Dragging Sri Lankan cricketers into your campaign

Asoka Weerasinghe Ontario, Canada

April 3, 2007
Amnesty International
Ladies and Gentlemen:

Whose dumb idea among you lot was it to make a pitch on the alleged human rights violations in Sri Lanka at the World Cricket Cup games tarnishing the image of our multi-ethnic Sri Lankan cricketers? Did you not realize that cricket in Sri Lanka is the crucible of affection, camaraderie and harmony between all ethnic groups – Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, Moors and Burghers? Wake up AI!

Or are you a bunch of illegal cricket gamblers trying to put off the Sri Lankan cricketers so that they will lose their matches and you all rake up gunny bags full of money? Coming from questionable do-gooders from the Amnesty International fraternity I won’t let that assumption pass by me without a question mark.

What is unnerving about your comic effort signing specially designed balls to raise awareness of human rights violations to tarnish the Sri Lankan cricketers participating in the World Cup in the Caribbean, is for the world to acknowledge that once we finish saluting Amnesty International as the squeaky-clean human rights organization which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977 and the United Nations Human Rights Prize in 1978 for its apparent saintly impartiality unmotivated by the slightest shred of ideological prejudice, going about the world protesting against human rights abuses by officials of governments where ever they me found, that there is where the niceties unfortunately end.

Yours is the same ball-signing organization that devoted a modest half page to Kampuchea in its annual report covering 1975, the year Phnom Penh fell to the Kymer Rouge. We learn that Amnesty International’s secretary general sent a cable “expressing concern for civilians detained in areas of conflict,” while noting prudently that allegations of mass executions were based on “flimsy evidence and second hand accounts.” This is when it was a known fact that nearly one-fifth of the population of Kampuchea were exterminated by the Kymer Rouge in the late 1970s. It is also interesting to note that Amnesty International also sent a cable congratulating the new regime of Kampuchea on the “large national union without distinction of class, religious belief or political tendency” it had just proclaimed.

Don’t you remember how you all by the following year had to deal with a barrage of press reports of mass executions based on accounts of Kampuchean refugees arriving in Thailand? And what did your Amnesty International do? It remained skeptical. Many allegations it said, seemed to be based “on the belief, rather than evidence, that people who disappear from a village or other place of work have been taken away by the army to be executed.”

That conclusion wasn’t surprising as it came from your left-winged ideologues, among whom were self-confessed pro-Communists like AI’s principal co-founder, Lenin Prizeman Sean McBride, who was boasting in his autobiography of having been a professional revolutionary since his teens, and also having employed the leading Australian Communist Derek Roebuck to head your research department in your London office, who refused to heed the testimony of refugees from Communist countries.

With that infamous medallion of left-wing cods-wallop hanging around your necks, you all had the gall and the temerity to violate the rights of Sri Lanka’s multi-ethnic cricketers to participate in a gentleman’s’ game with the rest of the cricketing world. What’s wrong with you foolish lot? Stop polluting to kill one of the few exceptional crucibles of harmony in Sri Lanka and let the Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim cricketers shoulder with pride the Sri Lankan national flag at this world event. Shame on you lot. Stop taking their rights away.

Grow up, Amnesty International. Smell the Sri Lankan jasmines to boost your faculties of reasoning to encourage and applaud the time proven harmony among the multi-ethnic Sri Lankan cricketers rather than smelling the patties of Sri Lankan cow-dung to get a high on your stupid tactics to destroy their crucible of harmony that they guard so selfishly from questionable organizations like yours.