CHOGM – An Acid Test For Malaysian Prime Minister
K. Arumugam
If our Prime Minister steps on the soil of Sri Lanka for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) later this week, he will be committing one costly political blunder. It will surely earn the displeasure of the Malaysian Tamils who had supported him in the last election. In a larger context Dato’ Seri Najib Tun Razak will be seen to have duped larger minorities within Malaysia for trading humanity and human dignity with hegemonic sovereignty that acted with impunity.
Sri Lanka is accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity for killing over 40,000 civilian Tamils in the last phase of war that ended on the 17th May 2009. That military act was brutal and its conduct was without witness save for its own military personnel.
The ethnic Tamils of Sri Lanka were living as a distinct nationhood parallel to that of the Singhala Kingdom prior to colonization. Sri Lanka became a unitary state when it was colonized by the British. Continuing the British system after independence the majority Singhala politicians introduced systematic marginalization, disenfranchisement of citizenships and discriminatory policies against the Tamils. Tamils fought back. When their non-violent struggle was met with the brute power of the state, the Tamils were pushed to take up arms in their right to self-determination. If the Tamils struggle was to take place right after the Second World War, it would have been called an independence struggle. That was the setting.
Immediately after the war in May 2009, Sri Lanka diplomatically labelled the crushing of the Tamils as a military solution to liberate the Tamils from the control of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam calling them terrorist. A resolution was tabled at the Human Rights Council (HRC) on 26th May 2009 justifying the military solution as an act in line with the promotion and protection of human rights’ standards. Malaysia was bought into that and voted for Sri Lanka, despite local Tamils crying foul.
However, soon after images of the war began to surface. These fueled worldwide condemnation. Various levels of compromise in the United Nations monitoring of the event were exposed. Sri Lanka tactfully handled it roping China and India as accomplices to the act with support from few allies in the region.
