Who 'owns' the R2P (Responsibility to Protect) Syria?

There’s saber-rattling in Washington.  There’s saber-rattling in Moscow.  Tit-for-tat talk.  Rattle-for-rattle.  Neither the USA nor Russia is under attack.  Neither country can claim that there is a threat to its security.  It's all about a country that is located almost 11,000km from the USA and about 5,500km from Russia.  Syria.

It all followed a chemical attack which Washington blamed on the Syrian President  Bashar al-Assad and then proceeded to launch some 60 Tomahawk missiles on the al Shayrat airbase.  US Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson warned that Russia was at risk of becoming irrelevant in the Middle East if it continued to support Assad.  

Damascus has denied US allegations, noting that the targeted area may have been hosting chemical weapons stockpiles belonging to Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) or Al-Nusra Front jihadists.  Moscow, in a wry dismissal, has alluded to the ‘events of 2003’ when the US representative (Colin Powell) insisted at the UN that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.   

Russian President Vladimir Putin observed that ‘the military campaign was subsequently launched in Iraq and it ended with the devastation of the country, the growth of the terrorist threat and the appearance of Islamic State [IS, formerly ISIS] on the world stage.’

They can laugh about it and they will

Just because the USA lied in 2003 does not mean that it will always lie and has done so in this instance.  On the other hand, that 2003 lie has given cause for any allegation to be properly investigated before any action is taken.  Russia in fact has called for such an investigation.  

Bolivian Ambassador to the UN, Sacha Llorenti lambasted the USA for its unilateral response, pointing out that the principle of multilateralism has been violated. He added that following the 2003 lie, the UN had set up modalities for dealing with such situations which included in the first instance independent and comprehensive investigations.  

But Washington does not care.  Washington rattles sabers.  Washington has promised to repeat military action in response to any possible new chemical weapon attacks.  Moscow has not blinked.  Russia (along with Iran) has responded likewise, telling the US to expect ‘response with force’ if ‘red lines are crossed in Syria’. 

There are no diplomatic niceties in the joint communique issued by the two countries: ‘What America waged in an aggression on Syria is a crossing of red lines. From now on we will respond with force to any aggressor or any breach of red lines from whoever it is and America knows our ability to respond well.’

It is hard to argue with Llorenti when he asserts that ‘the United States believe that they are investigators, they are attorneys, judges and they are the executioners. That's not what international law is about.’   The problem is that when any law is violated with impunity, that law ceases to be effective.  The problem with Llorenti’s argument is that it makes sense only if the UN makes sense (when it comes to multilateralism).  What we have is a monumental hypocrisy, a lie which makes it laughable when a liar is called out.  

If the UN cannot rein in the rogue state that is the United States of America, then we have to accept that Washington’s do-as-we-please ways in fact invite do-as-we-please from Russia, Iran or whoever.  It won’t take too long before we get to that terrible point where the question ‘who started it all?’ ceases to matter.  

Well, what’s new?  Isn’t this what ‘multilateralism’ has always been about?  Huff, puff, hot air and not much else? Lovely words that get lost in the misery?  Well, should we then shrug shoulders, raise and then lower eyebrows and wait for the next great example of hypocrisy?  

Perhaps we should use it to call to question certain groups and certain assumptions.  The International Crisis Group, for instance, has issued a statement following the US attack.  It is ‘an opportunity’ (yes, those words!) they say.  An opportunity to jumpstart diplomatic efforts, they say.  No mention of the legality of that attack.  Nothing on investigations.  The ICG takes the US narrative as valid.  

‘If regime chemical attacks were to continue (perhaps employing chlorine instead of the much deadlier nerve agent sarin), the U.S. might find itself compelled to launch additional, more significant strikes,’ ICG states.  Now this is certainly a cute license to trigger-happy Donald Trump.

What needs to be understood is that while these games are being played with Trump and Putin trying to out-stare one another and while outfits like the ICG tosses out character certificates to preferred aggressors, there are people who cannot stare, cannot blink and in fact are dead.  

This forces us to ask, ‘what happened to all those who were waving a flag called Responsibility to Protect?’  Is it about protecting Syrians from Assad?  How about the risks that Syrians face at the hands of the ISIS and a global thug wearing a Good Samaritan name-tag?

But wait, why should we even bother about these rag-tag outfits who are operating as approvers for the actions of preferred parties who don’t do too much apart from constructing legitimacy for aggression against the chosen enemies (of their chosen buddies), when the United Nations itself does just that when it is divested of the somber architecture and established procedures for the conduct of discussions?  

The UN’s impotency has been revealed once again. It is not a forum that can do anything of significance to prevent wars.  It can only pick on weaker nations that have for one reason or another fallen out of favor of the favored member states.  

Just imagine if Bolivia had taken the kind of initiative that the USA took in Syria.  The UN Security Council would not be discussing the legality of the particular action.  We won’t hear impassioned speeches of past errors, the reiteration of established procedures, calls for investigations and so on.  They would be discussing sanctions.  That’s if they didn’t authorize the USA to bomb the Bolivian capital.  

It’s all happening in Syria, folks.  For now, maybe we can call it ‘a show’ and watch from the sidelines.  After all Syria is more than 5000km from Sri Lanka.  But what if Sri Lanka became tomorrow’s Syria?   Sacha Llorenti may lash out at the USA at a hastily arranged emergency meeting of the UN Security Council.  The ICG would bend over backwards, touch its metaphorical heels and salute the USA for ‘opportunities produced’.   Trump and Putin would indulge in a game of who will blink first.  There would be Sri Lankans who won’t be watching though.  They won’t be able to blink.  They’d be dead. 

Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer.  Email: malindasenevi@gmail.com.  Twitter: malindasene.

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It's still raining in Afghanistan (six years later)

This article was first published in August 2010 in the 'Daily News'.  It was titled "Have you seen the rain in Afghanistan?"  It's still raining in Afghanistan.  It's raining in other places too.  Maybe it's raining so much and it has rained so much that some people just don't want to acknowledge it is raining.  But some cannot escape the rain.  Like the people of Afghanistan. 

 

Not this kind of rain, no.

Early this morning, i.e. around 4 am, there was a loud noise outside my.  ‘Rain,’ I told myself with a smile, even though I was a fair distance from Bubbly Land.  It did rain. For half a second. It was almost like some friendly cloud had decided to relieve itself just there. A loud noise.  Half a second’s worth of rain.  That was it.  That’s all the rain in Kottawa that I can talk of this morning (August 6, 2010).

I know there are floods in Pakistan and you might wonder if I got the country name in the title wrong. No, I did not.  It is raining in Afghanistan, I was told by a man who died of a heart attack in 1956, at the age of 59.  Bertold Brecht was his name.   

It was a poem, ‘When evil-doing comes like falling rain’.  It’s about what happens when people get killed.  At first there is a cry of horror, Brecht observed.  When a hundred gets butchered, there is still outrage.  And then a thousand get slaughtered and there no end to the butchery.  What happens?

‘…a blanket of silence spreads.

When evil-doing comes like falling rain,

nobody calls out

‘stop!’

When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible.

When sufferings become unendurable

the cries are no longer heard.

The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.’

A few days ago a NATO air strike killed at least 12 Afghan civilians, hours after the US commander urged his forces to avoid hurting non-combatants.  General David Petraeus is reported to have said ‘Every afghan civilian death diminishes (their) cause’.  I don’t know where they think they began, but we are talking about 3.5 million unnecessary deaths related to the invasion of Afghanistan.  That’s a lot of diminishing.  A lot of silence. A lot of rain. 

There is so much rain and not just in Afghanistan.  There is silence about all this in the holiest temples such as the one where a High Priest called Ban Ki-moon exorcises evil spirits by appointing advisory committees.  There is silence in a place called London.  Silence in a place called the International Crisis Group. 

There are some cries of horror I hear at the other end of the world. Someone is calling for butchery.  The knife is to be thrust, if ‘all goes well’, into the breast of a man called Bradley Manning. Representative Mike Rogers of the USA wants Manning electrocuted for allegedly (!) leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks.  To stay with Brecht-speak, that would be Manning being accused of not being silent about that which has caused silence to descend on Afghanistan like the summer rain.  This same Rogers had voted the previous week for funds which according to a congressional report ends up funding weapons and explosives used by the ‘enemy’ that US forces are supposed to be fighting in Afghanistan, the Taliban.

Speaking about WikiLeaks, Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said at a news conference last week that Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks ‘might already have on his hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family’.

So much irony!

So much blood. So much of butchery.  The dead in Afghanistan looked at me in silence. There was a message there: be silent for that is the loudest shout against butchery. 

It is raining in Afghanistan.  It is not a half-second cloud-burst. It is pure Brechtian rain. 

Let me be silent now.   

Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer who can be reached at malinsene@gmail.com

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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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Let’s get to know the International Crisis Group*

A few weeks ago the British Parliament is reported to have debated the issue of alleged war crimes in Sri Lanka.  Any comment on the various statements made and the charges leveled against Sri Lanka need to be prefaced by things that came without saying and therefore go without saying but should not be allowed to go away without saying.

Number 1. LOOT.  Did the British document?  Who has the inventory?  And total theft been calculated?  When will it be returned.

Number 2. DOUBLE STANDARDS. Have the British finished having a conversation with themselves and all relevant ‘others’ about all crimes against humanity (alleged, proven etc) that their ancestors and they themselves have perpetrated. ‘Are Perpetrating,’ I should say, in the present continuous, because Iraq and Afghanistan are yet to become ‘past tense’ and Gaza is a present and continuous tragedy of blood-letter by the Israelis, backed to the hilt by Obama and Elizabeth.

Number 3. SLOTH. When people don’t do their homework they get shown up.  A lot of people who had nasty thing to say about Sri Lanka have been guilty of such howlers that after being taken to the cleaners a couple of times they go silent.  I have no doubt that the members of the British Parliament who spoke that day are good-hearted human beings.  I do fault them for their double-standards, their clearly apparent myopia and absolute ignorance of that lovely English adage, ‘charity begins at home’, but that can all be put down to general ignorance stemming from being a colonial power for too many centuries.  This, however, this issue of giving unwarranted value to allegation (given slim supporting evidence and notoriety of source) and slipping quickly from allegation to fact to demand for censure smacks of a kind of vulgarity that we have been told has no place in the best of British parliamentary tradition. 

The MPs who have tripped over their egos and hearts and whatever else there is to trip over in the mad rush to feel self-righteous hunger need to be undressed but this is not the moment or the place.  What struck me is that all allegations, all good-guy posturing and other utterly nauseating articulations of the best of British arrogance is based on a report issued by the International Crisis Group (ICG).

Some weeks ago, after I wrote a piece about the ICG, I got an email from a person called Andrew Stroehlein, who chided me for not having visited the ICG website before writing. Andrew claimed that the ICG has in fact issued lots of ‘statements, comments and podcasts’ on recent events and implied that it was not singling out Sri Lanka for censure.  I apologized for not having visited the website. I pointed out that it was Chris Patten who had been shooting his mouth and that I hadn’t seen any statement from him regarding Isreali action on Gaza, for instance (which I had referred to in my article). 

I also sought Andrew’s help: ‘would appreciate if you can send me official releases pertaining to demands for investigations into us/uk actions in iraq, afghanistan and pakistan and more specifically, allegations of systemic torture (eg. guantanamo bay, abu ghraib)’.

He ignored my request.  He said, instead, ‘I am sure in quoting from this email exchange you will include your admission that you did not look at the organisation's website before criticising the organisation's public positions.’ 

I’ve done my part now.   He is yet to give me links to the ICG’s ‘work’ on the places and events I referred to.  I did visit the ICG website and perused its pages on Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, i.e. countries where US/UK action has resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary civilian deaths including the death of children due to sanctions, deliberate ‘absenting’ of drugs and medical facilities etc., not to mention internally displaced people numbering over half a million and living in conditions that would make the plight of Sri Lanka’s IDPs look quite ‘first-wordly’.  The overall thrust is very clear.  The ICG is quite comfy with what the USA/US rogue states are perpetrating in these territories and is at best quibbling about modalities on marginal matters and even then placing the blame squarely on ‘rebels’ for creating conditions warranting military action. A predictable European Conquistador narrative, I felt. 

The entire website is the stuff made for a phd thesis on colonialist posturing and relevant ranting.  Andrew Stroehlein and others at ICG need to be educated about the politics of absenting.  A full review of the website will be sent to Andrew and I hope he will post it somewhere in the interest of saluting the values and principles that the ICG was ostensibly set up to champion.

For now, though, I choose to write about the background, the who’s who, the what-have-they-done etc., and I am referring to the big names in the ICG. Just so that our readers will get a good sense of where these people are coming from and where they want to take us.  For the record, though, let me first get this qualifier out of the way: the ICG report is based on ‘evidence’ submitted not by independent witnesses but parties rabidly against the Government of Sri Lanka, parties that are openly pro-LTTE and individuals whose integrity has been severely compromised on account of embezzlement, theft and directly and/or indirectly supporting terrorism.  The ICG is a half-way source and the British MPs should have dug deeper. They didn’t, possibly because they are ignorant or else in cahoots with the bunch of shady characters that make up the ICG’s top brass.

My friend Vinod Moonesinghe did what the Sri Lanka Government ought to have done a long time ago.  It is something that I regret I didn’t do.  Sadly, Vinod’s letter was not picked up by any newspaper.

Vinod gives us the names.

‘The ICG was founded in 1995 by Ambassador Morton I Abramowitz and ex-Congressman Stephen J Solarz, among others. Helping to draw up the original proposal was Abramowitz’ special assistant Lynne A Davidson. The ICG’s Co-Chairs are former European Commissioner Christopher Patten and former US diplomat Thomas R Pickering. Its Board of trustees includes Abramowitz, Solarz, former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, former US diplomat Kenneth Adelman, former US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, former Israeli Foreign Minister and Minister of Internal Security Shlomo Ben-Ami, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander – Europe (SACEUR) General Wesley Clark, former Foreign Minister of Australia Gareth Evans, former president of PolandAleksander Kwaśniewski and former Venezuelan minister Moisés Naím. It’s Senior Advisers (former Board members) include former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and Israeli President Shimon Peres.’

Who are these people?  Vinod lays it out.  From now, it’s his voice. I concur and take full responsibility.

Morton I Abramowitz and Zbigniew Brzezinski are part of a network of shadowy right-wing organisations and advocacy groups. Both of them belonged to the now-defunct American Committee for Peace in Chechnya, another member of which was Kenneth Adelman, who had been Assistant to US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld in the 1970s, at precisely the time in which the CIA’s George W Bush (later President) was building up the BCCI-narco-finance network.

Bush’s son President George W Bush later employed Adelman in the Defence Policy Board, where he was a strong advocate of the illegal invasion of Iraq. He famously claimed in the Washington Post in 2002 that the invasion would be a ‘Cakewalk’. He has also advocated the pre-emptive invasion of both Iran and Saudi Arabia and supported the notorious 2002 ‘open letter’ to President Bush drawn up by the shadowy Project for the New American Century (PNAC), urging him to attack Iraq and the Palestinians.

Another supporter of the PNAC was a signatory to its 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton, demanding an invasion of Iraq without UN sanction, Richard Armitage. During his stint with the US Navy special operations, he was allegedly involved in the PHOENIX programme of murdering opponents of the USA in Vietnam.

As Assistant Secretary of Defence for International Security Affairs in 1983-89, Armitage was implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal, involving the use of drug money to supply weapons to the Afghan terrorists as well as to the Contra terrorists in Nicaragua. He has been on the board of CACI, a defence contractor implicated in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.

Another member of the defunct American Committee for Peace in Chechnya was ex-congressman Stephen J Solarz. In 1998, as a member of the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf, Solarz called in an open letter to President Bill Clinton, for the US armed forces to intervene illegally in Iraq.  Co-signatories of the document, which later formed the basis for PNAC policy, included Richard Armitage and Fred Ikle.

Abramowitz, Armitage and Solarz were also signatories to the PNAC Letter to President Bill Clinton on 11 September 1998, in which he was called upon to overthrow Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic and establish ‘a new political status for Kosovo’.  The USA had covertly been supporting the al-Qaeda linked narco-terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) since at least early 1998, and possibly earlier.

ICG Co-Chair Thomas R Pickering, while Under-secretary of State for Political Affairs, championed the US position of interference in Yugoslavia with aid for the KLA – even granted that the legal position on this was somewhat shaky. He was also obliquely involved in the Iran-Contra scandal while Ambassador to El Salvador.

Yet another ICG member involved in the Kosovo adventure was General Wesley Clark. He attended the Rambouillet talks, at which the US tried to force Kosovo secession on the Yugoslavs (with Abramowitz acting as adviser to the terrorist delegation). He threatened to bomb Yugoslavia, which he proceeded to do during the undeclared war on Yugoslavia, in his capacity as SACEUR; at the start of the campaign he threatened “We're going to systematically and progressively attack, disrupt, degrade, devastate and ultimately, unless President Milosevic complies” with US demands.  The British commander General Sir Mike Jackson reportedly told Clark "I'm not going to start the Third World War for you".

The bombing of Yugoslavia saw little damage to the Yugoslav armed forces, but considerable ‘collateral damage’, as the ‘Shock and Awe’ tactics which were to be used against Baghdad were tried out against the Serbian population. Among what Clark referred to as ‘mistakes’ were the bombing of the Chinese Embassy and a deliberate attack on a civilian train by a US Air Force F-15, which Clark tried unsuccessfully to cover up.

Board member Lord Chris Patten was part of the Thatcher regime which enabled the training by the SAS of Afghan terrorists. He was also minister in charge of Thatcher’s attempt to dis-enfranchise the British public through the notorious poll tax scheme. He referred to people taking part in the popular anti-poll tax demonstrations as ‘rent-a-crowd outsiders’.

Board member Gareth Evans was Foreign Minister of Australia and the foremost apologist for the Indonesian army’s reign of terror in East Timor, during which 200,000 people (a third of the population) were killed.

The commission investigating the October 2000 riots in which Israeli police killed 13 Arabs, held Shlomo Ben-Ami, the then Minister of Internal Security responsible for the behaviour of security forces, which came under his purview.

Malcolm Fraser, as Minister of the Army and later as Minister of Defence of Australia in the 1960s, oversaw the implementation of conscription for the Australian armed forces’ participation in the American war of aggression against Vietnam. As Prime Minister, he was the first to recognise the annexation by the fascist Indonesian regime of East Timor and to overlook war crimes committed by the Indonesian forces. His government gave massive aid to the Indonesian military at this time.

The chief claim to fame of Aleksander Kwaśniewski, a former president of Poland, is that he managed to get Polish forces embroiled in the illegal occupation of Iraq against the opposition of 70% of Poles.

Moisés Naím, a former Venezuelan minister, is a director of the National Endowment for Democracy NED), a US Government-funded organisation. Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing the NED, declared in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." The NED has been involved in undermining democratic elections in Albania, Bulgaria, Mongolia, Nicaragua and Venzuela; funded the ton-ton-macoute opposition to President Aristide in Haiti; and funded the Cuban-American National Foundation, which financed the terrorist Luis Posada Carriles. Its latest exploit has been backing the anti-democratic coup in Honduras.

Shimon Peres was part of the High Command of the Zionist Haganah terrorist organisation during its implementation of Plan Daleth (the ethnic cleansing of Palestine) in 1947-48. As Director General of the Defence Ministry he began Israel’s nuclear weapons programme and organised the tripartite mediation with Britain and France that led to the Suez Invasion. Peres was an early supporter of Israeli settlements in the West Bank after the 1967 war. He has criticised the International Court of Justice for ruling that the building of the Apartheid Wall in the West Bank is illegal. As Prime Minister, he was responsible for the massacre of civilians seeking refuge during the Israeli shelling of the UN compound at Qana in Lebanon in 1996. Incidentally, Peres also began the Israeli alliance with the apartheid state of South Africa, even offering to sell the latter nuclear warhead in 1975.

The ICG has bucks.  There are buck-givers. Here are some:

Sasakawa Peace Foundation - founded by self-proclaimed fascist and power-broker Ryoichi Sasakawa, who developed a private army to exploit Japanese-occupied Manchuria and Mongolia and who, after the Second World War, obtained political control and amassed one of the biggest fortunes of the world with the support of criminal organisations, the Yakuzas. 

BHP Billiton - the largest mining company in the world. It was responsible for the forcible removal of communities in La Guajira, Colombia to make way for the Cerrejon Coal mine, the biggest export strip-mine in the world.

Merck Foundation – which gets its wealth from the Merck Pharmaceuticals company, the drug company involved in the Vioxx controversy, in which it was alleged the company had a list of doctors critical of Vioxx to be "neutralised" or "discredited", that it intimidated researchers and impinged of academic freedom.

This is not a case, then, of pot calling kettle black.  We are talking about high-profile operators, a gang in fact of pretty foul-smelling creatures with lots of blood on their hands.

The name says it all. “CRISIS” is the key word.  It is a crisis-making outfit.  It is an organization that needs and thrives on crisis.  The top brass owe whatever creature comforts they have secured to a lot of crises. 

*This article was first published in the Sunday Island in July 2010.
 

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