IT WAS a victory for the history books. It was like a replay of the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. The 19th century promise of the younger Marx to usher in a free society had been betrayed by oppressive states of Eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall was physically broken by its residents who ran free, a streaming torrent of humanity.
The East Germany regime was far less authoritarian than that of Prabhakaran. The LTTE’s true German equivalent was Hitler but without the open adulation that the latter enjoyed. The parallel was nearer that of Mussolini as the Allies closed in. Italians revolted and ultimately hanged him from a bridge.
The revolt of the Tamils against their oppressor was still greater as video footage from UAVs and the expressions on the tens of thousands fleeing to the army’s open hands showed. The LTTE had been herding them with guns, away from the last bund that the LTTE built, the Tamils’ own Berlin Wall. And as the Tamils finally broke out of their prison, guns and suicide cadres of their "sole representative" took aim. Army communication intercepts heard Prabhakaran ordering to shoot those fleeing. In his own last days, Hitler did not do that.
Western media had been fed falsehoods both by Western governments’ local NGO employees as well as local journalists on anti-national NGO pay. Norwegians alone (I have the evidence) had paid millions to one defence columnist as well as to a newspaper journalist director. Depending on such sources, Western media had painted a false picture and was now struggling with the real truth as the people ran away from the LTTE. The biased BBC looked bewildered.
Only two days before, the President had publicly announced that there were attempts by the pro LTTE lobby to bring him, the Defence Secretary and the Army Commander to trial for the ongoing war. This was a reference to a gimmick by LTTE lawyers in the US to charge them for genocide, a fact known for a few months but not publicly announced. Rajapaksa declared he would "rather face the gallows than betray the country".
As the highly overrated LTTE limped on its last legs, its supporters went on a frenzy. There were demonstrations around the world by Tamil expatriates. Some protests were done through their direct proxies, others through intermediaries some of whom have been genuinely made to feel that the LTTE cause was just. While our universities were sleeping or became coolies for anti-national NGOs, a major one-sided technical literature had grown-up supporting the LTTE cause.
David Miliband, Foreign Secretary of the very Britain that in the 19th century had committed genocide by killing all the males over 14 in the Uva Province and was part of the coalition that killed nearly 1,000,000 Iraqis was fantasising a return of British rule in Sri Lanka. He put colonial conditions on Sri Lanka.
The US brought pressure through the IMF. This was only a day after Obama in a press conference in Latin America admitted that the IMF was seen negatively in the developing world and that he would change it. The American ambassador in an event of Kumar Rupesinghe, whom he designated "my friend" ordered, in Ugly American fashion, political prescriptions for Sri Lanka.
Rupesinghe had been head of International Alert which first spoke of "genocide" of Tamils and published a map which demarcated a much larger area for Tamil Eelam than did the LTTE. Rupesinghe in other roles had wanted UN intervention to prevent the army taking over Jaffna in 1995. To prevent the present war, he launched an Anti-War Front in the South which angry citizens physically attacked. The genocide canard was also spread by the TULF of Tiruchelvam - the ICES being his creation. The ICES director was recently deported on national security grounds.
The LTTE-supporting Norwegian government which co-authored the CFA coyingly turned aside as the LTTE destroyed our embassy. Vasudeva fretted about "human rights" on the Norwegian propaganda channel YA TV. Nimalka was described in Asian Tribune as the "vociferous apologist for the LTTE".
Key figures in the Norwegian peace industry were PRIO’s founder Johan Galtung and Asbjorn Eide. I know them both. A few years ago, I was a keynote speaker on future studies with Galtung. He took in my labelling of the CFA as Norway’s colonial intervention. Some 25 years ago with Asbjorn Eide and his wife Wenke, I co-authored a human rights book. (It is through my contacts with them that Rupesinghe first went to Norway.) With Wenke, I developed a scheme for equal academic relations between Norway and the Third World. They betrayed it subsequently. Their son Espen, with whom I used to eat reindeer meat at their house, was like them in the Labour Party. He has now grown up and is today State Secretary of their War [Defence] Ministry. Norwegian families speak peace and war with double tongues as do their governments. War means peace and peace means promoting a colonial war in Sri Lanka.
Those who had come from the LTTE-infested areas had been temporarily housed in separate quarters for security reasons to screen out LTTE infiltration. Western sources and their local NGOs were trying to paint these as concentration camps. Britain pioneered concentration camps in the Boer War. And in World War II, the US and Germany made such camps policy, Germany using them for extermination of Jews. Even now, the Nordic country Sweden keeps some of its refugees in "detention centres where people who have been detained are kept behind locked doors." And Australia has "a policy of mandatory detention [behind barbed wire] for all refugees and asylum seekers who arrive by boat on its shores". Sri Lankans have recently stayed in such camps of both countries.
The government and Sri Lanka thus faced a storm of orchestrated propaganda. The mass exodus seen live on TV belied these falsehoods. It was poetic justice that envoys of these very Western interfering countries were "herded" by our government to witness the Tamils running for freedom to be seen live through UAV broadcasts.
The mass exodus to freedom belied the false genocide charge of the LTTE, the ICES and International Alert. Instead, Mahinda Rajapaksa, Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Sarath Fonseka will go down in history as key figures in our 2500 year history. History properly written, will also record the contributions of the JVP, the student movement and the then SLFP in resisting the 1989 Indian incursion. The present JVP, JHU and Wimal Weerawansa’s NFF - all offshoots of that 1989 resistance, gave the initial strength for our country’s present victory. We are indeed privileged to live in historical times. (Courtesy : The Island)
