திங்கள், 10 டிசம்பர், 2012

Britain locally failing in nation building

Britain locally failing in nation building advises others: The Guardian

[TamilNet, Sunday, 09 December 2012, 01:37 GMT]
“Communal rioting in two cities. Bricks and bottles thrown and civic buildings wrecked. Flags torn down and 15 police injured. Local politicians forced to go into hiding. It happens all over the world, but this week it happened in the United Kingdom, evidence of continuing lack of community concord in Northern Ireland,” says an article appeared in The Guardian on Thursday. “The Troubles in Northern Ireland are not on a par with those afflicting states in the Middle East. But they remain unresolved and reflect a real British failure at local "nation-building". Belfast is still the only city outside Israel that must erect walls to keep warring communities apart. The lack of communal accord should evoke modesty from London towards the similar troubles of others. How dare we lecture them on reconciliation,” the article questioned.

The feature criticised the British foreign policy as “mere words, an echo of Washington.”

“When occasionally British forces are deployed to back them up, they are in America's back pocket. They sometimes succeed in toppling regimes, at huge cost in foreign lives and British taxes, but rarely lead to peace and democracy,” the feature said.

The US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visiting Northern Ireland on Friday, would not come out with any words on the riots there, but would discuss trade, world peace and other waffle, the feature observed.

“London's weekly bromides are ever more like those of a schoolmaster breaking up a classroom fight by telling everyone to grow up and behave,” the feature said.

“Know-nothing ideology, anti-intellectualism, cronyism, incompetence and cynicism” that now pass for western foreign policy, the feature cited a UN official.

The Guardian feature by Simon Jenkins was touching on Israel, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Bahrein. In an exceptional deviation from the world of its purview, it even had a mention on rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

But it had nothing to say on the worst ever genocide of this century that took place against Eezham Tamils in the island of Sri Lanka and that continues to take place in structural lines annihilating the identity of the remaining, thanks to contributions by the British foreign policy outlook, making comparisons between Northern Ireland and Tamil Eelam.

The August 2007 UK Peace Building Strategy (PBS) document came out with the following statement:

“The UK security forces have acquired expertise (principally from Northern Ireland and UN Peacekeeping operations) in policing conflict zones in a way that reduces tensions and violence. In 2001 the UK government established the Security Sector Development Advisory Team (SSDAT) as a centre of excellence for UK supported Security Sector Reform (SSR) activity, as part of its Global Conflict Prevention Pool activity. The SSDAT have a broad range of expertise on Policing, Justice, Defence and Intelligence and Security. They are available to provide practical support to the Peace Building Strategies objectives in Sri Lanka,” the 2007 PBS document said.

During the genocidal war in Vanni, the then British representative at the UN Security Council and the present MI6 chief, Sir John Sawers said that the LTTE was long blighting Sri Lanka government.

Yet, the hundreds of thousands diaspora Eezham Tamils in the UK never came forward to directly challenge the British policies that harmed them and in fact laid foundations to their miseries since colonial times, or never thought of showing solidarity with similarly affected people of Northern Ireland. Even in telling what had happened to them and what is happening to them is genocide, sections of them are highly apologetic, fearing that it would displease the British establishment buttressing state in Sri Lanka.

The unresolved issues in Northern Ireland are part of the larger question related to nations without State in the world. The worst dangerous paradigm of direct relevance on the question was set mainly by US-UK and India in the case of the Eezham Tamils.

The civil world is yet to grasp the gravity of the test case involving Eezham Tamils.

But the Establishments experimenting the dangerous paradigm are fully aware of the importance of what they are doing in the island.

That’s why they keep the world deliberately uninformed and misinformed by still gagging the affected through ‘terrorism’ ban, by not allowing them to speak out directly, by ‘leaking’ only filtered information and by promoting the versions of their own media writers, agenda-setters and even versions of those who played leading roles at their behest in the course of the war.

To what extent the Western writers and media are justified in their exclusive obsession with the Islamic world in identifying crisis in their own Establishments and in identifying a course of polity for entire humanity is a question.

Even the Socialist Equality Party in the USA was no exception in this regard. In its resolutions adopted at its Second National Congress in July this year that appeared in the World Socialist Web Site there was no reference to the dangerous paradigm at work in the island of Sri Lanka, while the focus was on the Islamic world.

Chronology:


External Links:
The Guardian: If only saying nothing were an option for William Hague of the FO

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