expats or traitors?

When we were kids we often heard the tale of “kutti mein mutti”, of the little boy who was reluctant to leave a game of marbles to go to pee, incase someone cheated on him. So he peed into the little hole, dug in the ground as ‘goal’, so the game would be disrupted and then could begin afresh after he relieved himself properly.
One is tempted to believe this is the attitude of expats from their homelands in underdeveloped countries. First they fleece the home country for subsidized quality education which wins them seats in foreign universities, jobs et all. And then, once they have settled in, instead of trying to do something constructive for the homeland, they fish in troubled waters, funding separatist movements and airing various theories with little knowledge of ground realities beyond the eerie word pictures of concerned relatives. There is often little awareness of the larger picture of a massive Indian subcontinent with all its myriad peoples and their equally myriad problems. Only a zeroing in on parochial interests with violent agitations. Is it concern for the motherland or merely to ensure that they retain their supremacy over home country cousins who may otherwise prosper at home too?
Witness the Punjab Khalistan movement funded by Sikhs in foreign lands, the JKLF with its foreign links and a still ongoing unstable state, the Northeast with its leaders fulminating in exile rather than roughing it out with the cadres at home.
The latest to join this band wagon are the Tamils in Canada who migrated long ago seeking greener pastures who have now raised a banner demanding international trial of the Sri Lankan President for war crimes, like Saddam. In the first place, who are they to demand something like that when they have left Sri Lanka already?
Secondly, what war crimes? Shooting down of some guerrilla leaders who had held local populaces hostage? Police encounters do so every day in every country with local criminals too. What has been the ‘human rights ‘ record of the LTTE and its chief? If any harsh action has been taken to achieve some ‘peace’, it would be akin to breaking some eggs to make an omelette. At times, it is difficult not to feel that the whole LTTE movement with its roots into various developed countries was not a calbierated and deliberate attempt to sabotage the development earlier taking placein Sri Lanka.
And finally the reference to Saddam. Who in the world actually believes that ‘justice’ is meted out in the US kangaroo courts? Do these Canadian Tamils want their erstwhile homeland Sri Lanka also to bend at the knee for such justice?

Comments

Haddock said…
Well said and well written.
I always felt the same way. You sit in some other country in a plush leather upholstery sofa and cry hoarse over the atrocities in "my country" or "fellow brotheren"
(my latest post "Next stop......" is also on the same lines"

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