They weren't so Grrrr-eat!

The end of the 30-year Sri Lankan kill-a-thon, howsoever brutally it might have been at the end, is a blessing, if an ugly one.

It is possible to have a just cause and still in the end not deserve to prevail in struggle, and the case of the LTTE (Tamil Tigers) illustrates this, as does the experience in Ireland, which has more or less successfully emerged from decades of murderous civil conflict. Taking up arms against oppression carries extreme moral risk. As happened with the IRA, the longer one is forced to continue to conduct armed conflict, the more likely one is to attract, in addition to those committed to the cause, those merely committed to the criminal and homicidal. The Tigers earned a reputation for a particularly sick version of ruthlessness, visited upon vast numbers of even their own community, drafting the entire population at gunpoint into their war, kidnapping children to turn them into soldiers, itself a crime against humanity, and training cadres of suicide bombers (something for which you never saw the leadership volunteering). They crossed irretrievably into the irredeemable when one of their suiciders assassinated then-Indian PM Rajiv Gandhi in the early 90s, because he had the gall to send peacekeepers to Sri Lanka.

This is not to diminish the culpability of the Sinhalese, who have their own atrocities to account for, going back decades. In a perfect world, there will be a war crimes trial for all those who participated in massacres of Tamils in the early 80s, which lit the fuse on this conflict, as well as for those Tigers responsible for forcing children to fight, and for waging suicide terror, to list only two. The Sri Lankan government are victorious, but victorious like the Russians, who "won" their war in Chechnya by utterly destroying it, thus ensuring that down the road we will be treated to a comeback performance.

In the end, history will look upon the Tigers not so much as freedom fighters, but as the Sri Lankan version of the Khmer Rouge.

Lyin' Brian

Dick is back from his spring tour of the Tropic of Torpor.

What is there left to say about Myron Bullroney? Anyone harbouring a shred of sympathy for this pompous, venal gladhander should take the time to read Andrew Coyne's take-down of him in Maclean's magazine, (normally not a publication I'm drawn to, since one would have to come across the sneering "what the fuck are you looking at, asshole?" gaze of the loathsome Mark Steyn). Coyne has been on the Mulroney-Schreiber case like a bloodhound, and his eviscerations of the greasy former PM should finally put to rest any questions as to whether he has, as he would have it, been unfairly pilloried in the court of public reckoning. Mulroney's performance at the Oliphant inquiry, the one he demanded from Stephen Harper so he could rescue his "good name" from the blizzard of allegations that he basically took kickback money from the Airbus affair, was a case study in maudlin self-pity. What is amazing is that he could have believed he would emerge from an examination of his relationship with such a low-life as Schreiber with an intact reputation.

As Coyne devastatingly shows, at the end of this sordid affair, Mulroney has still never answered head on the question of why he took this cash.

There may have been a time when having a whiskey tenor could open doors for the congenital bullshitter, but the Oliphant performance showed clearly that this time is past. In the end "I, Martin Brian Mulroney," who pledged to show up at the inquiry "with bells on," emerged looking like a clown.

This is a pity in some sense. Canadians who saw him every day and tired of his schtick might be inclined not to recall that Mulroney did Canada proud on a number of international files, most especially his leadership in helping rally the world community to the unfolding catastrophe in Ethiopia in 1984, and in his steadfast refusal to join with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in blocking action against the apartheid regime in South Africa. That he would sully this record with the spectacle of taking cash in envelopes from a shady professional palm greaser will continue to puzzle, since he never gave a coherent account of it when he had the stage to himself.