UNHCR and War Criminal Neglect
UNHRC voted for hope and good faith yesterday, not punishment. Much work to do!
Ye Gods. If you didn’t, the server went down yesterday. Was patching files all day. What I missed was, among other things, the UNHRC (Human Rights Council) Resolution that Sri Lanka proposed and passed. This is interesting not only for what it says (congratulating and supporting Sri Lanka in the work ahead) but for the way the vote broke. It’s basically Global South vs the North. There are seismic shifts in the world, and Sri Lanka seems to be a fault line.
I agree with the resolution in that it’s proactive. Here’s the basic text and the vote breakdown. My cousin in UK sends me press clippings and they’re infuriating. He’s quietly contributing to relief, but I can’t imagine what nonsense he must see everyday.
They frame it still from a diaspora perspective where the Sri Lanka government are the bad guys and the international community somehow protagonists. Like this from the Times Online: ‘Sri Lanka is to clash with Western powers at the United Nations Human Rights Council today in an effort to ward off any investigation into alleged war crimes committed during its military offensive against the Tamil Tigers.’
The disdain here is fairly palpable. Meanwhile over 1.7 million people are displaced by US backed fighting in Pakistan and the only calls are for aid to… the Pakistani government. Which hasn’t even won yet. Whereas Sri Lanka has won against a terrorist group with more suicide bombings than Hamas, Al Qaeda, and Islamic Jihad combined. We are in a position to resettle and they’re still fighting the diaspora’s 1983 vengence war.
If you guys can come here, occupy the country, pacify everything, build infrastructure, resettle people and rebuild the country, please do. If the UK can offer a little more than the $2 million it did last year, if you can pay us a bit more than a footballer, then I welcome the lecture. Otherwise, please deal with the government we have and try to support the sovereign nation of Sri Lanka. If you’ve got western educated fairly ‘liberal’ kalu sudda bloggers and, like, Voice In Colombo united about something you may want to reconsider your angle. That is, if you care about actually helping the people of Sri Lanka.
If you are Sri Lankan, it’s honestly not that relevant. The Rotary Club Colombo Regency is buying about 100 toilets to install at Menik Farm by next week. They’re 17,500 each and I think they’ve got about 96 so far. Also, ACT now has pretty full access to the camps. I’ll write a full post about that, but one particular item medically needed is these external fixature things to bind and support wounded limbs. They’re about 5,000 and we’re running low on funds.
For those pledging literally hundreds of millions to AfPak to ignore these needs and punish Sri Lanka is war criminal neglect, in my opinion.
Amen brother. You said it as it is.
good post by you. it is nice to see that your willingness to help and resettle IDPs and not critizize this government anymore. all UNP supporters should learn from u can help build our country and we will be a strong country in the world.
Divide it is. But people will prevail.
There won’t be a war without war crimes……..there never was ..there never will be….war is about people carrying guns and killing the enemy, its a fluid situation..you need to get into soldiers boots to know this……..in such situations its easy to forget(ignore) human rights and UN conventions… A soldier may have few seconds to find out if the moving object in front of him is a Civilian or a Suicide bomber….otherwise in few seconds he might be dead….people who talk about war doesn’t know this fact….people do mistakes in war…its normal….
I should however point out that the statistic about british funding for Sri Lanka may be flawed. The flyover in Kelaniya and nugegoda was built with british funding. Rs. 878 million for nugegoda, and I assume about the same for Kelaniya. If I remember right, they gave us $150 million (but I can’t find a link to prove that). I think the aid is allocated and then it’s up to us to use it as fast as possible. With infrastructure projects, the timeline is several years so the actual disbursement of funds gets chopped up across those years. Anyway, here’s a link from the Daily News for the nugegoda flyover (read the write up below the picture):
http://www.dailynews.lk/2009/01/23/main_News.asp
Indi,
As far as I can tell, Jeremy Page is not from Nallur or Thekawatte. In fact, Dean Nelson is also not a Tamil. How does everything you (and myself to a certain degree) disagree with magically become attributed to ‘the diaspora’? British journalists are not fighting anybody’s war, they’re performing as expected; as observed in every other hotspot in the world. They don’t call it the ‘humanitarian regime’ for nothing–they have a very strong incentive to shape the narrative such that it is congruent with clear examples of genocide. It’s not a diaspora-wide conspiracy–it’s journalism, lefty Brit style.
I know it’s heartless, that they are self-serving hypocrites with no skin in the game–but let’s not get carried away and imagine the Protocols of the Elders of Zion where it’s just individuals acting on cemented incentives.
Amen to that. There is an awful lot of paranoia here about the feared and hated “diaspora”.
The reporting of the left-wing western media re: SL is the reporting of the western media regarding every other civil war and international conflict, including the escapades of the West in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is actually a humanitarian drive with the primary concern being the safeguarding
What you perceive as one-sided reporting would be solved very simply by the GoSL stopping its wholesale assault on press freedom in the country and allowing independent media into Mullivaikkal, Menik Farm and other places.
The original justficiation was that it was too dangerous during the war. There is no justification now and the continued refusal to allow independent media or aid agencies in justifiably fuels the fears that there is a sinister agenda behind this.
Hey Indi check this article out:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-luce/in-sri-lanka-on-the-stree_b_209065.html
I think you’ll be quite heartened by it.