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Navinathem Pillai the UN High Commissioner’s prejudices have long been clear, but they have never been clearer than after her recent visit to this country. But, that’s not unusual. To use the figurative, in certain species, they are never known to change their spots.
The reaction at the end of her tour was so expected that the President predicted it the day before. He told her at Temple Trees that the people of this country think that her report to the U.N at the end of her tour of duty, will reflect her prejudice. For her part, he made sure that there was no deviation from that expected script. She didn’t change her mind on the fact that not only has there been vast progress not merely in terms of infrastructure and facility provision,
BUT ALSO in terms of greater democratic space and the freedom of movement and expression. The vast majority of enemy combatants have been unconditionally freed. In most cases they have been found jobs/livelihoods, and helped back on their feet by the government. They are free to move about, and there is no restriction on them whatsoever in terms of what kinds of lifestyles they choose to pursue. Yet, Ms. Navi Pillai recited a litany falsehoods, relying on fabricated accounts about the deaths of journalists for instance. Since 2008 and the end of the war, not a single journalist had perished.
From 2005 upto 2008 during the period of fighting, there were some journalists who died, but this was during the war — and it is a known fact that most of the alleged (journalists) that perished doubled as intelligence agents for terrorists. Certainly the number 30 dead that she gave was absurdly of the mark, and it is noteworthy that by any stretch, her figure certainly is not reflective of the reality that no murders of journalists had happened in the five years after the war was ended.
All of this means that her bona finds are suspect, and to say the very least — if she is not working to the agenda of a third party, it is clear that there is no rigour in her method, and that therefore she is not a fit or proper person to hold the high office of U.N High Commissioner for Human Rights.
She said that she finds it deeply offensive that some people had suggested that she is a Tamil Tiger agent, and at the press conference she made an indignant pitch to the effect that the Tamil Tigers were a ruthless and odious lot, and that the diaspora glorifying the LTTE was obnoxious. We may very well be able take her at her word that she has no truck with the Tamil Tigers, but if anybody on the streets gets that impression she has only herself to blame for it. A Cabinet Minister has made a startling assertion that she requested that she be allowed to proceed to Puthumalan to lay a wreath at the spot at which the ghoulish, notorious terrorist Velupillai Prabhakaran perished.
This seems to be the correct position as there has been no denial of newspaper reports that she made such a request. In any event she did plan to lay a wreath in Nandikadal, the location of the final battle in which the LTTE was annihilated. That proves in effect that she has no respect for the fact that a terrorist organization that has been banned in 32 countries should in no way be legitimized, even though it may be in the act of ‘commemorating the dead.’ We would dare her to place a wreath in Abotoabad in Pakistan, the site where Osama Bin Laden was taken out by a team of US navy seals.
The fact that she had asked to place wreath at Prabhakaran’s gravesite — unmarked — should be reason enough to call for her resignation from her post as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Despite her stout denials to the contrary, even though she may not be on the pay of the Tamil Tigers if we are to take her word for it, she is certainly acting in encouragement of its odious terrorist project. The platitudes about anyone being commemorated in death, and her justification of her intended wreath-laying on those grounds, are laughable. No doubt she will call this editorial an act of vilification as well.
She may be the U.N High Commissioner for Human Rights, but that does not give her the license to carry out any odious pro-terrorist act of ignominy, and ask also that people treat her with kid gloves! Indeed, if she is not living in this world, we can bring her back to it – See more at: http://www.dailynews.lk/?q=editorial/clearly-she-terrorists-side#sthash.BW983YXt.dpuf