Those forgotten final days

By N Sathiya Moorthy

The foreign ministry cannot be blamed for coming down relatively heavily on Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for using the 14^th anniversary of the end of the ethnic war to play to the gallery in his country. Yes, Diaspora Tamil constitutes a substantial constituency for him, yes, but to over-do the act of Canada?s traditional human rights concerns, year after year, with the same goal, does not help matters, anywhere.

But there is a difference, this time, to the customary governmental reaction to the even more customary Canadian ranting, independent of whoever is prime minister there. ?Such irresponsible and polarising pronouncements by the leader of a nation breeds disharmony and hatred both in Canada and Sri Lanka, instead of promoting peace and reconciliation,? the foreign ministry statement has said, possibly for the first time, indicating a possible reaction to Trudeau?s statement nearer home in Canada itself.

If the government indicated that it could soon be picking up human rights violations in countries that are critical of Sri Lanka on this score without real consideration for possible reconciliation on the ethnic front especially, then this may only be a small beginning. After all, Canada does not figure prominently in the global human rights map as a violator, but there are others that keep being on the top of the chart, almost on a daily basis. For instance, you have Canada?s US neighbour, where indiscriminate attacks on African-Americans nearer home is matched (only?) by military attacks on nations such as Afghanistan and Iraq, about which Trudeau, for instance, has not had a word, then or now.

Does it mean that Third World nations alone are for targeting, not First World partners, because they too sail on the same boat? It is not as if Canada is bereft of HR violations, but certainly not of the domestic kind as in Sri Lanka and/or the US. When it comes to the US war on terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, Canada was by its side and on the field. It will not take a group in Sri Lanka, if not the government, to flag the issue inside Canada, in the form of a statement, if not protest, everything Trudeau or whoever is in his place chooses to tick off Sri Lanka on rights violations from the past, again and again, year after year.

Fall guy, but…

Yes, Sri Lanka is the fall guy just now on the economic front. It may have diminished the government?s self-confidence to pay back others in their coin. But it does not mean that there is no other nation similarly placed in political terms but not in economic terms, for Canada, the US and the rest to pick their choice of target/victim.? One day they may decide to hit back, and that could mean much more than what the US and the rest of the West may have been prepared for in political terms.

After all, the US missed out on Osama bin-Laden and his Al Qaeda when it should have stopped him ? only because the nation and the leadership had conditioned themselves not to see through such a possibility. Likewise, now, for instance, the West has got used to picking its choice on the human rights front ? which is the fashionable thing for them just thing, to wash off their guilt from the past, near and distant. But they do need to acknowledge that the world has changed since the Ukraine War. Or, has the Ukraine War lent momentum to what was hidden in the minds of colonised nations from the past?

As coincidence would have it, the war?s end in Sri Lanka comes days before the LTTE?s terror-killing of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi ? though distanced by years. The Rajiv Gandhi assassination took place way back in 1991 whereas the Sri Lankan war ended much later in 2009.

As if to send out a message to nations like Canada and leaders like Trudeau, foreign minister Ali Sabry has tweeted his strong condemnation of the LTTE?s terror killing of Rajiv Gandhi, pointing out how the government in Colombo had eliminated the savage terrorist group. The hidden message is for the likes of Trudeau:?If you think that eliminating Osama needed doing, so did the elimination of the LTTE.?

Collateral damage

What the minister has possibly left unsaid even more is what they coolly dismiss as ?collateral damage?, which ordinarily should have shamed the US, Canada and the rest of the West, in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it has not. But in the case of Sri Lanka, it is not collateral damage but war crimes and human rights violations. Full-stop.

This is also because the West chose to believe the number of war victims that made its post-Iraq, post-Afghan conscience relatively clear. After all, to them, it is all in percentages. In the case of Afghanistan and Iraq, collateral damage, they calculate against the global population. In Sri Lanka, they choose work it out on the basis not even necessarily against the larger national population but viz the total Tamil population, or what they assume it to be at the commencement of the war.

That is because it calms their conscience, this way and that. More so, viz the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora, they also have a domestic constituency, that keeps soothing their frayed conscience dating back to the Spanish colonial masters? mass-killing of native American Indians and with retrospective effect, dating back to centuries, not just years ? where ?14? for them is only a number.

None of it means that there was no collateral damage in Sri Lanka. But Trudeau and his ilk forget how the LTTE would fire from behind schools, temples and hospitals, and the armed forces would be left with no choice but to fire their heat-seeking missiles that would destroy those institutions with their inmates (whom the LTTE would often not allow to escape to safety, before starting it all).

If there is one person who was cool and cruel at the same time, it was LTTE?s Prabhakaran. He is the only one in recorded history of centuries and millennia to have used his own people as human shields, and used the most convincing way of doing it. Decades earlier, he had begun by vowing to take care of the parents and family members of his fallen foot soldiers, as if they were his own family. They were his human-shields.

If the West knew of Prabhakaran?s motives even then, they conveniently overlooked it. If they did not with their greater exposure to war and violence across the world and through centuries, then they could not expect the much less exposed Sri Lankan government and troops to divine it, to avoid all those collateral damage.

Sophisticated ploy

So, when it came to the army encircling the LTTE in Jaffna town in the mid-nineties, they caused the townspeople to empty the place, threatening them with mass killing, mass rape and worse. But it was Prabhakaran?s sophisticated ploy of creating a human shield around himself, for his personal safety ? and make the world too believe that the Sri Lanka armed forces were crude and savage, and admiring his tact and command over the innocent Tamil people, who had always thought they (alone) were god?s very own gift to Sri Lanka.

Then came Mullivaikkal, the last venue of the LTTE war, to which PM Trudeau too remembers to recall 14 long years later. To Mullivaikkal, Prabhakaran moved with around 300,000 residents of Kilinochchi town and other villages his armed men passed through on their way to the one place, Prabhakaran had hoped to escape, yes, in a western ship, with possible western naval and air cover.

Overnight, the killer of President Ranasinghe Premadasa, Rajiv Gandhi and hundreds of others targeted as LTTE?s victims in pre-planned assassinations, had become worthy of the West?s indulgences ? and no Trudeau was there to tell the American partner and neighbour that it was not on. Yet, it was the Sri Lankan armed forces that brought back close to 300,000 Tamil civilians out of LTTE?s captivity, which history Trudeau has either not cared to know or has cared to ignore, 14 years hence.

Then what needed to happen, happened, and there are no details in the hands of the West, or the INGOs they fund, as to the number of old and lame ?human shields? that Prabhakaran had collected around him over years and decades, who ether did not want another lease of life or were not allowed to go. After all, as reports went, the LTTE cadres were shooting all those who wanted to escape from Mullivaikkal, yes, but were not allowed to in the initial phases — until the Prabhakaran leadership faced the revolt and let them go.

It looks as if PM Trudeau has not been briefed about the way the Sri Lankan soldiers helped all those 300,000 innocent Tamils, by whom all he came across in his country and who had lamented over the death of their loved ones at the hand of the armed forces at Mullivaikkkal and elsewhere. Not just that. The government and the armed forces had set up temporary camps beforehand for those they hoped to free from the LTTE?s clutches. The West was muted in its appreciation of the army?s achievement in all these. Instead, they called those IDP camps as ?concentration camps? and worse.

Thereby hangs a tale of prejudice and consequent pre-suppositions. Amen!

(The writer is a policy analyst & political commentator, based in Chennai, India. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)