{"id":81938,"date":"2018-10-12T16:51:03","date_gmt":"2018-10-12T23:51:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=81938"},"modified":"2018-10-12T16:51:03","modified_gmt":"2018-10-12T23:51:03","slug":"for-making-sri-lanka-great-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2018\/10\/12\/for-making-sri-lanka-great-again\/","title":{"rendered":"For making Sri Lanka great again"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Rohana R. Wasala<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

The USA, which tabled Resolution 30\/1 against Sri Lanka at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in October 2015, has by now left that body in disgust. Sri Lanka co-sponsored this resolution against itself to its eternal shame. President Donald Trump, addressing the 73rd<\/sup> Session of the UN General Assembly in New York in an upbeat hour long speech charged that the UNHRC had become a massive source of embarrassment to the United Nations\u2026\u201d.\u00a0 He described it as a cesspool of political bias\u201d. All the world know which superpower has brought the Geneva-based body down to that level. Of course, Trump was not indulging in self-blame. He was pointing accusing fingers at others, such as Cuba and China.<\/p>\n

He expressed some smug self-satisfaction about the American economy booming under his stewardship. He vowed that the US would not return to the UNHRC unless it was reformed and that they would provide neither support nor recognition\u201d to the International Criminal Court on similar grounds. He further said, “We will never surrender America\u2019s sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable, global bureaucracy.” Sri Lanka did just that by unnecessarily succumbing to pressure exerted by vested interests inimical to the country.<\/p>\n

During the last presidential elections which he won, his campaign slogan was Make America Great Again\u201d. Making an unmistakable allusion to that evocative phrase, Trump, a patriotic politician who\u00a0 puts the American national interest at the top of his priorities, observed that the global migration crisis (which negatively affects his country) can be resolved by encouraging every country to be great again\u201d. (Never mind that hardly any country in the world including ours exploited by Western imperialism was ever so great\u201d in the last half a millennium as to be talking about becoming great again\u201d without an acute sense of embarrassment!). However, \u2018making the country great again\u2019 slogan is not entirely without relevance when it is applied to post-2014 Sri Lanka, considering the greatness it steadily achieved in the previous five years since the defeat of separatist terrorism in 2009.<\/p>\n

America was not going to sign onto a global migration pact. His stand was that individual nations should set their own policies to achieve this status. He declared: Only by upholding national borders, destroying criminal gangs, can we break this cycle\u201d. (This is what the Rajapaksa government accomplished to a considerable degree.) Trump said that the US will recognize (the) right of every nation in this room to set own policy.\u201d The only way to stop people from leaving their countries in search of greener pastures elsewhere was to make their countries great again\u201d. How can we be great again\u201d by doing (as the current regime is doing) the exact opposite of what Donald Trump is advocating here? His Sri Lankan counterpart urged a an end to external interference in our domestic affairs at the UN General Assembly in Sinhala, but his swinish foreign affairs panjandrums were content to wallow in the UNHRC cesspool in Geneva.<\/p>\n

While the UN General Assembly was meeting in New York, the delegates of the non-governmental organization known as the World Patriotic Lankan Forum (WPLF) was attending parallel events at the Geneva UNHRC sessions in a heroic attempt to defend the country unofficially as best they could in the absence of anyone from the Sri Lankan government to do so. They \u00a0claimed that the Sri Lankan embassy entertained some leading pro-separatist Tamils, who were protesting against Sri Lanka that very day in thousands, with a dinner, whereas those patriots themselves were not given even a cup of tea as a sign of welcome at least. The embassy officials had told the WPLF delegates that they were following instructions from Colombo. (The hosting to dinner of leading anti-Sri Lanka demonstrators from the so-called Tamil Diaspora was denied by the ambassador later. But such denial could have been no more than a formality.) A Tamil woman, who had gone there to help urge war crimes allegations against the Sri Lankan army, charged that just ten days previously some Sri Lankan army soldiers had raped eleven young Tamil women in the north! This was a monstrous lie. Though she was making this false allegation in the presence of a female officer from the Sri Lankan embassy in Geneva, that woman didn\u2019t lift a finger in defence of the country. She kept silent. The WPLF member, a lady, was almost in tears when she revealed this and made an emotional appeal to the Sri Lankan president, prime minister and the minister of foreign affairs to look into this treacherous conduct of the embassy staff in Geneva. She also referred to the Tamil racists\u2019 attempt to introduce a false history in order to justify their separatist claims, and urged Sri Lankan parents and educational authorities to resuscitate the teaching of history in our schools as in the past.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Rohana R. Wasala The USA, which tabled Resolution 30\/1 against Sri Lanka at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in October 2015, has by now left that body in disgust. Sri Lanka co-sponsored this resolution against itself to its eternal shame. President Donald Trump, addressing the 73rd Session of the UN General Assembly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rohana-r-wasala"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81938\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}