Human Rights Watch, standard bearers of what Michael Roberts has characterised as HRE - Human Rights Extremism - seems to have decided that it has a special relationship with me. I am the only person quoted by name in the presentation made by their Senior Researcher Dr. Anna Neistat to the US Senate Foreign Relations Sub-Committee that dealt with Sri Lanka.
Sadly, this anxiety to use my name in an attempt to shore up her case against the Sri Lankan government was not accompanied by any attempt to check with me as to my views on the matters on which they were pronouncing. This is of a piece with their previous dodging of any engagement with me. Eighteen months ago, HRW failed to respond when I proved, from their own report, that their sensationalistic release about the Sri Lankan forces indiscriminately targeting civilians was totally false. Even more tellingly, they cancelled a discussion on Sri Lanka that they had arranged in the British House of Commons, when they heard that the Foreign Minister had asked me to attend. The official from our High Commission who had been liaising with them, and found first Sir Nigel Rodley dropping out, and then Human Rights Watch abandoning the event, thought they feared I would be excessively critical.
Running away from discussion based on evidence seems a dubious practice for an organisation that claims the moral high ground, but an investigation of the way they present their opinions suggests that morality has nothing to do with it. They have a purpose, and if that purpose coincides with the purposes of terrorists, that means nothing to them, since they do not have to live with the effects of terrorism. So they produce what seem to be well researched papers, but singularly fail to substantiate any of the points they make.
In the case of Dr Neistat's performance in the Senate, the one piece of verifiable evidence she produced was something she attributed to me, all her other quotations being from sources she would not name. However, despite this use, or rather misuse, of my name, she did not bother to check her story with me, even though she claims to have been in Sri Lanka at the time the London Times cited the line she so triumphantly used.
That the line was misleading must of course have been obvious to anyone who understands English. The London Times had claimed I said, 'Of course, it will not be voluntary - we need to check everyone,' which is tautologous because that is what the word 'check' means. Even in what is termed random checking, it is not those checked but those who check who decide who will be checked. I could only conclude then that Dr Neistat privileging me by citing a redundancy arose from a desire to score debating points, while fearing to see me face to face.
The fear is perhaps understandable, because her testimony is so full of falsehoods that she would have been extremely nervous to actually ask questions that would have upset her applecart. She starts by claiming that the Sri Lankan government is burying 'the abuses' by preventing people from gathering or disseminating information, and then immediately says that 'we', whoever that might be, managed to collect credible information. If she can achieve that in a short time, and so many others are purveying information they think credible, what on earth makes her think that the government is trying to stop information being collected, or believes that it is possible to succeed in such an endeavour?
Dr Neistat claims that the government and the LTTE are engaged in 'a perverse competition to demonstrate the greatest disregard for the civilian population'. She conveniently thus ignores that the government expended much energy and money in providing high quality health and education to those under LTTE control for several years, and continued to supply them when the LTTE drove them from pillar to post as the forces regained more and more territory in the North. She ignores forced conscription by the LTTE of one and then two children per family, the forced labour to build bunkers with all the cement the Sri Lankan government sent in for dwellings for civilians. And she will not admit that, if civilians are trying to get into government controlled territory, 35,000 of them succeeding despite being shot at in LTTE attempts to stop them, they obviously do not share her view that both sides are as bad as each other.