Prospects For Human Rights And Reconciliation In 2014?

By Laksiri Fernando -January 1, 2014 |

Dr. Laksiri Fernando

Both the world and Sri Lanka most probably enter the New Year with a melancholy feeling. Of course we greet each other to the contrary, hoping that everything would go well. The formidable challenge before the world in 2014 or for the years to come would be the ‘global warming’ and the consequent or unrelated ‘natural disasters.’ We lament on them when they occur and then conveniently forget about them all, engaging in our own day to day preoccupations, mostly conflictual.

Tsunami disaster just few days before the dawn of the New Year of 2005 was the best example. We all communities became instantly united when the Tsunami struck us on 26 December 2004, but then soon went back to our disastrous conflicts, one against the other, not only on ethnic and religious grounds, but also on the pretexts of politics and even personal grounds. We have been excellent in blaming each other without contemplating on our own follies of bigotry and foibles. That is how we came about of an Eelam War IV.

On the issue of global warming, we are condemned to ‘death by thousand cuts.’ It is slow and suffocating. The Liberal government that came to power few months back in Australia is determined to do away with the ‘carbon tax’ which was previously introduced to discourage the gas emissions to the atmosphere. Removal of the tax is argued to stimulate the economy, and of course it would, but at what cost? This is the logic everywhere. The long term wisdom is sacrificed to short term economic or other gains.

The year 2013 ended painfully for many people, especially for the poor, the destitute and the marginalised. All of them constitute more than half of the world population of now over 7 billion people in this small planet. The civil war continued in Syria without resolution, thousands and thousands of new refugees fleeing the country. South Sudan, the most recent new state, created under the patronage of the UN, just few years back, plunged into fears internal conflict just recently, hundreds of people newly killed, proving perhaps the creation of new states per se might not be the best solution for conflicts.

More dramatic were the events in Moscow. The ugly head of terrorism is raising its head again and even to the glee of the authorities because then they can continue their restrictions on freedoms of the people on the pretext of terrorism threat.                                       Read More