Poor battle plans to fight proxy wars abroad

If arresting the free falling COVID situation on land and the blazing ship at sea are not a handful to handle, fire-fighting proxy wars against it abroad seems a humongous task for the Government. Appointing ill- qualified personnel for the latter assignment is not helping in this onerous assignment, either.

There is a snowballing effect from resolution after motion after court order in Western legislatures and courts against the incumbent Government. Just last month the provincial assembly of Ontario in Canada approved a motion brought by a proLTTE member to declare a week in May to commemorate what it called 'Genocide in Sri Lanka’. It has gone unchallenged. Last week, the US Congress forwarded a resolution to the House Foreign Relations Committee to vet a draft resolution that follows up from the UNHRC resolution against Sri Lanka with the addition of the reference to a "Tamil Homeland".

In the UK, where the LTTE remains a banned organisation, sympathisers of the terrorist group have kept up the tempo with demonstrations in London while the local Police adopt a 'Nelsonian-eye'.

This week, a UK appeal tribunal upturned orders by granting two LTTE sympathisers asylum on the basis of not just the human rights record in Sri Lanka as the tribunal sees it, but the political trajectory of the incumbent Government in Colombo.

Mercifully for Sri Lanka, Dr. Colvin R. De Silva ensured the Republican Constitution of 1972 (now May 22 as Republic Day is not even celebrated in Sri Lanka) broke the judicial umbilical cord with the Privy Council in Britain and court orders in the UK are limited to its own jurisdiction. However, the upshot of the UK judgment (please see page 10 for details) is that any asylum seeker in the UK has only to show his LTTE membership card, or their trademark cyanide capsule, or even an AK- 47 issued to him or her to win asylum in the UK.

Any law student will be able to pick any number of holes in the UK appeal tribunal's order. It refers to Sri Lanka's "violent history" of the past four decades forgetting the violent history in the UK via the IRA. There is a reference to "entrenchment of the presence of military personnel in the power structure of the Government", but what is probably meant is 'former military personnel'. There are references to ' colonisation of Buddhists' in Sri Lanka and the introduction of new words to the English language such as 'Sinhalisation'.

Nit-picking the wording of these resolutions and orders is like barking at the moon. The snowballing of all these multi-pronged exercises is going to soon turn into an avalanche unless the Government can rectify its ineptitude in meeting these challenges.