Moon barking up the wrong tree

The UN is behaving like a jackal at the beck and call of the West bent on removing from its path strong leaders of the global south, who refuse to fall in line. UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon seems to be having sleepless nights trying to figure out how to fix Sri Lanka's political and military top brass, who crushed the LTTE's military muscle once and for all, for having committed the crime of ruffling the feathers of the US and its allies, which made an abortive attempt to save Prabhakaran and his confederates early last year.

Doesn't Moon have anything else to do? Day in day out, he has something to say against Sri Lanka obviously at the behest of the western governments that are being swayed by the overseas LTTE sympathisers who command block votes and wield tremendous lobbying power. He is snapping at Sri Lanka's heels relentlessly in a bid to appease his white masters. He could not be unaware of the trouble his predecessor who fell from grace got into. Perhaps, it is not criticism that Moon deserves but sympathy. The poor man is singing for his supper.

It is intriguing that the UN, which is so ferocious in dealing with a democratically elected government of a member State, chose to handle the LTTE with kid gloves in spite of its crimes against civilians including low intensity genocide. Yesterday, we revealed how the LTTE had thrown thousands of children into the Vanni battle as cannon fodder.

Long before the eelam war IV broke out, the outfit had earned notoriety the world over as a terrorist group that abducted children and forcibly recruited them into fighting units. The UN bracketed the LTTE with the Lord's Resistance Army and several other terrorist groups on its List of Shame for crimes against children but surprisingly stopped short of taking tough action against the terrorists concerned.

The UN also took the abduction by the LTTE of its employees and their families lying down. How would it have reacted if the Sri Lankan military had even tapped one of them? The UNHRC would have called a special session!

Prabhakaran took the UNICEF for a right royal ride by offering to have a partnership with it to rehabilitate child combatants. Gullible UN panjandrums in Colombo fell for his wiles only to have egg on their face. We warned the UNICEF against that harebrained scheme but in vain.

Towards the end of the war, the UNICEF launched a very expensive advertising campaign against child recruitment apparently in the mistaken belief that raising public awareness was the way to save child soldiers. We pointed out in these columns that it was a colossal waste of funds and the child recruitment would be a thing of the past once the LTTE was crushed. And today, children are going back to school in the North and the East without fear of being abducted by child recruiters on the way.

Instead of thanking Sri Lanka for having blazed a trail in the civilised world's war on terror and liberated children from the clutches of terrorists, the UN is mourning the dead terrorists responsible for tens of thousands of killings and various other crimes. It looks as if the LTTE rump had subcontracted its campaign to revive terrorism in Sri Lanka to the UN.

What would have happened if Sri Lanka had given in to pressure from the US, the UN and others and let go of the LTTE leaders trapped in the Vanni last May? They would have got a new lease of life and continued to recruit thousands more children among other things. In other words, it was at the expense of the hapless children and other civilians that those western governments tried to throw a lifeline to the LTTE leaders with a view to furthering their sinister interests. They are still backing overseas LTTE sympathisers openly. And it is they who need to be probed and not Sri Lanka, which put an end to terrorism.

Moon is barking up the wrong tree!