THAT the UN is a rubber stamp of the US is only too well known but the current UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has proved he is a puppet of the West. With him and UN human rights chief Navi Pillai around, the LTTE rump may not feel the loss of Prabhakaran and Pottu Amman so much.
Vilification of Sri Lanka seems to be Ban's raison d'être. His day is not complete unless he calls for a probe into what he makes out to be 'war crimes' in Sri Lanka. He repeated that call on Friday, maybe egged on by his white masters.
Instead of continuing a proxy witch hunt against a UN member state, he should be thankful to the Sri Lankan government for having successfully launched the world's biggest ever hostage rescue operation which also benefited about 17 UN workers and around one hundred family members and relatives of theirs forcibly held by the LTTE as part of its human shield. When those UN workers were abducted, a red faced pusillanimous Ban chose to remain silent! His Colombo office had stooped to the level of having unofficial negotiations with LTTE terrorists when two UN employees were abducted and held incommunicado in the Vanni on a previous occasion.
Now that terrorism has been defeated, Sri Lanka is safe for one and all including UN workers. UNICEF, Ban should note, had been struggling in vain for over two decades to secure the release of child combatants and to prevent child recruitment by the LTTE. Today, child recruitment is a thing of the past! Moreover, there are no Kangaroo courts, an illegal tax system, violent suppression of dissent, abductions and killings in the North and the East.
These benefits wouldn’t have been there but for the LTTE's decapitation, a task that could not have been accomplished without war, which ironically Ban et al are now condemning. It was unfortunate that people happened to perish in the war, though the figure of civilian deaths that the UN and a section of the international media are bandying about is hugely exaggerated. Most civilians died as the LTTE used them as a human shield.
What did the UN, the UK and their allies do to liberate those men, women and children? Nothing! They could have brought pressure to bear on the LTTE to let go of those hapless people by cracking down on the terror backers protesting in western capitals.
The UK, it may be recalled, employed that method quite successfully in the late 1980s, when the LTTE abducted Tamil MP Sam Thambitmuttu's wife and son. The British government summoned LTTE spokesman Anton Balasingham, who was in London at that time and told him in no uncertain terms that he would be deported unless the LTTE released its hostages. The LTTE complied immediately. (Prabhakaran had the Thambimuttus murdered later.)
If the West had rounded up key LTTE supporters and given Prabhakaran a choice between their extradition and the release of civilians in his clutches, he would have had no alternative but to fall in line. Instead, western governments indicated their willingness to step in to rescue the cornered Tigers thus prompting Prabhakaran to tighten his grip on civilians in a bid to hold out at their expense until help arrived. Thus, ironically the countries that are screaming blue murder about 'war crimes' in Sri Lanka have the blood of civilians on their hands; they cannot exculpate themselves by simply calling for a war crime probe. They must also take the blame for having allowed funds to be raised on their soil for the LTTE's terrorist war which resulted in tens of thousands of deaths of both combatants and civilians. Having sponsored Sri Lanka's terrorism in that dastardly manner for so long in spite of heinous crimes the LTTE committed against civilians and a legitimate state, what moral right do western nations have to wage war against Taliban for harbouring Al Qaeda responsible for terrorism in the west?
At least now, the UN and the west must stop pandering to the whims and fancies of Tiger backers shedding crocodile tears for civilians and demanding a 'war crime' probe against Sri Lanka. This is what President of the prestigious Mackenzie Institute, Canada, John Thompson says in an article on this page today about the LTTE’s international network, which is stage-managing anti-Sri Lanka protests: "The LTTE helped facilitate the establishment of a global organised criminal network of Sri Lankan Tamils in Western Europe, North America and much of Asia. Other products for this network also included people smuggling (which is to say, illegal immigration rather than the more sinister crime of human trafficking), and consumer and commercial fraud. For some 20 years these activities have been supported by counterfeiting, a skill that has often brought special recognition from police agencies around the world."
Prabhakaran and his butchers are now dead. The western powers are obviously smarting from their failure to rescue Prabhakaran and other killers to perpetuate Sri Lanka's conflict so that they could have a strong presence in this region vis-à-vis rising India. It is time they came to terms with the harsh reality that the LTTE cannot be revived. They also ought to take cognisance of the fact that the outcome of the recent Indian elections, where pro-LTTE leaders like Karunanidhi, Vaiko and Jayalalitha had their snouts rubbed on the ground, proved that even the Tamil Nadu people did not take anti-Sri Lanka propaganda and Jayalalitha's promise to carve out Eelam seriously. On the other hand, when India, which was au fait with Sri Lanka's war from the inception, says there were no war crimes and backs her neighbour to the hilt at the UNHRC, how can any other country pretend to be shocked and perturbed?
What the west and the UN should be doing at this hour is not campaigning against Sri Lanka which has demonstrated to the world that terrorism could be neutralised militarily much to the detriment of terrorist outfits the world over. They ought to help Sri Lanka handle resettlement and rehabilitation efficiently so that the IDPs in welfare centres could go back home as soon as possible. Their collective witch hunt against Sri Lanka will certainly prove counterproductive as regards the world's battle against terrorism in that no non-western country will want to fight the scourge of terror with might and main for fear of being accused of 'war crimes' later on.
Meanwhile, the countries and the UN bigwigs mollycoddling LTTE backers should be warned that they are playing with fire. They had better heed what Thompson says about an emerging new threat: "In any event, the Tamil Mafia will not be operating under the LTTE's shadow anymore, and there may be some struggles for the leadership of its various enterprises and for influence within the group. The rest of us will have to get used to the presence of yet another globalized criminal society. The Tigers exercised restraint on the violence used by this Tamil Mafia in the past, but this check has now been lifted and we can expect to see just how dangerous a Mafia staffed by veteran guerrillas can be."
Creators of monsters are bound to regret their action sooner or later. (Courtesy: The Island)
