HRW and blatant lies

Geoff Wijesinghe

Human Rights Watch (HRW) which has published a pack of diabolical lies against Sri Lanka and its Security Forces timed to coincide with the current United Nations Human Rights sessions, has been roundly condemned and criticized by its founder and former chairman Robert L. Bernstein, national governments, and the media.

It is described as a mouthpiece of the United States government being influenced by its policies. Human Rights Watch which allegedly carries out dubious assignments and has a rotten reputation in international media, as being a gun for hire has in its latest report, timed to impact on behalf of the Tamil diaspora at the March UNHCR Geneva sessions, accused the Sri Lanka Security Forces of raping Tamils in custody detained by the authorities.

Cabinet spokesman Minister Keheliya Rambukwella dismissed the report as a “total fabrication’’. “If they are making allegations they should give us the medical evidence, so we can see if we’ve investigated. There is not 1 percent of truth in the allegations’’. They are blatant lies designed to tarnish the good image of the country.

Political advantage

Sri Lanka's High Commissioner in India Prasad Kariyawasam based in New Delhi, quoted by Reuters said the report was a well timed effort to discredit Sri Lanka ahead of a vote on a US backed resolution at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva this week.

Human Rights Watch Robert Bernstein founder accuses the organization of poor research, often relying on witnesses whose stories cannot be verified and may testify for political advantage.

According to the Times of London, Human Rights Watch does not always practice the transparency, tolerance and accountability it urges on others.

The Times accuses HRW of imbalance because it ignores many human rights abusing regimes, while covering other zones of conflict intensely.

Human Rights Watch founder Berstein accuses HRW of allowing repressive regimes to play a “moral equivalence game’’ by failing to distinguish from open and closed societies. Of failing to recognize the difference available from open and closed societies. Also, of failing to recognize the difference between wrongs committed in self-defence and those perpetrated intentionally.

It is nakedly clear that Human Rights Watch, the infamous Channel 4 TV, the Tamil Diaspora lead by overambitious expatriates based in the West have pulled out stops in their contemptible, but always futile efforts to destabilise the North of Sri Lanka even by funding violence and causing another uprising.

That is why they are attacking our Security Forces with venomous consistency. But, to no avail. For, the truth always wins against these fictitious, palpable bedeviled falsehoods.

The Sri Lanka Mission has made a formal protest against the screening of the Channel 4 documentary film ‘No Fire Zone’: The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka organized and funded by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International which now serves the Tamil diaspora as well as others with nefarious motives and FIFDH organised at the Palais de Nations in Geneva.

Development work

Meanwhile, the UN Human Rights Commissioner has the brass to state that she believes these concocted terrorist inspired films and reports which are the work of highly imaginative terrorist-oriented criminal minds.

Naveen Pillay has time and time again been invited by the government to see for herself the development work going on apace, the reconstruction, the rehabilitation of hundreds of LTTE cadres and exemplary work being done in the North, built from the ruins left behind by the murderous psychopath who even had the brass to style himself the sun god. Thank God the sun set on his brigand who ruined the North. Northern cultivators told me in Jaffna, “We the ordinary folk of Jaffna are not interested in politics, we hate the LTTE for they are tyrants, that send our little sons and daughters to battle-child soldiers.

On one visit to Jaffna during Prabhakaran's rule, I was introduced to a 12-year-old boy, clad in uniform with a holstered pistol round his waist. He was a bodyguard to Kalikaran who was the No 3 in the Tiger hierarchy. And what were the HRW, AI and the like doing about it? Sweet nothing, only praising the terrorists brigands whom they called Freedom Fighters and what with the Western media and their local cohorts going all gaga over them. Yes, these human rights organizations made heroes of the most ruthless terrorists organization in the world. But, our brave, courageous Security Forces fought the good fight with all their might. And we won.

So great was our victory and so efficient our military, that one of our heroes who risked his life and limb in leading the troops and who is now our Deputy Permanent Representative at the United Nations in New York, Maj. Gen. Shavindra de Silva was invited by the US Marine Corps University to deliver a highly commended address on how to fight terrorism.

The irony of it is that while the US military highly respects and heaped encomiums for the former General Officer Commanding (58) Division, the desk bound mandarins of the State Department were going all out to destroy the good image at the behest of the LTTE rump Tamil diaspora for winning the conflict?

Small nations

Chief of these second rate bureaucrats is Robert Blake who has been carrying out a vendetta against this country for several years. But, with the new Administration in the State Department led by Secretary of State John Kerry which has called off the bullying of small nations by the US, the days for confrontationalists of the likes of Robert Blake are numbered.

Why on earth doesn’t Navi Pillay come to Sri Lanka and see for herself and that all is well in this fair isle, instead of forming opinions on two bit reports and film funded by the anti Sri Lankan lobby. Or, is Navi Pillay afraid of, that the scales falling from her eyes and being confronted with the truth. That all is well in this fair isle.

A senior US Congressman FH Faleomavaega, member of the US Foreign Affairs Sub Committee speaking at the hearing on the “Rebalance to Asia: Why South Asia Matters” last Thursday, called for the withdrawal of the US sponsored Resolution against Sri Lanka, for harping on the last few months of the war and failing to acknowledge 30 years of conflict.