Shenali D Waduge

Cyril Ramaphosa is the Deputy President of South Africa and the Deputy President of its ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC). He visited Sri Lanka in 2014 at the invitation of the Rajapakse Government and now immediately following the swearing in of Ranil Wickremasinghe as PM he has once more arrived in Sri Lanka. It is curious to know why?

Let’s just vaguely review the political climate of Sri Lanka. For 30 years Sir Lanka suffered terror by the internationally banned LTTE. That terror period served as a cover for other agendas at play and enabled entities that functioned as aid/charities/humanitarians as front office carried on a more sinister objective back office. These entities comprising local and foreign players were well funded by foreign governments and were often linked to the Church. Naturally the elimination of the LTTE did not augur well for those entities that had not completed the missions given to them. That set off a nasty diplomatic revenge upon the government that defeated the terror making a mockery of the ‘war on terror’. Be that as it may the anger was such that no stone was not turned to make life hell for that government. Everything from illegal UN Resolutions, ridiculous diplomatic statements, funding books, documentaries and reports all aimed at doing a Goebbles that would prepare the ground work in the eventuality that the targeted government was brought back to power. Reconciliation became a battering ram used at every turn now becoming even a joke among the diplomats themselves who are stuck to answer exactly where has humanitarian intervention succeeded, what ‘democracy’ has R2P brought, what success story does the UN and West have to even give as a single example of what they are preaching wasting millions in travel and printed reports!

We cannot be foolish to ignore that none of the humanitarian interventions used citing minority interests as reason for the intervention has given those minorities any reprieve. In fact these minorities have been worse off than the ‘dictators’ they were to be liberated from. Ask the Iraqis, the Libyans, the Kosovars, the Afghans and they would all agree. The entry of Western government funded NGOs were to peddle with the Reconciliation concept that would enable them to remain on ground on the argument that they held the templates and the capacity to monitor the reconciliation taking place.

Despite accepting all these conceptual frameworks we need to seriously ask where is the reconciliation in South Africa? What have the South African blacks actually got? Have their lands been returned? Do they run the economy or is it still in the hands of the white oppressors?

Cyril Ramphosa is a member of George Soro’s International Crisis Group playing the role of senior advisor. His ICG colleagues include Louise Arbor, ICG’s President & CEO who was also the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2004 to 2008 as well as Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Ramaphosa is also joined in the ICG by Kofi Annan, former UNSG and Nobel Peace Prize winner 2001. Wesley Clark, former NATO supreme allied commander, Gareth Evans, former Foreign Minister of Australia are also members of ICG. Would it also surprise anyone that 2 of the investigators investigating Sri Lankan war crimes are Asma Jahangir and Martti Ahtisaari who is the Chairman Emeriti of the ICG.

Ramaphosa is very much ICG idealism and very much R2P ideology too having compiled the 2001 The Responsibility to Protect Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. http://www.idrc.ca/EN/Resources/Publications/openebooks/960-7/index.html

It is no wonder that even South Africans are wondering exactly which side of the fence Ramaphosa is on. He is no longer the hero of the miners in 1982 for thirty years later he had as board member of Lonmin PLC upheld the decision to shoot at striking miners of whom 34 were killed. He is no longer the trade union leader but a millionaire businessmen and many continue to wonder where his assets are hidden. He is one of Africa’s richest men with a personal fortune of $700m. His companies include being franchise holder for McDonalds and Coca Cola in South Africa.

The man travelling to preach to Sri Lanka about reconciliation is himself another black man pulled by the white man’s strings. We are seeing strings of these now being used by the West who have found that Americanized Asians/Africans go after their own with far more vengeance than the whites.

South Africa’s apartheid and Sri Lanka’s terrorism are two poles apart and there is no comparisons. Whites came to Africa and took over African lands and treated the real land owners as slaves separating and segregating them. The Tamils have no such evidence to remotely suggest that they have been treated any less than equals in certain areas Tamil fare far better than the average Sinhalese. Terrorism affected all the communities in Sri Lanka with terrorists taking the lives of Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, Burghers even foreigners. While whites and blacks may have reason to reconcile in South Africa under apartheid policies, in Sri Lanka we do not feel any reason to reconcile with terrorists and we have no reason to reconcile with Tamils because the Sinhalese never fought with the Tamils the enemy at all times were LTTE terrorists. What or who thinks that Sri Lanka should reconcile with Terrorists? Why is that message not getting clearly conveyed to the meddling busy body foreign envoys, the UN and the nosy-parker NGOs/INGOs?

Shenali D Waduge