Royal pageantry amid Britain’s political chicanery

By the time this column appears the much looked forward to Royal Wedding would be over. The Britons are famous for switching on the pomp and pageantry which they have been doing for centuries. All that would have, by now, been wound down. Even the royals, these days, have to scale down their expensive ways.

The hundreds of common people who attracted by their monarchy or still worshipping it, especially the loveable Prince Harry, found positions however uncomfortable and inconvenient along the route the Royal couple would take and had settled down in their places days ahead of the event.

It might be considered unpardonable to compare this genuine sit-down to one of the farce-untodeath stunts of the publicity-seeking Wimal Weerawansa that suddenly came to mind. That momentary and unfortunate recall should not detract from what one might call la grande occasion yesterday.

But while Britain had been preparing several months ahead for this rather unusual Royal wedding, government bureaucrats especially in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, have been readying themselves to do the dirty on Sri Lanka, as it would on any country that is not willing to accept its diktat.

So in the quiet of the mother of all parliaments, Labour MPs who depend on Tamil diaspora votes to see them through in several marginal seats have been keeping the LTTE escutcheon alive and fluttering.

The Conservative ministers such as the FCO’s Mark Field have helped keep the subject of Sri Lanka’s international commitment to the UNHRC Resolution 30/1 of October 2015 simmering because they need to camouflage the UK’s own fractured and deliberately distorted view of civilian casualties in the last months of the LTTE war and allegations of war crimes on the radar screen.

Twice in recent days Mark Field, one of those rather vacuous juniors who keep surfacing in Conservative benches as Prime Minister Theresa May struggles to fill empty posts with competent Tories, repeated parrot like some rubbish put to him by the relevant desk at the FCO about how Britain was keeping the pressure on Sri Lanka to fulfill its international commitments such as on human rights and international law.

How could British pressure Sri Lanka or anybody when it has so much of dirty linen which obviously it cannot wash in public

All the while, of course, this great country that proudly says it stands for human rights and for its own commitment to international humanitarian and international law, is supplying arms to oil- rich states such as Saudi Arabia which has little or no concern for human rights, so it can bomb the daylights out of villages in Yemen.

It was a few months ago that fragments of a British-made cluster bomb were found in a Yemeni village. It may well be that this one piece of crates- full of ordnance that was sold to Saudi Arabia several years ago. But the fact is, as some military observer pointed out at the time, these cluster bombs could only be dropped from a particular British manufactured aircraft several of which are still in use in Saudi Arabia.

So when it comes to helping kill innocent Yemeni civilians, it seems all those international and other laws that the UK cites should only be observed by countries such as Sri Lanka which fought a vicious three-decade long war, but not by permanent members of the Security Council who should help in maintaining peace in the world without bombing West Asia into the stone age.

The problem is that today the UK is a second rate power -- some might even say third -- but still wants to be in the big league playing a world power as it did in colonial times. I remember during my years in Hong Kong there was an obnoxious former British army brigadier who was some big noise in the British Chamber of Commerce.

He was riled by some of my columns and what I had to say of the British administration of Hong Kong over the years. Pointing to some of the prominent Hong Kong Chinese present at a cocktail party at one of the territory’s leading hotels he told me “they don’t want the sun to set on the British empire”. Unable to resist a comeback, I remember quickly adapting some old saying and retorting “that is because nobody trusts the Brits in the dark”. That did not endear me to the retired brigadier because I had another encounter with him at another reception.

As British history and a decade of Hong Kong experience taught me was the arrogance and hypocrisy of the colonial power even when it was going down the tube and how it betrayed the minorities in Hong Kong who were going to be handed over to the new sovereign power when Hong Kong returned to China in 1997.

Only the last Hong Kong governor Chris Patten tried to help out the minorities by appealing that the minorities, especially Indians and Pakistanis be given British citizenship but to no avail.

Even worse was the treatment meted out to the Gurkha regiment stationed in Hong Kong. These famous Nepali soldiers who had fought and died for King/Queen and Country and had won the most prestigious battle field awards for bravery were treated so shabbily that they had to file action in British courts to win the right to live in the UK.

They fought in the same wars as British troops and unlike the British on behalf of another country. Yet when it came to salaries and pensions the Gurkhas were treated like third class soldiers.

That is the UK which hectors on human rights in Sri Lanka, on how to fight wars and most of all concocts figures on civilian casualties in the last stages of the war and hides or buries the reports of its own official defence attache’ in Colombo because the British are unable to face the truth, a truth that would reveal British chicanery to the world.

That is why the three-year old battle to get at the truth by Lord Naseby has evoked stupid remarks and tepid rejoinders by not only British officialdom but high octane gibberish from the Sri Lanka government and its own foreign ministry and from a spokesman of the Tamil diaspora organization GTF.

After t he Sri Lanka Government was found wanting having first ignored Lord Naseby’s findings extracted with difficulty from Whitehall, which would have helped the government to argue its case more vigorously, the Foreign Ministry made a statement that would surely go down in the annals of the ministry as one of the stupidest and confusing responses to emerge from a ministry that once produced great and respected diplomats.

It was tantamount to undermining Lord Naseby’s painfully extracted information from the FCO and providing support to Sri Lanka’s critics and one of the lead sponsors of the anti- Sri Lanka resolution.

One can understand the British High Commissioner James Dauris making inane remarks. He was quoted as saying that Naseby does not represent the British Government or was a spokesman for it or words to that effect.

Surely that would have been obvious even to a FCO diplomat. If Naseby had spent three years trying to find what precisely its Defence Attaché reported about civilian casualties and British officialdom was resisting releasing such information it should be clear to the dumbest diplomat London could send to Colombo that Naseby was not on the side of the government but was attempting to reach a balanced view if not the entire truth.

After Vasantha Senanayake, the state minister in the foreign ministry broke the ice by thanking the lord and President Sirisena managed to awaken from his slumber and send off a message to Naseby, came the piece de resistance from Foreign Minister Tilak Marapana, the third foreign minister that emerged in a few months.

Marapana said in the House that the Naseby findings which the foreign ministry had discarded as irrelevant would be used as an “ace”. We will certainly use it, said the president’s counsel. When would that be, the people clamoured to know, like the Roman citizenry gathered before Caesar’s body.

At the proper time and the appropriate forums, said yahapalanaya’s Mark Antony.

But the time has come and gone. That was in March in Geneva which the other rather openmouthed yahapalanite Harsha de Silva who seems to believe that he is competent to speak on most subjects, even those beyond his intellectual reach had dismissed as wrong place.

So back to Marapana. Could he please tell the public what would be the proper time and the appropriate forums. It seems that the Geneva conferences and other meetings do not fit the bill.

In the meantime where is Marapana hiding his ace? It surely cannot be up his sleeve. Perhaps a search party would need to be sent to Sirikotha to unearth it.