Some people are dancing in the streets over Sri Lanka’s failure to retain her seat in the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC). Now, the indefatigable campaigners for a UN human rights monitoring mission here will move up a gear to force their remedy down the country’s throat.

Those who launched an anti-Sri Lanka campaign in the run up to Wednesday’s election are patting themselves on the back and we hear champagne corks popping. But, do they really have any reason to disport themselves in celebrations? The discerning may not think so.

Sri Lanka’s loss was more due to Pakistan’s (or Bahrain’s) entry into the fray than anything else. Now that the UN has voted Pakistan and Bahrain in and Sri Lanka out, if one is to go by the arguments being peddled by the anti-Sri Lanka lobby, the UN must be of the view that Pakistan/Bahrain has a better human rights record than Sri Lanka. How on earth could that be? Pakistan and Bahrain are among the nations that received negative ratings from the New York-based Freedom House (FH) and the Geneva-based UN Watch (UNW)!

The NGO Coalition hell bent on giving Sri Lanka a bad name refrained from taking a position on Pakistan and Bahrain. Aren’t those NGOs being hypocritical? Their right to be critical of Sri Lanka cannot be impugned but by not opposing the candidature of Pakistan/Bahrain, they betrayed their intent to make Sri Lanka lose so as to achieve a hidden objective, which is widely believed to be helping a beleaguered LTTE. After the election we have the NGO collective telling Pakistan and Bahrain that they ‘must live up to the standards set for Human Rights Council membership’. In other words, before the election, the NGO Coalition didn’t want to paint those two countries black so as to ruin Sri Lanka’s chances of winning.

Why didn’t Nobel Laureates like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Adolfo Perez Esquivel (Argentina) and former US President Jimmy Carter campaign vigorously against the election/re-election of the other countries with FH and UNW negative ratings? It’s a pity that those great men have allowed themselves to be accused of having given a helping hand to the anti-Sri Lanka lobby promoting separatist terror on a flimsy pretext.

What have those who are celebrating Sri Lanka’s loss got to say about the election of Gabon and Zambia with the same negative ratings as Sri Lanka, due to an uncontested slate? Won’t their presence desecrate the ‘holy Council’? It was not for nothing that Romania’s UN ambassador in Geneva Doru-Romulus Costea, who chairs the Council at present said the other day that the UNHRC lacked credibility. The US voted against its establishment in 2006 and has refused to be a member. Backers of Israel have accused the Council of having a strong Muslim lobby which bashes Israel and shields its friends like Sudan.

The Human Rights Watch has said Wednesday’s vote should be a wake-up call for the Sri Lankan government. Yes, the government must get its act together. But, on no grounds should it give in to pressure and subscribe to the not-so-surreptitious moves being made in some quarters to undermine the country’s sovereignty and rescue the cornered Tigers.

It must say an unflinching ‘yes’ to the protection of human rights and a firm ‘no’ to the offer of Trojan horses like the proposed UN monitoring mission.