The Sunday Times, UK, takes David Cameron to the cleaners about his behaviour during CHOGM. This is freedom of the press. also note the dark british humour and sarcasm !
That s the president of Sri Lanka, PM, not one of your fags
by Rod Little, UK Sunday Times (Nov 17)
I have to say, I thoroughly approve of the manner in which our prime minister has decided to deal with foreigners, especially jumped up foreigners who by rights should really still be part of our dominion and thus be doing as they`re bloody well told.
David Cameron struck precisely the right note with a man called Mahinda Rajapaksa, who is somehow running a place that I think we`d all prefer to call Ceylon. Normally when one is a guest in someone else`s country, it is incumbent upon the visitor to be polite, even deferential.
But the prime minister is aware that this does not apply to Sri Lanka, as it is now apparently called. Indeed, there is a case for saying that it does not apply to almost any of the countries qualified to host the Commonwealth heads of government meeting. I cannot imagine, for example, how one could possibly be polite upon arriving in, say, one of those islands where they worship the Duke of Edinburgh as a living deity.
It might be possible to smile pleasantly for a while, but in the end one has to let them know who is boss. This will almost certainly mean telling them how to run their country, at some point, perhaps after some hideous local dinner of sheep spleen and plantain.
So it is to David Cameron`s immense credit that he struck the right tone when addressing this Ceylonese johnny. It is the tone of a member of the Eton upper sixth addressing some errant fag who has failed to buff his shoes to the correct level of shine, through either incompetence or laziness.
It should be peremptory, it should carry within it the vapour of contempt, it should be to the recipient chidingly insulting and remind the foreigner that we once owned his ghastly satrapy and things were a damned sight better when we did, frankly.
Our prime minister could not have been more wonderfully patrician. I was transported straight back to about 1952 and, do you know, I like to think President Rajapaksa was similarly moved backwards in time. We are not a colony! he bleated after the PM had issued his statement, condemning Sri Lanka for its human rights abuses and announcing that he was going to be the first politician for a very long while to visit Jaffna, in the north of this previously troubled archipelago, to see for himself .
Ah, off you go, Dave. The reason that you can go to Jaffna at all is that this Rajapaksa-wallah, over the course of three years, eliminated the terrorist threat of the Tamil Tigers. The country is now at peace, not merely economically stable but with a rate of economic growth that would inflame the loins of George Osborne. I dare say Rajapaksa has been a ruthless authoritarian, that not everything he has accomplished would earn the approval of the European Court of Human Rights.
But for 26 years the murderous, maniacal Tamil Tigers waged war in Sri Lanka assassinations, suicide attacks, using children as hostages, planting bombs. And they were able to do so thanks to the money that flooded in largely from the UK via the Tamil diaspora in, mostly, London.
For decades we turned a blind eye to the relentless fundraising for these terrorists and the Tamil Tigers were themselves only proscribed as a terrorist organisation (rather than lauded as freedom fighters) in 2001, a year, incidentally, when we all opened our eyes to terrorism. So maybe after ticking off this gentleman for the way he runs his country, a short apology from Cameron might not go amiss.
Source(s)
web/Sunday Times (UK)