{"id":102104,"date":"2013-08-25T01:46:11","date_gmt":"2013-08-24T20:16:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=102104"},"modified":"2013-09-05T12:32:45","modified_gmt":"2013-09-05T07:02:45","slug":"on-navi-pillays-open-mind-mildly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/on-navi-pillays-open-mind-mildly\/","title":{"rendered":"On Navi Pillay\u2019s \u2018Open-Mind\u2019, Mildly"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Malinda Seneviratne<\/a><\/span> –<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Malinda Seneviratne<\/p><\/div>\n

Navanethem “Navi<\/a><\/span>” Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, is due in Sri Lanka today.\u00a0 Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe<\/a><\/span> expects Pillay to come with an open mind.\u00a0 Pillay, for her part, said on Friday (23rd<\/sup>) that she has an open mind and will not be pre-judging anything ahead of her visit.<\/p>\n

Well, words are words, can be used to communicate, can be used to miscommunicate, to lie and distort, play down or exaggerate.\u00a0 Pillay knows words.\u00a0 Pillay employs them.\u00a0 And there are times she\u2019s silent.<\/p>\n

Navi Pillay says she won\u2019t pre-judge and that\u2019s a good thing to say.\u00a0 On the other hand she has pre-judged before and has shown a clear penchant to believe tall stories cooked up by pro-LTTE elements and regurgitated by the na\u00efve or else sour-graped, i.e. those who prayed for a different military outcome in May 2009, backed a different horse or bet on a different political winner in January 2010 and April 2010.\u00a0 None of the claims treated as fact by Navi Pillay are substantiated; dig from source to source and one ends up with an LTTE<\/a><\/span> spokesperson or someone held hostage by the LTTE as Source No 1.<\/p>\n

But Pillay is a human being; she can make mistakes.\u00a0 There are things Pillay\u2019s confidantes have not told her and things she is not ready to give ear to because she is not ready to believe anything contrary to what she has decided was the truth.\u00a0 That\u2019s human too.\u00a0 She cannot with finger-snap divest herself of all the judge-baggage she\u2019s accumulated over the years.\u00a0 So let us not entertain any illusions about Pillay\u2019s open-heart.<\/p>\n

On the other hand part of being human is being able to recognize error and having the humility to acknowledge.\u00a0 Pillay can compare and contrast. She must.\u00a0 She can take into account context. She must.\u00a0 She can be fair. She must.\u00a0 She can visualize the what-might-have-been if things didn\u2019t happen the way they did.\u00a0 She must.<\/p>\n

All this time, she\u2019s clearly been fed by mischievous elements in the I\/NGO sector that sided with the LTTE (for a variety of reasons of course, not necessary because of love for terrorism or Tiger but perhaps in accordance with the adage, \u2018my enemy\u2019s enemy is my friend\u2019).\u00a0 There was that infamous and laughably flawed \u2018Darusman Report<\/a><\/span>\u2019.\u00a0 There were scurrilous documents authored by pen-for-hire \u2018scribes\u2019 who are either utterly na\u00efve or incompetent or else suffered traumatic childhoods,\u00a0 not to mention great television productions by Channel 4 (key word: productions).\u00a0 Can Pillay shed all that? Let us see.<\/p>\n

Pillay must, most importantly, take care not to confuse issues.\u00a0 This regime is not the best on earth.\u00a0 It has erred horrendously on many counts.\u00a0 In this, there\u2019s very little to pick between this regime and its predecessors going all the way back to 1977 at least.\u00a0 Pillay\u2019s project however is not regime change.\u00a0 That\u2019s the business of the people of Sri Lanka.\u00a0 Now there are people who want regime change (for right and wrong reasons), but it is the most pernicious and politically bankrupt among them who would deliberately tag regime-change-need to a tall, uneven and politically tainted narrative about the last stages of the struggle against terrorism.<\/p>\n

Pillay is going to be here for a week. That\u2019s a short time to walk the length, breadth and depth of thirty years of a nation, so it would suffice for her to acknowledge that she is but tiptoeing on the corner of a territory that is mapped out according to cartographer\u2019s political preferences.\u00a0 But blood is blood, terror is terror.\u00a0 Even Pillay won\u2019t find it impossible to imagine a 2013 with the LTTE (by briefing herself about a Sri Lanka that had to contend with the LTTE) and contrast it to the LTTE-less Sri Lanka she is visiting.<\/p>\n

She can think \u2018resettlement\u2019 and think of IDP camps she\u2019s known and re-settlement programs that haven\u2019t got off the ground in countries with immense resources. She can think rehabilitation and integration and ask herself which country held to ransom by terrorists and terrorism rehabilitated and reintegrated into society more than 10,000 terrorists and terrorist suspects, against whom there hasn\u2019t been even a single police complaint since.\u00a0 She can walk around Colombo and imagine a city that had roadblocks and checkpoints at almost every junction, and get a rough idea of freedoms gained.<\/p>\n

There are a lot of things Pillay can do.\u00a0 If she can open her mind (yes, she can say she is coming with an open mind, but few will buy that).<\/p>\n

One thing she can be assured about is that whether she comes with open or closed mind, whether she sheds her biases or not, she will see a lot of smiles.\u00a0 From total strangers, especially those who don\u2019t know what on earth she\u2019s doing in Sri Lanka.\u00a0 That smile has a name: Resilience.\u00a0 We have survived all kinds of invasions.\u00a0 We will not be deterred by judgment, especially by the partial (even if they tell themselves \u2018We are fair\u2019).<\/p>\n

*Malinda Seneviratne is the Chief Editor of \u2018The Nation\u2019\u00a0and his articles can be found at\u00a0www.malindawords.blogspot.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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