Fein’s moral confusion as Human Rights Watch returns to reality
Prof. Rajiva WIJESINHA
TamilNet announced, just before midnight on Sunday December 14, that
its latest angel of light, Bruce Fein, ‘Counsel for a US Tamil Group’ as
he is described, had prepared a 400+ page model indictment against Sri
Lankan officials for genocide against Tamils.
In the course of his interview with TamilNet Fein claimed that the
New York-based Genocide Prevention Project has included Sri Lanka as one
of the eight “red alert” countries where genocide and other mass
atrocities are under way or risk breaking out.
Also, the Obama administration was handed a policy report on genocide
with specific recommendations from former Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright. This is likely to bring Sri Lanka’s genocide into U.S. focus.
Obviously Fein would like to invoke the sacred name of Madeleine
Albright, though how her policy report bears on Sri Lanka is not made
clear. The GPP, which will be the subject of more thorough analysis, has
in a sense made its standpoint clear in including trade openness amongst
the criteria used to judge the possibility of genocide.
Child soldiers in the Vanni |
That report, in including China and Pakistan too amongst countries it
worried about with regard to genocide, was a less subtle than usual
example of using morality to promote political and economic objectives.
Fein of course has never laid claims to subtlety, and his own
purposes are quite clear, given his clients. One hopes therefore that
the GPP administrators will at least now come to realise how their less
than intellectually coherent pronouncements are used, not just by their
peers for political gain, but also by terrorists and their apologists
for even less attractive goals.
Unfortunately for Fein and his cohorts, one of the supposedly
objective authorities he cites for his denigration of ‘Sri Lanka’s human
rights atrocities’ came out, just twelve hours later, with its own
indictment of the LTTE for crimes against Tamils.
Human Rights Watch, though it had been critical of the LTTE
previously, had seemed over the last twelve months to aim for some sort
of spurious balance in soft-pedalling its criticism of the LTTE whilst
engaging in emotional and sometimes totally fraudulent attacks on the
Sri Lankan Forces.
Now however the suffering to which the LTTE is subjecting Tamils
seems to have got the better even of HRW’s ambiguities. The latest
pronouncement on Sri Lanka says ‘Sri Lanka’s separatist Tamil Tigers are
subjecting ethnic Tamils in their northern stronghold, the Vanni, to
forced recruitment, abusive forced labour, and restrictions on movement
that place their lives at risk... The LTTE has a long history of forced
recruitment.
There has been a dramatic increase in the practice of compelling
young men and women, including children, to join their forces. The group
has recently gone beyond its long-standing “one person per family”
forced recruitment policy in the territory it controls and now sometimes
requires two or more family members to join its ranks.
“Trapped in the LTTE’s iron fist, ordinary Tamils are forcibly
recruited as fighters and forced to engage in dangerous labour near the
front lines,” said Adams (Asia Director for Human Rights Watch).
While increased international pressure and other factors had led to a
decrease in its recruitment of children, recent reports indicate that
the group has stepped up child recruitment in the Vanni. LTTE cadres
have urged 14 to 18-year-olds at schools to join.
The group often sends 17-year-olds for military training, apparently
calculating that by the time such cases are reported to protection
agencies, the youths will have turned 18 and no longer be considered
child soldiers.
“Last year they were taking the people born in 1990 - now those born
in 1991,” a humanitarian official from the Vanni told Human Rights
Watch.
“They look at the family identity cards and take the young ones. If
people of military age go into hiding, they will take younger children
or the father, until they get the boys or girls they want.”
During the past 25 years, the LTTE has killed large numbers of
civilians, committed political assassinations in Sri Lanka and abroad,
and carried out suicide bombings.
It has systematically eliminated most political opposition within the
minority Tamil community and is responsible for killing many journalists
and members of rival organisations. In the areas under its control, the
LTTE has ruled through fear, denying basic freedoms of expression,
association, assembly, and movement.’
Given such categorical condemnation by one of Fein’s authorities, it
is perhaps possible that, ‘once adequate funding for the litigation is
secure’, to use Mr Fein’s phrase about actions he contemplates, he will
proceed against the LTTE too. But that might require a return to reality
which Fein might find difficult.
As it is, he dreams of interventions that fly in the face of
international norms and law. He and his backers, the Tamils Against
Genocide (who seem however to support the Genocide of Tamils by the LTTE
itself) will not he claims ‘waver from its exclusive feasible goal of
genocide indictments and prosecutions of Fonseka and Rajapaksa in the
United States undistracted by a United Nations organised plebiscite on
Tamil independence, or a prosecution before the International Criminal
Court.
TAG has one goal and one goal only.’ Clearly the man has no problem
about naming non-existent entities as though they were real
(‘undistracted by a United Nations organised plebiscite’ indeed), which
one hopes will not be a characteristic of the new Democratic
Administration.
Fein may see himself as an expert on pressing the right buttons, but
TAG should rethink squandering its funds on such characters. Certainly
it could use the money it collects from Tamils all over the world much
more fruitfully if it were to support Tamils in Sri Lanka who are
joining with the Government to promote investment and better
opportunities in the North than were permitted under the ‘iron fist’, as
HRW puts it, of the LTTE.
The writer is Secretary General, Secretariat for Coordinating the
Peace Process |