West sings hosannas to fake democracy

Stoke-on-Trent (UK) - Remembrance Day is a deeply emotional and poignant reminder, especially in the West, of all those who sacrificed their lives in the two great wars of the last century. The memorial event in London this week was marked by the absence of the last survivors from the battles of the First World War. Wreaths were laid, the bugles sounded the Last Post, and a phalanx of British leaders were present with the veterans of Word War II and the other wars that followed, to pay their tribute to those fallen in what were believed to be the wars to end all wars.

In the UK the event had a deeper sense of poignancy with the arrival the previous day of six of the latest British troops to be killed in Afghanistan. Gordon Brown, made the required comments about the great sacrifice made by the British troops, whose bodies had just arrived, mournfully greeted by thousands of sad Britons, and those before them, to safeguard British soil from the terrorists of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, whose spawning grounds are in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the border between them.

It was not the most popular hour for the British Prime Minister, who has to keep on reassuring an increasingly unconvinced citizenry of the necessity for British troops to continue their presence in Afghanistan, despite daily reports of the growing strength of the Taliban resistance, and the failure of NATO operations there. This is a problem he shares with President Obama across the Atlantic.

Gordon Brown. AFP

Barack Obama

Hamid Karzai

The two main leaders of the NATO allies involved in Afghanistan are now facing bigger problems than they ever thought would happen.

There is hardly a sign of democracy in Afghanistan, with the re-election or re-appointment of Hamid Karzai as President, showing the utter failure of US-UK and overall NATO attempts to have a cover of restoring democracy, for the extension of their sphere of influence in a vital part of South Asia, bordering on the Middle East.

That the Afghan election was far from democratic was known from its very beginning. That the US and UK paid a manipulative role in it, shamefully supported by the United Nations, was evident when Senator John F Kerry, leading Democrat, and Head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US Senate, quite literally and shamelessly arm-twisted Karzai to accept the rejection of one-third of his votes in the first round, and agree to a run-off poll, with the second contender.

The joke turned to farce, when the second candidate withdrew, and the Independent Elections Commission that declared the 54 percent plus votes for Karzai in the first round, declared him elected in a one horse race, with democracy left to turn a blind eye from the sidelines.

It was again left to Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, to make the most contemptible statements of all, about the one-horse race to a corrupt presidency, when she said it was not uncommon for candidates to be declared winner when a rival dropped out of a race in the USA.

This means that the United States, the great defender and promoter of democracy, can now agree that one-horse races are democratic whether it is from the beginning of the race or at the end of it.

The problem is that those who suffer from this new definition of democracy are the Afghan people, who have been robbed of their democratic rights, not just by Hamid Karzai, but by those western powers and the UN too, who came to ensure the success of democracy in that tragic country.

Tartar

To cap it all there was the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who had come to Afghanistan to condone with UN workers there after the killing of several of them in a Taliban suicide attack in Kabul, being among the first to congratulate Hamid Karzai on his re-election, in a race without a democratic rival, and by this means give the imprimatur of the UN to what was clearly much more than a flawed election, but an outright hoax in the name of democracy.

President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Brown, as well as President Sarkozy and Chancellor Angela Merkel are now left catching a Tartar, to whom Brown has to give lectures on how to fight corruption, and Obama has to try and work out how he is to increase US troops in Afghanistan, having distorted the democratic process to place the Afghan leader most disliked by the White House and the Pentagon at the Head of Affairs in Afghanistan.

All of this will seem of academic and distant interest to many Sri Lankan readers, except for the fact that the entire world, or those who are often the loudest to shout about human rights violations in other places, especially Sri Lanka, are obviously very silent when it involves the total violation of the human and democratic rights of the Afghan people. They have all been robbed of their human rights. The election conducted by so many watchers from the UN to NATO and other organizations have robbed them of the right to choose a leader. A person who obtained a minority of votes in the first round has been foisted on them as leader with the blessings of the International Community. And we have all to sit down and cheer at this great achievement of democracy.

Gordon Brown insists that British troops must be in Afghanistan, in Helmand Province and elsewhere too a safeguard Britain from terrorism. This is the refrain of his Foreign Secretary David Miliband, too. It is the same in the USA. President Obama and Hillary Clinton are agreed that US troops are necessary in Afghanistan to safeguard the US homeland from terrorist attacks. What surprises one, is how none of these people understood the need for the Sri Lankan troops to drive deep into territory illegally held by the LTTE terrorists to safeguard the entirety of Sri Lankan territory from terrorism and safeguard India from the spill over of terrorism from Sri Lanka, too. Significantly, it was a terrorist outfit that was banned both in the US and the UK, too.

Those who speak of the necessity to carry out drone attacks on Afghan and Pakistani villages, killing civilians by the score, and strafe or carry out other attacks on civilian targets in the hope of striking Taliban leaders, throw thousands into refugee status. All the while, a threatened UN Corps is closing down food distribution centres in total disregard of the hardships it causes to the refugees. It is these same forces who have been making the biggest noise about the condition and status of the IDPs in Sri Lanka, who weren’t made IDPs by the Forces of the State, but by the forces of the now defeated terror.

The Obamas, Browns, Clintons and Milibands and others who think and act alike, will soon have to face up to the reality of their own citizenry not agreeing to what they are carrying out in the name of democracy, or safeguarding of homeland from distant Afghanistan and Pakistan. There will be questions raised soon as to why the lives of so may troops from the US and UK have to be lost in a far away stretch of the Earth, but seen very clearly each day thanks to the advances of modern communications. The difference with Sri Lanka is that our troops were not fighting in a distant land, and were not making people in distant climes destitute or internally displaced. They fought in their own land, to liberate its own people from the deadly clutches of terror.

And those who have been made IDPs through the acts of the so-called liberators of the Tamil people are now being fast re-settled in their own villages, and where possible in their homes, too. That is a measure of democracy and human rights that the US and UK can’t boast about today, what with the daily tragedies that are taking place in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Light relief

In the midst of such sadness for the human condition in Afghanistan and Pakistan, thanks to the determination of the West to draw them into a vortex of violence, there is some light relief in the newscasts of some of the major news and TV channels, that report on the speedy resettlement of the IDPs in Sri Lanka today, bringing the numbers down to nearly 120,000 from a high of 288,000 in May this year.

There are newscasters and anchors who ask their reporters in Colombo or some nondescript expert commentators on Sri Lanka whether the quick resettlement of IDPs is due to the pressure being brought on Sri Lanka by the so-called international community. Of course, the reporters who sing for their supper and the much favoured commentators often from the same stations are quick to agree. What they fail to realize is that the President of Sri Lanka set a target of 180 days, which ends by January 31, 2010 to resettle the vast majority of the IDPs. The pace of the resettlement just now, is fully in keeping with that target, and not the bowing down to any pressure, which the media in the West, with its angular interest that favours the remnants of the LTTE would like to show.