Double standards of the West
(By: Nitin Gokhale - New Delhi, India)
 |
|
(The author, NDTV's Defence Editor,
reported the war in Sri Lanka from the conflict zone for the
past six months) |
If ever there was a proof needed about the double
standards applied by the Western nations in dealing with Asia and
Africa, there is no better example than their reaction to the
developments in Sri Lanka over the last fortnight.
Here's a nation that secured a hard-earned military
victory over what was unarguably the world's most dreaded and ruthless
terrorist group--the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam or LTTE. Banned in
26 countries across the globe, the Tamil Tigers, as the LTTE was also
known, had a powerful naval arm, a rudimentary air wing and at least
25,000 infantry fighters backed like a conventional army with 155 mm
artillery guns, multi-barrel rocket launchers, Universal machine guns
and claymore mines among other small arms.
This was the outfit that gave the world the suicide
vest and suicide belt that were responsible for the assassination of at
least one President and a former Prime Minister across two nations, this
was the group that killed and wounded at least 70,000 people over a
quarter century; here was a group who's writ ran large over one-third of
a sovereign nation.
And to top it all, the LTTE had kept over 250,000
innocent, hapless Tamil civilians--women, children, the young and the
old--hostage for over two years and mercilessly used them as an
insurance against the advancing Sri Lankan army.
If ever there was a ripe case for a well-planned and
executed military operation, here it was in Sri Lanka. President Mahinda
Rajapaksa and his team went about prosecuting what, by all accounts, was
a legitimate war. But the world, the Western world went into an
overdrive to stop Colombo. Norway, Sweden, UK and to a lesser extent the
United States put pressure on Sri Lanka by various means. Some
threatened to move a resolution in the UN, others lobbied to prevent a
bailout package mooted by the International Monetary Fund for the
war-ravaged country. Now, many have called for war crime investigations
into the conduct of the Sri Lankan military.
Had it not been for countries like Russia, China and
to an extent India, Sri Lanka would have suffered grievously at the
hands of the so-called liberal lobby, ably aided and abetted by the
'bleeding-heart' liberals among the western media who think they are the
judge, jury and executors when it comes to dealing with Asian and
African nations. All of them had tried to stop the war in Sri Lanka,
ostensibly to safeguard the civilians but in reality the efforts were
directed at rescuing LTTE chief Vellupillai Prabhakaran and his top
associates.
The simple and bitter truth is: the Western world has
not been able to digest the fact that a small, underdeveloped nation
like Sri Lanka has managed to defeat a terrorist group, a feat that they
have not managed despite deploying huge resources and manpower across
the globe.
For years, the US and the NATO countries have been
trying to vanquish the Al Qaeda and the Taliban, without much success.
In the past decade, the US and other western militaries, operating in
Iraq and Afghanistan to take just two recent examples, have killed and
maimed scores of civilians. But except for cursory apologies, none of
these nations or the defenders of human rights operating from the safe
havens of western capitals have bothered to even acknowledge their gross
mistakes.
So why is it that a small nation's victory over
terrorism "fit to be tried for war crimes," but a big bully's (like the
US) blatant violation of human rights is part of a "necessary war on
terrorism?" Why didn't any one of these defenders of human rights put
pressure on the LTTE when it was taking hundreds of thousands of
civilians along with it as it retreated during the war?
If ever there is a clear case of the western nations'
hypocrisy, it is demonstrable here in India's backyard, in Sri Lanka.
Let Washington and London and Bonn and Ottawa first look at their own
conduct before trying to prosecute a small country for doing what any
sovereign nation has a right to do.
(The author, NDTV's Defence Editor, reported the
war in Sri Lanka from the conflict zone for the past six months) |
