Human rights cannot be advocated by crooks

[Many human rights organizations expressed concern about ‘vilifying’ human rights activists in Sri Lanka such as Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu.  None of these bleeding-heart crusaders were willing to entertain the thought that some of these activists were crooks or at least ready and willing to bend the rules when it came to money matters.  The point was made in Geneva that no one need vilify the likes of Saravanamuttu because he does a good job of it himself.  It was pointed out that Saravanamuttu has hardly rebutted his critics and has shown a remarkable penchant for dodging query.  The following two articles were written almost a year ago.  I dug them up to refresh memories]

 Is an election a ‘village tank’ to monitors and donors? 

There’s an old joke about NGO operations in Sri Lanka.  NGOs are said to send identical project proposals to several donor agencies.  For example, money would be solicited to rehabilitate a village tank (weva).  If more than one donor agrees to support the project, the particular NGO would not rehabilitate more than a single weva but would submit the identical final project report to each donor.  Some NGOs, the joke goes, would ‘rob’ the work of another NGO, claiming that the weva that NGO 2 rehabilitated was in fact the one mentioned in the proposal and referred to in the relevant report(s). 

That’s an old joke. Decades old.  Donors have since, we are told, tightened monitoring and evaluation mechanisms. Moreover, NGOs competing for the same funds are ever watchful and more than willing to rat on fellow-racketeers.  The state got into the act a little while later. So did individuals and groups who were suspicious of NGOs, especially those outfits that bent over backwards to promote the division of the nation, destabilization of the country and whitewash terrorists and give them legitimacy of one kind or another.  Tough.

This is after all the Age of Communication.  It is not that donors are unaware of the existence of other donors. Typically, also, the donor community, especially countries that have a diplomatic presence in the particular country, run into one another in various forums and indeed their top officials deal with one another on first-name basis.  In general they are aware of who is doing what and where.  ‘Who’ meaning the donors as well as the recipients of their largesse. 

This is why it is strange that the Centre for Policy Alternatives could apply for and obtain a staggering Rs. 58 million to ‘monitor’ the Presidential and Parliamentary elections held in 2010.  The breakdown is as follows:  Rs. 13 million and Rs. 20 million for the Parliamentary and Presidential Elections respectively from the Netherlands, Rs. 9.9 million from the USA (both elections), Rs. 22 million from the Federal Republic of Germany (Presidential Election) and Rs. 3 million from the United Kingdom (Presidential Election, covering just the Eastern Province). 

The monies had been obtained by the CPA on behalf of the Centre for Monitoring Election Violence (CMEV).  The CMEV, according to its website, had been ‘formed in 1997 by the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA), the Free Media Movement (FMM) and the Coalition Against Political Violence as an independent and non-partisan organisation to monitor the incidence of election related violence’ and is currently ‘made up of CPA, FMM and INFORM Human Rights Documentation Centre’. 

The FMM has a long history of engaging in fraudulent activities and its one time ‘convenor’, Sunanda Deshapriya, who also worked for the CPA (the incestuous nature of these outfits is well known) was asked to resign after being caught fudging accounts and pocketing bucks.   INFORM Human Rights Documentation Centre has not updated its website since August 11, 2009 and that’s surprising for an outfit devoted to ‘documentation’ in this day and age.  Sunila Abeysekera, another NGO fellow-traveller of the likes of Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu (CPA) and Jehan Perera (National Peace Council), is said to have been a co-founder of ‘INFORM’.  The entire lot engages in a lot of mutual back-scratching and rewarding one another (yes, incestuous is the word).  Anyway, the bottom like is that for all intents and purposes, CMEV is the CPA. 

We don’t know as yet if this Rs. 58 million is a part of the Rs. 272.31 million that the CPA is reported to have received from various donors over the past three years. We don’t know if other fraternal and similarly gift-exchanging organizations such as the NPC, PAFFREL (People’s Action for Free and Fair Elections) and Rights Now (convened by Sudarshana Gunawardena who is also ‘Convenor’ of the ‘Joint Movement for Democracy’ and who recently praised Saravanamuttu when he received a ‘Citizens’ Peace Prize’ awarded by Jehan Perera’s NPC), received money for monitoring activities pertaining to the said two elections from these same funding sources.  We do know that PAFFREL has come under an accountability cloud after its long serving boss, Kingsley Rodrigo passed away recently. 

We don’t know whether the tax payers of the Netherlands, USA, UK and Germany are aware that their governments have been pumping money into organizations with dubious track records including surreptitious and sometimes open support of terrorist organizations.  We do know that Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu has close associations with certain political parties and has even shared stage and petition-space with politicians and parties, a fact which these funders cannot be unaware of and which moreover compromise the ability of the CPA/CMEV to exercise neutrality in election monitoring activities. 

We do not know if each donor mentioned above were aware that the CPA/CMEV were being funded for the same project by the other three.  We do not know the details of the budgets submitted by the CPA/CMEV to each of these donors and we hope that Saravanamuttu gets his ‘under construction’ website running soon and, in the interest of his favourite buzz-terms, transparency and accountability, lays it all out for the benefit of the public he seems to love so much. What we do know is details of the budget submitted to the Secretary for State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs represented by Mark Gooding, Deputy High Commissioner, British High Commission in Colombo, Sri Lanka. 

We don’t know if CMEV rented out a special monitoring office during the two elections or used the CPA office down Ernest De Silva Mawatha for the purpose, but the budget indicates that Rs 1.12 million has been allocated for rent. This is for monitoring activities in the Eastern Province.  The project duration is from December 15, 2009 to January 31, 2010.  That’s 48 days or more than Rs. 23,000 per day!  That’s just a single line-item of the budget.  I don’t have to get into the details.  Saravanamuttu who signed the agreement on behalf of CPA would, I am sure, give us the beef.  Rohan Edirisinghe who signed the agreement with the Netherlands Embassy and L.M. Cuelenaere (Ambassador) who signed on behalf of the Embassy would similarly, in the interest of transparency and accountability (to the people of Sri Lanka and the tax payers of the Netherlands), reveal details of the budget submitted by the CPA/CMEV. 

Saravanamuttu also signed on behalf of the CPA the agreement with the U.S. Department of State (Jeffrey Anderson was the other signatory).  He also signed the agreement with Germany, represented by the Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs, Jens Ploetner.  These gentlemen, given their long-standing and dedicated service to the cause of democracy, accountability and transparency, reveal all shortly, I am sure.   They will tell us how many people were required for the overall monitoring exercise and reveal their names too for they know only too well how NGOs cook up names and numbers.  In the interest of decency and civilization and since all this is about the wellbeing of democracy and the citizenry of Sri Lanka, leave no stone unturned so that we know that things are all above board. 

The CMEV, according to their website, has been monitoring the recently held local government elections.  There’s no record of how much money they got, from whom and for what. They’ve issued statements so one assumes that they did some work on the ground.  If they did monitor and did so without bucks, then one cannot help wondering why Saravanamuttu, Edirisinghe and others needed so much dough to monitor the Presidential and Parliamentary Elections in 2010.  Were they marketing and selling the same ‘weva’, one wonders.  More disturbingly, one wonders if the donors were ‘in the know’. 

[March 22, 2011]

On making valid points and fudging critical issues

Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, in what he purports to be a response to critical reports about the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) of which he is the Executive Director and to what he thinks are ‘personal attacks’, has made some very valid and thought-provoking observations (see ‘Hack-attack,’ in the Daily Mirror of April 7, 2011).  He has not mentioned what the ‘personal attacks’ are or who has made them. Neither has he mentioned what these ‘critical reports’ are about or who the critics are. That’s interesting and pertinent. 

I did comment on Saravanamuttu and the CPA at length in an article titled ‘Is an election a ‘village tank’ to monitors and donors?’ in the Daily Mirror of March 22, 2011, mentioning the enormous sums of money that the CPA has received from the governments of several countries in its capacity as the most visible member of the Centre for Monitoring Election Violence (CMEV) and perhaps the only member with any real on-the-ground presence.  In that article I raised some questions about promise and delivery and about the logic of requiring scandalous amounts of money to pay for what seemed to be inexpensive services.  

I also asked why the CPA has not come clean on how much was spent on what and who got how much for what.  Elsewhere (for example in the Sunday Lakbima News of April 10, 2011) I noted the fact that the CMEV, for all the millions upon millions of rupees it has got its hands on over the last 12 years, failed to convince enough people about the importance of the work they do in order to build in sustainability to their projects.  I noted that the CMEV, perhaps for lack of funds, did next to nothing during the recently held local government elections. 

Saravanamuttu has, as I said, made some valid points.  He has said, for example, that the CPA had furnished all financial reports requested by the CID when MP Rajiva Wijesinha raised some questions in Parliament last year.  He has said that in any case the said information was already available with the Registrar of Companies in accordance with relevant audit requirements.  He has also raised the (valid) question, ‘why investigate right now?’ and added ‘why at all?’ He has asked whether the CPA (and other organizations) have been guilty of crime.  These are questions that the relevant authorities might want to respond to, although I don’t think that an investigative body has to launch action based on auspicious times or that investigations should be launched after it is established that a crime has been committed. 

In general, Saravanamuttu’s response does raise the question of selectivity, though.  In addition, the entire process and its political overtones do indicate that the regulatory apparatus is lacking in many ways and perhaps has in-built loopholes that make for inefficiency and hanky-panky.  As he has pointed out, the CPA and CMEV are legitimate bodies and recognized as such and moreover accorded respect by the Elections Commissioner.  If any mischief has been committed by the CPA/CMEV (and all indications are that they have) then the Elections Commissioner is automatically an accessory after the fact of mischief-making and other relevant wrongdoing.  C.A. Chandraprema has addressed the issue of flaws in the regulatory mechanisms in his article, ‘The legal basis of NGO impunity’ (The Island of April 7, 2011).

Saravanamuttu has not asked why the condition of accountability has not been raised with respect to other organizations, non-governmental, corporate and of course state agencies.  As far back as 2002, I insisted that for transparency and accountability to have any meaning in governance, there should be an Independent Audit Commission written into the now defunct 17^th Amendment, flawed document though it was for reasons I have elaborated in many in the Sunday Island at that time and elsewhere subsequently. 

He claims he has been threatened, harassed, branded as traitor and that the public has been exhorted to spit on him.  He says he has been accused of being supportive of the LTTE and terrorism.  He has said there has been no substantiation of the allegation that he or the heads of the other organizations about whose finances questions have been raised and which share with the CPA ‘a common critique of the regime’ have indeed been supportive of the LTTE and therefore terrorism.  This is not true.  Whitewashing the LTTE, bending backwards to legitimate that organization and give it parity of status vis-à-vis the Government of Sri Lanka, turning a blind eye to fraternal organizations purportedly engaged in rehabilitation in LTTE-controlled areas when in fact they were knowingly providing money and material to the LTTE and doing the utmost to save the LTTE leadership during the last days of the conflict are only some of the ‘evidence’ of support, not to mention of course the fact that they were actively endorsing the LTTE’s preferences in all stages of all negotiations.  There’s nothing illegitimate in all this of course.  Feigning neutrality in the political arena and claiming to be apolitical, however, is rather disingenuous.  As for threat and harassment, again, this shows in the very least flaws in the overall security apparatus, even though it is true that those diametrically opposed to the views held by Saravanamuttu and his ilk have suffered the same kind of abuse but in greater magnitude with scars to show to boot.  

What I find strange about Saravanamuttu’s response is that thinks passing the buck to the Registrar of Companies is adequate answer to questions about financial matters.  This is strange because he claims often and is recognized by his donors and others who frequently quote him as representative of civil society.  This ought to make him answerable to the general public and moreover, given known antipathies, should not make him see state as organ of civil society in all things transparent and accountable.  Whether or not the mechanisms of the state are flawed, whether or not state agencies are engaged in a selective and unwarranted investigation of his organization, Saravanamuttu, knowing very well the problems pertaining to information flow between state and public, ought to have (but of course not required to) come clean about how much, from whom, for what and to whom. 

He says foreign donors are aware of what the organizations monitoring elections do and that the organizations report to these funders.  That multiple funders appear to have given money to the CMEV for the same project, that relevant amounts seem highly exorbitant and that the monitoring outfits appear to have axed sustainability in order to milk and re-milk a set of generous donor cows doesn’t give his boast much meat, especially since the other organizations he mentioned, PAFFREL and CAFFE (one assumes) would have also obtained similar quantities of dollar-milk from these very same dairy.  He has not explained why the CMEV required so much money and from so many donors.  He has not explained why the CMEV spent Rs. 1.12 million to rent a headquarters to monitor activities in the Eastern Province over a period of 48 days, for example.

Saravanamuttu says that CMEV’s audited accounts are electronically available on the CPA’s and CMEV’s websites.  CPA’s website is, for the record, ‘under construction’ and does not give all the annual reports and none since 2009.  The CMEV’s accounts are hidden in the middle of a large pdf document in literally very small print. I am not claiming that the relevant auditors have been negligent or mischievous.  Audit reports are essentially summaries.  The onus on Saravanamuttu, who talks of transparency and accountability, is to give the details that don’t go into these reports. 

Instead of all this, Saravanamuttu chooses to point fingers at those who have criticized the CPA/CMEV, demanding that they reveal who gave them the information.  I have the photocopies of agreements that the CPA has signed with several donors.  Suffice to say I have friends in government as well as the cartel that calls itself ‘civil society organizations’. Saravanamuttu knows he has more enemies within that without, given competition for the same funds from the same donors. 

What is relevant moreover is whether the claims made are accurate or not.  He has not denied.  Nor has he explained, in the public interest that he professes to care so much about, how much was received, for what exactly and into whose bank accounts the money went.

He asks the valid question, ‘Are these individuals (those who have criticized and raised questions regarding the CPA/CMEV and others) acting alone or are they acting on instruction?’ I can’t speak for others, but I am hardly acting on ‘instruction’ for I owe no one any favours, except those I love and the tax payers who paid for my education.   Whether or not the state has got its act together, these are questions that need to be asked, especially considering the holier-than-thou nature of rhetoric spouted by the likes of Saravanamuttu about transparency and accountability. This is not about bucks. This is about big bucks.  It is about coming clean. Or closing shop. The ball is in Saravanamuttu’s court, not as far as the state is concerned, but insofar as ‘civil society’ is implicated. 

[April 12, 2011, Daily Mirror]

And the slothful must whine (for a living)

Jehan Perera of the National (sic) Peace Council (NPC) has confessed that he is a mudalali, i.e. someone who runs a company.  He can no longer call his dollar-guzzling outfit an NGO, for that would make Cargills Food City a non-governmental organization and the petti-kade mudalali (a trader selling betel, Hacks toffees and kola-kenda at a wayside kiosk) a ‘political analyst’, ‘rights activist’ or whatever else the likes of Perera make themselves out to be to a largely naïve bunch of donors and agent provocateurs ever-ready to mouth the proverbial ‘last word’ on all things that come under ‘none-of-your-business’. 

The NPC, currently under investigation has predictably issued a whine.  Perera has claimed that the NPC ‘[does] not in any way seek to engage in any political activity’.  It is funny that a man of his learning has such a kindergarten understanding of the word ‘political’, but I shall let that pass.  More crucially, in response to newspaper reports and comments about the scandalous amounts of money received by his bulath-kade and other kiosks in the political wayside to do next to nothing and with very little to show by way of results, Mudalali Perera has said that the strongly pro-LTTE, pro-Eelamist cartel ‘do not generally engage in activities where the output can be seen and felt or measured in terms of bricks and mortars or income increased’. 

Now Mudalali Perera has nothing to say about fraternal businesspersons who do the bricks-and-mortar type operations and who have had nothing to show for the billions of rupees spent in the formerly LTTE controlled areas.  I am going to be kind. I call it selective memory loss. The betel-tycoon says that the NPC, Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) and Transparency International ‘are primarily involved in public education activities and work that involves changing attitudes’ which, as he rightly claims are indeed ‘less visible, tangible and measurable’.  He says ‘outcomes are real, even if not so readily visible, tangible and measurable’. Neat way of explaining ‘zero outcome’. 

What has the money been spent on?  The NPC, in its latest release has effectively watered down original objective.  Whereas earlier, Perera advocated devolution of the ‘Federalism Plus’ kind, it’s now down to ‘reconciliation based on a just solution to the grievances of the ethnic minorities with devolution of power to enable them to carry out their administration of public affairs in the Tamil language.’  The NPC then takes the position that all that needs to be done is to ‘enable Tamils to carry out their administration of public affairs in the Tamil language’.  Now ‘devolution’ is not a necessary precondition for this, thank you very much. Add to this the fact that the majority of Tamils live outside the Northern and Eastern provinces and all talk of devolution as solution to ‘grievance’ and ‘aspiration’ go out of the window. 

Perera whines about the intangible and invisible; strange for someone who along with his buddies in the same business have got all the visibility and tangible benefits that a betel-kade mudalali could ever dream of. For more than 11 years (from 1994 onwards), these ladies and gentlemen had the ear of the highest in the land and their ideas had fantastic play-time on all media, private and state-owned.  They spouted Eelam Tamil mythology as fact, stuffed tons of devolution down the public throat and worked tirelessly to give a terrorist organization parity of status with a democratically elected government.  Almost forgot, they got billions of money to do all this with. They failed and that’s by Perera’s admission, evidenced by the brand-new watered down set of ‘objectives’ referred to above.  One can’t help thinking that a betal-kade mudalali sans all this visibility would have done better. 

Let’s move on to Perera’s corporate partner, Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu.  He claims that all audited accounts of the CPA and the CMEV (Centre for Monitoring Election Violence, which is an outfit essentially run by the CPA with two other name-board organizations) are on their respective websites.  No, not all annual reports and none since 2009.  The CMEV audit report is hidden in a small-print pdf file in the middle of a lengthy project report.  Nothing about who got how much for what.  It shouldn’t be too much trouble for an organization so fascinated with transparency and accountability to publish it all.  Have not, and I predict, will not.  Saravanamuttu takes refuge behind the fact that the CMEV is recognized by the Elections Commissioner and is a legally constituted organization and therefore accountable to relevant authorities.  The fact that the CPA/CMEV and others have got billions of rupees and nothing much to show by way of return on investment shows flaw in regulatory mechanism, but that is easy, slothful and morally reprehensible ‘out’ for organizations that enjoy riding the moral high horse on things like accountability, transparency and good governance. It is like someone using legal loopholes to hoodwink people and embezzle funds.  It is therefore incumbent on the Government to correct the relevant regulatory mechanisms.  C.A. Chandraprema has outlined the problems and suggested correctives (‘The legal basis of NGO impunity,’ The Island of April 7, 2011) and this is a useful set of guidelines in this regard.

Saravanamuttu is demanding that those who (like me) have mentioned amounts and signatories pertaining to massive funds received for election monitoring mention sources.  Well, let me say that I have copies of all the agreements with donors for Saravanamuttu’s perusal. He can check them against his own documents and let me know if they are duds.    He does not deny the amounts given or the fact of agreement.  He has dodged the issue of the scandalous nature of amounts, considering work promised and left undelivered.  Telling!

The CMEV was not at all visible during the recently concluded local government elections.  Some reports have been posted, but these don’t require hundreds of monitors but a careful monitoring of the news.  Perhaps they didn’t have money.  Now an organization (or a cartel, if we throw in the other members of the mutual-adoration club such as Perera) that has at its disposal over millions of dollars it has received for election-monitoring over a period exceeding a decade would have in that time built an entire army of committed volunteers in every nook and corner of the country which it could mobilize each time an election is announced. 

That the CPA/CMEV has not been able to do this shows incompetence, a lack of seriousness about things like sustainability (which feeds happy donor-dependency) and sloth.  Take money out, out goes business?  That’s not the way a self-righteous, committed, ready-to-do-the-hard-yards kind of organization operates, I am sorry.  Pampered is the word that is appropriate here, I believe.  And now they all lie exposed.  Exposed and whining. 

[April 10, 2011 in ‘The Nation’]

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Farah Mihlar and others tossed cats out of the bag in Geneva

They say that if you give some people enough rope they will hang themselves with it.  On March 19, 2012, in Geneva, no one needed give any rope to several individuals who came to talk about ‘Rule of law and human rights violations in Sri Lanka’.  They came with enough rope and a scaffolding to boot, so to speak.

The event was one of the many side-shows at the 19^th Sessions of the UN Human Rights Council.  It was ‘show’ alright and began before it all began.  Fahrah Mihler, who I have met just a couple of times and who, courtesy a mutual friend, invited me for dinner in Geneva during the Govt-LTTE talks in Celigny, 2006, came and said hello.  She said she had watched me debate Callum Macrae (Channel 4) and Bob Templer (International Crisis Group) on the Sri Lankan conflict in an event hosted by the Asia Society in New York in December 2011 (I participated via skype).

I said ‘they were spouting a lot of bullshit’.

Farah agrees: ‘I know!  In fact I was in my mind thinking out the responses you should make.’

So Farah agrees that what Macrae and Templer said was bullshit. And what did they say?  Macrae regurgitated Channel 4 lies (agreed upon, I should add) and Templer spat out stuff that Channel 4 and the Darusman Panel had stuffed down his gullible (I am being generous here) throat.  In short, taking as fact the claims made by unreliable witnesses, believing exaggerations, having no regard for the principles of proportionality and showing rank ignorance of or showing no respect whatsoever to that little uncomfortable thing called ‘context’.  Farah knows context. 

Then came the next show which was a no-show.  The moderator announced that the much anticipated screening of Channel 4’s latest ‘production’ on Sri Lanka was not going to happen.   Now that ‘new’ film was nothing more than a re-hash of the earlier ‘documentary’ called ‘Killing Fields’ whose toilet-wash worth was more than revealed in ‘Lies Agreed Upon’, where Channel 4’s collusion with the LTTE rump and its long history of glorifying terrorism was laid out without frill or clever juxtaposition and splice.  Perhaps the organizers knew that there were people in the audience who knew better than to believe anything anyone says and had evidence in hand to counter all the claims made in that second film including the stories of the tall-story spinners showcased. 

Then came Farah’s main show, which began with another classic disclaimer.  Ms. I Agree That Channel 4 Is Spouting Rubbish says ‘I am not against Sri Lanka’.  What was coming was apparent.  There was a ‘but’ to come of course, but not before it made me think that it’s like a sodomiser telling intended victim ‘this is good for you..enjoy!’ 

‘We are supporting the US Resolution on Sri Lanka’ she said, not surprisingly; the apologies, caveats, shy-making twisting, turning and squirming fooling few. 

Representing Minority Rights Group, London, Farah did the now boring tokenism number, glossing over LTTE atrocities.  This fluent operator was slick enough to toss out numbers tossed out before in the lie-construction industry, but as a doctoral student she slipped because she showed she had never heard the words reliability.  If one were to believe her argument, then we wouldn’t have seen people walking out of the No-Fire Zone (rendered a joke by the LTTE moving heavy weapons into the area and firing on the Government troops from there and then shooting to kill civilians held hostage as they sought to flee); no, we would have seen ghosts or skeletons.   She’s such a meticulous researcher that she missed the endorsements and words of praise accorded to the Government by the ICRC and top UN officials (Ch 4, by the way, continues to treat as biblical truth the opinions of disgraced UN officials, most of them clearly sympathetic to the LTTE and having axes to grind on account of preferred outcome not materializing).  

Farah’s presentation seeks to give some ‘first hand’ evidence.  When the frills are taken out, however, it’s all hearsay, littered with ‘I was told’, and nothing at all by way of numbers; just random statement that are not offered with even a semblance of substantiation.  There was nothing to indicate anything systemic or policy-driven.  If that’s being ‘academic’ then I seriously question the credentials of her supervisors, especially those who taught her research methodologies. 

Here’s more context she missed:

Sri Lanka is emerging after a brutal war against terrorism.  It is easy for a globe-trotting, neither-here-nor-there fly-by-night operator to pick and choose juicy bits that will titillate the ears of the uneducated and misinformed, but for us here in Sri Lanka, it makes absolutely no sense to defer in favour of sorry as opposed to safe.  Considering the virulent hate-mongering of Farah’s think-alikes (namely the LTTE groups in the West), the delicate that is post-war Sri Lanka cannot be underestimated.  Demilitarization is a process and the relevant time-table cannot be set by those who necessitated militarization and certainly not by their apologists.  Like Farah. 

She spoke of rape and vulnerabilities.  She didn’t mention that soldiers found guilty of rape  have been tried and punished (not whitewashed like Staff Sgt Robert Bales, who is not being media-pardoned on account of insanity).  She fails to make the case that these alleged violations were systemic or widespread or of a magnitude that is above national average or at levels exceeding those in similar situations elsewhere in the world.  She doesn’t say a word of the insecurities and vulnerabilities these very same women had to suffer at the hands of the LTTE.  She knows, but will not admit, that life pre-Mat 2009 was hell.  She expects Sri Lanka to move from hell to heaven in record time. 

Here’s  more context.

The United States, which tabled the resolution which she so ardently supports, walked into Iraq in search of non-existent weapons of mass destruction and is still there almost a decade after Saddam Hussein was overthrown.  The USA overthrew the Taliban years ago and is still discharging hell-bombs.  Sri Lanka is targetted though.  ‘For her own good,’ she reminds us. 

Farah was followed by Anna Van Gall of the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, Berlin.  Anna talked about gender-based violence.  Anna probably has no idea of geography for had she even the slightest clue, she’d be camped out in places like Saudi Arabia instead of going for easy pickings.  Unlike Farah, she can be excused for she has no idea what Sri Lanka is about, the status of women, the problems of women, what’s being done and what needs to be done.  It’s the same song: nothing is perfect is Sri Lanka so everything must be wrong. 

Theodor Rothgeber of the Forum for Human Rights, Geneva, was a treat.  The man said that he himself could not have come up with as ‘soft’ a resolution as the one the USA came up with.  Again, his annoyance is sourced to unreliable and corrupt ‘evidence’ trotted out by the likes of Colin Macrae and Bob Templer, the people who Farah agreed ‘talk rubbish’.   The man needs to do some reading about the history of resolutions, country-specific and otherwise, find out who has vetoed what, voted against what/whom, and how ‘softer’ resolutions and indeed no-resolutions led to monumental crimes against humanity. 

Now all three panelists and the moderator kept talking about their ‘colleague’ Sandya Ekneligoda’s presentation, but she was saved for the last.  There was a reason, which I will come to; just wanted to flag that.

Next came Ms. Giyoun Kim of the Asian Forum of Human Rights, Bangkok.  Poor lady.  She let her colleagues down badly and I am convinced that this is because she was honest.  Naïve yes, but honest.  She admitted that she was brought along for the show in order to indicate to the world that it was not a ‘West’ thing.  Poor thing, she didn’t realize that she had been tagged to give a ‘global’ look to a Western project, just like South Indian forums in the West always have a token Pakistani, Sri Lankan or Bangladeshe (key word: ‘or’) amidst a host of Indian, just to make it look non-Indian. 

More interestingly (and hilariously too), she found herself ‘getting emotional’ as she begged (yes!) Sri Lankans in the audience not to ‘attack’ her beautiful/wonderful partners in the human rights advocacy racket in Sri Lanka.  She named them: Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, Sunila Abeysekera and Nimalka Fernando.  The little girl didn’t know that all of them have been amply exposed as frauds.   Giyoun can be forgiven for ignorance but Farah cannot be, especially since the entire panel was so infuriatingly self-righteous from beginning to end. 

After the event, Giyoun was duly informed about the antics of these people, but she refused to believe they were anything less than angels.  I will come to that later.

Sandya Ekneligoda was introduced and re-introduced as the wife of Prageeth Ekneligoda (a ‘journalist’ who has disappeared).  No one, including Sandya, mentioned that Ekneligoda had once self-disappeared himself. No one mentioned the fact that Ekneligoda was not a journalist or that his ‘journalism’ was limited to the occasional cartoon and a lot of irresponsible, unsubstantiated and tasteless fantasies that bordered on cheap pornography.  No one seemed to have read the excellent undressing of what could be called the ‘Ekneligoda Saga’ by Uvindu Kurukulasuriya.  Now I’ve written about the incident and the debate and I shall not repeat it all here (‘On Ekneligoda, in spite of Ekneligoda and his pals’ in the Daily News of March 1, 2010: http://www.dailynews.lk/2010/03/01/fea02.asp) where I touched upon the issue and noted, inter alia, the following:

‘What is interesting in this missive is that Ekneligoda deems it necessary to fall on his knees and worship, again and again, a man called Sunanda Deshapriya, a charlatan of the first order who made bucks out of activism and stole bucks from the Centre for Policy Alternatives and dares not step into Sri Lanka for fear of arrest for perpetrating numerous acts of fraud.  Sunanda is Ekneligoda’s hero. Need I say more?’

That man Sunanda!  Sunanda Deshapriya sneaked into the discussion at the tail end.  ‘The translator is here, the translator is here!’ the moderator was clearly excited.  Yes, he was to translate Sandya.  The moderator might not have known, but Farah could not have not known what Sunanda has been up to.  Had it been Farah who moderated and had she had any integrity, she might have said ‘the translator-crook is here, the translator-crook is here’.  Sunanda’s love for the LTTE aside (the LTTE killed his driver, but he never once pointed a finger at Prabhakaran) his stubborn refusal to subject himself to the accountability doctrine he so vociferously espouses (he robbed money from Saravanamuttu’s organization and the lovely man Sara, Giyoun should know, cited ‘lack of clarity’ when Sunanda was hoofed out) has been amply exposed by Uvindu Kurukulasuriya (http://www.thesundayleader.lk/2012/02/26/sunanda-saga-states-of-denial-and-ngo-accountability/ and http://www.thesundayleader.lk/2012/03/04/how-sunanda-robbed-the-money-and-ngo-accountability-fmm-still-not-submitted-audited-accounts-for-rs-30-9-million/).  There’s more to come, I hear.

Interestingly, Sunanda’s dollar greed and dollar theft has been facilitated by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and its big names including Jacqueline Park.  The IFJ is frequently cited as an authoritative source about media rights in Sri Lanka.  Sunanda’s ‘Journalists for Democracy’ (JFD) has apparently submitted ‘evidence’ (doctored, it has been proven) to Channel 4.  And who endorses this evidence, but another JFD stalward, Rohitha Bashana who is said to have edited the LTTE’s Sinhala paper ‘Dedunna’ (Rainbow).  And who showcases Rohitha Bashana?  Channel 4!  The ‘evidence’ of a terrorist is aired to the world as though it’s the word of some pious priest of unblemished virtue. 

So Sunanda got late.  Why?  The man had gone with camera in hand to photograph a demonstration against the US Resolution.  The police were informed that his presence, with camera, was an act of provocation.  I wouldn’t disagree, knowing his links with the LTTE.  He was duly taken away for questioning and got late.  Hence the delay in getting Sandya to speak.

Sandya told her story.  The jist:  my husband disappeared and if I, a Sinhalese can’t find him, what more of Tamils who have loved ones that have gone missing?  Valid point, but an incomplete story.  It took 2 years for a suspect associated with the attempt to assassinate the Defence Secretary was found, just to keep perspective.  Those who disappeared in the middle of a brutal war will take finding.  Some may have died in combat, some may have fled.  Names and numbers are needed and exercises to this end are rubbished as though the rubbishers could do a better job themselves, which is what rubbish really is.  Channel 4, for example, neatly clouds the source of some numbers trotted out (Official Census of 1981!), for if they didn’t do that they would have to count ‘in’ those who fled the North and East (to the Western Province, USA, Canada, Europe, Australia and India in the main). 

Much needs to be done, no doubt, but as I have said before, just as much as Sri Lanka is no Paradise on Earth, neither is it the Hell on Earth that the likes of malicious and self-promoting individuals who lack integrity (Farah, for example) make it out to be. 

I feel for Giyoun, who was almost in tears.  I feel for her because I think she was the only honest person on the panel.  She does not know (and can be pardoned for not knowing) that Sunila’s commitment to preventing gender-based violence was amply demonstrated when a close political associate beat his wife regularly.  The wife had told Sunila and she had asked her to ‘be patient’.  Anna Van Gill would be appalled to know.  There are police records of complaints, I hear.  As for Giyoun’s darling Nimalka, the lady’s venom against Sri Lanka is well recorded, bending backwards to a) legitimate the LTTE and b) get the Government to stop the military offensive, not to mention a concerted vilification campaign all over the world.  

None of these three people would get more than a handful of votes in an election.  They are not under any threat.  No one needs to vilify them.  They do a good job of it themselves.  Most importantly, Saravanamuttu and Sunanda, both of who write regularly to newspapers (freely and without holding back punches) have never once responded to cogent critiques of positions taken and, more importantly, substantiated charges of wrong doing, including hanky-panky with finances.  Giyoun can google, I am sure. 

The entire panel was bombarded with charges of duplicity and double standards.  Farah and others were forced to say that they would not hesitate to take issue with human rights violations by the USA.  Just two hours before this event there was another on human rights violations in Afghanistan (the panel included a Human Rights Watch representative and a UN official) where the blatant and horrific crimes against humanity perpetrated by the USA were pussy-footed around.  None of the panelists were seen there.  On the following day there was a similar discussion on Iraq where the Amnesty International representative beat a hasty retreat, fleeing when questioned about double standards.  None of the panelists were seen at either event.  So much for across-the-board concern for human rights. 

Farah said that if Sri Lanka or anyone else brings a resolution against the USA, she would support it.  She said ‘the resolution has been brought by the USA, yes, but 53 countries get to vote’, in a sad exposing of rank ignorance about global political economy.  This lady still believes that the UN is about one member, one vote! 

Giyoun might learn and med her ways. Farah?  I doubt it.  She’s thick.  She knows what rubbish is (she admitted) but has no qualms about dishing it out as delicacies.  It all came out in Geneva.  Unintentionally. 

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Reflections on the map of my country

A few years ago my daughter, then just five, made a random observation: ‘langak venakal mama hithuwe ratak kiyanne toy ekak kiyala’ (until recently, I thought ‘a country’ was a toy).  This was in the year 2006. The month was October.  I wrote a piece for The Nation newspaper titled, ‘A country is a toy, but that’s alright’, in which I mentioned that I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she had been right all along.  

I am not going to re-write that article, but I must make a slight qualification to my observation: ‘our country may have been more of a toy then than it is now’.

I was thinking of this toy-business and the notion of ‘country’. I learnt the alphabet in Grade 1.  The first two letters I learnt were rayanna and tayanna (the symbols for the sounds ‘ra’ and ‘ta’).   That ‘rata’ has been the predominant concern for me since then in all things political.  Years later I learnt what ‘free education’ meant, and the responsibilities it confers on those who benefited from it. So too ‘free healthcare’.  The ‘rata’ that entered by mind when I was 5 years old took more concrete form later on, when I was shown the map of Sri Lanka.  I doubt if I had a notion of what rata meant when I was in Grade 1, even though I didn’t think it was a toy as my daughter did.  But when it came to the map of Sri Lanka, it was love at first sight.

Those were times when one couldn’t just pop into the boutique down the road and buy a ‘lankave sithiyama’ (map of Sri Lanka) or ‘loka sithiyama’ (world map).  We were required to draw these maps and bring them to class to be used during the geography period.  It was a matter of tracing the map from the bhoogolaya (Geography) text book.  Painstaking work for an 8 year old.  To me, what emerged was the most beautiful picture ever.  Sri Lanka.  I was fascinated by all the little thudu and kalapu (points and lagoons). I loved the division into climactic zones, the differentiation of the island according to elevation.  I loved tracing all the rivers and not just the Mahaweli, Kalu, Kelani and Walawe that are mentioned in folk song and poetry. 

Time passed.  We lost that map.  It got scarred. It got torn. Blood was splashed on it. Its rivers were turned into cemeteries. So too the thousands upon thousands of other water bodies, as were the road sides and canals.  We lost our map. We lost our innocence. We were weary of waiting for our leaders to gift us back our country, we were weary of waiting for a moment when our country was not treated as though it was a football and we were weary of people promising us they would deliver back our ‘rayanna tayanna rata’, of returning to us the beautiful map we traced as children, felt belonged to and felt we owned. . 

Time passed.  I was weary, but I didn’t give up hope. Like many others, I too fought for a motherland whose dimensions I admit may have not and may not be the same as those imagined by others.  To the geography that ‘nation’ denotes and is ‘capturable’ on paper was added the more intangible elements of history, heritage and culture, and the togetherness that resists description, the unity that translated (for example) into a collective national roar the day Sri Lanka won the World Cup in 1996. Added too were things like ‘citizenship’ in its many elaborations, structures of governance, and prerogatives of responsibility that rise from assertion of and demand for rights.  I fought, as others did.  My body and my mind suffered much violence on account of all this and I didn’t consider any of it ‘sacrifice’ but consequences of choices made. 

I go back often to the books I’ve read, the people I’ve associated, the things I’ve seen and heard, all of which boils down to one thing: the map of my country.  I know that it is more than something described by a line on a piece of paper, but I know too that all those other non-line/non-space, beyond-a-picture things would mean very little if we didn’t have an entity that could be described in black and white or if it wasn’t traceable by a 9 year old child onto a piece of paper which he/she could then hold up and say ‘rayanna tayanna rata’.

I remember the year 2005 and the kind of map we had.  I look back today and I realize yes, we are still a toy in a way but we are more of a country now than we were in 2005.  I remember that there are no bombs exploding in crowded places, that the smell of gunpowder is not attaching itself to torn pieces of school-uniform soaked in innocent-blood.  I remember that I don’t ask myself each morning ‘will I see them again?’ as my daughters worship me before they go to school and I kiss them and touch their heads saying ‘mage duwata budu saranai’ (May the blessings of the Buddha be yours, my daughter).

Yes, I love the map of my country. It is something that was robbed from me and I don’t want to dwell on the how and why of it all.  All I know is that after some thirty years, I got it back.  All I know is that I couldn’t say this in November 2005 but I can say it now.  All I know is that we had many leaders who were said to have been ‘great’, ‘capable’ etc etc., but that they did not give me this moment, they didn’t give me back the map that was such an important part of who I am from the time I was able to write ‘rayanna tayanna rata’ and trace the lankave sithiyama. 

Today I have my map.  I have a country.  Today I know that my children can build a world on this map.  I am thankful.

[based on an article written in January 2010]

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It is time to learn Chinese

The history of the world can be written along many lines.  Some go year by year, event after event.  We can talk about the evolution of species or class struggles, or review the unfolding of centuries in terms of species extinction, loss of forest cover and biodiversity depletion, the spread of disease, demographic tendencies, technological innovation etc.  We can also talk about empires: the Ottomans, the Umayyad Caliphate, Persia, Byzantine, the Hans, the (great) British, the Romans (holy and otherwise), the Russians and Mongols.  And then of course there is ‘America’, i.e. of the United States.   

It can be argued that world history has been shaped by epochal shifts in the relationship between capital and states or state formation.  Well, we are unarguably at a cusp now; a moment of ending and beginning.  And, as the proverb goes, the going light is shining its brightest. The flame has gone crazy and is burning whatever it can lick.  That’s the United States of America today, one might argue. 

Where is the world heading, though?  In a word, East.  To be more specific, China.  The number say it all.  China comprises 20% of the world’s population and that’s not counting the millions of Chinese living in other parts of the world.  It’s not about head count and country-size though.  Britain after all was a tiny island.  In these times it is about economic sway and of course about fire power. 

The US has lost it, the bucks, that is.  It has its guns, of course, but guns alone will not keep the home fires burning forever because others have guns too.  And the bucks. Most importantly you can’t really keep the fires you’ve kindled all over the world burning forever without help.  The helpers are also cash-strapped and are essentially client-states that can only depend, not defend. Add to this the fact that most of Europe will be made of countries where the majority are Muslims (within the next 20-30 years according to most extrapolations of demographic tendencies) and the rabid and fundamentalist anti-Islam thrust of US foreign policy, and you will have an EU that will not bite with the USA but would be more likely to bite back. 

China has the economic sweep and has played its strategic cards judiciously.  The striking feature about the Chinese is that its leadership doesn’t shout and brag; there is no chest-beating or frilling of achievement.  The coffers fill, nevertheless.  Today China is the Emperor of Bail Out.  Tomorrow, the way things are going, it will probably gather its interest. 

There’s a reason why the world embraced the English language.  It was the language of the conqueror, replacing French.  There’s a reason why English persisted being the Lingua Franca long after the sun set on the British Empire: the business of ‘empiring’ crossed the Atlantic to the United States of America, where too that language was spoken.  Now that the sway of the USA is diminishing, the world will naturally find that it has a new master and a new language to learn; China and Chinese, respectively; whether the world likes it or not.

It is not that the Chinese cannot or would not do business in English of course, but there is pride involved in ‘empiring’ and it doesn’t make sense to stick to the tongue of the defeated.  The Chinese will not do business in Sinhala or Tamil.  Time will reveal the true signature of the ‘Chinese Century’ if you will, what it takes and what it leaves behind, and how we as a small island in the Indian Ocean get located in the overall process of capital extraction, but just as much as the English language is a weapon we needed to pick up to engage the empire, it makes sense to learn Chinese to deal with the Chinese, regardless of the terms of that engagement. 

Let’s learn it.  We don’t stand to lose anything. 

['The Nation' Editorial, March 18, 2012]

  

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Reconciliation cannot be a single-hand clap

Two statements from two high profile US officials caught my eye this week.  The first was by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, commenting on the brutal massacre of 16 Afghans by a US soldier.  Describing it as ‘awful’ and ‘terrible’, expressing ‘shock and sadness’, Clinton claimed, ‘this is not who we are!’

Astounding!  It can’t be that Clinton has been blind to what US Foreign Policy has been and is.  She knows that this particular crime against humanity is just one of thousands. She knows that if there was ‘randomness’ here and if it was about an errant soldier, for each such random act by each erring private, there are a thousand policy-driven, deliberate and horrendous crimes against humanity. War crimes, all. 

Staff Sgt Robet Bales, the man who perpetrated the butchery, is a highly decorated American soldier. ISAF Deputy Commander, Lt. Gen. Adrian Bradshaw said, ‘I cannot explain the motivation behind such callous acts, but they were in no way part of authorized ISAF military activity’.  Bales is said to have ‘left Base without authorization’.  There’s a palpable downplaying and refuge-seeking in the doctrine of ‘errant soldiering’. 

The fact is that when US Drones ‘left base’ it was POLICY.  When they targetted ‘perceived terrorists’ and claimed that it was legitimate even when the said target was in the midst of a high-density civilian population, it was POLICY.  It was POLICY, also, when a million Iraqi children were MADE TO DIE courtesy sanctions on that country.  Torture in Guantanamo Bay is POLICY.  Two quotes will explain it all. 

Madeline Albright, one time US Secretary of State, commenting on US-led sanctions causing the death of so many children, said, ‘it was worth it’.  US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, commenting on the Afghan incident said, ‘War is hell, these things happen’.  

The truth is, for the USA, random acts of butchery and policy-driven crimes against humanity are both ‘part of the story’.  Obama famously said, after all, ‘we do what we have to do, let’s not talk about it’.  It is a criminal policy regime where perception is treated as fact and any amount of collateral is acceptable. 

The second quote comes from the US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, Robert O Blake.  He says, ‘unless Sri Lanka's government reconciles with minority Tamils and addresses allegations of war crimes it risks renewed conflict’.

This comes in the context of a US sponsored resolution in the UN Human Rights Council clearly seeking to open the door for direct interference in Sri Lanka by the USA, in complete violation of the spirit and regulations of that assembly.  It also coincided with a ‘new’ video released by Channel 4 on Sri Lanka. 

The Channel 4 ‘new’ footage is actually a re-hash of its earlier ‘production’ and mostly made up of material that has been in the public domain for several years, including in the Defence Ministry website.  Comment would be a waste of words at this point.   

Reconciliation, though, is our business.  Suggestions are welcome of course, but a fist in the pie usually takes away all and leaves just the crumbs.  Secondly, reconciliation is not a single-hand clap.  Even if one were to be out-of-mind democratic about it, then there are at least two parties here.  The LTTE committed horrendous crimes against humanity and its still-alive-proxies (TNA, GTF, BTF and people like Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu who is dining with the cassocked terrorist Fr (sic) Emmannuel in Geneva and getting character certificates to boot) know what the LTTE did.  All communities suffered at the hands of the LTTE.  If Eelam Tamils need ‘closure’ then other do too.  If you want accountability, it cannot be part accountability.  If you want to investigate, you cannot investigate just one part of the story. 

The evidence about ‘policy-led’ excesses by the Government forces makes a pretty thin portfolio.  Nothing like Obama and Clinton watching (live) the murder of an unarmed Osama bin Laden along with the point-blank shooting of a child in Pakistan where ‘chain of command’ is established beyond a shadow of doubt. 

Reconciliation is our business, let me reiterate.  The LLRC gives the road map and action has been taken immediately, via the AG’s Department and the Courts of Inquiry appointed by the Army and Navy.  How about something from the TNA, now?  They could submit a dossier of LTTE atrocities and a sober apology on account of complicity, perhaps.  

The ‘this side’ hand has shown far more willingness to clap, but the TNA hand is hidden.  You don’t get reconciliation that way, Mr. Blake.  All atrocities need to be investigated fully and the perpetrators brought to book.  Suresh Premachandra, for example, was in charge of a military arm of a militant group that recruited 2500 children and caused 700 of them to be murdered in cold blood by the LTTE, from whom R. Sampanthan took his orders (willingly and happily). 

There may very well be a renewal of conflict.  Everyone will suffer, the Tamils in the North and East the most.  It won’t even pinch the pro-Eelam sections of Tamils in other countries.  It will hurt only Sri Lankans.  And that, Bob, would not be because of anything this government does or does not do, because this government for all its faults has done a lot more than its predecessors to get this country back on track.  The TNA is not helping.  You are not, either.  It won’t cost you sleep, we know.  We know that sleep-loss is not possible for those who think nothing of perpetrating crimes against humanity, those war-is-war people. 

Reconciliation is our business.  It involves honesty.  By all parties.  The country is waiting on the TNA to get out of its LTTE shell.  Sampanthan and Sumanthiran are putting together a show. It is called, ironically, ‘no show’.  You don’t get reconciliation that way.  

[First published in The Nation, March 18, 2012]

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