# The White Man's Burden: Anglo-Saxon Attitudes towards abuses and impunity - 7th April 2008

From http://www.peaceinsrilanka.com/peace2005/Insidepage/SCOPPDaily_Report/SCOPP_report070408.asp: The Official Website of the Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process (SCOPP)
Over the last few months I have had to travel quite a lot, which has allowed me greater access to foreign papers than I had enjoyed for a long time. Coincidentally, on almost every trip I came across descriptions of inadequacies with regard to the protection of human rights on the part of Britain and America. In fairness to the Anglo-Saxon world, I wondered whether, had I read French or German papers, I would have seen similar allegations about those countries. At the same time I realize that Anglo-Saxons tend to beat their breasts (and those of others) more dramatically than most, perhaps secure in the knowledge that their control of the world will allow them to limit the damage (to themselves, though not to others), as required.
So some months ago there was an anxious article about the fact that, after years of inquiry, the British had found only one person guilty with regard to the well attested torture at Abu Ghraib. More recently there was a long article about the impact of the war in Iraq, which spoke of the instances ‘when America’s intentions were betrayed by its troops in more personal ways, with the abuse and torture of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib, with the shooting deaths of 24 civilians in Haditha and with the rape and murder of a 14-year-old-girl at Mahmudiya, along with the killing of three other members of her family’.
I have no quarrel with the benefit of the doubt being given to America as to its intentions, just as I should record, as the newspaper did, that these incidents led to court-martial hearings. But, as the British newspaper pointed out with regard to their little contribution at Abu Ghraib, the consequences of those hearings was not commensurate with the damage that had been inflicted. Indeed, coincidentally, shortly before the visit to Sri Lanka recently of a Congressional delegation that had some concern with human rights, I had been reading ‘Shalimar the Clown’, with its graphic evocation of the Rodney King case, when white police officers had been recorded on film when they beat up a black suspect. The case went to court, but a white jury acquitted the officers despite the evidence. I mentioned this, when they asked about allegations of human rights abuse and delays in justice.
One of the earnest young Congressional aides noted that he came from Los Angeles himself and this was an occasion to feel proud of the American system, given the outrage the incident evoked, but even he could not explain away the fact that the culprits had been acquitted. I hastened to add that I was not alleging endemic injustice. My point was that, in the British system we both had inherited, convictions were not easy to secure. What upset me was the failure of the Anglo-Saxon world to extend to Sri Lanka the same indulgence it extended to its own institutions.
Problems with independent institutions
So I was fascinated too by a recent defense of the British Independent Police Complaints Commission, in response to the claim that it ‘faces a crisis of confidence after a network of (lawyers) resigned from its advisory body’. I was reminded then of the brouhaha when first four local NGO activists resigned from an Advisory Committee of the Ministry of Disaster Management and Human Rights (which was claimed in some media reports to be resignation from the National Human Rights Commission), and now with the departure of the International Independent Group of Eminent Persons tasked to observe the proceedings of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into a variety of cases.
There has been no similar beating of breasts in Britain, but the Chairman of the IPCC clearly thought it necessary to respond to a newspaper article of February 25th. He pointed out there that the lawyers had not in fact attended the IPCC External Advisory Board since summer 2007, reminding me of the fact that the four activists had not often attended the MDMHR Committee, and the IIGEP personnel had been conspicuous by their absence from the CoI proceedings, often leaving attendance to a group of assistants who certainly did not have the eminence which had prompted the setting up of the Group in the first place.
In his response the IPCC Chairman referred to an allegation of a ‘pattern of favouritism’ towards the police (though he declared that he did not have the opportunity to respond to this on individual cases), to the question of ‘raunchy emails’ sent by a police officer (dealt with by saying that these were sent when he was working with his force, not when he was seconded to the IPCC) and to a particular case which ‘we inherited. We were not happy with it and so commissioned a review by another force. The review has taken longer than we anticipated but is now in its final stages’. The case was one of a stabbing in 2000, the Chairman’s response, still awaiting the report of the review, was in 2008.
Dickens wrote 150 years ago of the Circumlocution Office in Britain, and in the intervening years Britain has certainly brought circumlocution to an even finer art. We are only now seeing the long awaited formal Coroner’s Inquiry into the death of Princess Diana, but the Sri Lankan government would not dream of claiming that the delay is owing to a determination to protect Her Majesty the Queen or her band of murderous brutes, which is how a website funded by Canadian and Australian aid characterizes the Sri Lankan situation. The report on the Bloody Sunday massacre is still awaited, though it occurred nearly 40 years ago. Interestingly, Michael Birnbaum QC, who delivered the outrageous fraudulent finger pointing report on the ACF case, in which he perverted what the Australian expert Malcolm Dodd said into an allegation that Sri Lankan officials had tampered with evidence, had cut his teeth on the Bloody Sunday inquiry, which perhaps explains his profound suspicions of what governments might get up to, in order to conceal evidence. Fortunately Dr Dodd has categorically refuted his suggestion, and the white world at least has now given up on that particular canard.
Unsurprisingly, the Sunday Times, which occasionally delights in playing Uncle Tom, has once more resurrected that hoary story, in a typical misrepresentation of what happened in Geneva after the story broke. I have dealt elsewhere with its attempt to suggest that the Government was desperate for approval in this regard, when the fact is that it was quite secure from the start in its belief that there had been no tampering with evidence as Mr Birnbaum had suggested. What the British were up to with regard to the Bloody Sunday inquiry Mr Birnbaum doubtless knows, but his transposition of that expertise to Sri Lanka was singularly inappropriate.
I could go on with quotations from the IPCC Chairman’s response, which grants that ‘sometimes commissioners and staff get things wrong or are tactless. But we do not accept your sweeping criticism of our caseworkers and investigators…most delays are outside our control and result from trials and inquest proceedings’. I could refer to the impunity that most perpetrators of human rights abuse have benefited from in Iraq and elsewhere, even in Vietnam (where, with the victims of massacre at My Lai amounting to ‘between 300 and 500…Eventually just one man, Lt William L Calley was charged, and convicted of murdering 22 civilians; Calley served three and a half years under house arrest and has just retired from running a jewellery store’.)
Recognizing and dealing with problems in a human context
But there would be little point, because I am not going to succeed in making America and Britain change their ways. Nor indeed would I presume to think they should, not because I do not believe impunity and delays are bad, but because I understand that in theory at any rate these are not matters of government policy. In practice however there are lots of constraints, ranging from leaders who want to stand by their men, other leaders who are just not tough enough on discipline, endemic delays in the system of justice we practice, and so on. The important thing is that people should raise questions, that courts should at least sometimes impose punishments, that training should proceed apace to minimize abuses, and to make it clear that not only are abuses wrong, they are also generally counter-productive (though I know that some British and American military men would continue to disagree about this last).
Now Sri Lanka has enough and more of all the remedial measures I have mentioned, quite unlike in the dark days of the eighties, when very few people raised questions, when indeed there was hardly any independent media in which they could be raised; when courts hardly ever ruled against the government, with total contempt on the rare occasions when this did happen, policemen who had violated fundamental rights being promptly promoted, their fines paid by the state, and a tumultuous demonstration brought in state buses to their houses, led by a government goon; when there was no training at all in human rights awareness, when the Sri Lankan forces were described as the most indisciplined in the world, unfairly perhaps, but certainly not comparable to today’s military which is amongst the most disciplined in the world, with hardly any civilian casualties in military operations, very little collateral damage, almost no allegations of rape or sexual abuse in the field, a far better record than any other armed force fighting terror in any other part of the world.
And yet the complaints go on and on and on, culminating recently in two reports by the British and American governments, that have been seized upon to attack the Sri Lankan government. Why do what are supposedly friendly governments, more involved in fighting terror themselves than other white governments around the world, so willing to engage in naming and shaming? One would rather have expected them to assist us enthusiastically, drawing attention in private perhaps to deficiencies they had noted, but not allowing themselves to be used not only by politicians opposed to the government, but even by terrorists and by organizations that support terrorists, openly or stealthily. In short, why do they seem to be extending a lifeline to terrorism when for once it seems possible that Sri Lanka might do what they themselves have so signally failed to do, despite having so much military power and no one breathing down their necks? They have signally failed to crush terrorism, to restore not only democracy but also democratic institutions to areas deprived of it for many years, to also rehabilitate former proponents of terror into taking part in the electoral process, whereas we at least have been doing better all the time at this, since the present government took over.
Social Conditioning
Some sort of an answer came to me last week, when I attended a party given by the Swiss Ambassador, in honour of two members of her staff who were leaving, after having worked here in the fields of human rights and peace building. I was due to go out of Colombo, but I made it a point to attend because these were people for whom I had the highest regard. Admittedly the Swiss ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva occasionally says things that are misplaced, but his counterpart here has, as far as I know, never engaged in the public naming and shaming that some of her peers have perpetrated. She may have questions about human rights and the peace process, but these are not put in a way that they can be taken advantage of by others.
This seems the more remarkable, in that almost every Sri Lankan at the gathering would have welcomed a more publicly critical approach. Not that there were that many Sri Lankans there. My initial impression – and I certainly may have missed seeing or identifying many of those present – was of a sea of white faces. These did not, with a few exceptions, belong to the top officials, understandably so for these were largely the peers of the individuals being honoured. But it struck me that these were perhaps those who did the reports on which their seniors based their interventions.
And their reports in turn would be based, one assumes, on the views of their principal interlocutors, the Sri Lankans who were present at the event. These, it seemed, with just a few exceptions, were essentially those who lived off the whites in the room. In short, the Sri Lankans present were almost exclusively those who work for embassies, or for NGOs funded by these embassies or their agencies.
Now these people are not necessarily opposed to the government. Though some of those present have recently made it their business to attack the government relentlessly, I believe there are only a few NGOs that see this as their main focus, and many of those present were fundamentally decent people whose criticisms of the government and the armed forces are made in good faith. Again, though many are dependent on the white world for their wages, and indeed the status they enjoy, there are enough and more who would not let that affect their independence, who have shown themselves willing and able to take a stand against those who think money can buy anything.
The failure to engage
I was not then worried about who was there. What worried me was the almost total absence of anyone who might speak for the government. Where were the young diplomats, the academics, the officials and advisers of the Ministry of Human Rights, the Human Rights Commission, the Attorney-General’s Department, who should also contribute actively to the reports these young foreigners, working in missions and in aid agencies, prepare for their policy makers? And as for the journalists, except for Rajpal Abeynaike, and perhaps one or two others I did not notice, those present were the leading promoters of a change of government.
Whose fault is it that the interaction that would contribute to productive partnership has virtually ceased? On the one hand, there is certainly a language barrier, and a barrier perhaps of culture. When I read recently the enormous weight attached to sexual and transgender issues in the report of 39 NGOs to the Human Rights Council, I realized that they live in a very different world from that of the vast number of government employees. It is not that sexual issues are not important, of course they are, but it is economic and social rights that are of much greater concern to the vast number of citizens of this country who are represented by government officials. They can certainly appreciate the importance of civil and political rights, and assertions that these should be upheld they can readily understand; but looking at the gathering at the Swiss ambassador’s, wondering which of them saw overdosing on heroin as a mild aberration, I wondered about the great gulf that lies between the country at large and the influential members of a Colombo elite who are much more at home in such drawing rooms than in the country at large.
Many years ago, one of my brightest students, a former monk who had taken great pains to study English for his degree, told me after he had got a job with a newspaper to which I had recommended him that he found the culture unfamiliar. I thought he meant the drinking that I knew was common amongst my journalist friends. No, he said, what he meant was that they used spoons and forks to eat.
That young man subsequently joined the Administrative Service, being one of the few who completed the training course in English, when most of his peers revolted and got their medium of training changed to Sinhala. That was a batch in which there were no Tamils, something I found appalling. The authorities at the time agreed with me, but said no one suitable had applied. It did not occur to them that they should have engaged in the sort of positive discrimination that this government has at last applied to the police. None of this of course registers with the young foreigners who report on us, nor on their informants. I cannot otherwise understand the failure, in the days when President Kumaratunga’s pluralistic credentials were well known, to have at least initiated some policy changes to increase access by minorities to official positions. Sadly, I think I can understand, given what I have seen about the way they gather information, why the so-called international community that pleads for pluralism has scarcely registered the importance of the recent passing out of 175 Tamil policemen, trained in Tamil, for service in the East.
My former student, now quite senior in the Administrative Service, would probably not have felt at home in the ambassador’s drawing room. But he, and his peers – and some of those he introduced me to, when the Council for Liberal Democracy initiated a training session with the assistance of USAID, were even more intelligent and articulate in English - should have been there. But they might not have found the small talk easy, and the camaraderie that was so evident in that drawing room would not have been possible.
The Nostalgia of the Elite
So, though we can understand the insularity bred by our education system, though we can understand the ease with which the leadership of the Colombo NGO community interacts with the white youngsters who now constitute the international community in their own eyes and those of their interlocutors, the result is a mismatch between aims and achievements for the countries they represent. As Paul Scott so tellingly put it in describing the absence of the ordinary Indian from the portrait of the Jewel in the Crown, what is missing here is the citizenry of the country at large, with whom these foreigners should interact. Their failure to do so is perhaps what led to such a gross misreading of the situation in 2005, when they all assumed Mr Rajapakse would be defeated, and Mr Wickremesinghe would become President in a restoration as it were of the King over the Water.
A more perceptive American than most once referred to what was going on in Colombo diplomatic circles as the unhealthy nostalgia of some Europeans for the Wickremesinghe regime. This emotion affects even those, or perhaps especially those, who had no experience of that regime, but started working here in President Kumaratunga’s last days, when she too seemed to share that nostalgia despite her admirable role in getting rid of it – or, rather, in allowing the people a chance to express their views in what turned out to be a stunning electoral reversal in a very short time. By 2005 however the assumption was that, since the drawing rooms of Colombo had at last got together, in a manner not seen since 1947, there was no doubt that the Colombo ethos would triumph.
It did not, but then the dream was that it somehow would later, in 2006 or perhaps in 2007, as it had done in 2001 to subvert the people’s will as expressed in the 2000 General election. 2007 seemed especially hopeful, after the last SLFP leader steeped in Western culture jumped ship. No matter that the intellectual elite of the UNP had previously joined the government, finding their leader totally out of touch with the country at large. The drawing rooms of Colombo continued to believe they must have been enticed over, whereas the SLFP resignations were due to idealism, just like the SLFP and SLMC abandonment of the government in 2000. Now surely the millennium would dawn again, and if this depended on the horrid leftists bringing down the government, why there was ample evidence that Sri Lanka was full of turkeys who would vote for Christmas.
So right through 2007 we were told that the international community abhorred this government, that nothing could prevent an international monitoring mission from being imposed on us, that the cost of living was so appalling that the JVP had no choice but to vote against the government on the budget. One does not need to believe the stories about conspiracies to bribe people over to realize that the vultures were not only waiting to pick over the corpse, they had been depositing carrion to spread disease to promote a fatality. Much of the optimism in this regard was Sri Lankan, one should hasten to point out but, with such constant assertion of the inevitable, it is understandable that the more callow youngsters who frolic in the drawing rooms of Colombo were also affected, and turned wishful thinking into serious reports.
And, while I am inclined to grant the benefit of the doubt to most, to attribute much of what was going on to innocence abroad rather than deliberate distortion, certainly there is evidence of machination too. We have already been through the case of Rama Mani, working with her old friend Radhika Coomaraswamy to associate ICES with the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, without keeping the Board of ICES informed. Radhika even seems to have taken the UN for a ride on that one, getting their permission to stay on the Board to appoint a successor, and then assuming that bestowed on her the responsibility to protect that successor, to the extent of practically blackmailing those who drew attention to financial improprieties. Fortunately the UN has now seen the light, and Radhika has resigned from the Advisory Board of GCR2P. This is just as well, if the tactics she used were representative of how precisely her version of the international community planned to protect the countries they intended to force themselves upon.
The deceitfulness of the plausible
But before Rama Mani hit the headlines, there was another case in which initially I was even more naïve than I had been as concerns Radhika. This was with regard to Norbert Ropers, whom I met for the first time last October, when he kindly gave me lunch, and explained what the Berghof Foundation had been doing in Sri Lanka. During our meeting, he almost shyly introduced the topic of the Centre for Just Peace and Democracy which I had criticized in a recent press release, for arranging a meeting in Geneva at which the Sri Lankan government had been attacked, without allowing any opportunity for a response. We felt particularly hurt about this, because our Mission in Geneva had arranged several opportunities for those who wished to criticize Sri Lanka to do so at meetings within the Palais de Nations, so that there could be active debate and discussion. Instead – perhaps arrogantly, we felt it was because we had been able to refute all their allegations systematically at the earlier meetings – they avoided the final debate we had suggested, and instead met on their own to lambast the government and obtain maximum publicity for this.
Norbert Ropers very graciously, as it seemed to me, told me that the organization which had arranged the meeting was in essence an LTTE front, which had been set up by the Berghof Foundation. His point was that, in the time when the Ceasefire seemed a great opportunity, he had genuinely believed that the LTTE could be brought into the democratic process, and setting up civil society organizations like this, which could interact with similar organizations in Sri Lanka, had seemed a positive initiative.
I could understand this, but it seemed to me that once the LTTE had shown itself unwilling to change, the Berghof Foundation should have registered this and severed links. That, Ropers assured me, was precisely what had happened. Of course they had never controlled the organization, and now they had no idea what it did.
I believed him. I even attended his Christmas party, a couple of months later, when I realized questions about him had been raised, to show that I believed in his good faith. I was away then over Christmas, and found when I got back that his visa had been cancelled. He had sent me a book as a farewell, and I took pains to send him a thank you note. When I was told later that he had been conspiring against the government, I was not convinced, and I thought it understandable that the German ambassador, and then one of the German ministers, seemed very cross at his removal. I thought the way they had expressed this was strange, but I assumed that some liberties had been taken in the reporting, and they could not really have been as patronizing as the Colombo media claimed. The matter did not seem to me worth pursuing and, even though, in the course of studying some funding patterns, I found that the Berghof Foundation and its employees were at the centre of several interlocking directorates, I did not think that proved anything except misjudgment, based on the exploded ideals of the Ceasefire period.
It was only a couple of weeks ago that some alert Sri Lankan abroad informed us that Centre for Just Peace and Democracy will soon have formal status at the UN as a registered NGO. Further research revealed that it had been in continuous touch with the Berghof Foundation, and had signed last year a Memorandum of Understanding for Institutional and Programme support, which may have contributed to its elevation it seemed to official status at the NGO. I felt a complete fool. But I also felt deeply disappointed. The principle I had tried to uphold in all my work, and especially now at the Peace Secretariat, is that one must always engage. I was glad I had had lunch with Ropers, listened to his explanation of what the Berghof had tried to do. Why had he felt obliged to lie to me?
Holding funders accountable
I believe from what Ropers told me that much of Berghof funding as far as Sri Lanka goes comes from the German and the Swiss governments. Are these governments aware that the Centre for Just Peace and Democracy is an LTTE front organization? If so, does this affect the way in which we should respond to the pronouncements of these governments? If not, should they now not launch a thorough investigation into the manner in which their efforts at peacebuilding seem to have been traduced by the instruments through which they chose to operate? After all, when I suggested to the Swiss ambassador that funding for teaching policemen Tamil would be welcome, she said they did not have resources. But I pointed out that they had sunk it seems massive amounts into the Berghof. Now that it seems some at least of that funding has gone to the LTTE, surely they owe it to the people of this country to make recompense.
Elsewhere I have dealt with the enormous waste of funds intended for promoting peace that the Germans, and more recently the British, sank into disbursements by FLICT, an organization for Facilitating Local Initiatives for Conflict Transformation. I had previously discussed with one of the aid administrators at the German embassy, which has generally done much good work, how concentration on dancing butterflies seemed ridiculous to promote peace, by which I meant funding for what seemed abstract creations rather than concrete measures of the sort I put to them. Since that discussion I have shown how large sums went to precisely those social butterflies that decorated the Swiss ambassador’s drawing room. Since then it transpired that a fairly hefty sum from FLICT formed part of the funding my old friend J S Tissainayagam received for publications that certainly do not seem to have promoted peace.
Part of this is of course the fault of the government, in not having carefully monitored such disbursements. But greater responsibility I feel lies with the donors, who did not sufficiently consult with the government to ensure that initiatives were consistent with government policy. At the very end of 2003, as I have noted, Bradman Weerakoon, against the recommendations it seems of the Peace Secretariat, went ahead with procuring UNDP funding for the LTTE Peace Secretariat, with equivalent funding for the government one, only that the latter was disbursed to NGOs for the butterfly brigade. UNDP, despite promises, has still failed to let me know who precisely benefited from all that money. But I cannot blame the UNDP, though one would expect more careful accounting and record keeping from an international organization, it was our fault for not having put a stop to all this, for not having insisted at the time on transparency and accountability.
Bradman was of course prominent at the Swiss party. Apart from Mr Anandasangaree, he was the only politician I saw there, except that doubtless the Swiss do not see him as a politician, but rather as a fine upstanding member of Civil Society. Any clear sighted assessment will find that he has not made the transition made by say, Mangala Moonesinghe – also at the party, but clearly no longer a politician, now even more obviously the idealist he has always been - but clear sighted assessment is not what this game is all about. People believe what they want to believe, and I fear that the international community, in the sense Bradman would use the term, find him much more congenial than most. With a name like that, how could he not be?
An excess of seed money
Mangala Moonesinghe now chairs the One Text Initiative, which has been referred to in a piece on Tissainayagam, claiming that his bona fides can be seen in that he ‘worked untiringly for peace with the ministers of this government and with members of all parties at the One Text Initiative’. Now from the little I knew of Tissainayagam in the past, I believe he was a genuine idealist, who would not willingly get involved in terrorist activity. At the same time we have to recognize that the LTTE swept many people into its net during the Ceasefire period, many of them sincerely believing that the period of terror was over and that the Tigers had turned into Pussycats. Many such got involved in activities, and in particular funding processes, that they thought were totally innocent. When this proved not to be the case, it was not so easy to withdraw from their involvements.
I have no idea whether something of the sort has happened in this case, and in any case the details of suspicious funding from abroad, which seems to have occurred, though I trust not to Tissainayagam himself, are not my business. I am more concerned with the sums that seem to have been freely flung around here, without due accountability. FLICT provided money direct to Tissainayagam’s journalistic ventures, while his wife, in her article, uses his involvement with One Text to suggest that he is above suspicion.
This is extremely unfair, for Tissainayagam is only a TNA representative at One Text, not central to the reforms that have now been initiated to make the Initiative more meaningful. And whilst One Text officials have tried to ensure, as indeed anyone should, that Tissainayagam is not subject to any undue pressure, they have not interfered with the investigation. As a consequence of the concern that they, and indeed other officials, evinced, Mrs Tissainayagam was I believe escorted to see her husband by the police. Her article is misleading then in giving a harrowing account of what purports to be ‘her first visit to TID’.
Why such distortion? Is it necessarily the case that Tissainayagam’s arrest should have been based entirely on prejudice, that there is no possibility at all that something might be wrong about the way in which he received and deployed international funding? Many people have died because of terrorism, and more in the last few years because of the enhanced capacity of the LTTE, following the flood of funds they were able to get their hands on. Hardly any of that went for development, for alleviation of the difficulties faced by so many citizens of the North and East.
But much more important to our opinion makers, as they see themselves, is the welfare of the advocacy agents in the capital. In effect the concentration in the drawing rooms of Colombo of aid meant for Sri Lanka has thus totally distorted all perspectives, and any questioning of what is done with this aid is considered improper. In fact questioning leads to a determination to hand out even more to the stinking rich, just to show who is in charge. Thus the panjandrums at ICES thought it fit, without any proper budgetary provision for this, to pay out Rs 6 million for the benefit of having had Rama Mani for just over a year, and now want to pay around a third of that sum over again, as compensation – thus accepting responsibility as it were for her involving ICES with the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, even though she had not informed them of all this.
It seems to matter not a whit to them that they have been using money meant for projects, and even endowment income, to keep Dr Mani in the style to which she was accustomed. The donors, who should be concerned about misuse of their funds, are more concerned about reinstating Rama Mani, to the extent of threatening other more productive NGOs with cutting funds for not worshipping at the feet or whatever of this preposterous idol. At times I wonder if all this is seen as a small price to pay for institutionalizing the right to protect, to interfere, to pontificate at length – but I recollect a principle I learnt early in life, namely that one should never assume wickedness when incompetence provides a sufficient explanation of events. At the same time, there comes a stage when excessive incompetence, or ignorance, becomes culpable, particularly when public property is involved.
Ensuring transparency and accountability in partnership
I will doubtless be criticized for discussing these matters publicly, but I cannot understand why they should not be public. These funds have come into Sri Lanka to assist us in our quest for peace, and we cannot achieve peace without transparency and full accountability. Certainly some things may need to be kept confidential, but what such funds are used for, and the source of those funds, must be public knowledge. You do not need to be particularly sophisticated to understand that, in general, he who pays the piper calls the tune. There are of course several people who will maintain their independence regardless of who pays them, but that is all the more reason for there to be public awareness of any payments relating to issues in which their final responsibility is to the Sri Lankan public.
Government should of course investigate all this, and ensure transparency, but government is not always efficient and, if government officials also get involved in a collegiate atmosphere, transparency gives way to solidarity. I would suggest that an equal responsibility lies on donors, to make sure that they work in accordance with government policies, that they publish clearly all recipients of funding, that they ensure a match between aims and methods, and that they do not allow the whole exercise to degenerate into rent-seeking that needs to feed on itself.
What happened instead is an outpouring of funds that went to fulfil particular agendas, not necessarily those of the donors, perhaps not those of the immediate recipients. One of the guests at the party, a Tamil himself, having upbraided me for having got associated with what he described as two awful Tamils in their opposition to Rama Mani, told me he thought Tissainayagam had got carried away by money. If so, this was not apparent in his lifestyle, which seems to have continued as simple and I feel innocent as in the days when I first knew him. Rather, the funds he had to take responsibility for would have proved easy pickings for others less scrupulous than himself. In that respect, the donors who did not bother to check on what they were funding must bear some responsibility for his current plight. Significantly, the account of his case does not suggest any abuse on the part of the investigating authorities, and certainly from the start his wife had access to him and I believe he has been treated with total propriety. That is only as it should be, not only for moral reasons, but also because anything else would be totally counter-productive. After all, a media that persisted in claiming that all those arrested with him were Tamil, including a Mr Wijesinghe, would certainly twist anything that happened to alarming proportions, and their friends in the international community would not hesitate to follow suit.
Advantages to the Tigers from unaccounted funding
The investigation however needs to be thorough. Even if the funds Tissainayagam controlled did not directly benefit the LTTE, the concerted attacks of various media organizations on the government is grist to their mill. Now this does not mean that there should be no criticism of the government in the press. What is unacceptable is that so much funding should be given by foreign governments to agencies that denigrate the government relentlessly.
Sadly, the LTTE has since the Ceasefire seen this as their due. Their demand was that they should be funded without question, and their demand was acceded to. We are still waiting for the results of the long overdue audit of the million dollars or whatever it was that UNICEF – with the full acquiescence of the then Sri Lankan government, I hasten to add – handed over to the TRO. We have seen the use made of the funds given for communications – again with the full acquiescence of the then government – by UNDP and the Norwegian government, with only the latter at least telling the LTTE that it thought such use improper. We know about the equipment handed over by the then government, using the Norwegians as an instrument, we know how successive governments paid duty for sophisticated vehicles.
If all that has stopped, we now know that aid for what is termed peace building continues, as with the Berghof Foundation subvention to the Centre for Just Peace and Democracy. If Tissainayagam, with his millions from FLICT, has been used as a front, what about the partners with which projects in that dubious area called protection continue to be conducted in un cleared areas? The United States is now, according to a recent newspaper report, going to charge a man who worked for an Islamic charity because he organized ‘a trip by three US lawmakers to Iraq in the run-up to the war’ – but we are expected not only to accept foreign funding for agencies operating in conjunction with the LTTE, we are upbraided for preventing some of the white elements in the international community from visiting them and exchanging pleasantries. The United States, I should note, is consistent in this regard, but it seems to indulge the very different approach of its cousins, who would not dream of criticizing the US for practices and principles for which they roundly condemn us.
Possible motivations for double standards
What lies behind all this? The double standards, the rejection of democracy, the indulgence of perverse criticism. Is it only the mad social whirl of Colombo? Certainly, when Colombo was at one with the government, in the eighties, we heard very little criticism of authoritarianism, of the perversion of the constitution, the relentless belittling of Tamil aspirations, the postponement of elections, the attacks on strikers. This does not necessarily mean the West is hypocritical, for today’s policy makers have come a long way since the days of ruthless partisanship associated with the Cold War. But it does mean that their sanctimoniousness rings hollow, given that we are essentially now suffering for the sins of the Jayewardene ascendancy, its appalling constitution, its adventurism (which the white world then approved of) as regards India, its attacks on Tamils (which at least woke the West from its lethargy, if briefly).
Still, though one should not forget the past, one should not dwell on it overmuch. Today’s problems require solutions today. We should then consider what precisely makes at least some elements in the West act in a manner that may undermine the government, and provide an incentive to the LTTE to keep fighting, in the belief that the wonderful summer of 2002 can be brought back, when they could happily infiltrate the country as a whole, commandeer the allegiance of administrators throughout the North and East, build up their stock of weapons as well as fortifications in areas they had been kept away from previously, recruit children at will, and deploy massive amounts of funding, from the diaspora as well as a gullible collection of international donors.
Firstly of course there is the influence of the diaspora. That should not be underestimated, especially after the Ceasefire in a sense gave the LTTE the status it had long demanded, that of the sole representatives of the Tamils. To overcome this it is essential for the government to engage actively with the diaspora, to show them that their funds can be used to benefit their kinsmen in the North and East, that they can become partners in the development programme in those areas.
Secondly, there is the undue influence of the elite advocacy NGOs in Colombo. To deal with them, the government should ensure total transparency with regard to funding, preventing the game some foreign governments play, of claiming that Civil Society is critical of the government when it is their own funds that provide Civil Society with its voice. I am reminded when I hear such arguments of the head of the European Human Rights office, who basically called our Ambassador in and declared that the time was not ripe for elections in the East. He had been briefed by one of our more plausible activists, who is heavily funded by the EU, but he also claimed that the reports of EU monitors at the last election showed that elections in those areas could not be fair. It never occurred to him that it was precisely the parliamentarians who triumphed at that election (give or take a couple who were killed by the LTTE, because they were thought to owe allegiance to the East) who were the most vehemently opposed (together with the more dogmatic NGOs) to elections in the East.
The dilemmas of dependency
But, finally, there is perhaps the fear that their own influence will be minimal if Sri Lanka solves her problems. That is not a notion that is ever clearly articulated, but it lay at the heart of British policy in the subcontinent when they ensured partition sixty years ago. Most British administrators did not consciously seek this, but in the end they gave in to the predilections of what Scott calls their dark side, the paternalists who continuously required justification for the dominance they wished to exercise. I do not think there is any conscious policy of wanting to stay on, except perhaps in the younger aid workers who are having such a wonderful time in Colombo, and so many fantastic cheap hotels. But it must be hard to think that we might just conceivably be able to manage without them. And of course it cannot harm anyone, except the inhabitants of this island perhaps, to keep the pot boiling.
Twenty years ago, when India finally put paid to Jayewardene’s efforts to hand over Trincomalee to the Americans, I was of the view that America did not mind too much, given indeed that they had got Diego Garcia from the British, and without any people, in one of the more outrageous examples of sustained Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy. Still, that was doubtless done with the highest motives, to save the world from communism, as was the assistance to the Taliban, so graphically expounded in ‘Charley Wilson’s War’. But now that history has taught them they can never be sure who will be hostile next, a little insurance cannot come amiss.
How can we deal with this? I believe the only answer is the sort of forthright approach India has adopted over the years, now clearly with resounding success. We need to develop a sense of national unity, so that there will only be isolated examples of people in influential positions whose allegiance is not primarily to this country. We have also to make it clear that we cannot be used as an agent for extraneous purposes. For that, I believe, we have to develop a strong regional identity, the togetherness in diversity that has transformed the ASEAN countries into independent entities that cannot be used against each other. They may have their differences, but the confrontations of the past are clearly no longer possible.
I conclude then with the idea that we need to work much harder at developing SAARC. We are uniquely able to do this, for we are trusted by all its members, and have a population that can relate to every other country in terms of religion as well as culture. With the restoration of democracy in Pakistan, there is a window of opportunity for the region that we should not let pass. Sixty years ago, with partition, there began a history of rivalry and suspicion that has prevented this region from developing as it should have. Now, finally, we should take this chance to finally rid the white man of his burden, and move forward on our own.
Prof Rajiva Wijesinha
Secretary General
Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process