Being a Professor of English may not seem the best training available for heading a Peace Secretariat, but it has certainly proved invaluable in trying to understand the way people function. Unfortunately I have generally had to have recourse not to the more sophisticated literature I have taught, but rather to fairly simple works.
Thus, I could not initially understand why so many statements by those who purport to be well wishers of the Sri Lankan people so sedulously avoid mention of the LTTE. The ICRC recently managed to complain about ambulances not being allowed to evacuate patients from the Vanni, in a manner that suggested it did not know who was responsible, which meant that this was immediately taken up by various news agencies so as to cast blame on the Government. Ironically, this occurred on the very day that the LTTE suddenly refused permission (including for two foreign UN employees) to leave the Vanni, even though it had indicated earlier that this would be allowed.
This followed hard on a statement by the UN Secretary General, which failed to indicate who precisely was responsible for holding thousands of civilians in danger areas. That statement too did not mention the LTTE at all, again allowing news agencies yet another opportunity to blame the Government.
Given that two UN agencies had just previously categorically requested the LTTE to let the civilians leave, it was clear that the Secretary General could not be ignorant of the actual situation. Why then had he, like the ICRC, failed to name names?
As I was wondering, literary precedents came to mind. In the Harry Potter books, most people will not name the evil Lord Voldemort. The superstition that giving him a name will somehow increase the reality of his evil influence was not of course created by J K Rowling, she merely took up an old folk superstition that naming evil things gave them greater strength. So it was not really support for the LTTE that held the ICRC back from naming them, it was understanding of the depth of the evil they represented. Unfortunately, as the Harry Potter books made clear, failure to confront evil head on was much more likely to extend its influence - but at least, one felt, the ICRC diffidence was based on some sort of good will.
But, if that was comforting, continuing complaints by not only the ICRC but all sorts of Europeans brought further literary precedents to mind, and these were not so heartening. What, after all, would the cumulative effect be of relentless criticism of what was happening in Mullaitivu, drawing attention to the danger the displaced Sri Lankans there were facing, as though this were largely the fault of the government?
The naïve assumption would have been that those who expressed worry about these people were actually concerned about them. But, in that case, surely they would have intervened earlier, and have categorically asked the LTTE to let them leave. This had not happened, instead they had issued half hearted statements, which included critiques of the arrangements the Sri Lankan government had made for the displaced. These had been highlighted and, in the storms that rose, institutions like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International using phrases such as 'internment', people seemed to lose sight of the fact that the LTTE was driving people into smaller and smaller areas.
Were the people who ignored all this, while wearing bleeding hearts on their sleeve about everything else, simply blind to reality? Did they not realize - what was obvious to the Sri Lankans who really cared - that the LTTE was firstly trying to create a humanitarian crisis, secondly intending to use these people as human shields, and thirdly hoping that they might suffer in the fighting so that it could then be claimed that the Sri Lankan forces were targeting civilians?
The International NGOs, who had turned a blind eye to forced recruitment while they claimed that they were all that stood between the people of the Vanni and untold horrors (untold by them, as it turned out), declared that their workers had not been given passes to leave the Vanni, but refrained from public condemnation of this, claiming that they were worried for the safety of their workers. The UN did the same, hoping they claimed that this sort of appeasement would encourage the LTTE to let those people go, a hope that collapsed last week when the LTTE, having led them on, gave a categorical refusal - so that even the two heroic foreigners who went back with these victims had finally to abandon them last week.