Fein's moral confusion as Human Rights Watch returns to reality
(By: Prof Rajiva Wijesinha)
Tamilnet announced, just before midnight on Sunday
December 14th, that its latest angel of light, Bruce Fein, 'Counsel for
a US Tamil Group' as he is described, had prepared a 400+ page model
indictment against Sri Lankan officials for genocide against Tamils.
In the course of his interview with TamilNet Mr Fein
claimed that the New York-based Genocide Prevention Project has included
Sri Lanka as one of the eight "red alert" countries where genocide and
other mass atrocities are underway or risk breaking out. Also, the Obama
administration was handed a policy report on genocide with specific
recommendations from former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. This
is likely to bring Sri Lanka's genocide into U.S. focus.'
Obviously Mr Fein would like to invoke the sacred name
of Madeleine Albright, though how her policy report bears on Sri Lanka
is not made clear. The GPP, which will be the subject of more thorough
analysis, has in a sense made its standpoint clear in including trade
openness amongst the criteria used to judge the possibility of genocide.
That report, in including China and Pakistan too
amongst countries it worried about with regard to genocide, was a less
subtle than usual example of using morality to promote political and
economic objectives. Mr Fein of course has never laid claims to
subtlety, and his own purposes are quite clear, given his clients. One
hopes therefore that the GPP administrators will at least now come to
realize how their less than intellectually coherent pronouncements are
used, not just by their peers for political gain, but also by terrorists
and their apologists for even less attractive goals.
Unfortunately for Fein and his cohorts, one of the
supposedly objective authorities he cites for his denigration of 'Sri
Lanka's human rights atrocities' came out, just twelve hours later, with
its own indictment of the LTTE for crimes against Tamils. Human Rights
Watch, though it had been critical of the LTTE previously, had seemed
over the last twelve months to aim for some sort of spurious balance in
soft-pedalling its criticism of the LTTE whilst engaging in emotional
and sometimes totally fraudulent attacks on the Sri Lankan forces.
Now however the suffering to which the LTTE is
subjecting Tamils seems to have got the better even of HRW's
ambiguities. The latest pronouncement on Sri Lanka says 'Sri Lanka's
separatist Tamil Tigers are subjecting ethnic Tamils in their northern
stronghold, the Vanni, to forced recruitment, abusive forced labor, and
restrictions on movement that place their lives at risk... The LTTE has
a long history of forced recruitment. There has been a dramatic increase
in the practice of compelling young men and women, including children,
to join their forces. The group has recently gone beyond its
long-standing "one person per family" forced recruitment policy in the
territory it controls and now sometimes requires two or more family
members to join its ranks.
"Trapped in the LTTE's iron fist, ordinary Tamils
are forcibly recruited as fighters and forced to engage in dangerous
labor near the front lines," said Adams (Asia director for Human Rights
Watch).
While increased international pressure and other
factors had led to a decrease in its recruitment of children, recent
reports indicate that the group has stepped up child recruitment in the
Vanni. LTTE cadres have urged 14- to 18-year-olds at schools to join.
The group often sends 17-year-olds for military training, apparently
calculating that by the time such cases are reported to protection
agencies, the youths will have turned 18 and no longer be considered
child soldiers.
"Last year they were taking the people born in 1990
- now those born in 1991," a humanitarian official from the Vanni told
Human Rights Watch. "They look at the family identity cards and take the
young ones. If people of military age go into hiding, they will take
younger children or the father, until they get the boys or girls they
want."
During the past 25 years, the LTTE has killed large
numbers of civilians, committed political assassinations in Sri Lanka
and abroad, and carried out suicide bombings. It has systematically
eliminated most political opposition within the minority Tamil community
and is responsible for killing many journalists and members of rival
organizations. In the areas under its control, the LTTE has ruled
through fear, denying basic freedoms of expression, association,
assembly, and movement.'
Given such categorical condemnation by one of Mr
Fein's authorities, it is perhaps possible that, 'once adequate funding
for the litigation is secure', to use Mr Fein's phrase about actions he
contemplates, he will proceed against the LTTE too. But that might
require a return to reality which Mr Fein might find difficult.
As it is, he dreams of interventions that fly in the
face of international norms and law. He and his backers, the Tamils
against Genocide (who seem however to support the Genocide of Tamils by
the LTTE itself) will not he claims 'waver from its exclusive feasible
goal of genocide indictments and prosecutions of Fonseka and Rajapaksa
in the United States undistracted by a United Nations organized
plebiscite on Tamil independence, or a prosecution before the
International Criminal Court. TAG has one goal and one goal only.'
Clearly the man has no problem about naming non-existent entities as
though they were real ('undistracted by a United Nations organized
plebiscite' indeed), which one hopes will not be a characteristic of the
new Democratic administration.
Fein may see himself as an expert on pressing the
right buttons, but TAG should rethink squandering its funds on such
characters. Certainly it could use the money it collects from Tamils all
over the world much more fruitfully if it were to support Tamils in Sri
Lanka who are joining with the government to promote investment and
better opportunities in the North than were permitted under the 'iron
fist', as HRW puts it, of the LTTE.
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