Accountability probe by the UNSG
Posted on September 6th, 2016
Dr D.Chandraratna, Perth
The editorial in the Island (3/10) on the visit of the UNSG was indignant enough to provoke thinking. The thinking alone, if not the SG’s probe, hopefully will bring some consolation to the suffering inflicted on citizens, not only Tamils, by the LTTE whose political foot soldiers were the TNA. Placed in the context of the inertia and monumental failures of this organization the silence on the part of the SG on many issues will not be a surprise to the discerning. That the UN has been the most unproductive international body since the Second World War is well known. It has created one of the world’s largest non-governmental bureaucracy, with the highest pension and salary structure, (tax free), is also mired in pervasive corruption, which has failed to improve its own much-maligned accountability.
The regimes of the previous seven Secretaries General will suffice to illustrate the disappointing history of the UN. The First SG Norwegian Trygve Lie resigned after Soviet Union protested his partiality. The UN under U Thant doubled the size of the UN recording a massive deficit of $175 million more than the size of its annual budget. His withdrawal of the Sinai peacekeepers triggered the six-day War between the Arabs and Israel. His successor Kurt Waldheim claimed rather unconvincingly not to know anything of the massacres of civilians when he was an Oberleutenant in the German Wehrmacht. Boutros-Ghali supplied $35 million worth of weapons in 1990 to the Ruanda regime as Egyptian foreign Minister to the Hutus to kill the Tutsis two years into his regime as UNSG. During his term the Balkans also suffered a series of massacres and he agreed that ‘Disillusion had set in’ after the Cold War. Mr Ban Ki-Moon presided over the current horrendous disaster in the Middle East and as the Chief Administrator, Diplomat and Public relations Chief must bear some of the responsibility. The sad part is that Mr Moon has come belatedly to Sri Lanka probing accountability issues when ‘for nearly 25 years the UN doing precious little to help tackle a terrorist group hell bent on destroying a UN member state’.
While the SG with UNICEF pathetically failed to liberate the child soldiers from the clutches of the Tigers after millions of Dollars in numerous failed projects the TNA is shamelessly leading the protest groups about missing persons about which they were guilty by association when the LTTE went on the conscription rampage. The TNA and Wigneswarams should understand that their defiant demand for the international parties to conduct the investigations to make them 100 percent accurate (in MR Sumanthiran’s words) seems ludicrous when these international parties were guilty of assisting LTTE activists who raised funds and coordinated terrorist activities internationally to destroy so many lives plunging, as the editor noted, ‘this country into a conflagration’, but now dubiously canvassing only the last phase to be probed so that the West can get away scot-free. Justice seems to be on the side of the mighty as the Greek philosophers said many moons ago.
September 5th, 2016 at 6:28 pm
Editor of “The Island” is still thinks like a true son of Mother Lanka.
However the Editor of the “Divaina” from the same group has changed.. He is all out to praise Maru Sira, who is having a political marriage with the enemy of Mother Lanka.
Is it a planned move by the Upali Group depending on the audience of the two leading papers.. Sinhala and English??
September 6th, 2016 at 2:01 am
In the Missing Persons Act, a relative or a friend can make an official inquiry (but a totally bogus inquiry) from the Office of the Missing Persons (OMP) by email inquiring as to the whereabouts of their relative or friend.
There are over 8 lakhs to 10 lakhs Tamil diaspora asylum seekers (actually economic migrants), a vast majority of who support the separatist terrorist LTTE and its aim of a separate state. If even 40,000 of these Tamil diaspora who support the separatist terrorist LTTE write bogus emails to the OMP inquiring the whereabouts of their friend or relative (but this friend or relative is actually living alongside them in these countries i.e. the US, UK, EU, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, India etc.) these inquiries will officially be accepted by the OMP as 40,000 missing persons.
According to the provisions of the OMP Act, even if the OMP inquires after these let us say 40,000 and finds out that these are all bogus inquiries and that all these 40,000 persons are actually living alongside the inquirer i.e. their relative or friend and these complaints about these persons being missing are all bogus, the missing persons, now found by the OMP, can request that their whereabouts not be revealed to their relative or friend or be made public. So officially these 40,000 persons will still be missing!!!
Then the OMP will use these bogus 40,000 missing persons (who are actually living comfortably in the US, UK, EU, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, India etc.) as manufactured ‘evidence’ that war crimes happened in Sri Lanka (and all these bogus inquirers will state that these persons went missing during the 2006-2009 period) and our Sri Lankan Armed Forces will be persecuted for committing war crimes that they never, ever committed by a judicial process using these bogus email inquiries.
The Missing Persons Act states specifically that if the missing person who is now found requests that the fact that they are now found not be revealed to the public that person will remain as missing as far as the OMP is concerned. That is how the OMP will manufacture bogus ‘evidence’ of 40,000 missing persons so that the Sri Lankan Armed Forces can be persecuted for committing bogus war crimes.
The OMP emails cannot be checked by any outside body as stated in the Act since all evidence (almost all bogus) gathered by the OMP remains confidential. The OMP cannot be taken to the Supreme Court on this issue. However the OMP should absolutely and immediately be taken to the Supreme Court regarding what has been written above which is what would happen when this OMP is set up.
The OMP will become a bogus ‘evidence’ manufacturing machine which will gather such bogus inquiries via email from those members of the Tamil diaspora who are supportive of the LTTE terrorists and who will send bogus email inquiries by their thousands. All these bogus inquiries (of people who are actually living in the US, UK, EU, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, India etc.) will then be misused as missing person inquiries.
I did not realize that the Sinhalese were this stupid as to allow such a process within the Missing Persons Act which can be blatantly misused in order to manufacture bogus ‘evidence’ like this. The OMP process is not transparent, it will happen in totally secrecy, no one in Sri Lanka will be able to question it, not our police, not our courts, not our Sri Lankan citizens, nobody. All the OMP will do is gather bogus email ‘evidence’ such as described above which will then be misused as missing person inquiries to try the Sri Lankan Armed Forces for bogus war crimes that they never, ever committed.
The OMP process as described above must be stopped immediately. If a relative or a friend really and genuinely wants to find out about their genuinely missing relative or friend (i.e. perished LTTE terrorist), they can make a complaint to the OMP in person in public. This is the only way that Sri Lanka and the world will know that their inquiry is genuine. This was the methodology followed by the earlier Paranagama Commission which then received 23,000 complaints from relatives or friends of the missing person (i.e. perished LTTE terrorist or our perished Sri Lankan Forces soldiers) but they made their complaint in public in person to the commission. This is the only way to ensure authenticity and make the process transparent since this happens in the public arena. However, even with such safeguards, even some of those complaints may have been bogus.
The OMP should be stopped immediately since it is not a transparent process at all as described above but a totally secretive process where no one and nobody can request to be provided an opportunity to even peruse, investigate or look at the email inquiries received by the OMP. If the UNHRC, the US, UK, EU, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, India, the TNA and the separatist terrorists genuinely want to find out about perished LTTE terrorists, this Yahapalanaya Government could expand and extend the scope of the already set up Paranagama Commission in order to make such inquiries. This process should be totally following Sri Lankan Law, within Sri Lankan jurisdiction, paid for totally by the Sri Lankan Government only and with only Sri Lankan citizens appointed as commission members and investigators. In fact the entire staff should be composed Sri Lankan citizens only. The process should be a totally domestic process with no interference or input whatsoever from foreign countries. Most importantly, all complaints should be made in person by relatives and friends in public if their complaint is genuine.
The Missing Persons Act is totally dangerous as pointed out above and should be dismissed totally as it is highly dangerous and a totally secretive process as described above designed and set up to manufacture bogus ‘evidence’ against the Sri Lankan Armed Forces.