No way mercenaries can be watchdogs

"If there is going to be a watchdog on these issues, the watchdog is certainly not going to be from the NGO circuit. Sauce and Lottery Trust, or CPA or any other organization cannot be a watchdog, for the simple fact that these organizations funded by the US and other Western funders with vested interests, would just as well destabilize this country to install a puppet government - - exactly the way they did in Venezuela."
______________

By Rajpal Abeynayake

(September 28, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Society needs watchdogs, but the character and the bona fides of the watchdog is of crucial import! There is a reason NGO lapdogs cannot be effective watchdogs. To label this assertion as ‘sinister’ or ‘xenophobic’ is lame, as this type of postulation about NGOs needs to be met with facts and arguments, and not hysterical tearing of hair.

Consider the following: We know that the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) basically bankrolled a coup once, against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. The NED is directly funded by the US government.

In August 2002, USAID opened an ‘Office of Transition Initiatives’ in Caracas, Venezuela. This was before the coup against Chavez, and a job opening advertisement sent out by USAID stated “(Chavez) has been slowly hijacking the machinery of government and developing parallel and non democratic structures ... Chavez has demonstrated increasing disregard for democratic institutions and intolerance for dissent.”

A USAID front organization, OTI, was pumping far more money into Venezuela than even NED, and the USAID refused to say where the US taxpayers’ money was going, and to whom, in Caracas.

Where was it going? To fund NGOs in Carcass, and to stir the pot against Chavez and hasten the coup against him, on the grounds that he is undemocratic. This, when Chavez had done everything by the book —- and successfully faced a recall election for the presidency which was called by Chavez himself. “The United States came out of the coup with its reputation battered in South America,’’ Bart Jones writes in the ‘Hugo Chavez Story’.

It’s conceded fact therefore. NGOs, particularly US funded NGOs, are subversive in many instances, and this has been a practice for decades now - - and it’s worth remembering that the US led coup against Chavez was in the 90s, that’s the recent remembered past....

The modus operandi seems eerily similar to what happens here. Fund NGOs to the teeth, to challenge alleged rights and democracy related transgressions by the state, and on the back of such civil society led destabilization efforts, install a puppet-government.
Now, nobody is saying that there are no rights related issues in Sri Lanka. On the heels of a searing conflict in which a vicious terrorist group was vanquished, there are probably more rights violations and rights related problem-areas than one would expect in normal times in this country.

However, if there is going to be a watchdog on these issues, the watchdog is certainly not going to be from the NGO circuit. Sauce and Lottery Trust, or CPA or any other organization cannot be a watchdog, for the simple fact that these organizations funded by the US and other Western funders with vested interests, would just as well destabilize this country to install a puppet government - - exactly the way they did in Venezuela.

Inspired ignorance

Why should what happened in Venezuela not happen here? Can anybody contradict or deny what happened in Venezuela? No, absolutely not, it’s too well known and documented. Sri Lanka is but a step away from finding oil reserves. There are US strategic interests in the Indian Ocean that only idiots and babies wouldn’t know about.

Therefore, anybody who cries “xenophobia’’ when a western hand is seen in NGO intervention, is a rank ignoramus. It’s true that these NGO types are indeed ignoramuses. Other than knowing their subject areas and their academic disciplines within their narrow limitations, and other than interpreting something within the circumscribed scope of the little ‘law’ they have learnt for instance, these people generally know zilch about the wider implications of foreign involvement —- of the insidious nature of how countries are destabilized with recourse to foreign funded NGO intervention etc,

And why should they know? They are the ones getting all this baksheesh for their NGOs from foreign donors. It’s their high octane lifestyles in five star opulence, that are being bankrolled by foreign inputs into local NGOs.

So their ignorance is inspired ignorance. They pretend to not know about the fact that the US can stage and bankroll coups via NGO funding, here as well as in Venezuela — and this is of course granting that these NGO types are generally ignorant, generally do not read other than within their narrow subject ambit, and are mere ‘subject experts’ who can write pages of prolix discourses on laws and rights, but do not know the first thing about how the cotemporary global political power dynamic operates. They are not interested that the US bankrolls coups through NGOs, and that if it can happen in Venezuela and other countries, it can happen here too. They are not interested in countering that point at all. (They have been receiving too may awards from Condoleezza Rice to do that.) Their interest is within the sickeningly narrow confines of parroting a law thesis in order to collect the money and run.

Governance issues

It’s another matter that we shall mercilessly expose such mountebank ignoramuses, but it’s also noteworthy that when they cry “xenophobia” or “delusional thoughts about little Sri Lanka being destabilized by very Western powers,’’ they are also displaying their monumental execrable lack of reading, lack of intelligence, and overall lack of class.

In short they are an embarrassment. It’s the same tendency that’s seen when people see IDP camps in the North and cry “holocaust’’ and “concentration camp.’’ These people just do not grasp the intricacies of the holocaust discourse, and the accepted parameters within which that discourse is aired. To call an IDP camp a concentration camp is an abomination that insults the Jews. For crying out loud, these people’s Western sponsors will be aghast at the depth of the ignorance they have been helping foster and perpetuate.

So, the issue is not whether there are rights violations or not — or whether there is torture or not. These are governance issues that are bound to emerge at the end of a long running anti terrorist war effort.

But the issue is pointedly about the legitimacy of the people who can play watchdog. Every Tom, Dick, Harriet and Haramanis from an NGO cannot be trusted to keep watch over our rights. You don’t hand your chicken farm to Aunty Fox.

There are other more credible non-NGO academicians and objective civil society persons who can do that job. But, above all, every civic minded person in this country should be advised and advised again, to desist from having money-minded ignorant mountebanks as their civil society human rights watchdogs. These people will not tell you the whole truth, because they get money to lie to you. For instance, they dare say that “Western countries are not out to destabilize little Sri Lanka’’, the very week Robert O Blake with his compatriots hand a document to US Congress on alleged wartime excesses in Sri Lanka. Why, last week’s newspapers were full of John Pilger’s articles about how US backed NATO troops bombed and killed little children in Afghanistan just weeks ago. Such articles were cheek by jowl, in the same newspaper spaces in which these ignoramuses are virtually crying out loud for international and US intervention on Sri Lanka’s alleged rights abuses.

Don’t these people have an infinitesimal sense of shame? They entreat the demon to —- the world’s number one serial violator of human rights — to intervene in Sri Lanka on comparatively milder human rights violations incurred here, while successfully fighting a necessary anti-terrorist campaign. They do so while sitting pretty in NGOs funded habitually by this same country. How abjectly, pathetically, slavishly self-serving and ingratiating can one get?

(The writer , Editor of the Lakbima News, weekly newspaper based in Colombo, Sri Lanka)

-Sri Lanka Guardian