Israel is in Lebanon, aren’t you appalled ladies
and gentlemen!
A lot of INGO work in this country makes me want to say ‘if you
want to help us, give the money and leave’. If they don’t trust the
trustees of such funds, then smile, say hello, commiserate with our
suffering and leave. If we have recovered to any extent from the tsunami
it is because we did what we could for our fellow citizens. If we
someday sort out the menace that is terrorism, I am inclined to think it
will be on our own.
By Malinda Seneviratne
‘This way to the Gas, ladies and gentlemen’ is the title of a book by
Tadeusz Borowski. As the title suggests it is about the terrible things
that Hitler did to the Jews. The title has a subtext, I feel. It insists
that we look in a particular direction and implies that we’ve been
looking somewhere else; that we’ve not been looking or haven’t really
seen.
I was reminded of this title when I read the last two issues of the
Ravaya and what its columnists had to say about Muttur, the fighting,
the casualties and damage and of course the one-upmanship. I read with
great interest the crass subterfuge engaged in by Thimbiriyagama Bandara,
Sunanda Deshapriya, Jayantha Seneviratne and Nimalka Fernando. Jayadeva
Uyangoda at least had the decency to name the LTTE over the matter of
the Mavilaru Anicut. Even though he has largely ignored this genesial
fact in the rest of his pieces, he does mention it, unlike his
fellow-columnists.
My friend Anuruddha Pradeep put it nicely: ‘These people, who get so
excited and upset when even a branch breaks from a tree in what they
think are exclusive traditional homelands of Tamil people, don’t have
the eyes to see the barbaric act of denying water, thereby destroying
thousands of acres of paddy and the consequent impoverishment of
thousands of families.” Anuruddha was not referring specifically to the
Sunanda Deshapriya, that poor darling suffering from Numb Finger
Syndrome, that terrible affliction preventing them from pointing the
finger at Prabhakaran and saying ‘terrorist.’
He was not referring specifically to the Pakaiasothy Saravanamuttu,
Uyangoda, Kumar Rupasinghe et al. No, he was referring to that entire
class of people well-fed by donor dollars who are loathe to reveal their
‘expatriate salaries’, the sad people who suffer from selective amnesia.
Yes, it is no secret that they are for the most part happily resident in
that house called the ‘NGO Community.’
They talk, these humanitarians who remain stoic when the LTTE is
barbaric but can’t keep their pants on if by any chance the striped
sweethearts get bitten in their behinds; they talk about the government
acting too hastily, being too quick to launch military strikes. They
have a point. What the government should have done is something that
needs to be talked about considering the costs already incurred. Still,
the manifest reluctance to talk about the closing of the anicut
certainly says something about the bona fides of these people, I think.
The tune changed, naturally, as the days passed. Now the rhetoric is
devoted to pooh-poohing government claims that the security forces took
control of the anicut. There is, in their lines, a smug affirmation of
the LTTE claim, that it was a thug named Elilan and not the security
forces that got the water to flow. As far as I know, the security forces
still does not have full control over the anicut. The evidence shows
that yes, a thug named Elilan opened the gates. All this is true and yet
there is a lot that these people leave unsaid. We shall say it,
therefore.
The LTTE decided to close the anicut not with the intention of opening
it. The LTTE could not be coaxed into opening an anicut or into anything
for that matter. The LTTE understands one thing, the pain of war. The
LTTE was pained. Perhaps it was this pain that prompted the LTTE to open
the anicut, perhaps it was not, but no one can dispute the fact that the
LTTE never once yielded anything through negotiations. All that the LTTE
did through negotiations was secure additional benefits without giving
anything up.
The LTTE wanted the government to agree to all kinds of things in return
for the release of water. That is holding communities to ransom. No
self-respecting government can be expected to go on its knees and agree
to such conditions. Muddle-headed and unprofessional though the
Rajapaksa Administration appears to be in all matters, they got this one
right. They refused to budge. The LTTE blinked. And what do our NGO boys
and girls do? They pat the LTTE on its back. And what do our NGO boys
and girls refuse to do? They refuse to admit that the water came too
late for some 25,000 acres of paddy and some 15,000 farming households.
Instead, they talk about the 17 employees of a French NGO who were
murdered in cold blood, allegedly, according to them, by the security
forces. The government says “No, it was the LTTE.’
I say, ‘I want to know who did it because I am against all killings
outside of combat situations, whether they are extra-judicial or not.’ I
say ‘I will not be silent when the killing is done by people on “my
side” of the equation.’ I know that no army is perfect and I know that
war is something that inevitably causes death and destruction, but I
want suffering to be at a minimum level. This was unnecessary.
Premeditated. Brutal. Very LTTE-like. If the armed forces were
responsible, it is self-defeating because we cannot defeat the LTTE by
being like them in our operations.
Our NGO friends, on the other hand, say little or nothing about the
(possibly up to) 300 Muslims who died not in some cross-fire between the
government forces and the LTTE, but were butchered in cold blood by the
LTTE in Palathoppur. This is understandable. The moment you talk about
what the LTTE did and does to Muslims, the entire ‘we are discriminated
against’ sob-story that Eelamists and their lackeys talk about sounds
like a load of rubbish. So the Muslims are conveniently sandwiched
between the government and the LTTE. A delicious tidbit isn’t it for our
terrorism-laundering NGO fraternity?
It is not just Sunanda and Co., of course. Last week I came across a
classic whine by someone claiming to represent International NGOs or
INGOs: ‘According to the CFA, a work permit was not a prerequisite to
engage in humanitarian work in Sri Lanka; while the government continued
to honour the CFA, fighting went on between the government troops and
the LTTE, the government was now depriving them (INGOs) from engaging in
humanitarian activities’. Reserve your guffaws for this: ‘This is not
justifiable. It is unfair. The government can’t say that the CFA is in
motion and then do something in violation of the provisions of the CFA.’
Do these people think the CFA is our constitution, just as others of
their tribe believed that the tsunami was nothing but the announcement
of an open season to do the vini-vidi-vici number economically,
politically and culturally? Just because the CFA does not say that INGOs
will be prohibited from doing this or that, does it amount to a blank
cheque for dubious outfits with even more dubious agenda to do what they
want? Does it mean that governments cannot say ‘no’ to something if they
feel it is not in the better interests of the population?
There is nothing to say that all NGOs and INGOs are engaged in
gun-running, drug-smuggling etc., etc., but there is also nothing to say
that they all run above-board operations and should not be investigated
should incidents and circumstances warrant such investigation.
We are talking ‘national security’ here, ladies and gentlemen of the
INGO-NGO community. Not all of you are ‘innocents-abroad’ and we know
that. For example, a person who calls himself Thomas Seibert, working
for an organisation called ‘medico international’ who has worked in Sri
Lanka has done something quite out of the ambit of things that deserve
the tag ‘medico’; he has been petitioning the German Parliament to
revoke the ban on the LTTE. There are others whose actions are suspect,
to say the least. A lot of INGO work in this country makes me want to
say ‘if you want to help us, give the money and leave’. If they don’t
trust the trustees of such funds, then smile, say hello, commiserate
with our suffering and leave. If we have recovered to any extent from
the tsunami it is because we did what we could for our fellow citizens.
If we someday sort out the menace that is terrorism, I am inclined to
think it will be on our own.
But let us get back to the business of looking the other way. The latest
issue of the Ravaya and all the commentaries therein are conspicuously
silent about a little girl by the name of Asvini. Asvini, two and a half
years old, was killed when the LTTE exploded a bomb attempting to
assassinate an ex-MP who was a member of the EPDP. What’s the problem?
The fact that the sweethearts missed the target? The fact that the
sweethearts, Tamils, targeted a Tamil, and killed a little angel who
probably didn’t know what ‘Tamil’ meant although she was Tamil?
You may have looked the other way, so tell us: where were you looking
and where are you looking now? Were you looking at your TV set, were you
watching CNN or BBC or whatever channel you go to for ‘news’? Were you
appalled by what the Israelis are doing in Lebanon and the strange
silence of your pals in the ‘international community’? Were you in a
phone-conference with Eric Solheim (they were in the thick of the Middle
East peace process, those Norwegians, were they not?) about re-locating
the industry in Beirut? Were all of you locked up in some
air-conditioned room, contemplating the poetry of your individual navels
in silence? Tell us if you will. Remain silent. All things considered,
let me offer that you are rabidly writing irrelevancy into your
preferred scripts, knowingly or unknowingly. |
