Paymasters and Godfathers of Centres for Poisonous Accusations
Prof. Rajiva WIJESINHA
The last couple of weeks have seen much verbiage expended over what
might be termed the ICES issue, with a predictable range of skilled
polemicists rushing to the defence of Dr Rama Mani, the once and future
head of the Colombo branch of that once august institution.
Her defenders have clearly followed the time honoured technique of
obfuscating issues, by attributing nasty motives, and making dramatic
claims as loudly as possible in an effort to convince the world that
what they say is true. In the process they have completely ignored the
facts.
Judge the character
Gareth Evans |
|
Bradman Weerakoon |
Radhika Coomaraswamy |
I have long believed that you can judge the character of people from
the allegations they make against others. It is in this light that we
need to see the assertion by Bradman Weerakoon that ‘some people can be
unreasonable and vicious. It’s like a village feud where you have a
problem with someone and you poison his well or something.’
Characteristically, his whole interview is replete with snide
allegations against Pradeep Jeganathan, who was appointed to look after
ICES when Dr Mani was dismissed.
Interestingly Dr Saravanamuttu, who has now rushed in to comment on
what he sees as a urge to ‘rid our pure paradise isle of alternative
perspectives to the militaristic, majoritarian Chinthanaya’, was under
the impression that it was the opposition to Dr Mani who had first
politicized the issue.
The sanctimoniousness with which he criticized this when he discussed
her case with me did not seem feigned, though he soon enough remembered
that initially the matter had been raised in the ‘Daily Mirror’ on
January 26th, before the Nation expose.
Supportive
That first article had quoted ‘An ICES board member’ (obviously
Bradman Weerakoon) who claimed that ‘ICES staff were supportive of the
former Executive Director and were now under pressure following her
removal, which he alleged was done with the purpose of making a
‘favoured’ appointment in her place.’
Not entirely coincidentally, Bradman Weerakoon, himself appointed to
look after ICES by the time his interview appeared, spearheaded a move
to close the office down to protest at Dr Mani’s expulsion.
A petition from a member of staff to the Prime Minister on this
matter indicated however the bullying that was done, so as to show the
solidarity with Dr Mani that he had reported to the ‘Daily Mirror’.
Before the ‘Daily Mirror’ reported on ICES however, there had been an
even more emotive story in a website called ‘Lanka Dissent’, claiming
that a raid on Dr Mani’s house had been stopped by interventions by the
Indian High Commission, calling up both the Foreign Ministry and the
Defence Ministry.
This had not happened, and the Indian High Commission made it clear
that Dr Mani was not even an Indian national. She had indeed gone to the
High Commission to make extravagant claims about the threats she was
facing, but this like the reporting is indicative of a desire to create
a wedge between India and Sri Lanka.
That interpretation seems the more likely inasmuch as the driving
force behind Lanka Dissent is Ruwan Ferdinands, the National Organizer
of the SLFP dissident group.
It is no coincidence obviously that the initial leakages regarding
ICES were to this individual’s website and to the ‘Daily Mirror’, the
editor of which was in the forefront of the campaign to denigrate the
Secretary to the Ministry of Defence, a campaign that took in even the
hyper-enthusiastic British High Commissioner, Dominick Chilcott.
Dr.Saravanamuttu seems to have swallowed wholesale the assumption
that the initial problems of ICES had to do with ‘the prize of
institutional capture...a grubby power struggle’. The fact that for many
months those who objected to cavalier and essentially illegal uses of
money sought internal reform has evidently escaped his notice.
That crude blackmail was used on some of them, along with
vituperative name calling, would be dismissed by him as simple
‘incivility’, making no distinction between those at fault and those who
tried to correct those faults, quietly at first until it became clear
that the juggernaut would brook no dissent.
Dismissed
Having cursorily dismissed the initial problem, Dr Saravanamuttu then
moves on to the main issue, which he describes as ‘the use of R2P to
turn Dr Mani into a national security threat’.
He claims that ‘ICES was to be associated with the R2P Centre to be
established in New York’ and refers to ‘Dr Mani’s interest in
associating her institution with R2P’.
He never mentions that the association had in fact occurred, on the
basis of Dr Mani’s agreement to the proposal from Gareth Evans, an
agreement given fraudulently on behalf of the ICES Board when she
invited Evans to Sri Lanka to make what she described as much needed
waves.
Far from R2P being about other countries, as she disingenuously put
it in an interview, she talks of ‘confronting governments and supporting
the international community and R2P advocates with hard evidence from
the ground’.
When Dr Saravanamuttu claims that ‘Hard evidence of this has not been
made public’ he fails to make clear what ‘this’ is, a not untypical
instance of a prose style that privileges platitudes over precision (if
I might make bold to caricature the splendid parade of ‘p’ she
perennially practices, doubtless justifying Dr Mani’s characterization
of him in Galle as the most eloquent of our wordsmiths).
Favourite practice
Instead of discussing the evidence, through an analysis of the
material made available in the ‘Nation’ the previous week, he goes on to
his favourite practice of berating the government, which he has long
assumed is a monolith, dominated by an ideology he loathes.
Obviously, with eloquence such as Dr Saravanamuttu’s at its disposal,
the campaigners for R2P, or even for a UN Monitoring Mission in Sri
Lanka, may not actually have needed ICES.
But the shifty way in which the operation was conducted, Bradman
Weerakoon still being in denial about facts that Rama Mani’s own
correspondence makes clear, suggests that the ICES link was considered
important.
Certainly the revelation by one of her lawyer associates, that $4
million dollars had been lost because of her removal makes clear the
high stakes that were involved, as does the strange very strong-armed
intervention of the Canadian High Commissioner.
Advocacy that is already relentless would have become irresistible
with over 400 million rupees to help build up capacity / inclination or
whatever else the Global Centre wanted to promote R2P.
Towards the end of his mock philosophical insights, Dr Saravanamuttu
comes to the point that he makes endlessly in all his articles, a point
that underlies his own support for external intervention, namely that
there is something wrong with the government. This time his assertion is
that ‘We are being turned into a silly and vicious little country by
silly and vicious little men.
Dangerous
They are mean and dangerous and have no compunction in playing
dirty.’ Evidently he does not mean Bradman Weerakoon, who used every
trick in the book to keep Rama Mani on, beginning with the vicious
denigration of ICES staff through his political associates in the press
and trying to involve the Presidential Secretariat in his manoeuvres.
But how could Dr Saravanamuttu begin to criticize Bradman? Bradman
was a founder Director of the Centre for Policy Alternatives, of which
Dr Saravanamuttu has been Executive Director since its inception.
Bradman resigned when he became Secretary to the Prime Minister in
2002 but went back on the Board in 2006. Sunil Bastian, who was
appointed to look after ICES along with Bradman at the time Rama Mani
was restored (but supposedly to go on leave) has also been a Director of
CPA since its inception.
Bastian, who used to act for Radhika Coomaraswamy in her absence when
she was ICES Executive Director, and who was put on the ICES Board in
2005, resigned earlier this week, following the expose of ICES
mismanagement, the burgeoning deficit that began in the days when, as
Radhika put it, she signed whatever cheques were put in front of her by
an incompetent Financial Controller.
All this is part of the system of interlocking directorates which
receive massive funding from similar sources and all, accordingly or
otherwise, dance to a similar tune. CPA, according to Dominick Chilcott,
used to be one of the principal recipients of British peace building
funding, along with the Foundation for Co-Existence (FCE).
Replaced
More recently, he said, CPA was replaced by an organization called
Facilitating Local Initiatives for Conflict Transformation (FLICT).
FLICT, it turns out, has provided massive amounts of funding to
organizations which are in effect run by many of those who signed a
petition on Rama Mani’s part or otherwise agitated for her restoration,
viz Young Asia Television - Rs.14,452,280 (Sharmini Boyle) 30,179,185
13,382,844 -64,000,000 Neelan Thiruchelvam Trust - 9,500,000 (Sithie
Thiruchelvam) 19,250,000 Theertha International Artists Collective (Anoli
Perera) - 8,500,000 National Peace Council (NPC) - 3,024,644 Jehan
Perera - 4,077,097 Social Scientists Association (Kumari Jayewardene /
Sasanka Perera) - 5,900,000 Women & Media Collective (Kumudini Samuel /
Sepali Kottegoda) - 3,739,450 Foundation for Co-Existence - 67,175
(Kumar Rupesinghe/Sharmini Boyle) -12,002,292 -13,000,000 National
Antiwar Front -1,000,000 (Kumar Rupesinghe) 100,000 Over 200 million
rupees going to this conglomerate of like-minded interventionists is bad
enough.
It is worse that a couple of the signatories, Dilrukshi Fonseka and
Mirak Raheem, sit on the FLICT Steering Committee, the latter working
for CPA, the former being a former Berghof Foundation employee who is I
believe married to Sanjana Hattotuwa who works for CPA. Hattotuwa indeed
gets his own distinct tranche of funding, to run his ‘first and award
winning citizens journalism website’, set up in response to requests
‘from INGOs, humanitarian aid organizations including sections of the
UN, CSOs, local and international journalists as well as members from
the diaspora’.
Elements
What these sections of the UN are it would be interesting to find
out, given the pusillanimous acquiescence in LTTE authoritarianism that
some elements in the UN displayed in the days when Groundviews was set
up. Who are the ‘Partners and Donors’ of Groundviews? Apart from CPA
itself, we have IMPACS, ‘a Canadian charitable organization committed to
the protection and expansion of democracy’, Infoshare, which is a
‘Non-profit technical support organization providing web media services
and application development’ and CIDA and AUsAID, the Canadian and
Australian aid agencies.
The former is ‘charged with planning and implementing most of
Canada’s development cooperation programme in order to reduce poverty
and to contribute to a more secure, equitable and prosperous world’
while the objective of the Australian ‘aid program is to advance
Australia’s national interest by helping developing countries reduce
poverty and achieve sustainable development’.
Does providing funding for Groundviews truly advance these aims? Is
it really the function of such aid agencies to encourage articles that
talk about Sri Lanka as ‘a country at war and democracy that’s hostage
to the whim and fancy of a President and his coterie of murderous
brutes’?
Does it advance Australian national interests to propagate articles
that characterize Indian support for the APRC proposals as ‘almost a
case of Panglossian benevolence...Underpinning this is the containment
of Chinese interests - political, military and commercial - in their
back yard’? Will Canada achieve a ‘more secure, equitable and prosperous
world’ through blanket generalizations about the ‘increasingly
jingoistic rhetoric of ruling party politicians, bureaucrats and
military top brass’?
Dissenting views
It could be argued that debate and discussion are important, and
certainly there must be room for dissenting views. But such relentless
criticism of an elected government, the determination to denigrate,
exemplified most recently by the assumption of ‘extraordinary influence
of the JHU and the JVP in the Rajapakse administration’ even though the
JVP has come out strongly against the APRC proposals, the extraordinary
levels of funding provided to just a small coterie of self-important
panjandrums, suggest that many issues have been prejudged without
sufficient flexibility to deal with new evidence as it emerges.
In this context one can only contrast the approach of the Norwegian
ambassador, which suggests why, despite earlier worries, the government
is correct in continuing with the services of the Norwegians as
facilitators. Norway provided the LTTE Peace Secretariat with a great
deal of assistance, but this was with the approval of the Sri Lankan
government of the time.
When that Peace Secretariat began to glorify suicide bombers, the
Norwegian ambassador promptly contacted them to suggest that the
celebratory photographs be withdrawn.
He was doubtless polite, and the LTTE did not respond positively, but
the moral point had been made. In contrast UNDP, which had also, as
initiated by Bradman, funded that Peace Secretariat and in particular
its communications systems, stayed meekly silent.
Censorship
Though Groundviews talks about repression and censorship in Sri
Lanka, the Government has no problems about it attacking what it is
privileged to call the President’s ‘coterie of murderous brutes’.
That can be countenanced as exemplifying freedom of expression. But
it is outrageous that such freedom should be financed by the taxes of
Australian and Canadian citizens, who are told that their money is used
to alleviate poverty. And it is sad that those who administer such aid
programmes continue to fund this family of self-supporting dissidents,
whose rent-seeking becomes ever more successful the more relentless
their recriminations are.
The writer is Secretary General, Secretariat for Coordinating the
Peace Process |