EDITORIAL

Suffer, Little Children

Dear Reader, mull, if you will, on the following (imaginary) news item:

"A spokesman for al Qaeda told the media that the group had struck a deal with the US government that the 1,200 children taken hostage at Lincoln High School in Portland, Oregon, in last Wednesday's daring raid would not be returned to their parents but rehabilitated at special centers to be set up by the group's White American Wing (WAW). The spokesman explained that many rebellious teenagers did not want to return to their families, while others allegedly refused to identify their families. As such, WAW had no choice but to care for the children indefinitely.

"A spokesperson for UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy, agreeing wholeheartedly with this arrangement, stated that UNICEF would pay WAW US$ 1 million to build rehabilitation centers to house the children until they turned 18. The deal has been met with relief by the well-known children's charities CARE and Save the Children, who said they had every confidence that WAW would take good care of the children.

"A smiling and visibly relieved President George W. Bush, addressing a hastily convened media briefing at the White House, told reporters that thanks to UNICEF and WAW, a disastrous situation whereby abducted children might otherwise have been forcibly returned to their parents, had been averted."

Translate that into sunny Sri Lanka, and this is the story Ted Chaiban, the UNICEF representative in Colombo, is telling us about the 1,200-plus children abducted by the LTTE. UNICEF gleefully agrees with the outrageous contention that most of the children have no idea who or where their parents are; others, it seems, simply don't want to go home. So what does UNICEF do? It pockets out Rs 100 million to the Tamils Rehabilitation Organization, an NGO wing of the LTTE, to set up rehabilitation centers in which the children will be kept, rather than returned to their parents. Three cheers for UNICEF: what would we do without them?

We doubt if a single of our readers would dispute UNICEF's blatant double standards. The only difference between reality and our fictitious example above, is the colour of the children, and the wealth of their parents. What difference is there between American children and Sri Lankan children? We ask, with Shakespeare's pardon; If you prick us, will we not bleed? If you tickle us, will we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?

The Sunday Leader has never been afraid to take a contrary view. UNICEF's cynical endorsement of the abduction of Sri Lankan children must be exposed and reversed. The fact that the Tamils Rehabilitation Organisation is a non-governmental organisation is neither here nor there: after all, so is al Qaeda. Besides, isn't there something terribly wrong with an organisation that seeks to rehabilitate just Tamils? What about children from other racial persuasions? Kid's are people too, you know.

When it comes to racial tolerance, The Sunday Leader has been more outspoken than most. In one of our earliest issues, almost a decade ago (and many times since), we pointed to the endemic nature of racism in our society. "We have," we then lamented, "The Singhalese Sports Club, the Tamil Union, the Burgher Recreation Club, the Muslim Congress and even a sprinkling of political parties with 'Eelam' in their names, all merrily doing business with one another." It is time we all (and that includes UNICEF) accepted that we are children of a common god: Sri Lankans, all of us, not adherents of some divisive conception of race, ethnicity, religion, colour or language.

So, dear reader, before you go out and spend your hard-earned savings on UNICEF greeting cards this Christmas, consider well. The money you spend, building as you do so, colourful images of starving children gratefully sipping a cup of milk provided by UNICEF, may well go to a cause for which you have little affection. It is high time these grim facts were brought to the attention of Carol Bellamy, to say nothing of the international celebrities who have lent their names to UNICEF's cause, such as Richard Attenborough, Roger Moore and Harry Belafonte.

UNICEF stands alone and above all else in the struggle for the rights and welfare of the world's children. By acting as it has done in Sri Lanka, by underwriting and funding the abduction of innocent children, it has betrayed a sacred trust. There is simply no way UNICEF could condone the abduction of children and pay blood money to prevent them from being returned to their parents. We do not know whether or not Mr. Ted Chaiban has been blessed with progeny, but if he has, let him set an example to us all and send his kids to the wonderful rehabilitation centers he has so thoughtfully paid TRO to set up for ours. After all, if it is his contention that TRO can bring up children better than parents can, it should work for his brats too.

Environmental Lapdogs

For the average citizen, while cleanliness is next to godliness, tidiness is next to impossible. And it is not just the poor who are environmentally 'unconscious': the rich are often worse. Listen to the horning and tooting outside Colombo International School on Gregory's Road of a weekday morning: you will see Jaguars jostling BMWs, Monteros brushing aside Mercs, even as well-heeled brats fling litter through the power shutters of their chauffeur-driven limos.

The government has embarked on a major development initiative through its $4.5 billion Regaining Sri Lanka initiative. Unless carefully managed, this could do a lot of environmental damage. The donors- the World Bank, the ADB and their kin-do insist on environmental impact assessments (EIAs), and require project proponents to consult the public. All very well, except that one is never quite sure who 'the public' are. For, let's face it, the Sri Lankan public is not environmentally savvy. By and large, people want economic progress, with environment coming a poor runner up. However, development and environment can go hand in hand: the Mahaweli Scheme increased the national park network by 50 percent, from 310,000 to 460,000 sq. km.

The success of the EIA process depends on public participation. Given the hoo-ha there was about Upper Kotmale, one would have thought environmental NGOs are ever straining at the leash, ready to battle any cause. Read a Sunday newspaper and you will see all manner of environmental hype: forests sold to the Americans, precious biodiversity pirated.

The massive investment that the Regain Programme entails will be spent largely on roads, dams, power stations, industry, construction and the like. None of it has been earmarked for the environment. Unless care is taken therefore, we run the risk of an environmental catastrophe. The total budget of the official watchdog, the Central Environmental Authority, amounts to less than 0.03 percent of the Regain investment: a pittance.

It took Rukman Senanayake, our worthy Minister of Environment, a long, hard and low-key battle to persuade his cabinet colleagues to ban polythene bags and sili sili lunch sheets from government premises- offices, schools, hospitals, national parks. Even better, Senanayake has managed to win approval for a tax on polythene that will help pay for the cleanup. No NGOs egging him on there. No NGOs either, taking on the places of religious worship that blare their doctrine through deafening loudspeakers.

There is an increasingly credible counter lobby that asserts that many environmental NGOs are a load of hot air. Take the case of the Menik Ganga diversion the Irrigation Department plans at Weheragala. This involves the construction of a 65-foot high dam inside Lunugamwehera National Park, including the flooding of 3,500 acres of the park itself, almost all of it top-quality forest, in addition to a 60-foot wide, 15-foot deep canal 22 km through the park. Tragedy, you may cry, but not so our worthy environmental NGOs snoring quietly in their armchairs.

Bizarrely, the Department of Wildlife Conservation, unknown even to Minister Senanayake, issued terms of reference for an Environmental Impact Assessment, thereby tacitly approving the project should "environmental concerns" be addressed. It is moot however, whether 3,500 acres of a national park may be permitted to be inundated regardless of how 'environmentally friendly' such inundation is. Who knows (indeed, who cares) how many elephants will drown in a death trap of a 22-km canal?

Last Sunday, after much newspaper advertisement, the Irrigation Department held a public meeting at Lunugamwehera to seek the people's views on the proposed project. While 500 souls showed up, there was among them not a single one national environmental NGO. Lunugamvehera, after all, is a longish drive from Colombo.

For all the talk there is, few national environmental NGOs have actually done anything for the environment apart from gripe and sling mud. How about protecting some forests, cleaning up some plastic, planting a few trees or educating a few schoolchildren on nature conservation? Such things, alas, require one to leave one's armchair and put parts of the body other than the mouth to work.

The trust that is reposed in national environmental NGOs such as the Environmental Foundation and the Wildlife and Nature Protection Society cannot be fulfilled from the comfort of Colombo. We'll all take them more seriously if we saw some soiled hands and muddy feet. Sadly, many environmental watchdogs have become lapdogs of the 'donors.' The ADB recently paid for and sent, Business Class, the head of one of the most vociferous environmental NGOs on a luxury junket to the Philippines. The head of another key NGO is involved in a foreign funded horse-racing track coming up at Bentota, that involves the filling of thousands of acres of wetlands. Where is the morality in all this? Let's see these hypocrites at least now climb out of their armchairs and into their 4x4s, push off to Lunugamvehera, and do some real environmentalism. That's where the forests that need protection are.