Grotesque Human Rights Watch Needs To Grow Up

My fellow Lankans, lend your ears, I have a story to tell.

On 5 May 2009 the HRW ran with a story about “boat people” from Sri Lanka arriving in Andra Pradesh, India. I remember few decades ago we called the Chinese-Vietnamese bolting out of Vietnam in thousands, the “boat people.” With that kind of numbers, it was a massive humanitarian crisis that spread across the entire Far East and Oceania. But I don’t ever recollect calling a group people in two boats escaping the ravages of LTTE (Tamil Tigers) literally as “boat people” per se. There is a colossal difference between the two happenings and certainly the later is not a comparable exodus.

The headline seeking HRW nonetheless wants the world to grasp the plight facing the Tamil hostages held by the LTTE is as a calamity equivalent to those Vietnamese “boat people.” It is a quite a common practice for HRW to stick convenient labels to events/incidents in Sri Lanka to catch the attention of world to force the UN to charge Sri Lanka, but not so much of the LTTE.
HRW claim they interviewed this group of Tamils and took extra-ordinary pain to say “the Sri Lankan government is doing everything it can to keep these stories of suffering from reaching the world." Seemingly this is the very first interview the HRW admitted to have conducted with Tamil refugees in the on-going counter terror war in Sri Lanka since GOSL scuttled all NGO efforts to undermine the SLA success. Interestingly, this small group of people in two boats apparently thought that escaping to India was the most prudent thing to do despite the fact nearly 115,500 other Tamils who braved the fire from resentful LTTE thought it was wise to escape to SLA lines.

There is an oddity about their arrival in India. Given these people managed to escape the Navy’s cordon with sufficient fuel and drinking water to move towards Indian coast smells rotten to the LTTE’s core. No doubt in my mind that this was hatched by LTTE to send their Mahaveer people to tell their horrific story to the world – that they were subjected to the brutal shelling by the SLA without mentioning the LTTE torture in the NFZ. Naturally, the HRW was there to embrace them and amplify to utter "these accounts must be multiplied tens of thousands of times to capture the full horror of those who remain trapped by the Tamil Tigers and shelled by government forces."

By strange coincidence, my research lead to an Israeli based group that monitor HRW over the years. The NGO Monitor has done analysis of repeated distortion and exploitation of facts in conflicts zones and questions HRW’s credibility.

Here I am attempting to draw parallel with our quarrel with HRW and how the Israelis managed to identify the flaws in HRW’s workmanship. They found that in HRW’s reports show a pattern of,

1) Reliance on unverifiable and highly questionable evidence

2) Political and ideological biases of the authors, which would explain manipulation of the evidence; and

3) Dubious interpretations of international law. These are all aspects of a well-established pattern of false claims and a biased agenda in HRW publications regarding Israel.

My research does concur all these, especially what worries me most the misinterpretation of international law as the NGO Monitor discovered to give the readers in Western capitals the impression that HRW is an authority in international law. I discovered the same while investigating for my Blog “Rendering Mute to ‘Genocide’ in Sri Lanka” that HRW flouts with international law and it is extremely dangerous precedence to let loose a bunch half-baked zealots define what international law for us.

It is easy to accuse HRW of the following meshed with a broader, yet carefully planned discrediting mission on Sri Lanka, which is similar to what Israel is accusing them of doing.

· Use of unreliable or tampered "evidence" whenever HRW has no personnel in conflict zones. Moreover, the chain of custody for crucial evidence is not mentioned, nor can this be verified

· False or inaccurate claims to justify their reporting

· No proof of motive, and unsupported charges against the SLA while charging the SLA of "willfully-that is, deliberately or recklessly" harming civilians without presenting evidence regarding SLA motives

· Alleging SLA lacks effective investigative capacity because the SLA is "infected by a climate of impunity" and alleges that the SLA cannot conduct an honest and thorough investigation

· Reliance on NGOs that lack credibility as partner to their “crime” of deceit

HRW fails to recognize that Sinhala are equally concerned about human rights as they are, and much more concerned about the equality to all citizens of Sri Lanka. For HRW to gain credibility, it must show elementary professionalism in reporting matters of great magnitude such as the right to live in peace without terror as shared by terror ravaged nations like Israel and Sri Lanka.

Unfortunately HRW lacks the vital capacity to separate the state and non-state actors to derive at the right conclusions. Failure to recognize that line of separation in conflicts, such as in Sri Lanka and Israel, allows the non-state actors continue to abuse all the rules of engagements that a state would adhere to. Perhaps it is because HRW has determined from its inception that they are better off not knowing the complexities of any conflict. Instead focusing on the states allows them to assault with impunity and without morally or legally responsible to a higher authority. The aura that HRW has built for them simply afford them a pass without any liability.

The extent to which the HRW is striving to be heard and seen relevant through misrepresentation of facts says a great deal about the personnel at HRW, who are obviously sweating bullets to profit from conflicts for individual career growth.

I am not alone in suggesting that HRW has to grow-up without exhibiting crass in their delivery when lives are at stake on all sides of conflicts.