AI completely bowled

Asoka Weerasinghe

April 12, 2007

Ms. Betsy Ross
Amnesty International-USA

Dear Ms. Ross:

By chance I happened to read your response to Kamal Rajapakse on ‘*AI completely bowled.’*

* *In that response you said*, “The cricket action seems to have been misunderstood, but here is Amnesty International’s recent statement about Sri Lanka….”* Your statement was a weak response, quite understandably, as it would have been difficult for you or any other AI official to admit that, “Yes, we bombed that one, and with this comic act in the Caribbean we have exposed our chilling arrogance and bullying when it comes to dealing with human rights violations in developing countries, like Sri Lanka.”

That stupid communications strategy by AI showed that you all are continuing to provide a cloak of respectability for the suicide-bomber terrorists, Tamil Tigers. This isn’t new as it has been going on for almost two decades. No doubt you all are now scratching your heads and pulling your hair trying to figure out what really went wrong with your – */Play by the Rules/* – campaign, which has turned almost all in that little island nation against you lot, as well as the majority of the Sri Lankan expatriate communities around the world. When local NGOs are critical of your campaign, then you know that you all got it wrong and slipped on a Caribbean banana peel and hurt yourselves horribly.

Not understanding the cricketing culture in Sri Lanka, you all blew it by choosing the wrong slogan – */Play by the Rules/*. Your strategist’s commonsense was the pits. The slogan itself insinuates that the Sri Lankan cricketers are not playing by the rules. Tell this to any school boy in Sri Lanka, and he will tell you lot to “Go to Hell and damn yourself as my cricketing Hero is no cheat.” And their cricketing heroes happen to be from all ethnic communities – Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, Moors and Burghers. And they would at the same time tell you, “Stop violating my rights”. And that is the rub. That is where you all went wrong, believing that you could get away that easily with your arrogance and bullying to unglue one of the few aspects of ethnic harmony in Sri Lanka – cricket. In their eyes, you lot are a bunch of jokers.

And did you not know that the majority of the countries that are participating at the Cricket World Cup are human rights violators. Leaving aside Zimbabwe and Bangladesh even the white man’s countries are, like England, Australia and Canada who you think are lily-white. So you decided not to target them, how come and what was your problem?

You AI bunch live in a pretend world telling us, “We are squeaky clean going about the world being do-gooders and that is why we were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for our work on human rights.” Not so Betsy. By the 1980s, you fooled me too.

On an April Sunday in 1981, the day when the Polish military had broken up a Polish */Solidarity /*Movement demonstration in Gdansk with water cannons, Ottawa’s Amnesty International demonstrated peacefully at St. Joseph’s Church on Laurier Avenue with a Faith in Peace service. All denominations participated, and there were a crowd of about 300 in the congregation. And every leader of a faith stood at the pulpit and contributed to the service from the scriptures of their faith. An Asian-Buddhist male took his turn at the pulpit and annunciated the Buddha’s teachings on compassion and peace. That man’s name was Asoka Weerasinghe, the President of the Ottawa Buddhist Association. And that was me.

When 1992 rolled in and I happened to be with Sri Lanka’s High Commissioner to Canada at a meeting with your AI representative in Ottawa at his Headquarters in Vanier, he expressed that “Amnesty International is concerned about the excessive force that Sri Lanka’s Armed Forces are using on the Tamil Tigers.” Betsy, that was when I blew my top. My response was, “Listen, when your Tamil Tigers point the barrels of their Kalashnikovs at the hearts of my soldiers, I don’t expect my soldiers to point the barrels of their rifles at the knee caps of your Tamil Tigers. This is no game of cops and robbers; this is a conventional war with sophisticated weapons. And I tell my soldiers, if you want to live another day, get those bastards before they get you.”
That was the moment when I turned my back on Amnesty International.

Betsy, Amnesty International thinks that they are squeaky clean, that is what they are not. In my eyes, they are a bunch of arrogant fools providing a cloak of respectability to the Tamil Tigers, who with that assured support go on killing innocent, unarmed civilians with impunity, and snatch infants from their Sinhalese mother’s arms and bash their heads on rocks splitting them and watch their terrorist-eyes spinning cartwheels of joy watching innocent crimson blood oozing out of infant skulls And what does Amnesty International do? They would go on complaining about Sri Lanka government’s human right violations, and involve themselves as a bunch of Humpty Dumptys trying to get */Play by The Rules/* balls signed at the Cricket World Cup tournament.

It is time that AI admit that you Humpty Dumptys had a great fall, and you bet I won’t be the one who would want to put you Humpty Dumptys together again.

Asoka Weerasinghe