Clinton and rape of Sri Lanka
Wendell W Solomons
Delivering a speech at the UN Security
Council on Sept. 30, 2009, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed
that rape was used as a weapon of war in the Balkans, in Myanmar and in
Sri Lanka.
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Dr Milton Friedman |
US Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton |
US President Barack Obama |
She said that in too many countries and in too many cases, the
perpetrators were not punished, and the impunity encouraged others to
commit the same crime.In Sri Lanka, Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama
summoned US Ambassador Patricia Butenis to express his concern over the
Clinton allegation.
Explaining Clinton’s remark, Ambassador Butenis said the Secretary of
State had not identified any group in the speech she had made. All that
Clinton said was that during the 26-year long war in Sri Lanka, there
were allegations of rape and sexual violence, just as in other
conflicts. Clinton’s statement was to raise awareness of such brutality,
and not to implicate specific perpetrators, Butenis said.
You see Ambassador Butenis leap backwards into the nebulous, into
clouding the Clinton declaration. Yet, this leap places her in the
proposition that Clinton, a lawyer by training, has selected Sri Lanka
for smearing without specific facts.
Plaint in US court
By primary definition the missing facts for Clinton’s declaration of
institutionalized rape worried Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister, himself a
lawyer.
What motivates Clinton to become an attacker of a nation’s dignity?
Should Clinton, the perpetrator, be allowed impunity to get away with
this attack, the rape of the honour of a people?
A plaint can be filed against Clinton in a US court where she could
summon any facts that support her declaration on rape used as a weapon
of war in Sri Lanka.
Who would file such a case in US courts?
Would we see the executives of one of the NGOs who have promoted
their names in the press as defenders of Sri Lanka, financed by NATO
Norway, come forward? Or financed by a similar step-and-fetch-it? Surely
these mothers, like other mothers in an Asian civilization such as that
of Sri Lanka, did not bring up their children to be rapists.
We speak of a civilization that used the franchise for the first time
in the world to vote in a woman, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, as Head of
State.
Today, together with bringing up children, women have become
important as family breadwinners. Women have to squeeze into market
niches in a situation of high unemployment set off by the economic rape
of Sri Lanka by US neo-liberals. This economic rape began in 1977; the
assembly lines in Sri Lanka for FIAT, Mazda and Mitsubishi cars were
closed down after Wall Street cheerleaders promoted a prescription of
imports and more imports as if on bankers’ credit card run.
Perhaps the NGO celebrities can make amends at last for the opinions
they have not expressed in their newspapers forays? In three decades
they might have exposed the economic rape of Sri Lanka by the
neo-liberals.
More on neo-liberal rape
The neo-liberal quack physicians lie exposed and bleeding in the US.
Their staged diversion of fiddling with money supply and bank rate has
not helped the US. Their prescription of imports on credit has blown
back on the USA where the nation annually buys a critical excess of
imports of $ 1,000 billion.
A 1998 quote on the results of decades of neo-liberal diversion from
famous NY billionaire George Soros:
“The USA’s influence has already begun to decline. For the past 25
years, we have been running a constant current account deficit. The
Chinese and the oil-producing countries have been running a surplus. We
[in the U.S] have consumed more than we produced. While we have run up
debt, they have acquired wealth with their savings.”
In the face of potential US national bankruptcy, President Barrack
Obama began in 2009 with measures that include a policy of “Buy
American”. However, more blowback from the house of cards created on TV
by neo-liberals who promoted free trade, provides another complication.
Canada and the European Union have cited free trade and registered their
protests over President Obama’s 2009 policy.
A plaint
can be filed against Clinton in a US court where she could
summon any facts that support her declaration on rape used
as a weapon of war in Sri Lanka |
The Obama policy of buying domestic takes us back to the 19th Century
US bid for survival. The banking fraternity in London had used
Lancashire textile-mill imports of cotton from US southern plantation
states to embroil the nation in civil war. The purpose of the
one-sq.-mile financial city of London was to annul the 1776 US
Declaration of Independence and to re-absorb the USA into Britain. Yet,
Abraham Lincoln fought the civil war and went on to develop the war-torn
economy by implementing the economic policy of Henry Carey. This policy
promoted domestic production by erecting high customs tariffs. Through
this policy, the US matched Britain’s industrial production by the turn
of the century.
South Korean-born Ha-Joon Chang of Cambridge University summarizes:
“... Americans knew exactly what the game was. They knew that Britain
reached the top through protection and subsidies and therefore that they
needed to do the same if they were going to get anywhere. Criticizing
the British preaching of free trade to his country, Ulysses Grant, the
Civil War hero and the US President between 1868-1876, retorted that
‘within 200 years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it
can offer, it too will adopt free trade’. When his country later reached
the top after the Second World War, it too started ‘kicking away the
ladder’ by preaching and forcing free trade to the less developed
countries.’
“The UK and the USA may be the more dramatic examples, but almost all
the rest of the developed world today used tariffs, subsidies and other
means to promote their industries in the earlier stages of their
development ...even Sweden, which later came to represent the ‘small
open economy’ to many economists had also strategically used tariffs,
subsidies, cartels, and state support for R&D to develop key industries,
especially textile, steel, and engineering.”
When India gained independence from the financial London in the
mid-20th Century, it developed through the policy of buying domestic
produce (“Swadeshi”.) Sri Lanka was also following a similar policy of
increasing national productivity through developing local industry. Yet,
pressure from the World Bank and the IMF was used by the bullying
technocrats of Dr Milton Friedman to abort the policy of developing
local production. In recent years a group of perceptive business leaders
in Sri Lanka noticed Friedman’s browbeating and set up Maubima Lanka, a
foundation that promotes the use of local produce.
Clintons as lobbyists
The Clintons arrive not without their record. It was reportedly
Robert Rubin, an associate for two decades of the private financial
house Goldman-Sachs, who wined, dined, grilled and anointed the young
Governor of Arkansas as US President. Upon being bankrolled in the
elections and assuming office Bill Clinton gave this private financier
the control of the US Treasury.
Hillary Clinton’s unerring tendency to be fallible surfaced when she
pronounced that Sri Lanka does not need an IMF loan at this time.
Renowned for her disastrous Primary election campaign when she grounded
to a halt, over one hundred million [dollars] in the red while losing
ignominiously to a rookie called Obama, Hillary is now dabbling in
economics. Hillary Hubris is jinxing the Obama administration according
to many observers. |