South Asia Daily

A few observations about Mega Millions

The first three numbers of the winning $640 Mega Millions jackpot drawn last night read like the vital statistics of a porn star. They are 46-23-38. I missed the final combination of 46-23-38-4-2-23 by a few light years.

Greed was on display over the past few days as the frenzy to buy the lottery tickets for America’s highest jackpot built up. A local Indian-American owned grocery store in Naperville had people practically doing pooja on the lottery machine dispensing the tickets. Three people won the jackpot, one in Maryland, one in Kansas and one in Illinois. My only consolation is that one of the three lives in the same state as I.

I am pretty certain that lottery is a uniquely human pastime. I do not think lions or apes or hyenas or vultures or lemurs have their comparable Mega Millions. That could be because they have not perfected the drawing machine technology. If they had, they too would have their version of Mega Millions with the lions always drawing the numbers in the Serengeti and winning. Also, Nat Geo would have made a special about Mega Animillions.

At its heart lottery is about grabbing a fortune without breaking a sweat. There is primal attraction in attaining something without any effort. The idea that the simple act of spending a buck or two on a lottery ticket may hold the promise of millions and millions is irresistible. I have done it about a dozen times over the past 14 years. I never did that while in India. It is only after coming to America that I contracted the disease. I suppose one can argue that buying about one lottery ticket a year hardly rises to the level of a disease but still it says something about my vulnerability to greed.

I have heard stories about the lives of jackpot winners taking a turn for the worse in the aftermath. People cite these stories to underscore the myth that an undeserving windfall never does any good to anyone. I don’t think there is anything particularly destructive about an undeserving windfall. In the end, it all boils down to how intelligently one manages one’s fortune. It is true that wealth attracts many forgotten friends and relatives, not to mention non-existent ones. On balance though, how could a lot of money in one’s bank account be destructive in and of itself?

The only problem I see with a windfall like a jackpot of any scale is that more often than not those who win it do not have the imagination to employ it smartly. The luxury of never ever having to work to survive ought to open up so many fantastic creative possibilities.

There is nothing like too much wealth. There is, of course, something like too little imagination.

On a side note, people often ask me (Actually, no one does) whether I would let the world know if I ever win a big lottery. My answer is no because it is unseemly enough to win without working for it. To make it public is to make it even more vulgar.

Indonesia knows what miniskirts make men want to do

Miniskirts may soon be banned in Indonesia because they are considered “pornographic.” Or, as the country’s parliamentary Speaker Marzuki Alie has been quoted as saying, they make men “do things.” We all know the “things” that men do just as soon as they see women in miniskirts. They want them to get minier and minier (Not a word but works here) until they can crack the mystery lurking underneath.

Under the proposed new ban Indonesian women can no longer wear skirts above their knees because that’s where pornography resides. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has set up the anti-pornography task force whose job it would be to enforce the standards of decency once they are decided. Incidentally, for those of you care about such trivia, Susilo comes from Sushil in Sanskrit which means decent and cultured. Although Indonesia is now the world’s largest Muslim country,its past is steeped in Indian culture.

It seems certain that the standard of decent clothing would proscribe any dress higher than the knees for any woman or girl of any ethnicity. Speaker Alie was earlier this year quoted as saying, “There have been a lot of rape cases and other immoral acts recently and this is because women aren't wearing appropriate clothes...You know what men are like. Provocative clothing will make them do things."

I suspect the Indonesian authorities have not really thought this through because it raises more questions than it answers. Once again it is left to me to raise those profound sartorial questions.

Would miniskirts worn over tights considered pornographic? How do the Indonesian authorities propose to enforce the law for visitors from other countries? Would they stock immigration counters with calf-length skirts that visiting women in miniskirts and shorts must change into before their passports are stamped?

Since the official Indonesia seems to think that miniskirts are pornographic because they make men want to do things, here is another pertinent question. Have they seen Madhuri Dixit in a full-length sari in the song ‘Dhak dhak’ from the movie ‘Beta’ or Sri Devi singing ‘Kate nahi katte’ in ‘Mr. India’? What if someone like that visited Indonesia in that attire?

Madhuri Dixit in the movie ‘Beta’

Are they also going to be particular about the kind of fabric that women can wear? For instance, what if a woman wore a full-length but figure-hugging, 1500 thread Egyptian cotton dress? Or, for that matter, a sheer chiffon or georgette of both silk and rayon blends? (In case, you wonder how I know so much about fabrics, remember I come from the fabric city of Ahmedabad where it is sold, and sometimes even worn, by the kilo).

The point is lust does not reside in the length or the fabric of the clothing but in the human brain. Despite the fact that the brain is solidly encased inside a tough-to-crack skull, it escapes effortlessly. And once it does, even Madhuri Dixit in yards of sari is impossible to take one’s eyes off.

In the event I win $500 million jackpot tomorrow

Not that this blog earns me a farthing but I intend making Friday’s post my last provided I win the $500 million Mega Millions jackpot. I have surmounted greater odds in life than the impossibly low odds one has of winning this one.

Various estimates suggest you are more likely to be struck by lightening, about 500 times, than winning the massive jackpot tomorrow. I say bring it on because I have survived 30 years as a print journalist and mostly managed to pay my bills.

According to some mathematicians, the odds of my winning tomorrow are about one in 176 million. I think more people have seen UFOs and have been anally probed by aliens. But one lives in hope.

Here is my dream scenario. Think of a person who has survived after being struck twice by lightening, seen half a dozen UFOs, shot their high definition videos with an utterly steady Panavision movie camera, communicated with alien crew members, had breakfast with them and then goes on to win the jackpot. I am not saying any of this has happened to me but purely as a story about luck this one would be nearly impossible to beat.

I am going for the cash option which means if I win I get a lump sum amount of $359 million. I would have preferred a neatly rounded number like $360 million but one takes what one gets. Why quibble over a million dollars?

There are reports of frenzied purchases of the Mega Millions tickets across the country with some people going to extraordinary lengths to improve their odds of hitting the jackpot. I am doing nothing more than just going to the nearest vendor and buying one ticket.

One cannot plan what one might do on winning a jackpot of any size but particularly of this magnitude. I just might go to sleep after the drawing in the hope that I will dream about winning a jackpot.

***

It remains to be seen if the death of the 26-year-old Tibetan activist Jamphel Yeshi due to more than 90 percent burns that he inflicted on himself after self-immolation in New Delhi has forever changed the discourse among the Tibetan exile community about their homeland.

The last self-immolation by a Tibetan exile in India took place on April 27, 1998, around the same spot of Jantar Mantar, an 18th century observatory, where Yeshi staged his protest. I was there reporting on the unrest in 1998 when Thubten Ngodup decided to set himself on fire. At that point too it seemed that his act might forever change the discourse but that turned out not to be the case.

What is different this time, however, is that Yeshi’s fatal self-immolation comes close on the heels of at least 29 others inside Tibet. Together they appear to lend a whole new urgency to the question of Tibet’s future. Also, something in my gut tells me that this time around, the protest could upend some established wisdoms.

I recognize how absurdly unevenly matched the two sides to the dispute are but it is clear that unlike in the past the power of the social media may manage to keep the momentum going. Even the Dalai Lama’s late elder brother, Thubten Jigme Norbu, who unlike him favored complete independence, recognized the futility of an armed uprising. “One billion Chinese, six million Tibetans—What can anyone do? Even if the Chinese say come cut our throats, who is going to do that? The Tibetans will get tired and the Chinese will still be there,” Norbu told me.

Is journalism a mission or missionary position?

It somehow seems fitting that just a day after I employed my skills as a journalist to loftily urge China’s President Hu Jintao to directly engage the Dalai Lama, I am writing about a reporter in Texas moonlighting as a stripper.

Sarah Tressler,29, is apparently causing a great deal of outrage and fury among her colleagues and others at the Houston Chronicle, after she was discovered to be a stripper by night. ABC News’s Alyssa Newcomb reported that some of them said Tressler would “flaunt her stripper money" by coming to work in “high-end clothing.” This is ironic at so many levels but let me mention just two. A stripper showing up to work in high-end clothing and a journalist getting paid. Also, what exactly is the “stripper money”? Is it a new currency that has the bare minimum security features and works only in strip clubs?

I suspect Tressler’s colleagues were upset for two reasons. One is that she gets paid to strip and the other that she shows up to work wearing clothes. “You get paid to strip as a journalist? And we thought it was a mission,” is what some of them might be saying.

Tressler, who has been working at the Chronicle as a society reporter, has been quoted as saying by ABC News that she is now awaiting her editor-in-chief’s decision. I am not sure if this is an offence that should get her fired. At the very worst she should be stripped of her assignment for a few months until she learns that journalism is a mission and not the missionary position.

For some reason, I am more amused than horrified by Tressler’s news. There is something strangely admirable about her mischievousness. I am not sure whether she is mocking stripping as a profession by being a journalist by day or journalism as a profession by being a stripper by night or both by eventually selling her life story as a book.

From a purist’s viewpoint Sarah Tressler is not fit to be a journalist because she appears to have violated some basic standards of the profession. On the other hand though, did she abuse her access as a reporter for personal aggrandizement? I am not entirely sure. She made money by stripping layers off her fetching body to which journalism has made no contribution. She does not look the way she does because she is a reporter. So now, do you understand my dilemma?

If I were Sarah Tressler summoned by my editor-in-chief to explain my conduct I would gently point out the main page of the newspaper’s website this morning. I took screenshots of the website chron.com this morning because something caught my attention.

In their “Don’t' Miss’ strip (excuse the unintended pun) among the topics that the paper feels you should not miss, one is “Topless Octomom.” Incidentally, Octomom refers to Nadya Suleman, who famously or notoriously, gave birth to octuplets three years ago. Strapped for money she has been doing whatever she can to make ends meet for her total of 16 children. The latest is that she has bared some skin for a British magazine.

If the Chron editor thinks it is fit to carry that bit of news in their ‘Don’t Miss’ section on their website’s main page right below the banner, can he/she really moralize to Sarah Tressler? It is a question at least worth pausing over and thinking about?

Historic opportunity for Hu Jintao to engage Dalai Lama

The following piece appeared worldwide on the IANS wire today.

China’s President Hu Jintao (Picture: Dilma Rousseff, Brzil, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu_Jintao)

By Mayank Chhaya

History beckons China’s President Hu Jintao during his India visit if he sheds entrenched antipathies and chooses to directly engage the Dalai Lama with a specific intention of initiating the process of resolving the Tibetan issue.

Although Hu is visiting to attend the 4th summit of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa (BRICS) on March 29, its sidelines are fraught with an opportunity for him to make a statesmen-like gesture by meeting the Dalai Lama.

With 29 self-immolations in the past one year of which 22 have been fatal and seven in the past three weeks alone, Hu could soothe the growing unrest in a region which he once controlled with an iron fist as the political commissar of the People's Liberation Army units. He was also the Communist Party's Regional Committee Secretary of the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) in 1988. If there is one individual in the Chinese establishment who could make a bold gesture on Tibet, it is Hu.

Seven years younger than the Dalai Lama, President Hu has the political and administrative weight to break some outdated molds and at least initiate the process of direct engagement with the Tibetan leader. Realistically, there is no prospect of the meeting taking place of course, but that is precisely where it requires the Chinese leader to do something entirely unexpected. Starting later this year and over a period of six months Hu is expected to give up at least two of his three powerful positions as president of the People's Republic of China, chair of the Central Military Commission, and party secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). There could not be a more opportune time for him to exercise gumption.

While Hu is not known for dramatic gestures and has distinguished himself throughout his long career as a low-key and solidly grounded political figure, there is nothing intrinsic reason to stop him from doing something out of the ordinary. No one expects a single Chinese leader, even someone of Hu's unquestionable consequence, to even begin to wind down decades of Sino-Tibetan animus. However, from all indications Tibet appears only tenuously welded to China; and the rash of self-immolations are seen to incinerate Beijing's idea of harmony.

The self-immolation of 26-year-old exiled Tibetan activist Jamphel Yeshi on the streets of Delhi in the run-up to the Hu visit this week serves as a macabre reminder to both the Chinese leader and India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that things can go out of control very quickly. China has officially described the Tibetan self-immolators as "terrorists" acting under a pernicious external influence. The description might satisfy the narrow official purpose of how to treat this deeply disturbing means of protest, but it is unlikely to address the broader challenge of putting a lid on the growing restiveness. It is in this context that President Hu should seek out the Dalai Lama for a one-on-one meeting.

Over the last six decades Beijing has with some manifest success pushed Tibet into a tight territorial and cultural integration but frequent outbursts of protests over the years have shown the assimilation is nowhere close to being as harmonious as it would have the world believe. With the Dalai Lama having long emphasized meaningful autonomy for Tibet within China as opposed to complete independence and steadfastly pursued a peaceful and nonviolent middle-path, it is time for Beijing to yield some ground rather than sticking to its tired out of hand rejection of the Tibetan leader.

President Hu ought to be aware of the rise of a youthful and genuinely independent and democratic polity under Lobsang Sangay as the Tibetan prime minister-in-exile. By divesting political powers specifically invested in the person of the Dalai Lama to the new elected leadership, Tenzin Gyatso has already sent a strong signal to China that he would remain only a spiritual face of Tibet who has no intentions of controlling the lives of close to six million Tibetans.

From the Indian perspective the Hu visit also offers Manmohan Singh an extraordinary opportunity to make a lasting contribution to the decades-old problem. Perhaps the Indian prime minister too can spend some of his own political capital on bringing Hu and the Dalai Lama together.

Fiery contagion travels to India from Tibet

Tibetan activist Jamphel Yeshi,26, in New Delhi. He suffered 90 percent burns.

Two days before China’s soon to retire President Hu Jintao visits New Delhi, a 26-year-old Tibetan activist set himself on fire and suffered 90 percent burns.

Jamphel Yeshi’s self-immolation is the first in many years among the Indian capital’s Tibetan refugee community but there are apprehensions that it may trigger a rash of some more as the Chinese leader arrives on March 28. Hu is visiting to attend the fourth summit of BRICS or Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, a sort of new economic bloc pursuing common economic interests among these countries and, by unspoken intentions, strategic ones too.

Self-immolations have ignited a debate in China over the direction that the unrest in Tibet is taking. So far 29 ordinary Tibetans have self-immolated themselves, 22 of whom fatally. Seven of the self-immolations have taken place in the last three weeks alone. Going by independent reports the self-immolations have been spontaneous but they terribly illustrate a growing disenchantment in the country’s about 6 million ethnic Tibetans against the Chinese policies.

Beijing describes self-immolators as “terrorists” who are acting under the pernicious influence of external forces. What they really represent is the ultimate expression of rejection of official policies in a system where the Tibetans do not have many more attention-grabbing ways left to make their voices heard.

Calling self-immolators terrorists is the Chinese way of getting around the real issue of the profound dismay that has taken hold among the ethnic Tibetans. The problem with using that culturally and legally loaded term is that it is so flagrantly inaccurate. Unlike those terrorists who strap explosives on and set themselves off in order to kill as many people as they can, self-immolators  deliberately harm only themselves with the intention taking their own lives. The purpose is never to harm or terrorize anyone else.

India needs to watch out in the next couple of days if that fiery contagion has traveled from the Tibetans in Tibet to the Tibetan exiles in India. Yeshi’s act is bound to have pushed the Indian authorities to the edge. Self-immolations have a way happening in multiples.

Who was I in my past life?

A part of the reason why some people believe in the idea of past life is because it is at once mysterious and magical, not to mention that it lends one a sense of out of the ordinariness.

The possibility of a previous life allows its believers to think of themselves as those who are more special. It makes one feel that one has been around for a long time and the current version is merely one more update with more bugs fixed than the last one. The present is right here and can be felt everyday in all its discommoding mundaneness. What is here is not mysterious; what may have been centuries ago is.

Subsequently, a dagger through one’s heart on a rain-washed cobbled street of a medieval French town in 1411 sounds far more edifying than being jumped and stabbed in a rodent-infested street in modern day New York in 2012.I am just saying. 

I say all this while introducing a website called www.thebigview.com that I chanced upon. Established by an IT entrepreneur called Thomas Knierim the site as he describes it, “is about philosophy in the widest sense. It includes science, religion, mythology and other fields of thought that are not within the traditional scope of philosophy.”

The site also has a fun feature called ‘Who were you in your past life?’ You punch in your date of birth and it tells you what you might have been in your past life. Of course, being an electrical engineer with a serious bent of mind Knierim offers the following disclaimer:

“I keep receiving a lot of mail from people asking me questions about the Past Life Analysis feature which I would like to address here. First of all, credit to whom credit is due: The program was originally developed by Natalie V. Zubar. The author claims no responsibility for the correctness of the calculation and gives no warranties thereto.

Please note that neither do I!

I have included this software in thebigview.com for your entertainment. The analysis program is based on a 445 lines of Javascript code which perform relatively simple numeric calculations. If you would like to know the details of the algorithm, you can examine it using the "view source" option of your browser.

It is up to you how you interpret the information given by this program; however, you should know that this software is only slightly more sophisticated than an electronic fortune cookie.”

So like all self-obsessed people I fed in my date of birth and here is what it said.

“I don't know how you feel about it, but you were male in your last earthly incarnation.You were born somewhere in the territory of modern Ukraine around the year 1175. Your profession was that of a leader, major or captain.

Your brief psychological profile in your past life:
Timid, constrained, quiet person. You had creative talents, which waited until this life to be liberated. Sometimes your environment considered you strange.

The lesson that your last past life brought to your present incarnation:
It always seemed to you that your perceptions of the world are somewhat different. Your lesson is to trust your intuition as your best guide in your present life.”

The curious part is even my nine-year-old daughter Hayaa’s past life includes one common passage with me about her being timid, constrained, quiet person. She was born in central India in 1200 and was a philosopher and a thinker.

Come to think of it, I now know why the brave ladies of the Ukrainian women’s rights group Femen that stages topless protests against various issues looked so familiar to me. I was there in their country in 1175.

As for the observation that in my past life sometimes my environment “considered me strange” , that bit has changed in nearly a 1000 years.

No closer to comprehending time dilation

Illustration: MC

I am on my fourth reading of “Relativity: The Special and the General Theory” by Albert Einstein. I am no closer to comprehending it than I was when I first read it over 30 years ago. You have to see my lack of comprehension of Einstein’s theory of relativity in the context that I have lived my entire adult life in the mistaken belief that I have a fair idea about physics.

So when I read Einstein’s preface I have got to seriously question my intelligence. He writes, “The work presumes a standard of education corresponding to that a university matriculation examination, and, despite the shortness of the book, a fair amount of patience and force of will on the part of the reader.”

I do have “a standard of education corresponding to a university matriculation examination” as a matter of fact. I also do have “a fair amount of patience and force of will.” And yet I find myself not getting the hang of the specifics of his theory. I understand it at the intuitive level but struggle at the more practical level.

He also candidly says that he has not paid “the slightest attention to the elegance of the presentation.”  “I adhered scrupulously to the precept of the brilliant theoretical physicist L. Boltzmann, according to whom matters of elegance ought to be left to the tailor and to the cobbler.”

I suppose that’s where I come in, either as a tailor or a cobbler or a writer. We are all the same after all because we create things that fit either your body, feet or mind.

The purpose behind reading the book again has been necessitated by my enthusiasm to understand the concept of time dilation. While reading about time dilation one frequently comes across what is known as the “Twin Paradox.” It is about an imaginary set of twins, one of whom travels by train to a distant station and returns while the other stays stationary. The one who has traveled and returned would be younger than the one who stayed stationary. That is the general concept. I get it and yet don’t get it. That is my paradox.

I would not say I feel frustrated, but I certainly do feel unhappy that I have not been able to grasp the theory of relativity to the extent that I can just write something off the cuff the way I do about a lot of other subjects. As someone captivated by physics it is embarrassing that I have made no headway when it comes to understanding one of the core principles of physics.

How fair did Einstein think “a fair amount of patience” should be? For that matter, how forceful should my “force of will” be to be able to explain the theory to a complete novice and make it comprehensible?

Sri Lanka’s raw groin and China’s balm

Sri Lanka is probably nursing a raw groin after a swift kick there by India. China may be at hand to solicitously offer some solidarity and a lot of balm.

Those are the two lines to which I have distilled down New Delhi’s vote against Colombo at the United Nations Human Rights Council’s 19th session in Geneva. Trust me to reduce everything to crass formulations but you would grant that the imagery works.

India’s diplomatic establishment could not have been unmindful of the impact of the vote on their bilateral relations with Sri Lanka, particularly when China has been courting it with unseemly ardor. If it still went ahead and voted in favor of the US-sponsored resolution, it had to have much more than just domestic political compulsions to do so. For instance, its eagerness to ensure that Sri Lanka expedites the process of reconciliation for its ethnic Tamil minority profoundly brutalized by the 2009 military action against the Tamil Tigers.

The objective of an expeditious reconciliation may be easier demanded than achieved, especially because Colombo now feels its sovereignty intruded upon and may go into a shell. India may claim that it took a principled position, a sort of tough love approach, but it is unlikely to mollify Sri Lanka in the immediate future. Although there is some polite noise being made to the effect that India’s UN vote would not affect bilateral relations, there are bound to be strains. To that extent India’s standing is likely to be diminished in Sri Lanka.

Equally, the foreign policy establishment in Colombo ought to be aware that China’s vote against the resolution is less out of principles than opportunism. Of course, at some level Beijing is deeply conscious that such resolutions can also be passed against its own human rights record in Tibet and elsewhere. However, for now it is motivated by the opportunity of using Sri Lanka as a strategic outpost on the Indian Ocean.

China has invested $1.2 billion in developing infrastructure in Sri Lanka apart from $1 billion in creating a world class port at Hambantota at the southern tip of Sri Lanka. That the port is a pet showpiece project of President Mahinda Rajapaksa fits well with Beijing’s foreign policy objectives.

That said, lately I have been thinking about the strategic importance of Sri Lanka to India and China. The received wisdom would suggest that the two Asian giants need a strong strategic presence because of its location. I am beginning to think that for India, with its own vast maritime southern peninsular presence over the Indian Ocean , probably needs Sri Lanka less for that purpose than China does. India does not have as much to lose in not having a strong maritime presence in Sri Lanka as China does. There might have been some overestimation of that much talked about strategic purpose as far as India is concerned.

If India’s vote, which was instrumental in passing the resolution, propels Sri Lanka to speed up reconciliation, its diplomatic capital would have been well spent. If not, Sri Lanka knows that India is not going anywhere soon, unless the earth’s tectonics go completely out of control and refashion continents.

India votes against Sri Lanka and China votes for it

I have received my fair share of emails which say at the very end “This email is UNCLASSIFIED.” That is funny at so many levels but let mention just two.

Why would anyone send a “CLASSIFIED” document by email? And, why would anyone send me anything “CLASSIFIED”?

Now that that unnecessary crack is out of the way let me turn to the main subject. I received an “UNCLASSIFIED” email this morning containing the text of a statement by US Ambassador Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe at the UN Human Rights Council’s 19th Session in relation to Sri Lanka. As some of you might know that major world powers, spearheaded by the United States, are pressing Colombo to thoroughly investigate the allegations of war crimes during the 2009 liquidation of the separatist Tamil Tigers.

Contrary to my early sense, India has voted against Sri Lanka and in favor of the US-sponsored resolution at the ongoing session. I was wrong in thinking that India’s regional compulsions arising out of relations with its southern neighbor might outweigh its relations with the United States. However, in the end it was more nuanced than just either/or situation as it seemed some days ago.

One major reason why New Delhi may have voted for the resolution is that it seems to encourage Colombo to implement the recommendations of its own Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission Process (LLRC). India perhaps legitimately sees merit in Sri Lanka being pressed to go by the recommendations of its own commission.

Also, domestic political pressures prevailed on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The DMK party from the state of Tamil Nadu, which is a key ally of the Singh’s coalition government in Delhi, sees itself as the champion and custodian of the interests of the Tamil people around the world and particularly in Sri Lanka. The DMK’s 88-year-old chief Muthuvel Karunanidhi had asked Dr. Singh to clarify his government’s position on the US-sponsored resolution.

When a powerful Indian politician says “Clarify” what he really means is “Do as I say”, which in this case means vote for the resolution, which Dr. Singh could not do without taking into considerations its bilateral implications. The DMK supports the resolution because it calls on Sri Lanka to investigate human rights abuses against the Tamil minority during the 2009 war.

In the end, India voted with the US and, quite instructively and tellingly, China voted with Sri Lanka saying it strongly opposed countries being pressured in the name of human rights violations.

Here is the text of the US ambassador’s statement while introducing the resolution:

“It is almost three years since the end of Sri Lanka’s long and painful conflict. For the past three years, my government has worked bilaterally, and with like-minded countries, to engage officials at the highest levels of the Sri Lankan government on the steps that are necessary to build a peaceful future for the Sri Lankan people. For those three years Sri Lanka has had the time and space to develop its own roadmap for lasting national reconciliation and accountability. Most recently, we have encouraged Sri Lanka to address actions taken on both sides of the conflict through its domestic Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission Process. We looked forward to the Commission’s report, and understood that Sri Lanka would develop its own action plan to implement the LLRC recommendations.

We have also worked bilaterally, and with like-minded countries, to encourage Sri Lanka to take advantage of the resources of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. And we have encouraged Sri Lanka to engage with the Council, and to benefit from the broad range of experiences of Member States that have dealt successfully with their own post-conflict situations.

Mme President and Distinguished delegates, an enduring peace will be unsustainable without meaningful steps to foster national reconciliation and accountability.

Given the lack of action to implement the recommendations of the Sri Lankan government’s own LLRC, and the need for additional steps to address accountability issues not covered in the LLRC report, it is appropriate that the UNHRC consider and adopt this moderate and balanced resolution. It is a resolution that encourages Sri Lanka to implement the recommendations of it own LLRC and to make concerted efforts at achieving the kind of meaningful accountability upon which lasting reconciliation efforts can be built.
In addition, this Resolution urges Sri Lanka to work with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and draw from helpful expertise the Office can offer.

These proposals are reasonable, constructive, and carefully tailored to the needs of the situation. At our informal session on March 8, none of the many delegations present offered proposals for specific textual modifications.
To close, I wish to emphasize that this resolution is intended to help the people of Sri Lanka achieve a lasting and equitable peace that is marked by equality, dignity, justice and self-respect.”