It’s trendy to shed tears for IDPs here
karthika
Light Refractions
by Lucien Rajakaraunayake
A £1m government scheme to help failed asylum seekers and their
children return home resulted in just one family leaving Britain – BBC
Headline
Could the British Government be so generous about asylum seekers and
their children? Nothing like it; this is just the cost of a dismal
failure.
And the story reveals something more that is good for us, and BBC that
ran the story, to chew on.
Campaigners in the UK for the welfare of those who fail in attempts to
seek asylum in the UK, estimate that each year 2,000 children are
locked up in immigration removal centres with their parents who have
been refused asylum. Together with the parents, the numbers locked up
in "removal centres" must be at least 4,000.
The Home Office has denied this estimate of children locked up, and
for the first time broken the veil of secrecy about it admitted to
having 991 children so restrained in 2008. Mull the number – 991; not
so small is it? And this is in a country that offers so much promise
to would be asylum seekers, almost to the point of tempting them to
leave their homelands and seek asylum in this so-called showpiece of
democracy, and care for minorities.
These figures of children locked up for years, even with their
parents, would seem only of academic interest, but for all the fuss
that Gordon Brown, his tottering Cabinet and badly shaken Labour
Government on the verge of a major electoral rout, and the BBC too,
are making about the IDPs in Sri Lanka.
Yes, I mean the over 250,000 Sri Lankan Tamil citizens of Sri Lanka
who are at present internally displaced and live in refugee centres,
that the British do-gooders would refer to as "detention" or "holding
camps". Initially some used to call them concentration camps, not for
the concentration in numbers of escaped hostages from terror who are
there, but because of barbed wire around them and the presence of
military personnel there.
Pictures of the Yard’s Wood detention centre in Bedford, where most of
these families have been "locked up", do not have barbed wire around
it, for sure. But it has very high metal fencing and huge, strong
metal gates. My guess is that all this precaution is to prevent any
outsiders from entering the place and not for any fear of those held
there escaping to greater freedom outside. May be it’s the other way
around.
Let’s admit we can’t spend one million pounds or even a million rupees
on ensuring that just one family leaves the refugee villages in North,
even after one year. We will not be able to do this even if we get the
IMF loan that the UK and the US State Department are trying to block,
and even if we get more aid from the so-called international community
that is niggardly in helping Lanka face this challenge.
But, unlike the British who have sent out only one family of those
locked up in camps after one year, Sri Lanka has clear plans to
resettle all of the IDPs in six months time, to safer and well
provided for areas, most likely to the homes they were living in. That
was before being forcibly uprooted from their homes and herded around
from place to place like animals, by the LTTE, the so-called
liberators of the Tamil people, for whom the BBC that now talks of
holding camps for failed asylum seekers and their children, and many
British politicians of Gordon Brown and his ilk, had a great regard
and an undisguised sympathy for.
Guess who has now joined the chorus of pleaders for the Sri Lankan
IDPs. It is Rohini Hensman, a former Sri Lankan who once pleaded the
Tamil cause with a modicum of sanity, but later joined the bandwagon
of pro-LTTE Sri Lanka bashers allegedly in the name of the Tamils
here. But, in fact to further of cause of the expatriate Sri Lankan
Tamils, who had severed all links with their homeland, (which was not
Eelam that never existed) and were funding the LTTE in all its
policies of savage brutality, against the Sinhalese, Muslims, and
particularly against the Tamils who either opposed it or had no choice
but to be corralled by its killers in the areas under its control.
To Rohini Hensman, described in "Groundviews" as "a noted
commentator", now living in the comfort of the UK, the IDPs are "Vanni
civilians still hostage in Sri Lanka and a virtual Sinhala-Buddhist
dictatorship".
We are back again to the allegations of Sinhala-Buddhist dictatorship,
the denial of fundamental rights in preventing the IDPs from living
with families willing to take them, there is still starvation and more
dying daily, with the sick, injured pregnant women and mothers with
babes still vulnerable. She also warns that "with the monsoon, it is
likely that gastrointestinal disease will kill thousands. Why, then,
are these unfortunate people being penalized like this, she asks.
There was a time during the Cold War that a person who wished to have
a piece published in the Reader’s Digest could be sure of achieving it
if the piece was a so-called expose or strongly critical of the Red
Russian Bear. That was when Communism of the Soviet style was the
great evil.
Today, there is the certainty of publication and dissemination of the
most outrageous untruths about Sri Lanka, and especially about the
treatment of IDPs in the North if you write to anything that has a
connection with the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) which Is more
of the propagation of Saravanamuttu Think, that hardly offers policy
alternative but is well funded to distort even alternative thinking to
it its narrow purpose of serving is foreign paymasters. That is just
what Rohini Hensman is doing, with a whole lot of unsubstantiated,
generalized allegations about conditions of the IDP relief centres.
This is bunkum that is not in keeping with the standards of
"Groundviews", although I do not agree with them all.
Remember the CPA – Peace Council axis shouting out about the
invincibility of the LTTE and towards the latter stages, when the LTTE
was about to be routed, going on to lament an imminent bloodbath about
to happen; prophesies that did not come true. The tribe of those
discovering the profitability of having a go at Sri Lanka through
supposed concern for the IDPs is fast increasing.
True there were great hardships in the beginning, when the Tamils
poured in unexpected thousands into the arms of "Sinhala-Buddhist"
troops of a Sinhala-Buddhist dictatorial regime, to escape the terror
of their own liberators. But things are different today. There are
also necessary constraints to freedom as yet, because of the nature of
the enemy that was defeated, and the large numbers who had willingly
or not, been forced into its campaign of terror and belief in the
correctness of the policy of terror. That’s not relevant to those who
find in the IDPs a good chance for a profitable, international wail.
Hensman and others had better start shedding tears for the families
with children who are being locked up in holding centres for years,
even at the cost of one million pounds per family, and ask some
questions about their fundamental rights. They could also ask for a
retainer from manufacturers of barbed wire, for bringing their product
to public attention so often. Possibly Hensman, is so far removed from
reality in Sri Lanka, that she does not know that barbed wire is
widely used here to protect from intruders and not necessarily to
prevent escape from within such marked boundaries. Or else, her home
in Sri Lanka would have been of the more expensive sort that had a
parapet wall round it, with shards of broken glass on top for added
protection, and a sign at the gate that said "Beware of dogs".
It is better if such people mind their business in their countries of
adoption to which they cling, and not present wrong pictures of a
country they left, and have no allegiance to anymore. Shut your eyes
when Britain locks up children in holding centres; its trendy to shed
tears for IDPs in Sri Lanka.