by M. J. N. Fernando
‘The Grecians and the Romans were strongly possessed of the spirit of liberty but not the principle, for at that time they were determined not to be slaves themselves, they employed their powers to enslave the rest of mankind’.
- Thomas Paine, a founding father of the USA and author of "Common Sense"
(March 25, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Colonel Muamer Gaddafi, leader of Libya, and a friend of SL for nearly 40 years is engulfed by the people’s power protests that are sweeping over Arab states with inexorable force. Their absolute monarchs, autocrats and dictators are all trembling. Egypt and Tunisia have been liberated while the quaking rulers of Yemen and Bahrain despite USA and Saudi Arabia interference know their days are numbered. Gaddafi always an eccentric who says ‘all of the people love me’ decided to unleash his armed forces including aircraft and artillery to murder his very same ‘lovers’. When the Arab League, amongst whom he has few friends requested the UN for a ‘No Fly Zone’, Gaddafi cunningly declared a ‘cease fire’ which he had little intention of following. His objective was understood. He was not believed. He is now faced with a UN sanctioned military action which has stopped his forces in their tracks. Over in SL the American Ambassador has quite as cunningly thrown her weight behind three indefensible SL NGOs. The non cocktail circuit of SL with whom she has no contact, know them as die hard covert LTTE sympathisers with inexhaustible foreign funding. So why has she stood up for the ‘three’?
Mrs. Patricia Butenis has very suddenly after over nearly two years of exhausting circuits in Colombo, (she arrived in SL in Sep 2009) bothered to write to The Island newspaper responding to accusations of and supporting the NGOs role in SL. The particular NGOs have not said a word. She has been careful not to say which of the three NGOs who were accused of being given ‘foreign funds galore’ she particularly supports if it is not all three. Let her modesty be respected. Everyone in SL knows the ‘three’ musketeers very well. It is not surprising that she wishes to hide their stinking names. After all, they worked ceaselessly until the bloody end to prevent the genocidal LTTE from being defeated. Whereas the LTTE is finished, its ‘three’ best known ‘civil society’ supporters who wrapped themselves around the donors’ massive funds, are not. Everyone knows they were programmed and helped to do their best to suborn the defence forces and Veterans during the conflict. Thanks to a ridiculously tolerant non cocktail circuit ‘civil society’ that has existed two thousand years before the US was even thought of, these three still revel in the joys of Colombo’s cocktail circuit. So what made Butenis plead for a no fire zone for the NGOs? Who outside that ‘circuit’ will be deceived? What about the funds?
Butenis, who is well known only to the cocktail circuit of Colombo, naturally knows little of the ‘civil society’ that has through the centuries and not from 1776 given their best to SL. They were not funded by the West and consisted of nearly 99.9 of the people. They gave alms to their clergy, looked after their poor, deprived and needy giving them food and shelter. Orphans were always looked after by near relatives and others. Their doors were always open. While she knows only about how some ‘foreign funded NGOs’ helped during the floods, she should take time off to meet these other people to know what they have been doing for thousands of years. She might learn for instance how they spontaneously helped during SL’s tsunami (December 2004) when 34, 000 were killed in about 30 minutes and utter devastation took place. SL’s ‘civil society’, the majority of them just ordinary folk speaking the vernacular, from school children, house wives, working class to business men to professionals, without any ‘organization’ and with little government support, met the needs of the affected and provided succour long before the international community arrived. No one went without food and water or had to sleep in the open. No child was abandoned. The government medical services reached every inch of the land and made sure after first attending to the injured that there was no outbreak of any disease as predicted widely by the West. Electricity was restored quickly everywhere. Bridges and railway lines were repaired in double quick time. She may find out what her ‘three musketeers’ were doing during this time apart from as always living in splendour in five star hotels, driving around in SUVs, hatching plots to give the LTTE an advantage and milking money from the ‘donors’ to sell the country. She might also compare little SL’s performance in the tsunami with that of the mighty US after the devastation of ‘Hurricane Catherina’ when some noted the most affected and long neglected were poor blacks of New Orleans. Much restoration work still remains to be done there unlike here. The blacks fear a repeat battering. In SL there was and is no discrimination in providing emergency relief!
Gratuitously and condescendingly Butenis states that the mighty US of A even allowed a single French NGO, Handicap International, to mess around in her country and that it was a Nobel Prize winner too. Just like President Barak Obama? She should also jog her democratic mind on the reasons that were given by her government to prevent that wonderful and famous black singer Paul Robeson from visiting Russia in the 1960s when McCarthyism made a mockery of civil liberty in the US. There were also other civil society units which not only tried several times to assassinate the Cuban leader Castro but were organized, armed and despatched by her government to mount the notorious but abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Where were the US civil society people then? Despite all this she persists in defending the ‘three’ local NGOs. She says that there is ‘strict accounting of funds and monitoring’. She does not give details. Was it like how the US contractors worked in Iraq? They were contracted at enormous cost by high profile US government leaders from their own private companies like Halliburton’s. They were allowed to get away with even murdering Iraqis. She says organizations on social issues like the Civil Rights movement operated in the US. She doesn’t say why they had to operate in the 1970s to give the Negroes their place as equal human beings 200 years after the US ‘founding fathers’ made their spectacular utterances that keeps Colombo’s cocktail circuit bewitched. Can she say why Barack Obama is still not acceptable to the majority of whites as US President? He will certainly not allow demonstrating students like in Kent State University to be shot and killed in the campus by the Ohio National Guard as in 1970.This is a crime that even Libya has not followed in extremis in 2011. She should follow the advice of that African student at Harvard university who Gamini Goonewardene (retired DIG) quotes in The Island of 22 March 2011, who when asked, said that the best thing the US could do for his country is to leave it alone.
Butenis may not also have fully appreciated what the retired USAF pilot, who flew 101 combat missions in Vietnam, directed all Star Wars programmes when they were classified SECRET, served under US Presidents Ford and Carter and was the foremost authority on US National Security, Colonel Robert Bowman, said at a Veteran’s dinner recently: "We lost America. Our government was stolen from us. This is no longer our country. Our police, our military and our courts, with all the courageous men and women who serve us.... became but criminal organizations. Our armies work for oil companies, banks and that ‘special’ country that doesn’t get along with the rest of the world very well. Our police are little more than collection agents for the gangsters who run our economy, our country. We have always known they helped the powerful keep their boots on our necks".
Butenis, who just flies missions for three ill famed SL NGOs at the first sign of any criticism, should now follow the example of Gadaffi’s Ambassadors. Will she resign and ask for asylum in that ‘special’ country that carries no name? The three ‘special’ NGOs she has defended can then try to join her but I think there’s a colour bar there. Who will care?
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