A Hybrid Court Of Inquiry Into War Crimes & Crimes Against Humanity?
Emil van der Poorten
I forget who, but someone said “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”
Anybody in their right mind who thinks Sri Lanka is an exception to that rule has only to take a look at the farce that is unfolding before our very eyes consequent on the United Nations Human Rights Council’s (UNHRC) unanimously-adopted resolution in Geneva recently.
We have village idiots parading as political savants mouthing the same stupid platitude: “We will let no harm come to our war heroes from any inquiry.” This is a slogan being mouthed by demagogues from the Rajapaksa camp as well as those supporting the Maithri/Ranil coalition. That phrase regarding “protection of our war heroes from harm” simply means that the intention is that not one single member of our armed forces, numerically identical to the Russian army, should be investigated and certainly not prosecuted according to the provisions of existing Sri Lankan law, after a thirty-year conflict.
No matter how shrilly the British Channel 4’s documentaries have been abused, every person knowledgeable in the matter of “doctoring” material of this kind has stated that there is no evidence of alteration of the material. Even if opinion might suggest that they have sensationalised events, there hasn’t been an atom of evidence that the content is manufactured. I am well aware that what I have just said is going to provoke (the usual) accusations my being “in the pay of the Tigers” or acting as some kind of agent of yet another “Western conspiracy. Let’s just say that “dogs bark and caravans move on!”
To suggest that an armed force equivalent to modern Russia’s army was not guilty of any kind of “misbehaviour” during approximately thirty years of war is beyond incredible. But then those who mouth those sentiments at every news conference and on every TV talk show will be speaking to a public that gobbled up the description of the final carnage of a war among Sri Lankans as “A war of liberation,” accepting without a murmur of protest the fiction that “there were no civilian casualties.” That, my friends, was how the Rajapaksa Horde, one of whom was in fact the Commander in Chief of the armed forces in the final days of the war and now leads this country, described what occurred at Nanthikadal in 2009.
Bad enough? What’s worse is that the so-called “educated public” of this country accepted this grotesque fiction without a murmur of dissent, leave alone protest!
