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Of that House of Commons debate- Island Editorial
British MPs have, in a special parliamentary debate, bashed India and Sri Lanka over alleged accountability issues. India has been criticised for the Jammu-Kashmir situation and Sri Lanka for the final stages of its war on terror. Earlier, the House of Commons was to have a debate only on Sri Lanka but later the two countries were lumped together.
It is being argued in some quarters that Britain, which is in the forefront of a campaign to have Sri Lankan leaders arraigned on charges of war crimes, has blundered by dragging in India, whose support the West is trying to secure for the anti-Sri Lankan diplomatic offensive. But, it is possible that the British lawmakers responsible for the debate sought to make northern Sri Lanka out to be a disputed territory by bracketing it with Kashmir. Or, they may even have tried to give their Sri Lanka bashing timed for the UNHRC session in Geneva a semblance of balance by being critical of India as well.
How uninformed some of the British MPs are about the Sri Lankan situation came to light when Robert Halfon claimed 17,000 Tamils were caged behind bars and 200,000 others held in transit camps. There are only 3,000 LTTE cadres in custody out of over 11,000 taken in; others have been released. The number of IDPs is well below 10,000. Halfon is either ignorant of the situation here or has tried to mislead the British public by uttering such falsehoods in the Commons. Another MP claimed that the people driven out of the North in 1990 were Tamils, though they were all Muslims. Perhaps, he, too, did a Goebbels thinking that a blatant lie repeated many times over would pass for the truth ultimately.
India has pooh-poohed criticism from the British lawmakers claiming that the debate was initiated by a group of backbenchers and therefore it did not reflect the official position of the British government.
Why the British parliamentarians are campaigning for a war crimes probe against Sri Lanka is clear. They cannot depend entirely on the votes of enlightened, native Britons to win elections. Therefore, they bank on organised immigrants capable of delivering block votes to politicians and doling out campaign contributions to them in return for their services. MP David Miliband has admitted, according to a diplomatic cable revealed by Wikileaks, that while he was British Foreign Secretary, he spent two thirds of his time on Sri Lanka's war in early 2009 in view of LTTE sympathisers' votes in Labour constituencies.
Most British lawmakers are not paragons of virtue. They are as fallible and corruptible as politicians in other parts of the world, especially in Sri Lanka. Some of them, in fact, stand accused of misappropriating taxpayers' money. In January this year, a former British MP, David Chaytor, was sentenced to 18 months in jail in connection with what has come to be known as MPs' expense scandal.
Three other British parliamentarians were charged with submitting false expense claims over the past six years, according to Britain's Crown Prosecution Service. Some British MPs stooped to the level of obtaining taxpayers' money even for dog food! Miliband (David) is among the lawmakers who have drawn flak for the expenses scandal. His spending on his constituency home was so extensive that even his gardener questioned whether some of the costs were strictly necessary. An application for reimbursement for a pram was among his expense claims that got rejected.
So much for British MPs integrity!
Now that tight controls have been slapped on the reimbursement of lawmakers' expenses, how they sustain their expensive lifestyles is anybody's guess. It is only natural that affluent lobbyists are in a position to sway them. The latest US State Department Country Report reveals that the LTTE continues to raise funds. There is no war to be financed and where is all this money going? The LTTE rump is spending its funds on a propaganda and diplomatic war against Sri Lanka with the help of influential western politicians and a section of the media. Prominent among the British MPs who initiated Thursday's debate are some LTTE backers such as Lee Scott (Con.) and Steve Baker (Con.)
If the British parliamentarians are really driven by altruism and love for human rights in having parliamentary debates on other countries, they should, before expending their time and energy on Sri Lanka, discuss in the Commons the humanitarian catastrophe in Libya, where NATO air strikes continue to kill civilians in large numbers and a bloodbath is inevitable if the western-backed rebels on the rampage march on the cities held by pro-Gaddafi forces.
The rebel leader himself has admitted that about 50,000 people had been killed before the capture of Tripoli. The number of deaths must be much higher now. Moreover, there is conclusive evidence that Sirte and other pockets of resistance are being systematically starved into submission by the rebels who have laid siege to them.
The British lawmakers should also call for pressing war crimes charges against former US President George W Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair for having invaded Iraq on the basis of forged intelligence dossiers and caused over 600,000 people to be killed. That is the only way they could prove that they have not lent themselves as a cat's paw to the LTTE rump to pull political chestnuts out of the fire.
Courtesy: The Island