A Fein imbalance

by Prof Rajiva WIJESINHA

TamilNet seems to be working overtime now on disinformation, with claims that the cause of its leader has been taken up by the highest in the world.

Most recently it has attributed to the British Foreign Secretary - and from a Sri Lankan expatriate point of view you cannot go higher than that - some strange views on genocide and Sri Lanka.

It declared that Britain’s Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, agreed Tuesday with parliamentarians who said that the Sri Lankan government is “quite prepared to go ahead with acts of genocide”.

Going through the actual extracts from Hansard, it seemed to me that Miliband, while being his usual charming self, had not quite said that, but doubtless our Foreign Ministry will call in the British High Commissioner for a clarification, so I will reserve comment until later on young Miliband.

Incidentally, the British envoy in Geneva thought I was being rude when I thus described him shortly after he had taken up his current position, but I was only being affectionate about a fellow Corpuscle.

He was so much younger than me, and looked even more so, that I was reminded of an old adage, that one realizes one is aging when policemen looked younger than oneself. When it comes to British Foreign Secretaries, one realizes that the time for walking sticks is drawing nigh.

My present concern however is not that holiest of holies, but rather the egregious Bruce Fein, who TamilNet claims was invited to present written testimony on `”Recent Developments in Sri Lanka” before the Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Middle East and Asia. I cannot believe that that exalted body actually invited Fein, since American traditions of justice would surely have demanded that it also invite me along, if it had gone out of its way to ensure it had the benefit of Fein’s views.

After all it was I who accepted Fein’s challenge to a debate, only to find him worming his way out of it, which surely the Senate (assuming it takes people like Fein seriously) must have realized cast some doubts on the validity of his case.

Unless my idealistic view of America is all wrong, what must have happened, I decided, was that Fein had asked to be heard, and had been gently told that he could provide written testimony instead. It should be noted however that Fein himself claimed that he had been contacted by the office of the Chairman of the Subcommittee.

If this was an unsolicited request, based on Fein’s sterling reputation, one assumes the office aides were also aware of Fein’s history of courageous if quixotic diatribes against American politicians of every hue, beginning with President Clinton, which may have been what endeared him to the Tamil Tigers and their surrogates who have hired him.

Fein certainly did not disappoint, at least according to TamilNet. He talked of an `impenetrable media blackout and eviction of all outside observers’, to a Subcommittee which had heard from a representative of Human Rights Watch who claimed to have visited the affected areas and talked at length to various anonymous international observers. Fein claims that best estimates from neutral persons in Sri Lanka place the death toll of innocent Tamil civilians in the predominantly Tamil northeast over the past two months at more than 2,000. This figure coincides with that of TamilNet itself, not surprisingly, since TamilNet is the best exemplar of Wittgenstein’s man who bought a second copy of the morning paper to check that what the first said was true. Fein then talks of the latest number of displaced persons numbering about 350,000, whereas recently observers have noted that even the worst case scenarios have plunged steadily, to at most 150,000, including those now safely in government controlled areas.

Fein is however right if he includes what are termed old IDPs, those displaced before 2005, many of whom are Muslims forced out of the North by his friends the Tigers, in the only example of ethnic cleansing this country has suffered.

Fein goes on to talk of the `Sinhalese Buddhist GOSL’ which has `imposed a media blackout. It has evicted all NGOs. It has evicted all humanitarian aid workers. It has evicted the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission. It has evicted the International Committee of the Red Cross.’ This is all nonsense, as anyone who reads recent reports of the ICRC knows. And it was the Tigers who threw out most of the countries that comprised the SLMM, after the SLMM had found them guilty of nearly 4000 violations of the Ceasefire Agreement.

The SLMM left, after the abrogation of the Ceasefire Agreement, which a year previously it had said seemed dead because of Tiger actions. (The writer is Secretary General, Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process)