After making a few puerile utterances and awkward gesticulations, the Foreign Secretary has returned home, bitter, dejected and empty-handed, except for a few thousand air miles. 

Mr Miliband (Some cynics in Colombo call him the LTTE Miniband!) strenuously denies that his motives were electoral. One could have given him the benefit of doubt had it not been for a few oddities. 

Mr Miliband waxes lyrical about the safety and welfare of civilians in the No-Fire Zone. I have scanned in vain Mr Miliband’s speeches on his website and elsewhere to find any antecedent of his now well-publicised concern, consideration and compassion for civilians in conflict. As far as I can recall, Mr Miliband did not oppose the illegal war in Iraq which has caused over half-a-million civilian casualties, according to a serious study published in 2006 in the Lancet.

In fact, the British Government disdainfully rejected the figures and said that it did not keep records of civilian casualties, anyway. Mr Miliband is not on record as having uttered a half a syllable when, in 1996, the US Ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, claimed that the half a million Iraqi children said to have died due to sanctions was a price worth paying.

Mr Miliband did not deem it necessary to make day-trips to Colombo when LTTE suicide bombers were blowing to pieces hundreds of innocent civilians, some of whom were Tamils. Mr Miliband’s Government would simply trot out a few lines, admonishing the Government of Sri Lanka to start negotiations with a terrorist organisation banned in the US, EU, Canada, India and Sri Lanka.

I am sure that Mr Miliband shared the public outrage in the UK when terrorists killed 52 innocent people, or did he? Mr Miliband does not seem to have put any pressure on his LTTE friends in London to free the thousands of Tamil civilians held hostage by the outfit. Instead, Mr Miliband’s Government has allowed the supporters of a banned organisation to parade through London, waving its colours and often bringing the traffic to a halt.

Moreover, Mr Miliband’s Government has failed to protect the Sri Lankan High Commission in London and at least one other High Commission from attacks by the LTTE supporters. Is Mr Miliband aware that it was the Sri Lankan armed forces that freed nearly 200,000 civilians from the clutches of the LTTE when he pronounces on ceasefires?

There is enough here to make Tamil Nadu politicians blush! It is a pity that there are no Nobel Prizes for hypocrisy in international diplomacy. 

- Bandula Kothalawala, London N7