http://www.dailynews.lk/2013/03/06/fea02.asp

There is method in Navanethem Pillay’s ‘madness’

Dr Kamal Wickremasinghe

Steven Biko, the South African martyr of the anti-Apartheid movement who quit his medical education for activism sagely pointed out that ideological control over the minds of the oppressed is the greatest weapon in the hand of the oppressor. The phony global human rights campaign is one such ideological weapon in the armoury of the neocons.

The anti-Sri Lanka campaign at the UNHRC, based on false allegations of war crimes and human rights violations needs to be seen as an integral part of this elaborate strategy of the imperialist neocon aims to acquire moral superiority over long established cultures of the poor - concocted allegations and so-called ‘evidence’ of heinous war crimes are the means of attacking the national integrity of countries like Sri Lanka trying to implement a domestically generated development policy agenda.

Needless to say, the accusers’ unspeakable atrocities against humanity in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia during the last decade, most recently in 2011 in Libya, and currently in Syria through proxies, fail to attract the attention of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) or Britain’s Channel 4 video producers.

The human rights of a US Army private named Bradley Manning and the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange are being violated with impunity by the US and British governments for trying to attract attention to such crimes.

As a current example that exposed the fraud, , the two boys aged and seven and eight years shot dead by the NATO forces in Afghanistan on March 3, during the 22nd session of the UNHRC session in Geneva, failed to rate a mention at the UNHCR by Navenethem Pillay or the bleeding heart NGOs.

Navanethem Pillay is part of the problem

Considering the mammoth resources the US devotes to pursuing poor countries on baseless allegations of war crimes and other crimes against humanity, an aggrieved UN member country should at least be entitled to an objective ‘prima facie’ opinion from a disinterested party, or from those in charge of officiating on such charges.

Steven Biko	Bradley Manning

On the contrary, what such countries are receiving is loads of prejudice from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Pillay and her office. Pillay’s personal opinions and interest on the Sri Lankan issue and her allegiances to the accuser appear to be taking the better of her, denying natural justice to Sri Lanka at the UNHRC forum.

Pillay has a history of meting out prejudicial treatment to Sri Lanka - last year, after submitting her annual report for 2012, while welcoming the release of the report of the internal review panel on the UN actions in Sri Lanka during the last phase of the conflict,she emphasised the finding that there was a “systemic failure” on the part of the UN.

In an undisguised attempt to coax the UNHRC to ‘act’, she reminded that “the UN, wherever we are, has a duty to live up to the principles and standards we promote” - there is nothing on record to show that Pillay has ever made similar remarks on the proven US and NATO killings of children in Afghanistan, for example.

In March 2012, she warned Sri Lanka against reprisals against “human rights defenders” in the aftermath of the adoption of the US anti-Sri Lanka resolution by the HRC. This was quite unnecessary and was beyond her powers anyway.

In November 2012, Pillay clearly overstepped the mark when she expressed “alarm” at the Australian immigration policy decision to promptly send bogus Sri Lankan asylum seekers back, asserting that Sri Lanka was still “volatile”, despite the end of the civil war in 2009. Her charter clearly does not allow her to interfere with the immigration policy of any sovereign member country, let alone Australia.

The aggressive pursuit of the State Department-NGO agenda seems to make her oblivious to the fact that she is an ‘employee’ of the 193 UN member countries, large and small, and rich and poor, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.

Forgetting this simple reality, Pillay seems to treat the smaller and poorer member countries of the UNHRC differentially, with disrespect, assuming the role of preacher. By acting haughtily upon trumped up allegations by the US and the NGOs on face value, she displays total subservience to the US neocon agenda at the UNHRC.

Pillay seems to be easily annoyed by the protestations of the unjustly accused, and almost demand that foreign intervention be allowed even if the allegations are baseless - she is out of control!

Who or what is driving Navanethem Pilllay?

Pillay’s decidedly un-diplomat like behaviour towards Sri Lanka, indeed her bellicosity,reveals much about the many factors and influences that have formed her and her personal agenda in her capacity as UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

One of the easiest accusations that can be made is that her own Tamil ethnicity is clouding her judgement and impartiality on matters relating to Sri Lanka. There is also the practical imperative of her wanting to create ‘work’ for herself and the immense human rights monitoring and investigating infrastructure including the NGO contractor networks the West has created to haul countries that disobey their orders over the coals.

Pillay obviously has strong neocon and NGO connections forged during her days at the Harvard Law School which she attended between 1982 and 1988, reading for a PhD in Juridical Science. A large number of USAID, the State Department and other US bureaucrats as well as the top rung of the INGOs like the Human Rights Watch (HRW), International Crisis Group (ICG) and other NGOs are also Harvard alumni and contemporaries of Pillay.

Probably Pillay’s almost missionary zeal for human rights that mirrors the celebrity bogus human rights agenda promoted by the US Department of State, and the NGOs financed by them, is a hangover of the neocon brainwashing received following the neocon hijacking of the anti-Apartheid struggle in the 1980s.

Pillay’s approach to international affairs is a carefully orchestrated act of ‘singing for supper’, portrayed as a child-like naivety.

Navanethem Pillay

Julian Assange

For better and for worse, Pillay is a product of the Apartheid era

Pillay was born in Durban, South Africa in1941, literally in to the Apartheid (separateness) era that began in 1948. She would have grown up under the evil Apartheid regime of the pass laws,in a social environment devoid of fundamental human rights.

Her Tamil family was extremely poor and her education up to a LLB degree from the University of Natal in 1965, just a year after Mandela was imprisoned for life, was supported by the local Indian community. In 1967 Pillay started her own law practice in Natal Province because no law firm employed her as a lawyer due to her colour. In 1973, she won the right for political prisoners including Nelson Mandelaon Robben Island to have access to lawyers.

In 1995, the year after the African National Congress(ANC) came to power at the end of Apartheid, Mandela nominated Pillay as the first non-white woman to serve on the High Court of South Africa.

She was soon elected by the United Nations General Assembly to serve as a judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda from 1995-2003, and later to the International Criminal Court. She resigned in August 2008 in order to take up her current which was renewed in 2012 for two more years.

Pillay’s personal background and life experiences would have been clearly life moulding. The apparent lack of perspective on the current human right charade being staged by the West is all the more perplexing due to her irrefutable credentials as a ‘real’ human rights worker at the cutting edge of probably the single most important human struggle against colonialism in modern history.

The answer lies in the brain washing the influential anti-Apartheid activists of her generation received in the hands of the neocon-led free market globalisation movement during the final throes of Apartheid.

End of Apartheid was a theft of the dream

South Africa’s early anti-Apartheid struggle of the exiled African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) coincided with, and was inspired by, the socialist revolution in Cuba, other African anti-colonial struggles and the rise of the new Left in Europe. The United Democratic Front (UDF) played the role of mobilising the people.

The defeat of the South African Defence Force in Angola with the help of Cuban armed forces made the ruling elite realise the need for ending Apartheid, coupled with a process of economic restructuring to enable the ‘quiet’ exploitation of the oppressed majority blacks. The counter move, as well as the strategy of survival of the Apartheid regime was to align with the free-market, neoliberal globalisation project that was being launched by the neocons.

The ANC-led liberation movement made the critical strategic error of complying and cooperating with this plan in a sadly mistaken gesture of good-will to the oppressors - without requiring the white monopoly capital to take responsibility for its complicity with apartheid and demanding economic transformation, the ANC acquiesced with neoliberal macro-economic ‘reforms’ in the name of ‘economic stability’, hoping to engender a new black bourgeoisie. Both these eventualities failed to materialise.

South African dream was stolen from the majority

The ANC leadership in post-Apartheid South Africa appears to be living their “historic mission” Frantz Fanon disparagingly assigned in his classic The Wretched of the Earth to all African leaderships following liberation -“having nothing to do with transforming the nation,but being the transmission line between the nation and capitalism rampant though camouflaged”.

Upon Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990, the ANC appeared to have renounced its “unbreakable promise” to take over monopoly capital. On his triumphant tour of the US, Mandela said in New York: “The ANC will re-introduce the market to South Africa.” The hedge fund criminal and founder and financier of HRW and ICG George Soros noted in 2001, South Africa has been delivered into “the hands of international capital”.

The ANC today has evolved into a mere electoral machine run by factional interests. A new generation of wealthy black politicians risen from the ashes of the ANC engage in patronage politics, state-led class formation and widespread corruption in today’s South Africa. Political participation is based on the allure of enrichment through ANC patronage rather than affecting economic and social change.

Leading ANC figures such as Cyril Ramaphosa, head of the National Union of Mineworkers once seen as heir-apparent to Mandela, after leaving the movement due to conflict with former president Thabo Mbeki, has become a corporate multi-millionaireby aligning himself with the forces that nourished Apartheid.

The ANC has been rocked by scandal and tragedy - President Jacob Zuma faces investigation over $27 million in government money spent on security upgrades to his private residence - The killing of 33 striking workers by the police at a platinum mine in August 2012 has caused irreparable damage to the ANC’s standing with the poor.

Post-Apartheid South Africa has moved into a market-led form of ‘Afro-neoliberalism’ that has, in two decades, produced 40 per cent unemployment, the highest in the world, and obscene levels of social and economic inequality with sprawling shack settlements with no clean drinking water or sanitation where basic needs of healthcare and education are unmet. In effect, racial apartheid has been replaced by economic apartheid of the “free market”.

As an effect of the neocon brainwashing they received in the early 1990s, politically, the post-apartheid South Africa has been firmly repositioned within the US-led bloc internationally - the ANC government of Jacob Zuma stopped importing 42 per cent of its oil from Iran under pressure from Washington, sharply increasing the price of petrol, further impoverishing people.

Pillay is a product of the same process

The above trend helps putting Pillay’s human rights crusade that is an abuse of her position as UNHCHR in context. Examples are abound - on February 18, at the current UNHCR sessions she tried to provide a pretext for imperial aggression against Syria by calling for Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad to be referred to the ICC. She went even further in calling for military intervention to “end the killing”.

Through such corrupt behaviour, Pillay is seeking to demonise the Syrian president and delegitimise his government in the eyes of western public opinion, turning him into an international pariah in anticipation of a possible full-scale, western, military but “humanitarian” intervention for regime change in Syria.

She executed similar nimble legal footwork in advance of the illegal, so-called “humanitarian”, NATO intervention in Libya by demonising Mouammar Gaddafi and his son Saif at the UN.

There is obviously a method to the lady’s “madness” and it is not hard to guess as to where her orders emanate from.

Minister Samarasinghe’s refusal to meet with her is an appropriate response considering that he could have used the time more productively with UNHRC members in Geneva.