Human rights in Lanka and oil deposits in Palestine - EDITORIAL

On September 6, 2023, the report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights castigated Sri Lanka saying that the country suffers from a continuing accountability deficit- be it for war crime atrocities, more recent human rights violations, corruption, or abuse of power- which must be addressed for the country to move forward.

In Sri Lanka’s near three decade-long civil war, around 40,000 Tamil civilians reportedly died of military attacks. Thousands of others were wounded, while some were critical. Women suffered the most, and it is alleged that rape was used as a weapon of war.

Hundreds of Sinhalese civilians too were killed by armed Tamil militant groups -mainly the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)- during the course of the three decade-long war.
Since the civil war ended, there has been no credible government mechanism set up to apprehend these different merchants of death. 

We in Lanka, remember with shame, the heinous acts committed by our people on sections of our population, irrespective of their race, religion and/or caste. 

Having gone through three insurgencies in which thousands of civilians died, we Lankans have demanded inquiries into the killings. Nothing has come of these demands. 

But, we did not hear either the UK, Canada or other countries of the West crying foul or calling for international probes into those killings. Could it be because  there was no large diaspora population with large vote banks in both those countries at that time?

Britain and Canada have been two leading states leading condemnation of alleged war crimes committed during the Sri Lankan civil war. The Prime Minister of Canada went to the extent of naming the week the LTTE was defeated by the Sri Lankan military as ‘Tamil Genocide Week.’

Today, we are witnessing in real time the most ruthless killing of Palestinians by Israel. Men, women and children are being killed in hospitals, in schools and in their homes. Israel has cut off water, electricity, food and medicine to the besieged people of Gaza. 

The casualty count since October 7, 2023 had reached 32,226 Palestinians killed, of which most were women and children. Seventy-four thousand five-hundred and eighteen others have been injured. This number includes, 94 journalists and over 136 UNRWA aid workers. 

The crimes bear a striking similarity to the war crimes perpetrated by Hitler during World War II.
Yet neither Canada, Britain nor the self-styled world ‘keeper of the peace’ -the US- raises a finger to stop the killings. Even the slightest condemnation of Israeli crimes is vetoed at the United Nations (UN) by the US and the West. 

Why this difference? Could it be that it is because, geologists and natural resource economists have confirmed that the Occupied Palestinian Territories lie above sizeable reservoirs of oil and natural gas wealth, in Area C of the occupied West Bank and the Mediterranean coast off the Gaza Strip?

The new discoveries of oil and natural gas in the Levant Basin, amount to 122 trillion cubic feet of natural gas at a net value of $453 billion (at 2017 prices) and 1.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil at a net value of about $71 billion!
With the West starved of oil and gas because of its disastrous indirect war with Russia, these large untapped resources of oil in Israeli hands would be a ‘God send’ to the oil-starved West.

We wonder whether we could expect to see the champions of human rights (the US, UK, France et al.) making any serious effort to bring the killings in what is left of Palestine to an end, until Israel occupies the whole of that state.