ET TU JEREMY? NATURALLY WHAT!

“The Times” of London and its sister paper the Sunday Times could never find a good word to say about Sri Lanka.
Not that there is nothing good to say. More prestigious media than the Times which has fallen on bad times, have taken more objective approaches to Sri Lanka than the old lady of Fleet Street has wont to do because they had no axes to grind like some journalists of the Murdoch-owned Times group.
A few of their names come promptly to mind either because of their somewhat puerile and partial journalism or because some of them deluded themselves that they were above the law. Marie Colvin, Catherine Philip and Jeremy Page are some of them.
It is now well known how Marie Colvin and the Sunday Times were chastised by the usually slow to condemn British Press Complaints Commission (PCC) for some horrendous articles on Sri Lanka some 10 years back which the PCC admitted had actual errors and biased comments.
More recently Jeremy Page who is the New Delhi-based South Asia Correspondent of the Times was thrown out of Sri Lanka for trying to creep into the country as a tourist when in fact he was trying to enter for journalistic purposes.

Unceremoniously kicked

Since Page was unceremoniously kicked out of Colombo he has had a knife into Sri Lanka and the Rajapaksa government whenever he finds the most tenuous reason to write on Sri Lanka, a matter that has been commented upon previously.
My attention was drawn a couple of days back to his most recent attempt to put Sri Lanka in the dock, this time using the visit of the Commonwealth election observer mission for last month’s presidential poll here.
The tenor and intent of Page’s piece in the Times are clear enough though he likes to pretend that he is standing up for the principles of the Commonwealth.
What Page is hoping to do is, influence the Commonwealth Observer Mission to present a report critical of Sri Lanka. He then hopes that his invidious attempts to influence a condemnation of Sri Lanka in the mission’s report due later this month, could be used to push through further Commonwealth action against Sri Lanka.
Page’s enmity is so embedded that he would be able to turn a new leaf and produce untainted journalism. Saying that the Commonwealth rarely gets an opportunity to “play a decisive role on the world stage” Page is hoping that Sri Lanka’s presidential election would afford such an opportunity.
No mature commentator on Commonwealth or international affairs would have said that the Sri Lanka election is a chance to put the 54- nation organization on the world stage. Had Jeremy Page any idea of even the recent history of the Commonwealth he would not have written what he had. Let me give one example of a situation where the Commonwealth could have played a significant international role but let the opportunity pass because of countries such as the UK, Canada and Australia, which constitute the three main actors in the “White Commonwealth.”
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and the great fear among western nations such as the UK over what they perceived as Islamic terrorism, the then secretary-general of the Commonwealth Don McKinnon set up the 10-member Commonwealth Committee on Terrorism which included Sri Lanka with Australia in the chair.
At a meeting in London on 29 January 2002, Alexander Downer, the Australian foreign minister chairing the CCT said that the Commonwealth with its diverse membership could play a very valuable role in building political and practical support for international efforts to combat terrorism.
Here then was a great opportunity for the Commonwealth to take centre stage on an issue that had become of major concern to the international community and to the people of the world.
But what in fact happened and who was responsible for letting this opportunity available to the Commonwealth to slip by? None other than what has come to be known as the ABC countries- Australia, Britain and Canada.
Since 2003 the CCT under Australian chairmanship never met for five years or more to discuss the strengthening and implementation of its Plan of Action on terrorism.
When Sri Lanka proposed at the Kampala Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in 2007 the holding of a ministerial level meeting on counter terrorism in Colombo, the Commonwealth heads welcomed the proposal.
Yet it was sabotaged by Canada with quiet, behind-the-scenes support by the UK which was determined to downgrade the meeting to official level. The officials were then expected to decide whether a ministerial meeting was indeed necessary. The whole was to stop such a meeting being held in Colombo and international attention being focused on Sri Lanka which was then fighting a war against terrorism.
We all know why Canada and the UK did not want Colombo to host such a meeting on a matter of concern to the world at a time when suicide bombers were blowing up innocent civilians and children were being forced to join terrorist groups.
The truth is that under pressure from the huge Sri Lankan Tamil communities in Canada and the UK, communities that used their voting power in local and national politics to censure Sri Lanka, these western governments caved in and did their best to stymie Colombo’s effort.
Jeremy Page speaks of Commonwealth principles. Do its principles permit lower level officials to stultify an idea welcomed by their political leaders at the highest level of the Commonwealth? Page says that at the 60th anniversary of the Commonwealth last year members added a “commitment to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and human rights covenants and instrument.”
These covenants were long preceded by the Charter of the United Nations which one might say is the constitution of that world body. That Charter forbids one sovereign nation to militarily invade another member without the express sanction of the UN Security Council.
Yet the UK, a member of the Security Council violated the most fundamental of principles of the UN by playing a leading role in illegally invading Iraq in violation of those principles.

Important information

And where pray, did the Times newspapers stand on the UK’s decision to militarily attack another sovereign nation? We pause for an answer from Page Iraq might not be a member of the Commonwealth but the UK certainly is.
The current inquiry into the very basis on which the UK invaded Iraq is beginning to unveil important information which appears to question the very legality of the UK’s action.
Invading another country without UN Security Council sanction is a far more serious offence and an ominous sign of the return of imperialism than any breach of Commonwealth principles. It undermines the very foundation of inter-state relations.
We know which UK media lent themselves to the recrudescence of imperialism and hardly raised a voice when the UK gave support to CIA’s extraordinary rendition, violating human rights covenants which Page alludes the Rajapaksa administration has breached.
The trouble with Jeremy Page is that he pressed for international action against Sri Lanka many times before. Nobody paid any attention to his entreaties on behalf of the LTTE. Certainly not the Sri Lanka Government! It probably considers him a silly clot anyway
If he wants to be taken as a serious journalist he should stop playing the point man for the battered and bruised Tigers like his colleague from the same stables, Marie Colvin.
But then it is hardly likely that Page will turn a new leaf.