The UN Resolution on Lanka and hypocrisy of the West

The United Kingdom and Canada informed our government that a new resolution on Sri Lanka would be presented at the 60th session of the UN Human Rights Council next month. Resolution 46/1, adopted on March 23, 2021, established an accountability process to collect, analyse, and preserve evidence of war crimes committed in Sri Lanka for use in future prosecutions.

Well and good, as war crimes cannot be tolerated. Again they need be firmly applied to all countries equally. Lankans know that around seventy thousand civilians were killed in the ethnic war which tore our country apart. The  victims of that war cry to the heavens for justice.

We also know that various governments, in power since the war came to an end, have avoided taking action against the perpetrators. The leadership of the present government has continuously called for investigations into human rights abuses during the civil war. Since the present administration came into power, these investigations have proceeded unhindered. 

The investigation into sites of alleged mass graves has continued transparently and unhindered –unlike during past administrations. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk, who was Sri Lanka in June, visited the site while work  was in progress. 

While these developments were ongoing, Britain and Canada informed our government that a new resolution on Sri Lanka will be presented at the 60thsession of the UN Human Rights Council next month.

It is in this background that the tabling of another resolution to be presented at the 60th session of the UN Human Rights Council next month becomes embarrassing and hypocritical. Both Britain and Canada have committed all manner of atrocities –including mass killings of their own people in their own lands, as well as in different parts of the world.

Britain for example is guilty of starving hundreds of thousands of Irish civilians as part of their war strategy to crush the Irish freedom struggle. During the Irish ‘Potato Famine’ from 1845 to 1852, approximately one million Irish people died from starvation and related diseases. Another two million fled to the US to escape the famine.

It has also condoned the killing of civilians in their colonies to crush freedom struggles. 

In our own country during the 1818 Kandyan rebellion, all heads of households and male children were slaughtered in cold blood by British troops. In India, the 1943 famine in Bengal killed up to 3 million people. Studies, including those by the journalist Madhushree Mukerjee, show the famine was exacerbated by the decisions of Winston Churchill’s wartime cabinet in London.

Churchill has been quoted as blaming the famine on the fact that Indians were “breeding like rabbits”, and asking how, if the shortages were so bad, Mahatma Gandhi was still alive! Even today Britain romanticises Churchill. 

Churchill and his fellow murderers are held up as heroes and paragons of virtue though evidence of war crimes were aplenty – but NO prosecution, no accountability, and no analysis of evidence 

In Canada,  thousands of indigenous people were hunted to near extinction while attempts were made to eradicate their culture. Up until 1960, Indigenous peoples in Canada did not have the right  to vote in federal elections, unless they were willing to give up their ‘Indian’ status.

During the  war in Afghanistan,  the total number of civilians killed directly due to the war is estimated to be between 176,000 and 243,000. The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) prosecutor defended omitting the United States from an investigation in Afghanistan, saying the “worst crimes” were committed by the Taliban and the ISIL (ISIS)! 

Today, Israel continues its genocidal war in Palestine which began prior to 1948. It has since increased its barbarity and is using hunger as a tool of war to impose a ‘final solution’ to the Palestinian problem.

Yet Israel is free of sanctions despite the current 10-month genocidal war in Gaza which has killed over 70,000 Palestinians, starved  nearly  half a million people and killed 18,000 children–an average of 28 children daily.

If this is the ‘gold standard’ set by the UN, then there should be no ‘Resolution on Lanka’ at the UN, as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) committed crimes which were as bad as or worse than those of the Lankan government.

The UN needs be ashamed of its record. It needs even at this stage to commence prosecuting and naming war criminals and their backers not only in  Africa and Asia but those especially in the West where crimes have gone unpunished for centuries.