Mr. Cameron, lest you forget all the HR violations on your side

The ultimatum delivered by David Cameron during the CHOGM 2013 that Sri Lanka should come up with an acceptable resolution on what happened during the last days of the 2009 War against terrorism by March 2014 or face consequences of international inquiry supported by the UK has to be considered in the light of a few glaring human rights violations committed by the British forces during the recent past.

The first that comes to the mind of many of us is the ‘The Bloody Sunday’ of January 30, 1972, where 13 unarmed Irish men, seven teenagers among them, were shot to death in Northern Ireland. The famous Saville Inquiry set up in 1998 (26 years later) made public its findings 12 years later on June 15, 2010, which found the killings ‘unjustifiable and unjustified’, and recommended opening investigations on the soldiers involved in the incident. The cruelty and the lack of judgment on the part of the ‘highly disciplined British Army’ were clearly manifested by the very fact that five of those who had managed to survive the onslaught were in fact shot in the back.

In response to the Saville Inquiry findings, the only action, Cameron could take was to offer a so-called public apology. So the accountability so unforgivably punishable for the armed forces of certain developing countries can never be applicable, in the eyes of the British Premier, to the British forces. To add insult to injury, the Attorney General of Great Britain a few days ago issued a communiqué to the effect that it served no purpose to reopen criminal investigations on the soldiers involved in the massacre of the Bloody Sunday.

The other episode obviously is the reluctance in going ahead with the Chilcot inquiry, constituted to find the truth behind sending nearly 40,000 British troops to Iraq in search of ‘ Weapons of Mass Destruction’, in which operation 140,000 Iraqi civilians lost their lives. As the illuminat- ing article in last Sunday’s Sunday Times shows, very little progress has been made in this regard, despite requests by Sir John Chilcot for copies of relevant conversations between the then Prime Minister of the UK and the US President. A ray of hope is the promise made by Cameron in Colombo that the Chilcot Report will be out in six months. Let’s hope that the learned British AG will not rule this time that it’s too late for any judiciary action as it appeared to have happened outside the British soil.

Dehiwala