The two yardsticks

One may perceive it a pro-civilian move by a dominating and powerful member of the world order, but a little peeling would make it clear that the draft proposal submitted by the US at the ongoing session of United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) for a probe into human rights violations during Sri Lanka’s 26-year-long civil war seems just a case of ensuring the United States attempting to shift global focus away from the American military's indiscretions (from the Quoran burning to shooting of innocent Afghanis by a US soldier). Through this draft resolution, the UN can force the Sri Lankan government to come up with details of all the action plans during the war, and to justify each and every step the government took during the long drawn war. According to UN estimates, the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka claimed nearly 100,000 lives between 1972 and 2009. 

 

However, the American concern for humanitarian laws in Sri Lanka seems to be quite out of place if one considers the fact that a demand for investigation into instances of human rights violations have not been raised in the case of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars perpetrated by the US and its allies. Clearly, if one looks at the violation of human rights across the world, one would find that the US itself is no saint. It has repeatedly violated human rights both at home and abroad. One wonders why the US kept mum during the Haditha incident where 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians were killed by a group of US Marines in 2005. Why should the world look into theMuttur Massacre and not into the Haditha massacre? The Americans' invasions in Iraq, Afganistan (and Libya; through UK and France) are widely seen as unjustified and outrageous. But where are the talks about human rights violation committed by Western forces there?

It's quite evident that this move of the United States to introduce the draft proposal against Sri Lanka is nothing but a well timed attempt to keep the UNHRC busy and attention away from their own intransigences. At a political level and on the diplomatic front, this is exactly how the game should be played (oh, how one hopes India learns from such case studies).

 

But if the UNHRC accepts the American demand for probe into rights violation in Sri Lanka - in all fairness it should - at the same time, it should also form fast-track investigating bodies to look into the instances of human rights violation in Iraq and Afghanistan. After all, you can't have two different yardsticks to measure the same crime!