WHITE MAN'S BURDEN IN BLACK AND WHITE OR R2P THE LTTE
Gareth Evans is the president of the International Crisis Group, not known to many people in the world. These crisis groups may be there to create crises internationally, and their function in any event is to see that the white man continues to carry the burden of civilizing the black man. Of course the ideas evolve and the burden has been widened to include various other responsibilities. The latest such responsibility (or is it one of the latest responsibilities) has been spelled out by Gareth Evans at the Neelan Thiruchelvam Memorial Lecture in Colombo.
As a black or brown, it does not matter very much as relative to white they are all dark, I feel sorry for the white man for the burdens and responsibilities that they have, simply because they are thoughtful and concerned of the darker people. Evans instead of enjoying life after retirement from parliamentary politics in Australia, with his extended families, is going around the world carrying the burden of the white man. We must thank him for such generosity, though he may say that he has an extended family in each port he visits, or even that the whole world is his extended family.
Evans and the other whites could claim that it is not only the whites who are members of these crisis groups, and they would point out to a number of dark people who are not only members but office bearers of these burden carriers. It may be so but these are dark people have already being civilized by the white man, and they are all white culturally though they may not be so in respect of the skin colour.
Within days if not hours of Evans' speech the dark friend of the whites in Lipton's tea circus in Sri Lanka, Thondaman with some of the others in his party resigned from their portfolios. I am not trying to claim that the two events are causally related but it is apparent that the speech and the resignation are all related to the major theme of the white man as far as Sri Lanka is concerned. The theme is nothing but weakening, if not destroying, the culture of the main enemy of theirs in the country, meaning the Sinhala in general and Sinhala Buddhist in particular. In this regard the white man has number of friends in this country including Prabhakaran, Thondaman, Ranil and Hakeem in active politics and the NGO activists in auxiliary politics. White man's burden is carried by whites as well as by blacks, though white in culture, and the burden is now written in black and white.
I have no intention of analysing Evans' speech but I have to point out to a contradiction in his speech before I spell out in black and white, what is in store for the Sri Lankan government and the Sinhala people. Evans and his crisis people and other crisis creators have formulated a new version of colonialism in their "thesis" on the responsibility to protect. The so called responsibility to protect is nothing but a licence given by the white man to himself to intervene in the affairs of dark sovereign countries, whenever the white man thinks it fit to do so. The white man intervenes only when there is a threat to his culture and chinthanaya and in Sri Lanka the Sinhalas have been a thorn in the flesh ever since the Portuguese landed in this country some five hundred years ago, an event Ranil Wickremesinghe wanted to celebrate in style. If not for his defeat at the presidential elections we would have witnessed tamashas in Colombo and other places which would have made Don Juan Dharmapala or Parangi Dharmapala and Yankee Dickey proud.
Evans of course claims that there are limits to state sovereignty. In the eyes of the white man states have sovereignty only as far as they do not upset the white man's global kingdom. The concepts and ideas created by the white man in black and white using not only whites but also the blacks who are culturally white, are for the maintenance of their supremacy in the so called global village, which is only another name for the global kingdom, and naturally the sovereignty of the states have to be limited when it comes to protect the interests of the whites. Leaving aside all these background material and coming to the text of the speech by Evans I find that though he talks of responsibility to protect he does not name from whom they have to be protected. The International (another international body of a dozen of people, in this global village we have such international bodies not only in New York or Sydney but also in Colombo and suburbs and also in places such as Agunakolapelassa where one may come across an International Montessori to the delight of Evans and Co.) Commission on Intervention and Sovereignty (ICSS) in their formulation of the responsibility has failed to spell out the agencies from whom the human rights or whatever have to be protected.
Evans talks on the "need to protect communities from mass killing and ethnic cleansing, women from systematic rape and children from starvation" but does not mention by whom. Then he goes on to mention responsibility (according to Evans these are big conceptual contributions of the ICSS. Western Physicists, Mathematicians and Philosophers who dabble with hard concepts should make it a point to meet the ICSS for help). Let us listen to him. "The starting point is that any state has the primary responsibility to protect the individuals within it. But that is not the finishing point: where the state fails in that responsibility, through either incapacity or ill will, a secondary responsibility to protect falls on the wider international community. That, in a nutshell, is the core of the responsibility to protect idea or 'R2P' as we are now calling it for short."
Now, I for a moment do not agree with either the content or the spirit (should it be Spirit) of the formulation of the ICSS. However, going by the letter it appears that ICSS has to support the Sri Lankan state to defeat the LTTE. The ICSS has been careful not to mention the agents of mass killings, ethnic cleansing raping of women thus leaving an uncertainty as to who are "responsible" for those crimes, if I may use one of the concepts so dear to the ICSS. In Sri Lanka those crimes are the work of the LTTE and by the letter of the ICSS formulation (in spirit ICSS wants to interfere with the sovereign states) it is the responsibility of the state to "protect" the individuals within it. Thus according to the ICSS formulation the Sri Lankan state has to protect the Tamils and others in the Sri Lanka and especially those living in the Northern Province from the crimes mentioned above committed by the LTTE, unless of course the ICSS is of the view that the residents in the Northern Province or somewhere else are not individuals within the state of Sri Lanka. The ICSS goes further and says that if the state, in this case the Sri Lankan state, fails in its duty then a secondary responsibility falls on the so called wider international community. Thus even if the "international community" of dozen or so people think that the Sri Lankan state has failed to protect the individuals living in the Northern Province and elsewhere from crimes committed by the LTTE then the "international community" should help the Sri Lankan state to defeat the LTTE. However, instead of that, Evans thinks that he should direct "veiled" and not so "veiled" threats to the government of Sri Lanka and insist that the government of Sri Lanka should start negotiating with the LTTE.
It is clear that the whites have a "responsibility to protect" (did you say R2P) the LTTE and they are determined to stop the operations by the armed forces against the LTTE in the Northern Province. After all Tamil racism is the creation of the whites and they have to protect the LTTE, the agent of Tamil racism at any cost. The whites will even try to topple the government in order to protect the LTTE and the black components of the white strategy in the form of Thondamans and Hakeems would help the whites in this R2P game. Thondaman would not have left the government on some silly verbal exchange with a higher up in the government and as they say in Sinhala "honda honda netum elivena jameta". (Could a black agent translate this for Evans?). The Sinhalas and others who love this country should unite to defeat the interests of the white man who is acting against the interests of the sovereign state of Sri Lanka. In this context it becomes the responsibility of the JVP to protect the government, and it is time for another "parivasa" government.
Professor Nalin de Silva
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