Ceylon Today Editorial

UN SYMBOL OF A FUMBLING FAILURE

05 September 2016

 

What could very well turn out, in the long term, to have been a statement tantamount to political suicide was uttered by President Maithripala Sirisena when he addressed the media after talks with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Friday, revealing the fact that he had in one-on-one talks with Ban slammed 'Extremist political elements in the North and South' for 'exerting unfair political pressures on the government'. He had gone to the extent of literally warning Ban to watch out for those extremists.

One is of course mindful of the fact that it was those extremists who persuaded northern Tamils to vote him into power as the then ideal foil to Mahinda Rajapaksa. His statement could therefore mean that he is not going to allow himself to be goaded into 'reconciliation' actions and 'war crimes allegations' and bend over backwards to please every whim and fancy of men like Chief Minister Wigneswaran and extremist elements in the TNA who insist ad nauseam that hard core LTTE men in prison be released, that foreign judges be inducted into the reconciliation/war crimes process among other extremist demands which can only lead to Sirisena's ouster from power should he seek a second presidential term.

Ban says the UN could have saved tens of thousands of lives which, "were lost in the conflict's decisive final stage". He says in the same breath that the "decades long civil war saw terrible violence , terrorism, the use of human shields and other grievous violations of human rights".

So in what context then could the UN have saved more human lives but did not? Why content himself with speaking of the last days of the war but not on the 30 years of LTTE terrorism, egged on by today's TNA, its proxy in Parliament, which left a trail of bloodied footprints all over from north to south, east to west, wherever the TNA's champions, the Tigers, felt it good to attack mercilessly with bombs, swords and machetes...whether in a Buddhist temple, a Muslim mosque or even to the slaughter of their own people, the Hindus, who said 'no' to that swath of blood-letting they were opposed to.

Did not the UN fail then, at the start, to bring to an abrupt end the insatiable lust for Blood, not only Sinhala blood, by the LTTE that was backed by Tamil organizations raising funds in the very shadows of the UN's New York headquarters to help the LTTE continue keeping the killing fields soggy with the blood also of Muslims and whoever it was who crossed their paths?

We'd rather say to Ban, turn the light inwards, for it was you at the helm of the UN for many of those years, who kept your mouth shut and even made out verily stentorian cases against Sri Lankan army brutality and 'end phase war crimes'.

In case his memory fails him, may we remind him that had he addressed all UN rights agencies and the general assembly to the heinous deeds of the LTTE way back then, there'll be no talk today of war crime tribunals and spineless UN hacks cow-towing to mercenary elements to ingratiate themselves to the TNA/LTTE by persistently pressing the President of Sri Lanka to set up a war crimes tribunal with foreign judges on it.

Ban said: "Reconciliation may take longer than expected but that does not mean you can take forever, the families of victims cannot wait forever". nor could the slaughtered sinhalese, wait forever for an imbecilic un to act and stop that bloodletting.

Sinhalese victims of that spree of brutality were kept waiting indefinitely, for over 30 years, for the UN to act and come to their aid. But the UN and Ban were then too much, as perhaps even now are, on the side of the powerful diaspora. Wish you had gone to Jaffna 20 years ago and told off the LTTE and its cohorts in the TNA and the then TULF, to cut it out or the UN would demand an international war crimes tribunal against the Tamil leadership for promoting, aiding and abetting in the slaughter, 30 years of slaughter, of the Sinhalese.

For a man in your position it's remarkable that you've not heard the truism that reconciliation can only issue forth from understanding and mutual forgiveness...not out of war crimes tribunals aimed at proving which Tamils killed whom and which Sinhalese killed whom.

It's time to let Sri Lanka let go of the past.That's if the Tamils are genuinely interested in reconciliation. There's not one single sign that this is the case. They're baying for blood, insatiably so, since the LTTE their heroes did not spill enough Sinhala blood.