CLASSIFIED | POLITICS | TERRORISM | OPINION | VIEWS

AI accuses Sri Lanka on Human Rights violations

Asoka Weerasinghe Kings Grove Crescent . Gloucester . Ontario . Canada

February 24, 2008

Ms. Irene Khan
Secretary-General
Amnesty International
The Human Rights Action Centre
17-25 New Inn Yard
London EC2A 3EA
UK

Dear Ms. Irene Khan:

I have noticed that you on behalf of AI go on the defence whenever the Sri Lankan government points out that your reporting on Human Rights in Sri Lanka is biased favouring the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE aka Tamil Tigers).

“Oh No, you are wrong”, you say putting your hands up in defiance. But, you know Irene, your Organization was founded on Leftist biased deceptions influenced by left-wing ideologues. AI is still in that operational mode and you all have not changed gears. Among these ideologues were self-confessed pro-Communists who wished for a Marxist Government in Sri Lanka. This was no surprise to me since Amnesty’s principal co-founder Lenin Prizeman Sean McBride boasts in his autobiography of having been a professional revolutionary since his teens. Amnesty also employed then, the leading Australian Communist, Professor Derek Roebuck, as head of its Research Department. Your archival Library will reveal all this.

AI’s foundation was built on left winged platitudes when in the early 1970s AI dismissed mass executions by Khymer Rouge saying that the information were based on “flimsy” evidence of second hand accounts, when the whole world was appalled by this human rights violation when nearly one-fifth of Kampuchea’s population were exterminated. And then you all devoted a modest half page to Kampuchea in your annual report the year Phnom Penh fell to the Khymer Rouge in 1975.

AI’s bias for the Communists then was capped when AI sent a cable congratulating the new regime of Kampuchea on the “large national union without distinction of class, religious belief or political tendency” it has just proclaimed. The word ‘bias’ has been written with indelible ink ever since all over the AI symbol, the burning candle with a barbed wire wrapping.

For Amnesty’s information, in case it continues to choose to apply clinical blindness to brutal events perpetrated by its friends, the Tamil Tigers, the Sri Lankan government has decided to install metal shields in buses that are plying to the North to begin with and perhaps, may be, all buses making them an army of armadillo like public transporting carriages on wheels. There is a reason for this extraordinary tinkering of the buses, Irene. It is again because Human Rights are a top priority for the Sri Lankan Government and wanting to save the lives of the innocent civilians who use buses for travel which have been targeted by the Tamil Tigers lately, and blasting them with claymore mines killing and miming hundreds.

*“NEWS FLASH : It is 3.30 in the morning Ottawa time, of Saturday February 24^th . *

*“ LTTE Tamil Tiger Terrorists are attacking civilians again. Another bus bomb blast in Mt.Lavinia, Colombo wounding 18 civilians.
Eighteen year old girl, seven women and ten males were among the seriously injured passengers of the LTTE exploded bus at the center of MOUNT LAVINIA junction at about 11.15 a.m. this morning (23) when the ill-fated bus had just stopped to embark its passengers…..”*

*With such incidents where the Sri Lankan Government has made Human Rights its top priority to uphold the values of ‘right to life, which the Tamil Tigers have rejected and are attacking innocent civilians targeting them on buses the poor man’s Cadillac’s and BMWs, you and Amnesty International have no moral right to rest your haunches on saddles on high horses and in your case in a howdah of a Bangladeshi elephant away from danger of exploding Tamil Tiger bombs, and wag your fingers at the Sri Lankan government accusing them of human rights violations. This is absolutely wrong and is unacceptable and you all should keep your noses out of Sri Lanka’s internal affairs, unless you want to be realistic, and honest and make a basic attitudinal change the way you all look at Sri Lanka’s separatist war.*

**Irene, I recognize that your employer, Amnesty International’s charter was set in the pre-terrorist era in 1961, where there was absolutely no comprehension of the organized terrorism, like that of the Tamil Tigers, and the magnitude of its challenge to democratically elected governments. But surely, there must be words like “honesty’, ‘realistic’, ‘hypocrisy’ in the lexicon of AI’s working vocabulary.
Let’s use them for a change. When you all are not that much concerned by the Tamil Tiger brutality snuffing lives of innocent civilians, then let me be frank with you, AI is poxed and damned for ever. No one is going to believe you. No one is going to honour AI as a squeaky clean human rights organization. And everyone is going to tell you all – who the hell care whether you were awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, as you are a bunch of dishonest human rights critics. Israel, Singapore and Sudan have already implied so, and Sri Lanka is beginning to do so.

I do not expect any government, democratically elected to govern, to abdicate its obligations to its citizens to maintain law and order, and nor would I want the government of Sri Lanka to permit anarchy in the island, and to allow these foreign trained Tamil Tigers a free rein, in harassing civilians all over the island and killing them with impunity, and nor should you.

Amnesty International not being overly concerned by the killings, torturing, and maiming for life by the Tamil Tigers in this dirty, unnecessary separatist war in Sri Lanka, indeed makes it a Godsend for their separatist terrorism and AI becoming an unwitting ally of Tamil Tiger terrorism.

As entrenched in the Sri Lanka Constitution, protection of human rights exists for all Sri Lankans, and those who make it their business to defend the claim of human rights of Tamils in Sri Lanka should also make it their business to see that these Tamils also religiously practice them. That also goes to your local satellite Human Rights organizations.

With that comes the responsibility of the Sri Lankan Government armed forces the right to sweep the hundreds of temporary lodgings in Colombo and its suburbs where these Tamil Tiger Suicide bombers and Parcel bombers are active like vermin at night putting these bombs together and emerge in the morning to do their killings during the day, and not be shouted at accusing the armed forces of ‘ethnic cleansing’. Irene, lets, cut out this rubbish, as the government has to do what it has to do to save the lives of its citizens, as it trumps all other human rights concerns..

In case AI wasn’t aware, On February 19, the government of Sri Lanka said that it would open a ‘gateway’ for trapped civilians in the Wanni area to crossover to controlled areas.

“We would open an escape route for civilians in the Wanni area and would give necessary accommodation”. “The government would create a ‘no war zone’ to facilitate civil movements. We will drop leaflets to educate the public on our strategy which includes escape routes for them like we did when liberating Sampur” said Minister Keheliya Rambukkwella, the government Defence Spokesman.

Surely, Irene, this strategy to preserve human rights and not letting the Tamil Tigers snuff out the lives of innocence people of all ethnic groups with impunity, and for the government to reaffirm to its peop in the Wanni that they have a ‘right to their lives’, deserves an applause from your committee when you all discuss Sri Lanka next.

Be realistic. Be honest. Don’t be a bunch of hypocrites. And don’t claim that you are squeaky clean by sanitizing yourselves bathed by the shadow of the Noble Prize for Peace, because it will just not cut mustard in my eyes.

Asoka Weerasinghe
Ottawa, Canada

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