International Crisis Group

How impartial would its report be?

by Gomin DAYASRI

The International Crisis Group (ICG) is preparing an ex parte report calling for an international inquiry into alleged war crimes in Sri Lanka. To give credibility to itself, there will also be a vague finding against the LTTE. With the LTTE ceasing to exist - such an adverse finding would cause no impact on a defunct LTTE. The ICG naming them too as a guilty party will be mere eyewash.

It is the backroom boys at the ICG that are playing the role of scripting the ghost report to discredit the Defence Forces of Sri Lanka. Why does the ICG want an inquiry into war crimes in Sri Lanka?

The objective of the report is to bring Sri Lanka into disrepute in the eyes of the international community. Unlike the non-existing LTTE, Sri Lanka is a live nation state that can be subjected to international sanctions. Western powers and their allied NGOs were incapable of finding material to discredit Sri Lanka in its effort to defeat terrorism. These nations and their shadow NGOs failed, having fought to preserve the LTTE; they now require a busybody such as the ICG at their command, to unearth material to hang Sri Lanka. It is an assignment on a contract given to parties specialised in plumbing operations, as the ICG is. They are the front-runners on whose doctored reports the Western powers and NGOs can activate their objectives of attempting to shame Sri Lanka.

From the charge sheet, it is obvious that their target is the present Army Commander Jagath Jayasuriya. No more are they interested in the ex-Army Commander Sarath Fonseka who was chief of the Army at the time of the war, since their allegations do not name Fonseka as a wrongdoer. Instead, the ICG charges the present Commander for the events of the past. Possibly after Fonseka expressed a desire to make revelations, they seek him for information.

The ICG describes itself as an “independent non governmental non-profit organisation”. Its key officials are highly critical of Sri Lanka on its war efforts. Its present CEO and President is Louise Arbour, the President Emeritus is Gareth Evans. The co-chair is Lord Chris Patten. This ‘Gang of Three’ has been harsh on Sri Lanka in its conduct of the war against terrorism.

Can an organisation, which is headed by officials with such prejudiced and jaundiced views, present an impartial and objective report? Obviously such a report is a pre-meditated effort to destabilise Sri Lanka in the international arena.

Chris Patten has asserted that the UN should have intervened politically and diplomatically under the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) to safeguard Tamil civilians in Sri Lanka’s campaign of the military to wipe out Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. (Island, May 5, 2010).

Gareth Evans visited Sri Lanka in the company of expelled Rani Mani, to lecture that the country is certainly capable of deteriorating to the extent of an R2P situation and that it is an R2P situation that demands preventive action. (Foreign Policy Magazine May 1, 2009).

Gareth Evans during the height of the war alleged,“The whole world watches the continuing calamity in Sri Lanka, with thousands of civilians dead with tens of thousands at risk as government forces try to quash the last of the insurgent Tamil tigers.” (Foreign Policy Magazine, May 7, 2009).

At the Neelan Thiruchelvam lecture in July 2007 Gareth Evans pronounced, “Recent Sri Lankan history offers too many examples of large-scale atrocities, mass graves, war crimes and ethnic cleansing. It was Louise Arbour’s reports that prompted US State Department officials to assert that”.

We remain concerned about the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Sri Lanka as confirmed in the recent assessment of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour. An international human rights presence in Sri Lanka would be an important step in improving human rights, accountability and the rule of law and ultimately resolving the conflict in Sri Lanka.”

This is proof that those who are trying to hang Sri Lanka for war crimes were once prime movers backing international intervention in Sri Lanka.

This was the common stand of Patten, Evans and Arbour, prime players in the ICG that would soon be releasing a report to call for an international inquiry to find Sri Lanka guilty of war crimes with a finger directed at the present Army Commander.

[See boxes on Patten, Evans and Arbour]. In a nutshell the ICG officials had pronounced Sri Lanka guilty long before deliberating to write a report!

But does not the ICG report originate from sources that have displayed its partiality and bias and exposed their mala fides towards Sri Lanka’s Defence Forces? What degree of impartiality can be attached to a report that is prepared by a group that has been hostile to the war related events of Sri Lanka?

Though the ICG in its introduction boasts of a ‘non-governmental’ character, Source Watch has traced that it raises funds from governments and that its prime sources of funding includes the governments of US, UK, Norway, Sweden, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany and Australia. It is estimated that 40 per cent of its funding comes from State funds.

Its funding sources include George Soros Open Society Institute, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Henry Luce Foundation and United States Institute of Peace [Source: Spin Watch in the article-Who pays the Piper? by Jan Oberg-Director Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future].

George Soros, executive member, foundation trustee and long time core supporter of ICG and founder of one of its prime financiers Open Society Institute is known as “the man who broke the Bank of England” due to his sudden withdrawal of US $ 10 billion worth of sterling pounds. This led to the Bank of England withdrawing the currency from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism leading to the devaluation of the sterling pound. It is reported that George Soros earned an estimated US $ 1.1 billion in the process which cost the Treasury 3.4 billion UK pounds.

Former Prime Minister of Malaysia, during the Asian financial crisis, accused Soros of using the wealth under his control to punish ASEAN for inviting Myanmar as a member and for unbalancing the Asian currency markets.

In 1988 French courts fined him US $2.3 million for charges of insider information.

In the US, George Soros has been highly criticised for avoiding tax payments.

In September 2002 George Soros’ Open Society Institute, a main funding source for ICG, gave US$ 20,000 to the Defense Committee lawyer Lynne Steward who defended terrorists in court and was sentenced to 28 months in prison for providing material support for a terrorist conspiracy. (Source: Wikipedia)

This reveals that funding sources of the ICG are of a suspicious nature and dubious character; at times its funding sources appear to be tilted in favour of terrorist objectives.

Policy guidance

Diana Johnston (Emperors New Clothes- Feb.28, 2000) described the ICG as a - “ high-level think-tank supported by George Soros.... {devised} primarily to provide policy guidance to governments involved in the NATO-led reshaping of the Balkans” ...which led to the creation and the recognition of Kosovo as a “state”, just as the LTTE attempted to create a state of Eelam.

The ICG openly interferes in the exercise of the franchise of the people being supportive of political parties of their fancy and in the last election in Macedonia in the Balkans, it came in favour of the opposition. The ICG published a rabid attack on the then incumbent government of Macedonia relegating the rampant corruption of the predecessor [like in the case of the atrocities of the LTTE] - whom it tacitly supported. In Bosnia in the Balkans, the ICG has recommended confrontations, the imposition of sanctions and if they fail the use of force. It is an organisation that supports “just wars” - when it suits them.

According to the Certified Independent Auditors Report of Gelman, Rossenberg and Freedman addressed to the Board of Trustees, the ICG maintains a regional office/local field representation in Sri Lanka.

A famed economist once remarked sardonically “To say (that the ICG) is ‘solving world crises’ is to risk underestimating its ambitions, if over- estimating its achievements.”

In the recent confrontations in Thailand between red and coloured shirts, the ICG was the only NGO that called for international intervention to solve an internal dispute, describing it as an undeclared civil war.

In this background, the credibility of the ICG is highly suspect and appears to be an undisclosed agent of western powers that did not want terrorism to end in Sri Lanka and was acting as a supportive buffer for the LTTE.

The ICG could not prevent a victory for the Sri Lankan Forces that brought peace and tranquillity to Sri Lanka, most notably to the Tamils in the North and East.

Having failed miserably in saving the LTTE, the ICG now returns to discredit Sri Lanka by attempting to fault them on war crimes.

Who will believe them with their dubious past, except those Western powers and their front NGO organisations that fund the ICG to do assignments they are unable to undertake?

This is another instalment of a Western strategy to bring Sri Lanka to disrepute. This is neither the beginning nor the end of this exercise.

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Chris Patten “Now, put yourself in Tamil shoes and decide whom to vote in the presidential elections: choose either the head of the government that ordered the attacks against you or the head of the Army that carried it out”. (New York Times, Jan 12, 2010) “Both Rajapaksa and Fonseka executed the 30-year conflict to its bloody conclusion at the expense of the Tamil civilian population”.

(New York Times, Jan. 10, 2010)

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Louise Arbour Jon Boulton, US Ambassador to UN, on Louise Arbour : “Inappropriate and illegitimate from an international civil servant to second-guess the conduct that we are engaged in, in the war against terror with nothing more as evidence than what she reads in newspapers” (New Democracy, Sept. 7, 2007) UN Watch on Louise Arbour: “Louise Arbour holds back criticism from many countries that wield power and influence at the UN”. (Wikipedia) Louise Arbour on Human Rights Council Louise Arbour scolded some Human Rights Council members for going too far to criticise her and her staff by impeaching their integrity at alleging “bias, hypocrisy, insubordination and dereliction of duty as being outside the acceptable range”.

(AP News and Fox News, March 7, 2008.)

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Gareth Evans

John Pilger in his book Distant Voices refers to the UN peace plan for Cambodia and the dominant role played by Gareth Evans in it. According to Pilger it gave Pol Pot and the dreaded Khemer Rouge immunity from prosecution for the acts of genocide inflicted on the Cambodian people. The Indonesian military massacred large numbers of people in the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili. Evans dismissed the event as -"They might have simply gone bush".

(Sydney Morning Herald, December 28,30 1991).

According to Pilger, on Evans recommendation, Ali Atatas, Jakarta's Foreign Minister and the principal apologist for the massacre was awarded the Order of Australia, the highest honour of the country.

The Foreign Ministers Gareth Evans (Australia) and Ali Alatas (Indonesia) celebrated the signing of the Timor Gap Treaty with a champagne diet on board a plane as captured in the film, Death of a Nation (Distant Voices - John Pilger); which allowed international oil companies to exploit the seabed off East Timor yielding possibly seven billion barrels of oil. In the words of Gareth Evans "zillions of dollars".

(Indonesia News, Feb 1991).