Wednesday, 21st May 2014
By Dr Kamal Wickremasinghe
It appears that the neocon busybodies from the UK, US and Canada never tire of offering unsolicited ‘advice’ to Sri Lanka. The latest such unwelcome intervention involved the offensive remark by someone who claims to “diplomatically” represent Canada in Colombo, a person named Shelley Whiting.
Whiting’s unsolicited advice that Sri Lanka abandons the victory celebrations “as it wouldn’t help post war national reconciliation” was accompanied by another inconsequential Canadian “boycott”. In making such an arrogantly insensitive remark, Whiting - a dead ringer for that other uppity North American “diplomat” who recently graced Colombo streets, Patricia A. Butenis - appears to have taken a leaf out of the book on crass diplomacy by the inimitably, intellectually-challenged John Baird, the current foreign minister of Canada.
Notwithstanding the off-handish response of the government the shameful remark fully deserved, Whiting’s (and Canada’s) barefaced arrogance needs to be roundly condemned for its crudity as much as for its erroneous linking of the victory celebrations with “national reconciliation” that seems to be the favourite byword of every Canadian man, woman and their dog these days.
It is striking that the skulls of everyone managing the foreign affairs of Canada, from the minister downwards, seem impervious to the simple notion that Canada, as a country trying to hide its shameful genocidal history under various innocuous sounding labels including reconciliation circuses designed to white-wash, is simply not in a position to lecture Sri Lanka on reconciliation and this country will never take their advice seriously.
We repeat - Canada has no credibility
A good primer to the true magnitude of the crimes against humanity the Canadian state has committed and never been held accountable would be the books The Genocide Machine in Canada: The Pacification of the North (1973), by Robert Davis and Mark Zannis and Accounting for Genocide: Canada’s Bureaucratic Assault on Aboriginal People (2003), by Dean Neu and Richard Therrien.
The formal Canadian government policy of aboriginal genocide goes back to the establishment of the Indian Act of 1876 that put in place a corrupt legal framework for treating First Nations as an inferior group and made them wards of the state. In a shameful attempt to hide the true atrocity of its actions, Canada is now engaged in the charade of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that seeks to address a mere "cultural genocide" carried out in residential schools. The plan is clearly devised as a means of hiding from the consequences under the UN Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, currently operational with a mandate to investigate human rights abuses in the Canadian Indian residential school system that has caused mass deaths from tuberculosis, and has starved aboriginal children under the pretext of nutrition “experiments”, is a clear attempt of an eye-wash designed to fool the world by owning up to a crime of much less legal consequence, though equally abhorrent.
In the face of such a damning Canadian record of non-performance on matters of national reconciliation, Sri Lanka is fully justified in ridiculing the disingenuous attempt of a Whiting to draw a link between the victory celebrations and the issue of our national reconciliation.
The less than intelligent attempt of Whiting to link victory celebrations with national reconciliation stupidly ignores the salient fact that what the government defeated was not the Tamils as an ethnic group of Sri Lanka, but the scourge of terrorism that was inflicted on all communities in Sri Lanka for three decades.
Whiting’s attempt to confuse such a fundamental distinction relating to Sri Lanka’s recent history tends to suggest that she was deliberately aiming to create a rift between the wider Tamil community who are enjoying the peace in the country as any other group, and the government that refuses to cow-tow to Canada, a country that is irrelevant to Sri Lanka in the international context - except for the interest in monitoring their role in nourishing the LTTE rump for future exploitation. Whiting’s career history with stints in locations of all key neocon “projects” such as the UN, Belgrade, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kandahar and Kabul in Afghanistan – similar to other neocon operatives in the US State Department, Virginia Nuland, Samantha Power and Paula Schriefer – provides support for suspicions of conspiratorial intent on her part to her disgraceful interjection. In addition, Whiting has also “worked” as Canadian political adviser to NORAD, fuelling further suspicion.
Whiting was not alone
During the last week, there were others who also wanted a piece of Sri Lanka. That former auctioneer at Sotheby’s, Britain’s Hugo Swire once again tried to barge in to Sri Lanka’s domestic affairs by demanding that civil society, human rights defenders and activists are allowed the space to “act freely”.
Following that thinly-disguised bid to create conditions favourable to divide Sri Lanka, Swire repeated the strange demand of his High Commissioner in Colombo - who seems to be under the illusion of being a Viceroy - that the proscription of terrorist suspects should not be used to “prevent or stifle” the right to freedom of speech.
It would be clear to anyone with a barely functioning mind that such demands are aimed at dividing the Sri Lankan society by providing fertile ground for “dissent” by the NGO hacks under the worn-out pretence of human rights protection. A cursory look at the records of human rights, ethnic and immigration policies of the neocon government of David Cameron Swire is representing provides credence to such a belief.
Added to these unsolicited, indeed unwelcome offers of advice was another gratuitous remark by Eileen Donohoe, another former US State Department official who has seamlessly moved back in to the INGO circuit. There is no surprise in Donohoe’s change of work place surroundings – now representing the infamous, Gorge Soros-financed, subversive organisation Human Rights Watch, she would carry on as before from just another location from where the neocons pursue the same global agenda, hand in hand with the US State Department.
Donohoe has told a particular Sunday newspaper reporter (who seems to take delight in providing a propaganda platform for the global neocon agenda) that the only motive behind the meaningless US carrying-on at the UNHRC over the last three years was to “provide a means to establish the facts and to potentially prevent impunity for past mass crimes”. She simply could not have been providing that excuse with a straight face!
Casting aside such “advice” crafted to achieve the conspiratorial neocon objective of “divide and rule” is vital for the success of the journey Sri Lanka has embarked on to become an independent, ethnically mature economically developed nation.
It is crucial that the country understands the factors motivating the neocon hoards that are seeking to destabilise as the means of divide and rule. As an example, the life experience of people like Hugo Swire - currently a Minister of State for the Foreign Office with “responsibility” towards India, the Far East, Latin America and the Falklands - reveals the neocon mindset and vested interests that motivates people like him to seek to unethically and arrogantly intervene in the domestic affairs of sovereign nations, with the connivance of local agents.
A brief look at the work history of Swire before going into politics, through the Grenadier Guards, a financial consultancy, the National Gallery, and then Director of the auction house Sotheby's and as non-executive Chairman of a private concern named Photo-Me International shows that he has led a charmed, not to say a privileged life, never having to “toil”.
The natural tendency of such people is to maintain the parasitic life style afforded to them by colonialism, by resorting to newer versions of scheming of various degree of sophistry.
Sri Lanka needs to show them that we are a different country inhabited by a group of people different to the stereotype they have in mind and we will not allow their evil designs – under such cuddly labels as human rights protection, reconciliation and freedom of expression – to divide and rule us.
Never again!
From : http://www.dailynews.lk/?q=features/whiting-s-lanka-remark-reeks-conspiracy
