Rajiva Wijesinha

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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’.) ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”