6.1.2008
H. L. D. Mahindapala
The
official termination of the Ceasefire Agreement (CFA)
signed on February 22, 2002 was long overdue. Everyone
knew it was dead as the countless number of whales killed
by the Norwegians, defying the ban imposed by the International
Whaling Commission in 1986.
The
Mahinda Rajapakse government has rightfully concluded
that it is unjust, illegal and unacceptable to let the
Tamil Tigers do what the Norwegians are doing to the whales:
violating international law and decimating the endangered
species (Tamils in the case of Velu Prabhakaran). Even
Ranil Wickremesinghe, one of the co-signatories, is on
record saying that the CFA is dysfunctional.
Only
Velu and Erik Solheim pretend that it is still valid.
Both are hanging on to the CFA not because they respect
international law. No. They do it purely to tie the hands
of the Sri Lankan government to an illegal agreement (i.e,
not endorsed by president, parliament, or people) that
was designed to serve only the political objectives of
an armed group banned by the international community.
This is not surprising because both Solheim and Velu,
two co-signatories to the Ceasefire Agreement, are paddling
in the same boat, insisting that Sri Lanka should observe
international law without paying the slightest respect
or regard to the international laws that applies to them.
Year
after year the International Whaling Commission has passed
resolutions banning the hunting of whales. Norway and
Iceland - two key peace monitors - have cynically defied
the ban for commercial purposes. Velu too follows their
example in defying international humanitarian laws on
killing human beings for political purposes.
Tragically,
Norway and Iceland have once again decided to defy the
ban. Norway and Iceland, along with other whale hunting
countries, have decided to increase their current catch
from 2,395 whales a year to 3,215 by 2008, according to
official reports. Environmentalists and animal rights
activists consider Norwegians as eco terrorists destroying
precious lives with utter contempt for international law.
The
CFA came with an “international safety net”
leading the people to believe that the international community
will not only play fair by both parties but also intervene,
if necessary, to bring to heel any party that violates
the CFA. The significance of the CFA was in this promised
international guarantee, standing way above any other
moves to restore peace. Not surprisingly, it did nothing
of the sort when Velu went on the rampage committing war
crimes and crimes against humanity. That was the time
when the international community should have invoked R2P
and intervened to protect its own agreement and the civilian
victims of Velu’s ruthless killing machine. Instead
it stood by watching with it hands folded until the Sri
Lankan forces moved to enforce R2P to save the nation
from the Pol Potist regime in the Vanni.
Then,
out of the blue, Western interventionists and their local
agents like Jayantha Dhanapala landed here, with the blessings
of Ms. Radhika Coomaraswamy, to stop the Sri Lankan forces
from marching into Pol Potist Vanni. The time to intervene
with R2P was when Velu was violating every clause of the
CFA. Nothing was done then. But they all galvanized into
action only when the Sri Lankan forces began their march
into the east and the north. Then they raised cries of
escalating violence and human rights violations.
Now,
as if he had woken up from a coma, Solheim, the failed
peace broker, states, according to a foreign news agency,
that "the violence raging in Sri Lanka will worsen
after the government pledged to withdraw from the 2002
cease-fire". In saying this he pretends that violence
did not "worsen" under his CFA. He and his peace
monitors know the statistics that give the lie to his
statement that the abrogation of the CFA will "worsen"
violence.
In
fact, he should be held responsible for the "worsening"
of violence under his Ceasefire Agreement. He and Velu
jointly and separately worked to undermine the CFA they
signed separately. Solheim was manufacturing excuses to
back the Tigers each time Anton Balasingham walked out
or dragged on the talks, blaming the Sri Lankan government.
Velu,
for his part, was cutting up the CFA into ribbons blatantly
and with impunity. Solheim was complicit in this act by
lending his diplomatic, financial and material support
for Velu to consolidate his position through brutal violence.
He worked on the undeclared premise that he could squeeze
more concessions from the Sri Lankan government if he
strengthened the hands of Velu. The image of the Pol Pot
of Vanni was blown out of proportion to his real strength.
He
was made to look like the invincible king of the Tamils
even though the Tamils as a whole did not accept him as
their “sole representative.” Kumaratunga and
Wickremesinghe too fell for it hook, line and sinker.
Only Mahinda Rajapaksa had the courage to challenge it
and expose Velu as the hollow man, with a head full of
straw. His “gahuwoth gahanawa” policy has
been the right strategy and it has worked. The leadership
of Mahinda Rajapakse should be respected for taking up
the challenge and producing results.
He
also exposed the hypocrisy of those who signed the CFA.
Leaving aside all other violations of the CFA, Norway
failed in its international obligations to stop the Tigers
from killing their own people just like the way Norway
failed to honor its international obligations in killing
the whales. The Royal Norwegian government has even started
culling the moose -- its national symbol -- because the
wind they pass pollutes the environment.
Norwegians
may be experts in dealing with the wind that comes out
of cows and moos. Good luck to them in that field! But
Sri Lankans expected their performance to be somewhat
decent and higher than dealing with wind that comes out
of cows and moos. Sri Lankans which relied on Norway to
do their duty was let down by Solheim who manipulated
the international community to steer the negotiations
away from the fundamental aim of achieving a durable peace.
He
was more keen on retaining his place as a peace-maker
through backdoor pressures of cutting off aid than resolving
the crisis by addressing fairly and squarely the aspirations
of all communities. He, like most other pundits dabbling
in the Sri Lankan crisis, committed the unpardonable crime
of believing that only the issues of Jaffna Tamils need
to be resolved. The Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement and the CFA
failed primarily because it was based n this false assumption.
Sri Lankan peace negotiators and the independent commentators
agree that Solheim fouled up the peace process by teaming
up with Balasingham whom he visited monthly in London
to polish bottles of whiskey and plot against the Sri
Lankan government. Solheim’s disastrous tactics
were doomed to fail and in the end he has nothing left
to show except a big egg on his face.
Like
all the big power brokers in the West, Solheim stood on
the high ground of forcing Sri Lanka to adhere to what
they claimed to be international law while Norway was
descending to the lower depths of letting the King of
Norway and his Royal Norwegian government to flagrantly
reject and violate any international law that goes against
their interests. Solheim bent over backwards to render
services to Velu, with the compliments of the Royal Norwegian
government. In return he couldn't even get the Tigers
to sit at the table to negotiate the last round of talks
in Geneva. After that Solheim had nowhere to go except
into the oblivion from where he came.
Now
he is making feeble noises to cover up his failures. Without
accepting responsibility for his misguided role he is
now passing the buck to the Sri Lankan government warning
that the decision to withdraw from the Ceasefire Agreement
could lead to further escalation of violence. Where were
his eyes, and in which part of the nether regions of his
anatomy was his intelligence located, when his protected
cubs in the Tiger camps were violating 98% of the Ceasefire
Agreement? Was that an escalation or de-escalation of
violence? Though he has no qualms about killing whales
in the northern seas he has been very protective of his
Tiger cubs in the Vanni. He stands out now as the pathetic
example of the Indian proverb that those who ride the
Tiger end up in his stomach.
Having
gone along with the Tiger violations of his Ceasefire
Agreement he has the gumption to say now: "This (abrogation
of the CFA) would weaken efforts to protect the civilian
population, which would be most regrettable." This
was quoted on the Norwegian Foreign Ministry's Web site
last Wednesday. Before preaching to Sri Lankans about
honoring international agreements, or protecting living
beings, should not the Norwegian Foreign Ministry set
the example to Sri Lanka by observing its obligations
to international law, particularly to those gentle giants
of the sea?
Another
positive aspect of the decisive move of the Rajapaksa
government to withdraw from the Ceasefire Agreement is
to indirectly get rid of the Norwegian peace monitors
now, and in time the Norwegians, lock, stock and barrel.
Today Solheim is as irrelevant to the peace process as
the NGOs which were paid to toe his line. The Norwegians
have been menace to Sri Lankans in the same way they have
been to the whales. They would have been respected and
honored if they played their dutiful role with even a
modicum of impartiality.
Solheim's
role as a peace broker has been one of the most pathetic
charades in international conflict resolutions. Throughout
his performance he has been acting as a political greenhorn
who set out to achieve goals way beyond his capacity to
come anywhere near the envisaged objectives. To begin
with he has had no diplomat skills, or any experience
in the art of conflict resolution. He was charging like
a bull in a Tamil shop in Jaffna. I remember telling Lisa
Golden, the Foreign Ministry official who participated
in the discussions with a delegation from the World Alliance
for Peace in Sri Lanka (WAPS), in Oslo, August 2004, that
Erik Solheim will never succeed because he was playing
an unacceptable partisan role that is not conducive for
the restoration of peace.
I
told her this when she was escorting us down the lift
after our discussion with Solheim. Solheim was racing
down the steps into the hell hole he was creating for
himself and the Sri Lankans. That was the time when he
was cocky relying on the military balance that was in
favor of the Tamil Tigers. Like all pundits of the time,
mainly in the NGOs, he assumed that the best way to resolve
the conflict was by giving into the concoctions of Anton
Balasingham, the chief negotiator of the Tigers at the
rounds of talks held in Thailand, Japan, Norway and France.
Assuming
that the Tamil Tigers were invincible he arrogantly dismissed
the presentations and claims of the Sri Lankan government.
The politically illiterate Western diplomats who are ill-trained
and ill-equipped to read the ground realities in their
ex-colonies, too were waxing eloquent at cocktail parties
that the Sri Lankan forces would fall like flies if they
encountered the Tigers. This was the line swallowed even
by our know-alls like Chandrika Kumaratunga, the Queen
of Thieves and Lies. She ignored the warnings given to
her by the field commanders about the Tiger cadres encroaching
and occupying the east, violating the CFA. Besides, her
Prime Minister, Wickremesinghe, who is afflicted with
the chronic disability of walking straight on any constructive
political line, took the cowardly way out by signing the
Ceasefire Agreement promising peace in our time. Instead
he got, like Solheim, what he deserved: a kick in his
pants from Velu.
In
between Erik Solheim was basking in his fifteen minutes
of fame by dancing the jig on the international stage,
wielding not only the power of the international community
but also the mythical military power sold to him by Balasingham.
Misguided by his own miscalculations he unashamedly sided
with Balasingham, as all participants to the talks would
recall. Having taken the wrong route to peace he is now
blaming the Sri Lankan government - nothing new in it,
of course! -for abrogating the Ceasefire Agreement that
has brought nothing but misery to the war-weary people
of Sri Lanka.
The
Ceasefire Agreement was essentially a product of both
Balasingham and Solheim - a product sold to the naïve
and incompetent prime minister of the time, Wickremesinghe.
It was also hailed by the NGO pundits who claimed it to
be the ultimate solution to the national crisis. They
were over-reacting with an unwarranted euphoria, forgetting
their misplaced euphoric antics when the Indo-Sri Lanka
Agreement was signed. This time they were cock sure because
it came with the guarantee of "the international
safety net." They were wrapped in their futile theories
and analyses which never took into account the basic fundamental
that dominates the political equation: violent Velu.
To
the credit of Velu it must be said that he was successful
in taking the whole bunch - India, the international community,
the pseudo-intellectuals in the NGO circuit etc - for
a jolly good ride. Jehan Perera, the Norway-funded peace
mudalali, is one of them. He once returned from Vanni
and hailed the permission granted to hold a workshop there
as an early sign of Velu advancing to establish a democratic,
open society that could pave the path to peace. As usual,
Jehan Perera was clutching at straws. His Jesuitry led
him to believe that the NGO and Church missionaries could
transform the Vanni villain into a peace-loving dove.
Plying their mercenary trade to please their foreign-funded
masters they refused to accept the realities undermining
the ground on which they stood. Not a single of their
theoretical fictions has had a serious impact on the peace
process. Despite the events going against them, these
intellectual retards cling on to their bogus theories
as if their fictions are more valid than the hard lessons
and realities of history.
Simultaneously,
they have been maneuvering to halt the Mahinda Rajapaksa
campaign advancing to liberate Tiger-held territory. Preventing
the advance of the Security Forces, in the name of a peace
they could never guarantee, was their sole means of retaining
the Ceasefire Agreement that primarily defined the borders
of a future Terroristan. Their last gamble was to threaten
the nation with Right to Protection (R2P) – the
neo-colonial instrument of the West to interfere in the
domestic affairs of Sri Lanka.
R2P
is an instrument promoted by the Western powers on the
presumption that they have the power, the knowledge and
the skill to put things right if the small nations fail
to address the human rights violations within its territory.
They would not dare to preach that to China or India.
But smug and preachy pundits like Gareth Evans would step
into Sri Lanka and utter their high-sounding principles
though he would resist with all the muscle power at his
command if Sri Lanka steps into Australia to correct the
human rights violations against the Aborigines –
the natives who were exterminated to the point of extinction.
Oddly
enough, he made this statement when the Sri Lankan state
was already moving in to arrest and prevents the gross
human rights violations in the one-man Pol Potist regime
in the Vanni. Radhika Coomaraswamy's ICES, which played
a lead role in waving the stick of R2P, was expecting
a Rwanda-scale blood letting as the forces advanced into
the east and the north. But the Army Commander Sarath
Fonseka has moved in stealthily into the east and the
north without committing the mistakes and the horrors
of Iraq, Afghanistan or even Palestine.
He
is an exemplary soldier who has moved skillfully and intelligently
to complete a task which was considered impossible earlier.
And he has done it in style - an achievement that should
be the envy of every American general in the battle fields
of combating terrorism. He has led the Sri Lankan R2P
forces to achieve goals which a foreign R2P force could
never have achieved. Sri Lanka is the only country that
has proved its capability to fight and win against a formidable
terrorist group dreaded by the international community.
The
successes of the Sri Lankan R2P forces gathering momentum
leaves space only to bury the CFA. President Mahinda Rajapakse
is only performing the funeral rites to a corpse that
has no chance of resurrection. The CFA is not a Lazarus.
Nor is Solheim a Jesus Christ.
And
"Amen" to that!
Courtesy - Asian
Tribune