Libyan intervention and a confused Tamil diaspora - Neville Berava de Silva

Libyan intervention and a confused Tamil diaspora

Random thoughts By Neville de Silva

In and outside Sri Lanka sections of the Tamil minority are bristling with anger or disappointment. They believe that the western governments they assiduously cultivated in support of their dream of “Eelam”, an independent Tamil state, had let them down. The kind of help being given to Libyan rebels and denied them is the clear message that is being aired in the last few weeks in emails and other communications. They had hoped for UN or western intervention to save the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), banned by Europe, the US and others as a terrorist group, from annihilation after the Sri Lanka Government eventually decided four years ago to wipe out terrorism from the country after several attempts at a peaceful resolution were dashed. Tamil hopes of international pressure on Sri Lanka turned to desperation at the beginning of 2009 as the Sri Lankan armed forces pursued the Tamil Tigers, as the group is popularly called, relentlessly cornering them in their own lair in the country’s northeast. Despite the persistent demonstrations and protest marches in western capitals by the Tamil diaspora and the support of friendly western politicians keen to retain Tamil votes in their respective constituencies at home, the only help they got was ever-increasing rhetoric. Now they watch as the same western nations launch military action to tame Libya’s Col Muammar Gaddafi and help Libyan rebels acting on UN Resolution 1973 whose loose wording has led to multiple interpretations and created more confusion over how far military action could be legally applied. Libyan rebels prepare before leaving Ajdabiya to the front line near the oil town of Brega. AFP Britain and France were two of the European countries where the Tamil diaspora held their biggest demonstrations calling for western intervention. Now the diaspora finds to their obvious disappointment that these same countries have been in the forefront of the military action against the Gaddafi regime. While stories of unprecedented civilian deaths and genocide were peddled around through friendly western media, officials of international agencies and non-government organizations in the hope of extracting vengeance on Sri Lanka, these dubious claims were ignored, whereas the seeming threat to civilian life was sufficient to galvanize the west to rush to the United Nations. Correspondents in distant London were seeing a thousand amputees lying on a north eastern beach in Sri Lanka though the hospitals in the LTTE-held area where amputations could have been done were reported to have been destroyed earlier by aerial or ground bombardment. Discredited UN officials were spinning stories of up to 40,000 dead, a figure officially denied by the UN, but sufficient they thought for diplomatic threats on the Sri Lanka Government to end the military drive or even provoke western intervention. So why did the LTTE and the Tamil diaspora miscalculate so badly the reaction of the “international community (read western nations) with regard to Sri Lanka? Observers and commentators cite several reasons to explain the inaction though the rhetoric against the Rajapaksa government rose by several decibels as the military went for the LTTE’s jugular in April-May 2009. It seems the west, especially the vociferous pro-Tamil MPs in the British parliament, did not really believe the regular propagandist spiel they themselves put out. A diplomatic cable from the US Embassy in London to Washington released by WikiLeaks cited a Foreign Office source saying that the then foreign secretary David Miliband’s seemingly ardent concern over Sri Lanka was driven by domestic politics. The Labour Party, preparing to face a general election, was desperately trying to cling on to Tamil votes, especially in marginal seats, to save it from defeat. Western intervention in the Arab/Islamic world is largely dictated, observers say, by self-interest and the need to ensure regular supplies of oil at steady prices than any genuine desire to implant democracy in the desert sands as the west’s relations with some of the other states in the Middle East clearly show. Sri Lanka does not have oil- at least not proven underground reserves as in Iraq and Libya, two countries that have been at the receiving end of western military action purportedly to instal democracy among other things. If the west, egged on by human rights groups and NGOs intended to seek legitimacy via the UN Security Council, it would probably have run into the veto of one or two permanent members. That they did not want to risk for it would point to clear division in the Security Council and invoking the UNSC would be seen as essentially a western move. In any event any kind of western action would have been inconceivable without India’s concurrence, argue analysts. India is the paramount power in the region and what came to be known as the “Indira (Gandhi) doctrine” had carved out the region as India’s sphere of influence. India had already burnt its fingers once when it intervened in Sri Lanka in July 1987 at a time when the LTTE was with its back to the sea and facing military defeat. Indian intervention saved the LTTE leader to fight another day. He did, turning on the Indian peace keepers and killing 1200 of them and wounding nearly 3000. A few years later an LTTE suicide bomber assassinated Rajiv Gandhi, the Indian prime minister who ordered Indian intervention in Sri Lanka to save the LTTE. Following that experience India urged the west against collectively pressuring Sri Lanka and advised bilateral action as another diplomatic cable from the US Embassy in New Delhi to the State Department released by WikiLeaks has divulged. After nearly three decades of terrorist activity in which several thousands of innocent civilians of all ethnicities were killed by the LTTE and the so-called international community acting like the three proverbial monkeys, President Rajapaksa and Sri Lanka were in no mood to allow the LTTE to be rescued again. That mood of defiance added to western hesitation to intervene in Sri Lanka. The writer is a serving diplomat in the Sri Lankan embassy in Thailand