by:Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha

Last year, what seems to be an LTTE front organization had an exhibition which was designed to draw attention to the iniquities of the Sri Lankan state. The usual suspects from the British Parliament were there, those who have made a name for themselves as defenders of the Tamil cause, whether realizing or not that their antics further the LTTE agenda of armed resistance to a lawfully elected government.

That this ‘resistance’ includes attacks on civilians, and the interruption of supplies of basic necessities to the Tamil population they purport to represent, means nothing to our self-congratulatory freedom fighters in the British Parliament.

This is not surprising. What characterizes many of those who flock to what is in effect a terrorist cause is, apart from the need to keep a well organized vote bank happy, a certain moral softness. Recently, the erstwhile leader of the critics, Keith Vaz, resigned from headship of the Sri Lanka group, following revelations of financial impropriety.

Simon Hughes was invited to take his place, but declined, perhaps because he knew his career would not bear much scrutiny.It had been revealed, not so long ago, that he had engaged in a homosexual relationship. This in itself would not have been a problem for, as Oscar Wilde might have said, it is neither illegal (today that is, unlike in poor Wilde’s time) nor immoral, nor even fattening. What was worrying was what seemed hypocrisy. Hughes had first got into Parliament after a vicious campaign of denigration of his Labour opponent, Peter Tatchell, for being homosexual. Though Mr. Hughes himself had not participated in the attack, he had not disassociated himself from this.So much for the old pro-LTTE hands.

I was astonished to find, however, playing a prominent place at the Exhibition, a former Conservative MP whom I remembered as a fresh-faced aspirant to the Presidency of the Oxford Union. How had Andrew Pelling, I wondered, fallen into terrorist clutches.The answer perhaps has something to do with his own moral failings, as exemplified in a recent article in the London Evening Standard. The headline concerned his working for a City firm while on paid sick leave from the House of Commons.

That perhaps was bad enough. But it turned out that he was ill ‘after being arrested over an allegation that he beat his second wife, Lucy’. Whether cause or consequence, he was addicted to a sleeping pill and became bulimic.

That is the disease in which you eat and then make yourself sick in order to stay slim (seeing a florid Pelling in the Evening Standard, my mind went back thirty years to the slight creature so keen on Union influence it was understandable that he wanted that old self to re-emerge, but alas poor man, time does not stay still). He has now been deprived of the Conservative party whip, and was reported to have considered defecting to Labour or the Liberal Democrats, where he could have joined Keith Vaz or Simon Hughes respectively.With friends like that, one would have thought, the LTTE hardly needs enemies.

Yet these individuals go on and on, in the most sanctimonious tones possible, denigrating the Sri Lankan state, while no one questions their right to sit in judgment on people many miles away. And no one bothers that, to further their own agendas, they fib. Simon Hughes, for instance, claimed that ‘I understand that the Sri Lankan government still do not allow the UN into Sri Lanka so that there can be objective reports from international observers about what is happening on the ground’. If he were referring to our refusal to allow for the establishment of an Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, he could have made it clear instead of insinuating that we do not allow the UN in.

As he probably well knows, the UN is here in force, and the Office of the High Commissioner has a Senior Adviser on the ground here, while we have requested further assistance and provided access to several Special Rapporteurs.His lies were followed by an even more dramatic performance by a lady called Joan Ryan, though she does not, as far as I know, share any other characteristics with Mr. Vaz or Mr. Hughes or Mr. Pelling.

She cited Save the Children as evidence that children in the Vanni were ‘denied access to schooling and care previously provided by international aid agencies’. Save the Children specifically dissociated themselves from this claim in asserting that ‘We know that education is being provided by the Government of Sri Lanka to children in all parts of the country, including the conflict affected areas’.What Ms. Ryan omitted to cite from the Save the Children release from which she got a statistic was the evidence of continuing child recruitment by the LTTE, and the fact that it ‘has not yet permitted more than 300,000 civilians to leave the area’.

In short, Ms. Ryan’s concern for children extends only to criticism of the Sri Lankan government, with no reference at all to the brutalization that takes place under the LTTE.Equally preposterous was her assertion that there was failing capacity in the Vanni to meet demands for medical treatment, all because Medecins sans Frontieres was forced to withdraw. Inquiry from MSF revealed that the one midwife they had in the Vanni left in the middle of September after the expiry of her contract, as did a logistician. Only the project coordinator would have been left anyway of expatriates.Apart from that, there were seventeen local staff, many of whom have not been permitted by the LTTE to leave.

Whether they can supply medical assistance however is another question: they include four guards, three drivers, two cleaners and (instead of a partridge in a pear tree) one cook.Obviously NGOs, which live by persuading humanitarian donors to give them funds, have to claim tremendous influence if they are to continue with the good work that at times they do (MSF had one paediatrician in the Vanni for a 3-month period during 2008).

Sri Lanka has no objection, provided some benefit comes to our people, in their continuing the lifestyles – with cooks and cleaners and drivers and guards they could not have dreamt of in the concrete jungles of Europe. But it really is a bit much when the massive efforts of our own health service officials are belittled by people prone to bulimia, worrying so sanctimoniously about the underfed.

Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha
Secretary General
Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process