Wikileaks cables: David Miliband focused on Sri Lankan war ‘to win votes’
News Source: Guardian UK
The diplomatic campaign by former foreign secretary David Miliband to champion aid and human rights during the Sri Lankan humanitarian crisis last year was largely driven by domestic political calculations, according to a Foreign Office official.
A leaked May 2009 cable from the US embassy in London quotes the official, Tim Waite, a Foreign Office team leader on Sri Lanka, explaining Miliband’s intense focus on the plight of the country’s Tamils in terms of UK electoral geography.
“Waite said that much of [Her Majesty’s government] and ministerial attention to Sri Lanka is due to the ‘very vocal’ Tamil diaspora in the UK, numbering over 300,000, who have been protesting in front of parliament since 6 April,” Richard Mills, a political officer at the US embassy, reported.
“He said that with UK elections on the horizon and many Tamils living in Labour constituencies with slim majorities, the government is paying particular attention to Sri Lanka, with Miliband recently remarking to Waite that he was spending 60% of his time at the moment on Sri Lanka.”
The Foreign Office said tonight there was nothing wrong or unusual in explaining to a foreign diplomat the political context for UK foreign policy, and a former prime ministerial envoy on Sri Lanka said that the British involvement was motivated firstly by the scale of the humanitarian crisis.
The comments quoted in the US cable were made in the midst of a flurry of activity on Sri Lanka by Miliband, as the long civil war between the government and the Tamil Tigers was reaching a bloody conclusion. At the end, some local doctors estimated that as many as a thousand people, mostly Tamils, were dying each day.
The foreign secretary had just visited Sri Lanka with his French counterpart, Bernard Kouchner on 29 April.
Miliband told parliament two days later that the joint trip had been “to highlight the need to bring the conflict to an end in a way that minimises further civilian casualties; to press the case for the humanitarian relief effort to be ratcheted up, as the UN and EU have been calling for; and to make clear the need for a long-term political settlement that meets the aspirations of all communities in Sri Lanka.”
Britain was pressing at the time for Sri Lankan visas to be issued to international humanitarian staff, and for them to be given access to large numbers of civilians displaced by the fighting, so that food and medicine could be distributed to hundreds of thousands of people trapped in the war zone, a small strip of land on the island’s north-eastern coast.
The military action brought to a bloody end a civil war between the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam – the Tamil Tigers – and government forces which had begun in 1983 and cost many thousands of lives. The UN has said that at least 7,000 civilians were killed in the five months before the end of the war.
On 4 May 2009, a few days before the US diplomatic cable was sent to Washington, the prime minister’s special envoy for Sri Lanka, Des Browne, was part of a cross-party group allowed in by the Sri Lankan government, which had blocked Browne’s entry for months.
Waite told Mills that Britain would be sustaining its “concerted drive to achieve a fully inclusive political settlement” in Sri Lanka.
Miliband and Kouchner would be hosting a meeting on the issue on the sidelines of an international meeting in New York within a week, while Miliband would be raising the subject with American officials in Washington on the same trip.
Miliband could not be contacted for comment tonight.
Browne said: “This misunderstands what was happening. The conflict in Sri Lanka at the time was a world issue, with the US government, the Indian government and the United Nations all sending their envoys. There were over 100,000 people stuck in a war zone. It doesn’t take a lot of explaining why we were concerned with the issue.”
“Of course it had an effect here. There were tens of thousands of people on our streets and there was a presence in Parliament Square,” Browne said.
“There was a lot of concern, but it wasn’t restricted to one party. These people lived in everybody’s constituencies. It was all-party and I made sure it didn’t bleed into party politics.”
A Foreign Office spokesman said: “It’s perfectly normal for a Foreign Office official to set out the political context for British foreign policy. American diplomats similarly explain to us what Congress thinks of this or that American policy. There is nothing unusual about it.”
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Miliband is a shameless gutter level politician who will anything to get votes. Not different to Mervin Silva. Miliband will even walk naked on streets if someone says he will vote for him if he go naked. He is such a low guy in world politics.
Wikkileaks have done a great service to the world by exposing the gutter politics of both USA and Britain. They are hypocrites. They have one policy towards Al Qaeda and another tolerant policy towards LTTE. They even tried to save the LTTE and its hardcore cadres by airlifting them to US 7th fleet ship, diverted to save them, on the pretext of saving the Tamil civilians, held hostage by VP and the LTTE as a human shield against the fierce onslaught of the heroic SL army.
Both Milliband and Clinton along with the French clown Kouchner pursued a policy of saving LTTE all along from total annhilation. They failed in their mission. Now they are hell-bent on revenge from MR. He has stupidly fallen prey to their evil plot of inviting him to address the Oxford University Students Union. MR should never have accepted the invitation. It was a conspiracy by Oxford University Students Union with LTTE diaspora and British government to arrest MR on British soil for alleged war crimes. Once he was here, OUSU promptly cancelled the invitation saying they cannot provide him security. MR was stupid to have accepted the invitation. Why did he lower himself to this level? He is a great heroic leader of SL. It is below his dignity as President of a country to accept such an invitation. He was not invited by the British government. It would heave been a different matter had he been invited by the British government for a state visit. That would have been an honour. The invitation by a stupid Oxford University Students Union is not an honour. It was a plot to arrest him. He fell for it hook line and sinker because of his ego. What a waste of public money to come to UK at such great expense with his ontourage. Certainly the British government is not going to cough up the expense. The trip was not beneficial to SL economically or politically. All it did was to waste public money to please his ego. I am very angry about it. No one advised him not to undertake this silly trip. He has many enemies in the imperial West. He is in great danger. He should now cut his losses, as a learning curve, and return to SL before worse happens. His responsibilty is to the people of SL to take the country forward on Mahinda Chintanaya lines. Money that could have been well spent on building bridges and roads in distant poor villages have been utterly wasted on this trip to please his ego.