Complicit in silence- Kumar David

[TamilNet, Saturday, 31 May 2008, 22:38 GMT]
Pointing out that Rajapakse regime's "human rights record renders it undeserving of a seat on the UNHR Council," Prof. Kumar David, in a column in Lakbima, notes that a more worrying side to this state of affairs is that "significant majority of Sinhalese people are willing to look aside and allow human rights violations to proliferate, so long as the victims are Tamils, or persons suspected of LTTE sympathy, or journalists who expose military setbacks and lies, or as tit-for-tat replies to LTTE bomb blasts...the complicity of silence, on the part of a people in the crimes of its regime, the decay that will eventually corrode the fabric of that whole nation will be hideous."

Prof David urges the readers to reflect on the "cause of our human rights ailment and the worrying new disease that is provoking new forms of conflict and stoking fresh fires of potential terrorism," and to sidestep the pro-government excuses "that it was the imperialist powers, dollar corrupted NGOs and INGOs, meddlesome Nobel Laureates, pro-Eelam Lefties and British Labour party types that engineered the regimes unceremonious eviction from the UN Human Rights Council."

Noting that the "Government, buried as it is in its power- perpetuating machinations and financial misdemeanours," will not change its ways, Prof David says, the ouster from the UN will serve a most useful purpose if it serves as "a wake up call to the public at large."

Prof. David discounts as errorneous, left alliances theory that "imperialism too was deeply involved in managing Lanka’s exclusion from the HR Council," and reasons that "[n]ot everything that comes out of America, Europe or the West is synonymous with imperialism. In the current exercise the critique of our regime was led by democratic public opinion, human rights activists, and bold international intellectuals."

On the East elections, Prof David accuses the political establishment running "a dishonest and rigged election" and creating conditions for violence in the east. "Terrorists are not born, they are made, and they are made by governments that do this kind of thing," Prof David concludes.

Chronology:


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External Links:

Lakbima:

Understanding Lanka’s UNHRC eviction