A lullaby for Alan Keenan

Alan Keenan, Sri Lanka Project Director at the International Crisis Group, is doing his job.  Good on him.  The man has penned some thoughts: ‘Sri Lanka: time for action, not action plans’.  It’s all about the Sri Lankan Government not doing what Keenan thinks it ought to do. 

This is not the first time that I've written about the man.  A year ago I referred to him in an article titled 'Towards a post-complicit moment for those in pre-slumber slumber' as part of a series on self-appointed Grand Abbots on All and Sundry.

True to form, Keenan talks about ‘some 40,000 civilian deaths’ that are not being ‘fairly examined’.  Where that number came up from, goodness only knows.  But that’s not surprising.  The likes of Keenan have been throwing around all kinds of figures without a shred of substantiation.  And, if you really dig deep (you won’t have to because that’s how shallow these people are), you’ll find that the ‘primary sources’ are utterly unreliable, and worse, traceable to LTTE operatives or persons who trotted out information at gunpoint.   

Now just as legality and officialdom was conferred on the infamous Darusman panel by continuous reference to it as the ‘UN Panel’, Keenan has twisted ‘recommendation’ (from the UNHRC) as ‘directive’.  It was not a binding document and Keenan knows this.  And yet, he is horrified that the Government has rejected (in his mind) the commission’s ‘central finding’ (again, in his mind, for there was no ‘finding’ as such): ‘the need to initiate independent investigations. 

Keenan in essence has rubbished Sri Lankan processes and implied that ‘independence’ has to be ‘foreign’.  First we have claims made by terrorists and now we have this ill-informed and sophomoric commentator making grand statement of how things should be done based on an erroneous start-point. Keenan talks about the ‘well-known Channel 4 video’ but says nothing about the equally well known fact that Channel 4 in that video demonstrates abysmal media ethics and laughable media skills.  They have deliberately lipsticked and eye-shadowed terrorists and their backers as chest-beating, tear-popping innocents.  Keenan feigns ignorance.  

He knows that the ‘UN (sic) panel of experts’ gave a report that was a joke in terms of information gathering and analysis, not to mention horrors such as mis-naming the Secretary of Defence.  And yet, this Mr. I-know-Sri-Lanka-better-than-anyone actually takes the report seriously! 

Then he moves on to ‘talks’.  He blames the Government for not talking with the Tamil National Alliance.  He doesn’t mention that the TNA has played spoilsport from Day One.  He gives the TNA a ‘moderate’ tag.  Moderate as opposed to, Mr Keenan?  The LTTE?  But you’ve treated the word of the LTTE as Gospel Truth and although that’s not ‘moderate’ statement it is nevertheless holy, ain’t it?  For him the TNA is ‘pro-engagement’.  Well, the TNA is refusing to submit names to the Parliamentary Select Committee.  Makes sense.  Being pro-LTTE it is natural for Keenan to evolve into backing the reduced-circumstances articulator of LTTE Word.

Keenan then speaks on behalf of Sri Lankans. He knows better than us what we want.  He knows what we ‘need’.  Come off it, Mr. Colonial Residue, we don’t need you to make us inhabit your version of our reality.  We’ll handle our issues, thank you very much!  And yes, we do have serious institutional flaws and the constitutional flaws call for much overhaul.  You are not helping, because when people who have conditioned their mind to swallow anything sent their way by pro-LTTE operatives start making prescriptions, the medicine list comes with a caution ‘Poison’.  Helps keep systems intact and makes it possible for system-beneficiaries to rubbish both prescriber and prescription.  Doesn’t help the citizen.  That’s why we say ‘It’s ok if you don’t help, just don’t mess things up at this end!’

Keenan is out of order, but we should not be surprised.  The International Crisis Group has been undressed quite comprehensively (see David Cronin’s ‘International Crisis Group: craving approval from blood-soaked elite’).  A year ago I did a bit of undressing myself (‘Let’s get to know the International Crisis Group’).

This busybody is pretending to sleep.  He therefore needs to sleep for real.  That way he might wake up.  I am not betting on it!   

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Towards a post-complicit moment for those in pre-sleep slumber*

The Sri Lanka Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (SLACLALS) titled their annual conference ‘21^st Century Postcolonial: Issues and challenges in literature and languages’.   Professor Ashley Halpe, delivering the keynote address at the annual gathering of deliberated on the validity of the term ‘post-colonial’. 

This took my mind to a previous such conference where a friend observed that there was never a commonwealth, only a common thief and that talking about it won’t get our loot back.  I ran into him this year too, and he said ‘there never was a commonwealth, there’s only a common welt’.  He related a story about walking into the British Museum and bumping into someone he thought was from Africa who had asked him where he was going. My friend had responded, ‘I am going to take back some of the loot they robbed’.  The man had said it wouldn’t work: ‘they will just rob it back all over again!’ He had added, ‘rob something they can’t rob back!’  My friend had responded, ‘such as?’  The man had said ‘Jesus Christ!’ 

[I am not sure if he meant the blond-haired, blue-eyed appropriate of the bronze-coloured  individual mentioned in the Bible.  I do know that the looters robbed and slaughtered using convenient misquotes from the Bible to justify it all, in accordance with the interpretive authority that sanitized and helped vanquish doubt and remorse; i.e. from the killers, Buddhist and Hindu temple-destroyers, book-burners, rapists and looters.  I doubt if those who did receive Jesus were offered the real version, although some, theoretically speaking, may have outwitted the peddlers of ecclesiastical counterfeit.]

Let me continue, post-parenthetically.

I responded with my common-thief, common-welt, commonwealth story, about how Juliet Coombe had protested against the decision of that museum to do away with free entry for students.  She admitted that the building held loot from other countries such as Sri Lanka, but didn’t tell the audience (who were attending a book launch on the outside, literally and metaphorically, of the Galle Literary Festival earlier this year) if she had demanded that the loot be handed back.  ‘White men don’t kill,’ was the title of an article I wrote recently about the mis-naming or non-naming of Anders Behring Breivik as the terrorist he is (ref the recent attacks in Oslo).  ‘White men don’t rob either,’ my friend observed, in different words.

Liyanage Amarakeerthi, speaking on what he called a postcolonial moment in the modern Sinhala short story, suggested in passing that the ‘Centre’ of colonial is no longer clear.  True, the headquarters of mind-control, resource extraction, subjugation etc. etc. is now all over the place and strangely peopled, even though, as I pointed out, it can be called ‘Rupert Murdoch’ too. 

I don’t know about literature.  Don’t know about political literature that academics talk about.  Common-thief makes sense and common-welt too.  I don’t know about post-isms.  All I know is that I would like some people to wake up, post-sleep. 

I am talking about people pretending to sleep and pretending to sleepwalk.  I am thinking of a man called Alan Keenan, supposedly a senior ‘analyst’ for the ‘International Crisis Group’, who has deliberately lied when referring to the document released by the Ministry of Defence (MoD), Sri Lanka, on the humanitarian operation to liberate the country from the terrorist menace.  Keenan says that the MoD claims that there was absolutely no use of heavy artillery or aerial bombardment, when in fact the claim has been that once all key LTTE heavy weapons were taken out of the equation and no-fire zones demarcated, the military was instructed not to use such weaponry and tactics.  The reason was simple.  It was necessary to save the vast majority of the close to three hundred thousand people that the LTTE had taken hostage.  Keenan needs to sleep for until he does no one will be able to wake him up.  I would like him post-slept, so to speak.

I am thinking also of Elaine Pearson, Deputy Asia Director, Human Rights Watch (HRW) who on June 30, 2011, wrote that the Channel 4 film ‘Killing Fields of Sri Lanka’ adds weight to what she erroneously calls a ‘UN Report’ (i.e. the document submitted by a panel of highly discredited, intellectually dishonest and politically compromised people appointed by the UN Secretary General to advise him about Sri Lanka) and ‘conclusions’  therein that 40,000 civilians were killed in the final stages of the war.  The Channel 4 film and claims therein have been effectively countered by a recently released documentary titled ‘Lies Agreed Upon’.  She needs to sleep, so she can wake up.  I want her post-slept too.

Then there’s a man called Charles Haviland, working for the BBC, whining about a former LTTE cadre complaining that he is finding it difficult to find a job in post-LTTE Sri Lanka, post-rehabilitation.  I hope this person does find a job soon, but doesn’t Haviland have a sense of proportion?  Would he write heart-rending pieces about a rehabilitated Al Qaeda operative finding it hard to get a job, I wonder? Sorry, I forgot, Al Qaeda operatives are not rehabilitated and integrated into society, they are either summarily executed or else subjected to endless torture.  Anyway, Haviland might do well to take a nap, a real one.  I want him post-slept.

Professor Halpe, ended his presentation with a poignant reference to Mozart’s ‘Requiem’.  I didn’t quite catch the entirety of his comment, but I distinctly heard him mention the term ‘liberation from our complicities’. 

We know that those who pretend to sleep cannot be woken up.  They are essentially comfy in their complicities.  Now were they fall asleep by accident, then there is possibility of lie-rupture; a wake-up to a post-complicit reality, if you will. 

*See also, 'HRW and Brad Adams need to get some sleep': http://malindawords.blogspot.com/2011/08/hrw-and-brad-adams-need-to-get-some.html 

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