Dances with Tigers - The Island Editorial

This country is perennially under pressure to respect the rule of law. The international community never misses an opportunity to remind Sri Lankan governments of this democratic obligation on their part. Whenever a breach of law occurs here, alarms go off in London, New York and Paris. The government gets inundated with warnings. This kind of reaction from the democratic world may be anathema to those at the levers of power here but it is, no doubt, salutary. Governments, as ex-President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga declared the other day, cannot act like terrorists. How true! Nor should governments, she should have added, give in to or sleep with terrorists!

How do the countries which rightly bring pressure to bear on this country to uphold the rule of law conduct themselves? A recent confession by an LTTE cadre has revealed that Britain, which is in the forefront of a campaign to protect democracy here, does not respect her anti-terror laws. He has said he underwent training in Northern Ireland as a member of the 'Eelam police' immediately after the CFA came into being.

Kalimuttu Vinodkumar (29), who was arrested in Trincomalee recently, has admitted that he was among 12 LTTE cadres trained in Northern Ireland for three months, as our main news item said yesterday. He was later posted in Sampur as the head of the LTTE 'police' station there.

That the British government turns a blind eye to the activities of the LTTE, which is proscribed in the UK, is only too well known. The outfit is permitted to hold rallies and raise funds on the British soil to finance a war to dismember a Commonwealth member state. Some of the British lawmakers are being openly supportive of it for reasons best known to themselves. But, the confession in question is proof that the British government has gone beyond mere connivance. It serves as damning evidence that the British government has been involved in training a proscribed terrorist organisation. Britain, being a world power may afford to have a callous disregard for little Lanka's sovereignty but it must at least respect its own laws, mustn't it?

The knee-jerk reaction of the British authorities may be to claim that they only complied with a request by the then UNF government which, Vinodkumar has said, facilitated the Norwegian-sponsored training programme. But, the fact remains that in obliging the then government of Sri Lanka and the Norwegians, the Labour government committed a willful violation of the British law. On the other hand, if it is the policy of the British government to acquiesce in anything that a Sri Lanka government proposes, then, for argument's sake, would it arrange for a similar training programme for the Karuna Group, should the present government make a request to that effect?

The CFA certainly served a useful purpose at the initial stages, however flawed it may be. It helped minimise killings. But, the subservience of the UNF government enabled the LTTE to abuse the truce to the hilt, ably assisted by the Norwegians, to train its cadres abroad and smuggle in war related material besides gaining a great deal of legitimacy for its cause.

A logical conclusion from the UNF government's complicity in the training of the LTTE 'police' in Britain is that it recognised that illegal police force and helped it gain international recognition. A government negotiating with the LTTE or trying to bring it to the negotiating table cannot be faulted for being somewhat lenient in handling it but a commitment to any course of action, from which recognition accrues to the so-called parallel administration the outfit claims to run, amounts to treason.

Had the LTTE been allowed to perpetuate its illegal rule in those parts of the country in the name of the now moribund CFA, the outfit would have certainly used its 'police' presence to bolster its claim of running a separate state. Remember a few years ago a World Bank chief in Colombo got into the soup over a statement that the LTTE was running a de facto state in some areas. The British Navy, it may be recalled, even entertained an LTTE area leader on one of its warships off the Eastern coast in the aftermath of the tsunami disaster under the Kumaratunga regime that carried forward the UNF's appeasement policy.

How does Britain react when its terrorists are trained abroad? It has been instrumental in dislodging two regimes and bombing two sovereign nations-Afghanistan and Iraq-into the Stone Age to protect its national security interests and in retaliation for sponsoring its terrorists. Prime Minister John Major, as we have pointed out earlier, once, boycotted telephone calls from the White House for one week in protest against permission granted to Sinn Fein leader Jerry Adams to enter the US to attend an IRA fund raiser.

A thorough investigation into Vindokumar's confession is called for as it is likely to shed more light on the British-LTTE relations.

Sri Lankan government obviously cannot sway the British policy towards terrorism but at least it can expose Britain's nudity in its small way.