تامل ٹائیگرز کی شکست

سری لنکا کی وزارت دفاع کی ویب سائٹ کا میں کافی عرصے سے قاری ہوں۔ آج یہ کالم میں نے پڑھا اور میں حیران رہ گیا۔ ایسا لب و لہجہ تو آج تک میں نے جنوبی ایشیا کے کسی اخبار میں نہیں دیکھا۔ اور کبھی کبھی تو میں حیران ہوتا ہوں کہ آخر ہمارے حکمرانوں میں کم از کم اتنی اخلاقی جرأت کب پیدا ہو گی کہ وہ مغربی ممالک کو کچھ بھی کہہ سکیں ،عمل تو خیر جوئے شِیر لانا ہے۔ بہر حال یہ کالم میں آپ کے لئے پیش کر رہا ہوں۔ پڑھئے اور سر دُھنئے۔۔
I hope President Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka takes time out today to comment on the resignation of Mr Speaker. What the Sri Lankan government has “wanted to see”, he might say in the jargon of the new interventionism, is clean and transparent democracy in Britain. Speaking for all Sri Lankans, he would regard the affair of MPs’ expenses as “unacceptable” and “not living up to their commitments”. A group of Sri Lankan MPs would be visiting Britain to monitor developments.
Ridiculous? Yet those are exactly the words and tone of voice used by Britain’s foreign secretary, David Miliband, in his dealings with what seems like half the globe. The Foreign Office wakes each morning and scans the world’s conflicts to ponder where it might score a quick headline with a call for peace, reform, a ceasefire or “United Nations action”.
I cannot see the point of Britain telling the world that “what we want to see is Russia on a different course”. It merely infuriates every Russian. Why does Miliband say of Syria’s dictator that “I’ve been talking for over 18 months to him about his responsibilities in the region”, as if he were Lugard addressing a recalcitrant Nigerian chief? Why boast that he is “working on maintaining a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza” when he is doing nothing of the sort?
A delegation of Singapore’s MPs might feel equally justified in visiting London to express the “unacceptability” of Britain’s financial regulation. The Colombian prime minister, recently criticised by Miliband for the “impunity” of his militia, might wonder at the impunity of Britain’s corrupt arms dealers.
Pakistan, lectured weekly by London about its army’s performance, might demand an inquiry into discipline at Deep Cut barracks. Beijing might discover a Miliband-style “moral obligation” to defend minority rights in Northern Ireland, given the resurgence of separatist violence. The Swedes might denounce Britain’s care of the elderly on the grounds that they “cannot stand idly by” while welfare state values are traduced by British callousness.
Were any of these things to happen, British politicians and the British media would be outraged. How dare other nations pass judgment on our affairs? What business is it of theirs? Yet this is what Britain does to them. Foreign policy is in 19th-century mode, with a moral gunboat over every horizon. Iran, Colombia, Kenya, Russia, Sri Lanka have all been damned by Miliband with the same fatwa as “unacceptable”.

اس کالم کا بقیہ حصہ آپ وہاں ویب سائٹ پر پڑھ سکتے ہیں۔