CLASSIFIED | POLITICS | TERRORISM | OPINION | VIEWS

Amnesty Amnesia and Crocodile Tears over CFA

Asoka Weerasinghe Ottawa, Canada

January 18, 2008

Amnesty International
_Attn: Irene Khan, UK
Betty Ross, USA
John Argue, Canada_

Ladies and Gentleman of AI:

I was a bit surprised to read the Secretary General of Sri Lanka’s Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process still addressing you all with the article */“Amnesty/ /Amnesia and Crocodile Tears over CFA/”, *which I am sure you all may have read by now. And I hope that I will get an opportunity to read a response to that clinically crafted address to you all on your involvement in Sri Lanka.

To be honest, I thought that we had dealt with you lot once-and-for-all after your dunce-cap efforts with your fuzzy cricket ball fiasco trying to embarrass Sri Lanka at the Cricket World Cup Tournament in the Caribbean last summer, when all Sri Lankan cricket fans from around the world joined in to hit AI for a six repeatedly out of the Human Rights field; clean bowled you all for a duck at every turn with Sri Lankan-googlies that were sent to you all from all around the world; discovered that you bunch were being ‘silly- (and a bit) mid off’; and found that you all had ‘backward- (with no where to run after being embarrassed of your stupidity because of your) short legs’; and needed some ‘extra cover’ having been stripped naked getting caught with your shenanigans to embarrass Sri Lanka. Obviously you are a bunch of survivors riding on the 1977 Nobel Peace Prize fame.

It was intriguing to read Professor Rajiva Wijesinha’s opening statement, */“The Peace Secretariat is sorry that the latest venture of Amnesty International into international politics should have coincided with a terrorist attack which left 26 people dead and more/* */dying.”/* This was a classic text book human rights violation through savagery, denying the ‘right to life’ of the fleeing bus travelers at Buttala who were chased and shot to death when rightfully trying to hang on to their rights of ‘right to life’.

You all never got it right about Sri Lanka. Never did since the early 80s. In the 80s and 90s you stood guilty in my eyes when you all provided a cloak of respectability to the Tamil Tigers when AI went after the Sri Lanka government on alleged human rights violations in this separatist feud and did not scold nor rap the knuckles of the Tamil Tiger terrorists who were snuffing out innocent lives in droves of peasant Sinhalese farmers, fisherfolk, pregnant mothers, children and infants, with machetes, Kalashnikovs and hand grenades, and burning some alive in their shacks in the north and east of Sri Lanka. I will never, ever forgive you lot for that. That was unacceptable and that was disgusting and believe me, every one of you have Sinhala blood as well as that of the innocent Muslims from the east, in your hands and I say “Pox” to AI for that.

And, of course, AI had an excuse, as you said that your Charter which was set in the pre-terrorist era in 1961, when there was absolutely no comprehension of the organized terrorism of today and the magnitude of its challenge to democratically elected governments. That didn’t soothe my anger towards you all, as AI let the Tamil Tiger human rights violations go on unchecked for years before AI decided to recognize Tamil Tiger atrocities with a one liner in paragraphs where AI slapped the Sri Lankan government for alleged human rights violations.

But by then, your partiality in taking sides was transparent, as once I had finished saluting Amnesty International as a squeaky-clean human rights organization which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977 and the United Nations Human Rights Prize in 1978 for its almost saintly impartiality, unmotivated by the slightest shred of ideological prejudice, going about the world and protesting against human rights abuses by officials of governments, wherever they may be found, there the niceties in my eyes ended, having seen your involvement in Sri Lanka.

I was disillusioned when AI devoted a modest half page to Kampuchea in its annual report covering 1975, the year Phnom Penh fell to the Khymer Rouge. What was sickening was to learn that AIs Secretary General had 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 was exterminated by the Khymer Rouge in the 70s. It was also interesting to note that AI 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.

You may recall that by the following year AI had to deal with a barrage of press reports of mass executions based on accounts of Kampuchean refugees arriving in Thailand. And what did Amnesty do? It still remained skeptical. Many allegations it said, seemed to be based “on the belief, rather than evidence, that people who disappear from a village or the place of work have been taken away by the army to be executed.”

I have always questioned why such a conclusion did not fit Sri Lanka’s scenario of the 80s, 90s and 00s, since most of AI’s allegations that were presented as absolute were through hearsay, which would be invalid in any court of law according to norms accepted the world over. All this may sound strange and surrealistic, but it is true.

Now you know why I joined the Sri Lankan cricket fans the world over last summer, during the World Cup Series to hit AI for a six; why I bowled AI for a duck calling your fluffy-ball shenanigans as humbug; why I found you lot as “silly and mid-offs" trying your silly antics to demoralize our cricketers as well as embarrass Sri Lanka; why I noticed you all had “backward short-legs” unable to run fast enough once we turned the tables on you lot; and watch your desperation to find an “extra cover” to hide you nakedness after we stripped AI of its Sri Lanka-humbug.

I will be waiting to read with interest your response to Professor Rajiva Wijesinha’s*/ Amnesty Amnesia and Crocodile Tears over CFA. /*I am sure with my conclusions of AI, it would be good reading.

Asoka Weerasinghe
Ottawa, Canada

cc. Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha, SCOPP

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