I
shall give Yasmin Sooka the benefit of the doubt. I’ll get to that
presently. The back story is as follows: Yasmin Sooka and the outfit she leads, International Truth and Justice Project — Sri Lanka (ITJP-SL),
through counsel, has apologized to Brigadier Ravindra Dias for
wrongfully using his photograph in a missive targeting the incumbent
Director of the State Intelligence Service of Sri Lanka, Major General
Suresh Salley. Salley is just the latest of senior military officers
targeted by Sooka and the ITJP-SL in a long-standing campaign (project?)
of vilifying high ranking officers, typically at the point of
appointment to important posts or promotion.
Was Sooka and the
ITJP-SL careless in this instance or was the error symptomatic of a
deep-seated affliction marked by incompetence amplified by ignorance and
arrogance?
Sooka was first heard of in Sri Lanka only after
she was appointed by then UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon to a
three-person ‘panel of experts’ to advise him on accountability issues
in Sri Lanka. The panel set up in June 2010 was headed by Marzuki
Darusman. The other member of the panel was Steven R. Ratner.
I
want to believe that Sooka walked into Sri Lanka open-minded. It is hard
to believe of course. We, however, live in a world where scientists get
research-funding to manufacture ‘findings’ that are useful to the
funders. It is hard to believe because Sooka, not too long after the
report manufactured by the panel was found to be full of holes, had a
career-boost of sorts. She co-authored a book titled ‘The unfinished
war: torture and sexual violence in Sri Lanka: 2009-2014.’ Further
padding advocacy credentials, she authored a report titled ‘Five Years
On: The White Flag Incident 2009-2014,’ with the International Truth and
Justice Project, Sri Lanka.
Project. That’s a keyword here. They
come with proposals, objectives (stated and, as history has amply
shown, unstated or disguised), targets, time-frames, beneficiaries and
typically include articles for extension through reinvention. Truth is
another keyword. Justice too. She’s now a human rights troubleshooter
(!) And ITJP-SL is the armored vehicle she rides to battle in. Full of
conviction, let’s assume.
Perhaps Sooka did arrive with an open
mind. Maybe she was not a believer of lies agreed upon by certain people
who were in disbelief that terrorism in Sri Lanka had indeed been
defeated and therefore that fact had to be obtained at unbelievable
costs.
Sooka may have stepped in as an absolute innocent.
However, there’s a system in place in countries like Sri Lanka where
people like her are programmed to believe a preferred narrative. In this
case the then Government of Sri Lanka refused to engage with the
Darusman Panel for justifiable reasons of course. It’s not the case that
had the government decided to engage the outcome would have been any
different, again for programmatic reasons, let’s say.
What
happens can be nutshelled as follows: a) a fully convinced, half-way
convinced or absolutely ignorant or open-minded person gets off the
plane, b) he/she doesn’t speak Sinhala or Tamil and as such is
‘programmed’ to receive narratives articulated in English, often the
only language spoken by sections of society ideologically and
politically aligned with the political West and against
nationalism/nationalists, d) language is an easily identified common
ground, e) unknowns become acquaintances and acquaintances become
friends, not on account of the matter at hand but commonalities, f) that
no one is unbiased is forgotten, the word of ‘friends’ are privileged,
g) alternative narratives are either unheard or disregarded as being
fictitious, and h) conclusions already programmed and labeled ‘the
truth, the absolute truth and nothing but the truth’ are drawn.
In
walks Sooka. Straight into a tunnel. What does she see but what she
cannot but see! If she was open-minded, now she’s convinced by sheer
fact and logic that hypothesis is affirmed. She was structurally and
circumstantially bound to do so. She may not have been programmed to
receive, but receive she did.
Only, the story-tellers are human
and as such frail. They err. They slip. They exaggerate, they slip
stuff under the carpet or into foot note in the tiniest fonts available
if they can’t erase it altogether. They are blinded by the preferred
narratives and these they pad with material provided by unreliable
sources, the unreliability being, again, something they are too blind to
notice.
Things pop up and pop out, however. ‘Disappeared’
persons turn up. It is found that asylum-seekers are made-up by a
well-organized racket which includes outfits that manufacture
torture-evidence and monitor courts to ensure that ‘victims’ are
assessed by judges considered to be sympathetic and so on.
Over-enthusiasm produces mix-ups: wrong photographs, wrong designations
and names, ‘evidence’ easily refuted simply because cross-checks weren’t
made.
What now? Well, once you’ve made a song and dance, you
got to go with it. You can’t leave the dance floor; not if it is the
bedrock of your career. You have to sing. You have to dance. Until the
floor gives way simply because it was too brittle to last.
I want
to give Sooka the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she was open-minded and
wide-eyed. Maybe she was taken for a ride. Maybe she trusted the wrong
people. Maybe she never realized that friends are also flesh-blood
people with political/ideological agendas of their own, that they can
trip, can be found out, that witnesses who lied can have changes of
heart and pangs of conscience they can no longer ignore.
The
faux pas regarding Brigadier Dias is not ‘major.’ Apologize, settled,
move on. That’s a decent strategy actually. However, she’s got egg on
her face. The ITJP-SL looks silly now. And Sooka made all those
rent-a-signature petitioners who backed her when she interpreted
possible litigation on account of slander as ‘threats’ (even though her
entire operation has been one of veiled and not so veiled threats if one
were to apply this logic) look silly as well.
She met people
programmed to receive and a system to turn out believers, a
'truth'-factory if you will. They would like to say ‘you can check out
any time but you can never leave,’ but that’s a lie. Maybe she checked
out too early. Maybe she believes she left the building. Maybe she can
still get out.
It’s a harder project. It’s called truth. And
thereafter justice. It might cause a dent in earnings, but she will
regain conscience and dignity. Humility does that. She could do it, if
she was wide-eyed and open-minded to begin with, as we would love to
assume.
malindasenevi@gmail.com
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