The West’s bogus concern for human rights
President Obama, in a statement made on the 13th of May, has requested the government of Sri Lanka to “stop the indiscriminate shelling that has taken hundreds of innocent lives, including in several hospitals.” But with regard to the U.S. air strikes that regularly kill hundreds of civilians in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which includes women and children (according to the International Red Cross), President Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, ruled out ending air and drone strikes on the grounds that “we can’t fight with one hand tied behind our back.”
Meanwhile, the Obama administration in April chastised Pakistan for its attempt to appease and negotiate peace with the Taliban. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the U.S. Secretary of State, had this to say about Pakistan’s strategy to avoid war: “I think that the Pakistani government is basically abdicating to the Taliban and to the extremists.” Pakistan finally caved in to the pressure and launched a massive offensive against the Taliban that has created a humanitarian catastrophe of monumental proportions, displacing 1.3 million people in the Swat Valley. Satisfied with the new offensive, Hillary Clinton said, “I’m actually quite impressed by the actions the Pakistani government is now taking.” State Department spokesman Robert A. Wood echoed this sentiment when he told reporters that the Pakistani offensive is a “very, very positive” development but must be sustained. So positive, in fact, that the U.S. is considering a major boost in assistance to Pakistan-$1.5 billion a year (while U.K. Foreign Minister David Milliband is blocking the SL government’s request for aid from the IMF).
Let’s add a little more history to this. The U.S. and its loyal ally, the U.K., has waged a war in Iraq, begun on the pretext of a clear and present danger from purported weapons of mass destruction, which we now know never existed. That costly expedition has cost Iraq a civilian death toll in excess of 650,000 (according to a reputed study published by British medical journal the Lancet), and has displaced in excess of 4 million civilians.
So this begs the question: why is it that when the West slaughters and displaces innocent civilians in some foreign country, it is an unfortunate sidebar to the more important war on terror, but when we Sri Lankans slaughter and displace our own people, it is somehow transformed into a violation of human rights? How could this be? Are we not equal opportunity slaughterers of civilians?
We are, as everyone knows, fighting the most deadly terrorist organization in the world, and at the same time trying to resolve the largest hostage crisis in world history. So one would assume that the world would cut us a little slack as we bowl the final over in a 30-year-old match. After all, we have only killed an estimated 6500 civilians this year, which is a mere drop of blood in the gushing artery that is Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan. And we’re doing this not in someone else’s backyard; we’re doing it in our own country, to our own people. So how dare their Western pot hoot at our Sri Lankan kettle? We may of course add a few thousand more to our death toll in the closing days of this war (you can follow the score with DBS Jeyaraj, who has been a pretty unbiased umpire), but clearly we’ve killed far fewer than they have. So we’ve got the moral high ground. Don’t we? Or could it be that we are all morally decrepit?
Maybe, the only difference between the West and us is that they’ve got more expensive soap to wash the blood off their hands.
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Good old underdog! Always standing up for the rights of lesser villians against the excess of great ogres. Decades ago I went to the Majestic to see Cecil B de Mile’s ‘Robe’ and they were throwing the Christians to the lions in the Colleseum. A little girl, sitting in the row in front of me, pointed to a corner of the screen and cried out to her mother seated next to her: “Mummy, mummy, that poor lion, he has no Christian”.
@ EW Golding
That is hilarious…and telling. Thank you for sharing that. Btw, I just looked up the Robe–it was made in 1953, and you watched it in the Majestic. Suddenly I feel young again ! I hope to one day stand up for the rights of good people; alas, all I find is villains of varying degree, perpetrating villainy with the best of intentions.
Just because it is the pot that is calling the kettle black, doesn’t give the kettle a right to say it is not. And, the pot IS still right.
It’s so sad that too many in this land just lip-sync their budhist heritage and teachings like “ahimsa” “tolerence” and “violence begets violence”. But they have never heard of, let alone even begun to understand the concepts of equality, civil liberty and freedom, concepts on which civilization in the west is grounded. These concepts are the reason why a man from a community which was treated as slaves not so long ago is now the leader of the most economically and militaraly powerful nation in the history of mankind.
The way I see it that pot has lived on a gas or electric burner, while this kettle in the traditional Sri Lankan style has been on the soot emitting wood fire. So this kettle will need lots more detergent.
Setting aside the rather inept propaganda of the Government, the fact remains that there appears to have been no deliberate targeting of civilians by the Army in this last phase of the war.
Granted, the Air Force probably caused a great many civilian casualties. However, it had been using Israeli-built Kfirs which are notoriously useless for ground attack. Indeed the number of friendly fire incidents appear to be pretty high from anecdotal evidence.
The Government forces are not equipped with the ‘smart’ weapons which the USA deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan to target deliberately the civilians of those countries in accordance with the dictates of ‘Shock and Awe’.
It should be recognised, too, that (except in the air) the LTTE has from day one been better equipped than the Government forces. The LTTE was the first to introduce landmines, AK-47 assault rifles, night-vision equipment, MBRLs, etc. Even at present, fighter-to-fighter it has better firepower than the Army, which is why the latter required odds of 12:1 in order to defeat it. This is in stark contrast to the Americans who deploy firepower unimaginable by the populations they are fighting.
The Army now is a different kettle of fish from the disorganised racist rabble which was launched against the Tamil people by JR Jayawardene and against the Sinhalese youth by R Premadasa. Consider that the number of casualties among the Tamil population in the fifteen years since 1994 has been about half that of the eleven years before.
It does not appear that the Sri Lanka Army’s strategy includes the deliberate targeting of civilians, as is the case with Israel, which has targeted Palestinian civilians, as a matter of policy, since long before Plan Dalit in 1948.
What should be taken note of is the lengths to which the Americans and their ‘New Labour’ British lapdogs are willing to go to bring the Sri Lankan refugee issue to the UN etc. The casualties inflicted by the Israelis in Gaza are suddenly open to discussion as quid pro quo. It is impossible to believe that the US and British Governments, which quite happily inflicted a million deaths on the Iraqi population, should have considered the humanitarian aspect at all. Ergo there is something else they are worried about.
• The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing” Albert Einstein
“Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.” : Alexander Solzhenitsyn
• Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them. There is almost no kind of outrage—–torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, the bombing of civilians—–which does not change its moral color when it is committed by ‘our’ side. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.” —–George Orwell
•
“Iniquity, committed in this world, produces not fruit immediately, but, like the earth, in due season, and advancing by little and little, it eradicates the man who committed it. …justice, being destroyed, will destroy; being preserved, will preserve; it must never therefore be violated.” Manu 1200 bc
So just dont justify the violations of human rights of innocent civilians trapped n the war. Our judgment will come not from the International Community but from Karma or the moral force which operates in the world although it takes time to work.
@ Adrian: looks like we’ll have to stand in front of the mirror and ask “mirror, mirror on the wall. who is the blackest of us all?”
As for the leader who came “from a community which was treated as slaves”–he is disappointing in his Bush-like zeal to achieve political aims through force of arms. When Pakistan chose peace and dialogue, he forced them into a war that will surely cost thousands of Pakistani (disposable?) lives and will probably displace 2 million. It may be his undoing.
@ Vinod: I don’t think we or the West have targeted civilians intentionally, but war kills civilians even if we hope (or propagandize) for 0 casualties. So perhaps everyone should be less eager to resort to war?
This is a very good analysis of human rights, global realpolitik, and Sri Lanka’s (small) place in the world. Personally, I am more concerned that western governments and human rights groups remain almost entirely unmoved about the human rights of 33,000 African children under the age of 5 who die every day, most of them from preventable diseases and malnutrition. Why is it that human rights advocates only start caring about human rights, when there are (questionable) political identity labels attached to them, rather than when the rights of millions of people in poverty stricken villages are violated every day, all over the third world?
The civilians in the North are caught between two sides who have deliberately chosen war as a means of resolving conflict – somehow that seems to have higher moral ground for human rights activists.and western governments for intervention than killing people systematically by denying them rights to food and medicine, decade after decade.
As an advocate for a federal solution in Sri Lanka, I fully agree with Underdog’s assessment. However, where is the leadership and consitutuency for peaceful co-existence, on both the Tamil and Sinhalese sides? The Sri Lanka polity is poloarised than ever before. That in my view, is the ground reality. The question is where do we move from here, no matter whether this war is “won” or not? Ultimately, the international community certainly cannot force a lasting solution down our throats.
Today, the President of Sri Lanka announced that a 26 year war against a secessionist, non state, terroristic actor which controls the northern part and used the civilians there as a human shield was over.
Coincidentally, on the Daily Show of the 13th of May 2009, the Ambassador of Pakistan to the US spoke of how they plan to win their war against a secessionist, non state, terroristic actor which controls the northern part of their country and uses the civilians there as “cannon fodder.”
He said that Zardari signed an ceasefire agreement with the Taliban, knowing they would break it and show the people in those areas and the world that they cannot be trusted. Then, they would engage in an all-out conventional war to defeat the Taliban militarily. The US military, government, President Obama and Hillary Clinton are “fully supportive”, he said, and have funnelled in US$3 billion into it.
In Sri Lanka’s war, a ceasefire agreement was signed in 2001. The LTTE violated it countless times till, in 2008, the Sri Lankan government unilaterally withdrew. The international community was in agreement with this – an EU delegation which visited in late 2008 found that the government was justified in doing so. Then Sri Lanka began a conventional campaign, using air raids and shelling to reduce military casualties. As the LTTE had scattered itself amongst the civilian population, this has caused significant civilian displacement, injury and casualties. No independent media were allowed to report on it which has been another point of contention, internationally.
This suffering was increased when the LTTE, losing ground militarily, forcefully moved Tamil civilians at gunpoint further into their ever shrinking zone of control. The LTTE also refused to let these civilians leave, killing and injuring those that tried to escape.
The war is now over and the LTTE has lost. But the US government is still a significant critic of these tactics, threatening sanctions and war crimes investigations.
Yet, in Pakistan, air and missile attacks into residential areas are occurring, some of which are by the US Army. No casualty/injury rates are available for the current phase of the war but, given the 2% hit rate of US Army drones in this NYT article and the Pakistani claim of 1000 militant deaths so far, the numbers will be significant. Over 1 million people are displaced. Independent journalism is not allowed in the war zone.
The LTTE invented suicide bombing which the Taliban emulated. Now it seems that Pakistan is following the methodology that Sri Lanka invented for militarily defeating such non state actors. But the US is applauding and supporting Pakistan while detracting and sanctioning Sri Lanka. Cognitive dissonance, thy name is America!
regardless of what west says, the absolute truth remains the same. We justify, buddhist priests protesting to go to war and kill humans and we don’t talk about that duality but we are worried about the duality of the west.
Killing of humans are a relative crime. It’s absolute. You cannot justify this based on your ideologies.
At least the west shows some concern about civilian killings vs non by the Government nor the LTTE. And west doesn’t have white vans to silence who speaks against it nor calls them traitors and have to live in fear.
YES WE CAN!! Trample over human rights and even gay rights! Gays are minorities too. It’s all a show baby. Welcome to the world!
I like this article by underdog, because it envelopes few of the comments I recently made here regarding the hypocrisy of the west! Jon Stewart puts it so sweetly as he always does. Dailyshow FTW!
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=227351&title=moral-kombat&byDate=true
Since GV comments system sometimes breaks long urls, a shorter version…
http://bit.ly/VniTl