NGOs’ darling: Louis Arbour

I was wrong when I said earlier that “the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ms. Louis Arbour, was sitting on her French-Canadian backside doing sweet nothing.”

On the contrary, she had been doing quite a lot, so much so that one of her compatriots, Lead Counsel, Christopher Black, told the International Criminal Tribunal Rwanda (ICTR) that “the sooner she is indicted for being an accessory to mass murder and war crimes and thrown to prison the better it is”.

According to Canadian Black, Ms. Arbour, 61, is a “criminal, corrupt (and) a shame to all Canadians.” (UPI report, April 9, 2008).

Ms. Arbour was the Chief Prosecutor of ICTR trying the Rwandans accused of crimes against humanity. The Rwandan genocide is one of the blood-curdling inhuman scandals of the 20th century, with big powers like France, UK and USA accused of being complicit in the atrocities.

It all began when the airplane carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira, the Hutu president of Burundi, was shot down as it prepared to land in Kigali, on April 6, 1994. Both presidents died and it was the catalyst for the genocide.

In 1997, Ms. Arbour was informed by her chief of investigations into the Rwandan genocide, Australian Michael Hourigan, Q.C., and his team, including FBI agent Jim Lyons and Canadian police officers assigned to their unit that it was the Ruwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) led by Paul Kagame who had shot down the plane and massacred all those people.

“But instead of indicting Paul Kagame and the RPF men who had murdered all those people she ordered Hourigan to come to The Hague where she told him to kill the investigation and to burn his notes”, said Mr. Black.

“This makes her an accessory to mass murder and a war criminal,” said Black.

UPI reported: “Barrister Black points a finger at the UN, the US, Canada and Belgium as the culprits in helping the RPF to carry out the alleged assassinations. She did this on the instructions of the US government in violation of her oath to be independent as prosecutor, argues Mr. Black.”

In a sworn affidavit, the Lead Investigative Prosecutor of ICTR, Michael Hourigan, an Australian QC, recommended that President Kagame himself, be prosecuted for the assassination of Habyarimana in 1997. But Chief UN Prosecutor, Louise Arbour of Canada, ordered him to drop the Kagame investigation; to forget it ever happened; and, to burn his notes. Hourigan resigned rather than comply and copies of his original notes are now part of the ICTR public record for all to see, wrote The Jurist.

The Jurist added: “The Hourigan affidavit makes clear that the “Rwanda Genocide” cover-up has been going on for at least a decade, but the reasons for the cover-up did not become clear until late 2007, when a senior Clinton administration diplomat, Brian Atwood, was confronted with UN documents describing a 1994 “cover-up” meeting with the Rwandan Foreign Minister in Kigali and the UN’s Kofi Annan.

According to the UN documents, U.S.-sponsored human rights reports by investigator Robert Gersony had documented massive military-style executions of civilians by Kagame’s troops, during and after the final 90 days of the four-year Rwanda War.

“The former Rwandan Foreign Minister at the meeting, Jean Marie Ndagiyimana,testified at the ICTR that, rather than participate in the proposed “cover-up,” he resigned and went into exile, where he remains today.

His ICTR testimony confirmed that Clinton’s USAID Chief for Africa, Brian Atwood, and the chief of the UN Department of Peace Keeping Operations Kofi Annan, were both in his office in late October 1994 urging him to assist in the “cover-up” the war crimes committed by Kagame’s forces,” said the Jurist.

Before Black went on the attack against Ms. Arbour, French Judge Bruguiere (famous for indicting “The Jackal”) had accused her for not prosecuting President Kagame and members of the inner circles of his government for the Rawan genocide. Bruguiere had also met with Kofi Annan in late 2006 to personally urge the U.N. Rwanda Tribunal to prosecute Kagame for the assassination of Juvenal Habyarimana. It was this war crime that re-ignited the four-year Rwanda War and the massive civilian killings in the war’s final 90-days.

Given the enormity of the crimes against humanity committed by even nuns, priests and Seventh Day Adventists Ms. Arbour was morally obliged to pursue every bit of evidence against the suspects. But she didn’t. It is pretty plain that Ms. Arbour, the high priestess of justice, has been acting as a willing puppet in the hands of big powers manipulating the international justice system to serve their political ends.

All this is relevant to the Sri Lankan situation where our pusillanimous academics, hired NGO hacks and the servile media treated Ms. Arbour as if she was a kind of a judicial goddess whose word must be treated with utmost reverence.

Predictably, our bootlicking henchaiyas consider imported justice as being far superior to the home made justice.

To them the values dictated by the West - however corrupt, biased and self-serving they may be - should be accepted and followed to the letter of law without any deviation. To these obsequious hacks, whose knees are swollen from genuflecting before their foreign gods, the Arbours, the Alan Rocks and the IIGEPs are super human beings who should be worshipped with the finest pick of flowers from their gardens, if they have any.

Acres of space were allotted by subservient vassals in the print media to glorify Ms. Arbour who is now accused of being a war criminal for turning a blind eye to the gory details of the Rwandan genocide.

The cover-ups, the deceptions, the lies, the biases and the unmitigated self-interests of international power-brokers and institutions that pretend to be concerned with human rights had exacerbated and perpetuated violence globally. Rwanda would have been a better place without Ms. Arbour and the big powers who were accused, with documentary evidence, of being a party to genocidal attacks against the minority Tutsis.

When she came to Sri Lanka in Ocotober 2007 Ms. Arbour made a song and dance about the government’s refusal to let her visit Killinochchi. Apart from shaking hands with the war criminals and abductors of Tamil children what else could she have achieved for peace in Sri Lanka?

Would she have read the riot act and told the Tamil Tigers that she would haul them up before an international court for war crimes and crimes against humanity? She is notorious for dismissing the hard evidence presented to her (example: Rwanda) and the chances were that she would have come away from Killinochchi, if she was allowed to go there, exonerating them or sympathising with them like Kofi Annan.

Sri Lankans should never forget how Kofi Annan, the former Secretary-General of the UN, extended “his sincere condolences and deepest sympathies” to E.Kaushalyan, a senior political leaders of the LTTE, Eastern Province Division, and others Tiger apparatchiks who were waylaid and killed by a rival Tamil faction in February 2005.

Kaushalyan was a lieutenant in the killing machine of the Tigers before he was promoted to be the political leader of the Eastern Province.

But why did Kofi Annan, the CEO of the UN and the leading light of human rights, go out of his way to extend his deepest sympathies to a mere lieutenant in the Pol Potist regime in the Vanni?

He had never offered his condolences to higher ranking officers of the Iraqi army killed by US-UK fire power. So why did Annan sympathize with the death of an insignificant official in the Tiger outfit? What purpose did it serve other than to lend a hand to the Tiger outfit - a banned terrorist organization headed by a war criminal wanted by India and Sri Lanka for crimes against humanity? Did it help to save peace and the Ceasefire Agreement which was being violated by the Tigers even as he spoke?

Judging by the official statement issued by the spokesperson for Annan in New York (February 8, 2005) it was meant to preserve peace. It said: “The Secretary-General urges all parties to exercise calm and restraint so as to avoid actions that could disrupt the Cease-fire Agreement of February 2002 or the long-term interest of peace in Sri Lanka.”

But what did this foolish statement of Annan achieve? The condolences offered by the CEO of human rights to a minor apparatchik in the killing machine of the most ruthless terrorist group in the world (US State Department) is like offering ladders to jumping, mischievous monkeys, to use a native idiom.

Getting back Ms.Louis Arbour her duty should have been to initiate action to prosecute Velupillai Prabhakaran, a man guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes, many times over.

But what action has she taken against such war criminals? All this points to the fact that the UN is no longer the house occupied by pious protectors of human rights, as they claim it to be.

It is increasingly turning out to be a high-class brothel for male and female prostitutes who are obsessed with grabbing the next step in the bureaucratic ladder by selling their body and soul to the highest bidders stalking the global corridors of power.

By prostituting and debasing their values, these exploiters of the noble ideals in this institution have reduced the UN Charter to another roll of toilet paper.

Genuine defenders of human rights have every right to celebrate her retirement.

They also must pray and hope that her successor will not be like her, or a Kofi Annan, or Kurt Waldheim, the former SS officer who shed crocodile tears for human rights after he got the job of Secretary-General of the UN! That is the UN for you!