This week the British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, and his French counterpart, Bernard Kouchner went to Sri Lanka to "urge" a ceasefire. Mr. Kouchner, interestingly, used to be a long-time advocate of humanitarian intervention. Applying once to be head of the UNHCR in 2005, he stated "we could open together a new era in the process of protecting all refugees and displaced persons in the world." None of this applies to the Tamils, of course. Explaining their failure to get the Sinhala regime to stop its onslaught into the packed civilians, Mr. Kouchner said: "We tried very hard - we insisted and we insisted - but it is up to our friends to allow it or not."
Mr. Miliband, it might be recalled, was at the forefront of Western outrage over
It is clear this is far from true. Tamil journalist and activists who met this week with EU and American officials, British MPs and advocacy NGOs have been hearing consistent reports: Britain has long been blocking or neutralising other international efforts to sanction Sri Lanka. For example,
As we argued earlier, Western states, looking at
Ironically, other Western actors, such as the International Crisis Group and Human Rights Watch, who have long opposed the Tamil struggle for self-rule, have in recent weeks been screaming for international action to stop the bloodbath. Those who think that the LTTE will be destroyed in the coming weeks and that then it is a question of 'peace building' and 'development' for the next few years are gravely mistaken. The foundations for a cataclysmic civil war are being inexorably laid today. The kind of polarisation that sustain not decades, but generations of struggle has become widespread and embedded. Quite apart from the euphoric jingoism that has been sweeping the Sinhalese polity and population since 2007, the wholesale massacres of Tamils since January this year has hardened resolve amongst the Tamils. 'Reconciliation', as almost all Tamils and Sinhalese know, is now an impossibility.
All of this has only been possible by the ideological blindness and hubris of Western states that, whilst caring little for the specificities of places like
Unless they are prepared to confront and discipline the Sinhala state, it is of little consequence what else the Western liberal states do now. However, it is their very failures to act against
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