In campaign to recover from defeat inflicted at Human
Rights Council in Geneva...:
British Foreign Office feeds Times false figures
By Prof. Rajiva WIJESINGHE
The article below was written in the middle of 2009, at the height of
the campaign of disinformation conducted by the Times of London against
the Sri Lankan government. After a period of quiet Jeremy Page has, to
coincide with the April 2010 General Election, returned to the charge
with a misleading article concerning what he claims are suspicions about
plans to Settle thousands of Sinhalese across the north to undermine the
Tamils claim to an ethnic homeland. It may be worth therefore looking
again at the manner in which the Times is fed information and its
falsifying techniques. (Note, April 2010) This examination of the past
is even more important now, after the regurgitation in the Darusman
Report of many allegations made previously in the Times, as well as by
Charu Latha Hogg, who is alleged to work for British intelligence.
There are strong inferences that the extreme criticisms of Sri Lanka
made in her 2007 Report for Human Rights Watch, criticisms belied by
details from the Report itself, were part of a campaign which the then
British High Commissioner was conducting against the Defence Secretary,
even though he expressed himself reasonably satisfied with other
elements in government, when we first met. (Note, May 2011) The above
headline is clearly an exaggeration, but it is based on the style of
reporting adopted recently by the Times of London in its coverage of Sri
Lanka. Following its extraordinary assertion, at the end of May, that
over 20,000 had been killed in the conflict area, it seemed necessary to
examine the motives behind such whopping untruths. The investigation
revealed a culture of secretiveness and propagandist zeal that is not of
course novel, given the role that some newspapers have played in the
past in supporting British adventurism, as instigated by particular
political parties.
An expedition to London found that the Times itself was unwilling to
provide access. Like Channel 4, which had been equally fraudulent, it
kept its doors tight shut. However four other journals and two TV
channels were more open, and provided some explanation of the deceit
practiced by the Times.
The Times is in the pocket of New Labour, said one senior journalist.
They get all their material from the Foreign Office. Another
journalist speculated that the British Foreign Office was furious at the
own goal it had achieved in Geneva, when its efforts to instigate a
Special Session against Sri Lanka, and then to have a critical
resolution passed, backfired when the whole Third World combined to
administer a stinging rebuke. Even the Americans seemed to have advised
against such folly. However, thinking that Britain had asserted its
primacy with regard to South Asia over the new American administration,
David Miliband had forged (that being the operative word) ahead. Failure
had then prompted a determination to take revenge, hence the unleashing
of the Times.
Other commentators however opined that Foreign Office professionals
had not been in favour of the move, and that more seasoned diplomats,
though they had to succumb to New Labour pressure, were pleased that the
rebuke had allowed greater weight to more enlightened professional
opinion. Their view was that positive engagement, based on British
concern for Human Rights, but without any devious political agenda,
which could also be seen as threatening to India, would achieve more in
ensuring that Sri Lanka adhered to its traditional policy of neutrality.
Though for some weeks the saner minds in the Foreign Office had
seemed to prevail, the latest effusion in the Times suggests that its
handlers are once again champing at their own bits. Now the claim is
that about 1,400 people a week are dying at one of the big internment
camps, This is attributed to Senior international aid igures, though as
usual the Times is unwilling to name these mythical figures.
The response of the UN Resident Coordinator to this claim was
Ridiculous, and he could not even guess as to how the Times had arrived
at this figure. It was possible he said that a zero had been added on,
but even 140 was higher than the actual figure. Currently it averages
under 5 deaths a day, while in the period from May 1st to mid July it
was 618 altogether, with higher figures in May when there was an influx,
just as there had been averages of over 10 a day in the first few days
after the massive influx of April 20th onward. 618 deaths in 75 days out
of a total of nearly 300,000 people is not especially strange, and well
within the SPHERE norms for such situations.
The Times, or perhaps its minders, who have smuggled in their agents
in the guise of aid workers (at massive salaries, it should be noted,
and relentlessly disruptive of the good work of most aid agencies),
knows how to introduce figures by sleight of hand. The figures it now
confidently attributes to the UN were leaked, and that from tentative
extrapolations, and UN Emergency Relief Coordinator John Holmes has made
it clear that they were never formally issued because they were only
estimates. Holmes went further in totally repudiating the Times claim
about over 20,000 dead, when he said that it had no basis in anything
said or recorded by the UN.
In fact the Times had cleverly tried to insinuate that the UN was
responsible for that figure by first citing the leaked UN figure of
7,000 for the first four months of the year, and then using a semi-colon
(how Orwell would have relished that!) to assert that there was an
average of 1,000 a day over the next two weeks. Some gullible papers had
then claimed UN authority for the 20,000, though fortunately that canard
has now been nailed, and when it recurs, generally only in the Times, it
is now attributed to the Times alone.
The reason for the current attack may be related to the admission of
doctors who had been in the conflict area that they had lied about
casualty figures under Tiger pressure. That this was happening had been
evident at the time but, though the Sri Lankan government had noted
this, the Times and its allies had cited such figures as gospel. It was
only after the admission of the doctors that the Times finally noted
that. It would be surprising if the Tigers, who were no slouches when it
came to the manipulation of the media, had not attempted to modify the
doctors' testimonies.
This belated admission was made however only to claim that the Tigers
and the Government are just like each other. What is bizarre is that, if
the Times, albeit through a series of what are in effect self-effacing
double negatives, grants that the Tigers got the doctors to make things
up, it now blames the government for having the doctors issue a
corrective. Such correctives would never have been necessary if the
Times and its minders had made it clear from the start that the figures
cited by the doctors under Tiger duress were unreliable.
And, interestingly enough, even this concession seems to be missing
from later versions of the article, since obviously nothing should take
away from the assault on the government. After all the doctors had been
brought into play over the 20,000 figure, even though it had nothing
whatsoever to do with them. Any study of the chronology would have made
that clear, but the Times assumes that its readers are not going to
study anything, and that the bigger the lie, and the more diabolical the
insinuation, the more likely it is that it will be repeated by gullible
followers.
Thus the Times claims that The United Nations found that more than
7,000 civilians were killed between January and May. Subsequent aerial
photographs of beach graves, revealed in The Times, suggested that the
figure was more than 20,000. World outrage embarrassed the Colombo
Government. The doctors were swiftly arrested and nothing further was
heard of them until Wednesday. This ignores the fact that the revelation
in the Times, passed off as having UN authority, occurred at the end of
the week in May in which the New Labour initiative in Geneva had so
dismally failed. The doctors had been arrested over 10 days earlier,
well before the Times revelation, as they escaped the conflict zone
together with thousands of other civilians when Tiger resistance finally
collapsed. That facilitated the escape, since Tiger cadres stopped to a
great extent if not totally firing on the fleeing masses they had held
hostage for so long. This hostage taking, it should be noted, was with
the connivance of the Times and its Tiger sympathizers (as described by
senior Sri Lankan journalists) such as Marie Colvin.
Why does the Times love the Tigers so much, to the extent of
suppressing initially and subsequently what they did with the doctors?
Why does it hate the Sri Lankan government to the extent of telling
ridiculous lies, as described by senior responsible aid officials? Why
does it twist evidence and chronology, hell bent it seems on attacking
the government with no regard for journalistic or even basic human
ethics? The answer obviously lies in its political agenda. No wonder
that a senior British diplomat, when told that a Conservative victory
was anxiously awaited, said the sentiments were widely shared. A
professional Foreign Office needs better leadership than it has now, it
needs better agents than the Times in its current phase of amoral
secretive falsehood. It is no wonder that other journalists said there
was no reason to worry about the Times, since its circulation was very
small. But still, as with Browning on Wordsworth, Byron on Venice, those
who remember past glories can only weep at what the current management
of the Times has done, in enslaving past glory to New Labour
manipulation. To paraphrase the Times itself, It would be surprising if
New Labour, who are no slouches when it came to the manipulation of the
media, had not attempted to pervert the reporting of the Times.
Annex - Text of a letter sent to the Times and of course not
published
The Editor
The Times London
Sir, Your article on Sri Lanka of 21st May was so full of errors that
it was a disgrace to the Times even in its current state of denial about
Sri Lanka.
It concluded, before misquoting me, with the assertion that The
Ministry of Disaster Management and Human Rights, which set up the
camps, did not return calls asking for comment yesterday.
In the first place, this Ministry is not responsible for setting up
the camps, though we are responsible for protection issues in them.
Secondly, May 20th was a public holiday, so perhaps you could ask your
correspondent which number he called, at which he left a message asking
for comment on his story. You should also ask him why he did not call me
on my mobile, on which another correspondent of yours interviewed me at
length in February, only to produce a report very different from that of
the Indian correspondent who was in my room at the time and listened to
the interview.
The substance of the article indicates why your correspondent feared
to contact either me or my Minister, who tells me he was called up on
the 21st, and answered queries on this subject, well after you had gone
to print.
The article is headlined Paramilitaries abducting Tamil children from
Sri Lanka camps with well placed quotation marks attributing
responsibility for your story to the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child
Soldiers. The BBC, which had used the story earlier (and which I also
asked, without a positive response, to record my response to the story)
noted that it originated with Charu Lata Hogg. Ms Hogg was the person
who first began the witch hunt against Sri Lanka, way back in 2007, when
Human Rights Watch first alleged that the Sri Lankan forces fired
indiscriminately on civilians.
With regard to the substance of the story, paramilitary groups are
not permitted in the camps. There have been no allegations of abductions
by UNHCR, which has several hawkeyed ladies who make allegations at the
drop of a hat. There have been no allegations by them of rape either,
except one instance of an IDP abusing his niece, which they claimed the
Sri Lankan military encouraged.
Conversely the Sri Lankan forces had reason to believe that possible
LTTE cadres were being smuggled out of the camp by what are termed aid
workers, and they have therefore restricted vehicular access. This may
have been the origin of Ms Hogg's accusations, but clearly this cake has
been long in the baking.
Two years ago, when Ms Hogg first began to perform, I was told that
she had close links with the British Foreign Office, if not military
intelligence.
Whether this is true I have no idea but, given the recent efforts of
the British Foreign Secretary to save the Tigers, as expressed so
clearly in a recent article in the Guardian, it is a story that seems
more plausible than Ms Hogg's creations. Perhaps the Times might care to
investigate the lady, and let the British people realize that the
executive branch of government is as sleazy as the legislative.
Rajiva Wijesinha
Secretary,
Ministry of Disaster Management and Human Rights Sri Lanka
(Originally published in 2009)
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