Criminals as judges

Wednesday 24th March, 2021

Another round of the annual badger hunt is over in Geneva. The mastiffs of human rights are cock-a-hoop, having scored a victory though what they have done is like a heavyweight boxer flooring a school kid. The US, the UK and their allies are celebrating victory. However, they could secure only 22 votes in the 47-member assembly for their resolution against Sri Lanka, which received 11 votes. Notable among the countries that abstained from voting were two Quad members—India and Japan; the US failed to rally their support for its resolution submitted through the UK and others.

The outcome of yesterday’s UNHRC vote did not come as a surprise to anyone. Pitted against the US, Sri Lanka, though backed by China, etc., had the same chance as a cat in hell in winning the vote, at the western-dominated UNHRC. The US and the UK went all out to ensure the passage of their resolution. What is of concern is not the final result but the manner in which vital human rights issues are handled in Geneva. None of the UNHRC members are driven by any genuine desire to protect human rights. Interests of strategic alliances take precedence over the mission of the council.

Sri Lanka stands accused of having committed war crimes. But look at the human rights records of the accusers. The US and the UK have killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians in an illegal war for oil. Every civilian death is a war crime in that country, which was invaded on the basis of falsified intelligence dossiers. Former President George W. Bush and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair have got away with their war crimes in spite of the availability of irrefutable evidence to prove their culpability. The UK sheds copious tears for the victims of alleged war crimes in Sri Lanka and calls for action against the perpetrators, who, it says, include some members of the armed forces and the LTTE leaders. But it has no qualms about allowing one of the former LTTE leaders, Adele Balasingham, who brainwashed forcibly recruited LTTE combatants and turned them into ‘children of fire’ (suicide bombers) and cannon fodder, to lead a comfortable life in London. This, it does while demanding that universal jurisdiction be invoked against war criminals! It has also passed a law to protect its military personnel from legal action for what they do overseas.

The act of aiding and abetting terrorists responsible for massacres, bombing civilian targets, killing political leaders, including heads of state, using child combatants, gun-running and various other crimes is a punishable offence. The US bombed Afghanistan for sheltering al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, didn’t it? But the UK has been harbouring LTTE members all these years, and the US strove to save Prabhakaran, trapped in the war zone, while the Army was closing in on him. If the US had succeeded in its endeavour, the war would have dragged on and Sri Lankans, especially the children of the North and the East, would not have been safe; massacres, political assassinations, forcible child conscription, extortion, bomb attacks worse than the Easter Sunday terror strikes, etc., would have continued.

The US is leading the war crimes witch-hunt against Sri Lanka from the front (while defending Israel to the hilt) as part of its strategy to counter the Chinese influence in this part of the world. If Colombo had agreed to ink SOFA and ACSA agreements, loaded in favour of the US, Washington would have soft-pedalled allegations of human rights violations against Sri Lanka.

The UK has become a ventriloquist’s dummy for the influential pro-LTTE groups operating on its soil. In 2009, the then British Foreign Secretary David Miliband admitted, according to a leaked diplomatic cable, that he had rushed to Sri Lanka during the final stage of the war because he wanted to secure the support of pro-LTTE voters in key Labour marginal constituencies. Many British MPs’ integrity is in question. Some of them have been exposed for the cash-for-influence scandal; they do lobbying work for money. Thus, it may be seen that there are some British parliamentarians who are ready to sell their souls to terror backers, masquerading as human rights campaigners. No wonder the mother of all parliaments has become a den of greedy lobbyists who are ready to stoop to any level to make money and/or garner votes in return for their services.

The worst that could happen to human rights is for them to be championed by nations notorious for war crimes. If the task of protecting human rights can be left to the US and the UK, then there is no reason why criminals cannot be appointed judges.