Sri Lanka: Response to misplaced NGO criticism - 24th September 2007

Mr President,

Sri Lanka is grateful for assistance with its efforts to improve human rights in our country. As we strive towards perfection, as the European Union so graphically put it, we all need to be aware of our own shortcomings and we welcome countries and responsible institutions drawing our attention to possible violations.

However our task and yours is made more difficult by frivolities that seem to spring from undemocratic political agendas. The recent intervention by the International Commission of Jurists is typical of the absurdities that have multiplied recently. In lumping together Myanmar, the Sudan, The United States and Sri Lanka as egregious examples of human rights violations, ICJ seemed only to be satisfying a taste for the melodramatic.

Sri Lanka has been at the receiving end of such melodrama before. A few weeks back, in reporting on an investigation into the deaths of 17 aid workers. ICJ seized on a discrepancy in a description of a single bullet in the reports of a Sri Lankan and an Australian expert respectively. Privileging the Australian, ICJ had the temerity to claim that there was evidence of tampering with ‘bullets’ on the part of the government. When the Australian, after reviewing the arguments of the Sri Lankan, withdrew his identification and categorically dissociated himself from the ICJ allegation, he became someone with ‘no ballistics expertise’.

Such suppression of truth, such suggestion of falsehood is typical of hucksters, but could not have been expected from the ICJ in its early idealistic days. Now however, when it has to compete with others in the human rights industry, its voice too is as shrill and false as that of newcomers on the scene.

Typical was the other intervention that targeted Sri Lanka, by Ms Nimalka Fernando representing several human rights organizations. Previously her conglomeration had been part of a group that ciruculated a list of hundreds of disappeared, including the names of eight Sri Lankan soldiers, artfully disguised to seem Tamil, at least to an untutored eye unfamiliar with the language. Whether such chicanery was deliberate or otherwise, the callousness with which the dead become statistics, mere grist to the mill of these ghouls, does no service to those who do suffer through violations of human rights.

These do occur, and the Sri Lankan government recognizes this and welcomes assistance to deal with violations. But that most of these are on the part of the LTTE is ignored by these activists who live, and travel extensively, on the backs of suffering human beings. Recently for instance they distributed a leaflet on ‘Attacks on places of religious worship’. Perhaps they intended to convey that most of these were by the LTTE, but the leaflet seemed to target the government. To cite just one item: ‘On 13 August 2006, the Catholic church in Allaipiddy, Jaffna district, northern Sri Lanka, was shelled while civilians sheltered inside. More than 20 people were killed, and around 75 were injured.’ This incident in the self-perpetuating NGO book must have been light years away from what the UN IASC described as follows:

‘On 11 August, when hostilities resumed in Jaffna, the LTTE engaged in a seaborne landing in Allaippiddy. Shelling into the area continued for 48 hours. The Philip Neri Church, where villagers were sheltering, was hit during the shelling and 33 civilians were killed and 10 civilians injured’.

Mr President, one could go on and on about such misrepresentations, but time is limited. I can only request that, while striving all of us to improve our own records, and welcoming the responsible interventions of those who deal in facts, we discourage the fantasies of those competing with each other to develop what can only be described as their business interest in human suffering.