Commonwealth condemned to oblivion
The United Kingdom last Monday had a service at Westminster Abbey, the church in London associated with births, deaths and marriages of British Royal to commemorate Commonwealth (CW) Day. It was the first under the patronage of King Charles, the 54-nation group's titular head.
Most countries now rely on regional groups or Quads, or dealing bilaterally with powerful nations of today while many bodies like the CW Development Council or the CW Technical Fund are struggling without funds. So is the CW Secretariat. Once apartheid in South Africa was done with, the CW missed several significant opportunities for future development and floundered around looking for new focus. Other international bodies took up climate and environmental concerns and global health and education issues. Election observance is irrelevant with others also in the field most of the time and like media freedom, has become an industry.
The service at the Abbey was more of a 'Royal' event – in other words, what the Royal ladies wore – and didn't even make the BBC's evening news. It, however, included a side show that celebrated Sri Lanka's 75th anniversary of Independence with a duet by two Sri Lankan singers, which was touching. At the same time, it showed the sharp disconnect between the ceremonial CW and the real politics of the CW.
The Government of the United Kingdom, no less, is leading the charge against a fellow CW member state in the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, putting it on the rack for alleged violations of International Human Rights law at the end of a national insurgency with a terrorist group that wanted to split the country in two by armed conflict, and now extending the crusade to other issues. CW principles like the CW Charter and the Latimer House Agreement are selectively quoted and all of this due to pure domestic compulsions of the British electorate and party politics in the UK.
Take Canada, another CW member-state. It has joined with the UK in Geneva for the same parochial domestic political reasons. Canada’s provincial assembly in Ontario has a 'genocide week' declared to teach the next generation of Canadians that there was 'deliberate killing of an ethnic minority' by the majority of Sri Lankans. This is without an iota of proof and from a country which historically has a demonstrably poor record of how it treated its own indigenous minorities.
There has long been a perception that there is a 'white' CW and a 'non-white' CW. Is it a club to be in?
The CW is a spent force, moribund and in terminal decline. One wonders whether all the multi-faith blessings from Westminster Abbey are enough for a group that once did some good work, but is now facing hard times financially, selectively whipping smaller members into so-called 'international good governance standards' influenced by modern-day domestic political compulsions. The CW seems to be fading sooner than later from memory, just like any vestiges of nostalgia for the complex history of British colonialism.