared
what they would reveal about government violations. All this hot air
is based on the assumption that no one will actually bother to read
Louise Arbour's report, which explains why she wanted to go to Kilinochchi
and what she would have done there, and says nothing of the sort about
the East which the government regretted very much she declined to visit.
Then we have another long article explaining not very precisely why
Sri Lanka should take a leaf from the Nepalese book and invite a UN
Monitoring Mission. The article itself goes into detail about the wonderful
work the Mission is doing there in monitoring the arms surrendered by
the Maoists, inspecting facllities where they have been stocked and
all that. The fact that in Sri Lanka there was no attempt to ensure
that the LTTE did surrender its arms - except way back in 1987 when
the Indians failed signally in the attempt - seems to have been forgotten.
Other differences have also slipped the attention of the many writers
who go on and on about Nepal. The current Nepalese government was not
part of the conflict, indeed it was in virtual alliance with the Maoists
to bring down the autocratic rule of the King - and the army the rebels
were fighting was seen as the instrument of the King, not of the government
that took over when he finally yielded. The difference between that
situation, and the one in Sri Lanka which has a democratically elected
government, has passed all these critics by.
Instead, as though it were gospel, they cite the pronouncement of Ian
Martin, who worries that the Sri Lankan government is much less complaisant
than the Nepalese one. They have evidently forgotten that Ian Martin,
idealist as he is, had wanted to look at LTTE regulations to see how
they conformed with international law, just as though they were those
of a sovereign state. The most recent UN pronouncement in this regard,
that of Radhika Coomaraswamy, makes it clear that the LTTE is expected
to conform to Sri Lankan national law.
But doubtless the Human Rights industry will continue to accept inflated
claims for LTTE edicts. After all, though in all fairness our fantastic
four did not themselves blow themselves up to be members of the National
Human Rights Commission, the exaltation of their resignation from a
body they scarcely bothered to attend has been fuelled by their own
portentous pronouncements. The idea that the government would want to
muzzle them is as silly as the supposition that they could be muzzled.
Hot air will always rise, and no one should grudge it the most exalted
of heights, even if mingled there with less savoury smells.
Rajiva Wijesinha
Secretary General
Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process
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