Monday, June 28, 2010

The panel is about Ban-Ki Moon saving his skin

Posted on June 28th, 2010

Ajit Randeniya

The appointment by Ban Ki-Moon of a panel to advice him on the accountability process has justifiably attracted the ire of most Sri Lankans, the Sri Lankan government and some foreign observers. On closer inspection however, the devil does not appear as black as it appears at first blush; it is just a cynical bureaucratic manoeuvre by Ban.

Contrary to the malicious propaganda of Reuters and AFP, the panel has no legal authority, or commission from Ban, to conduct a war crimes investigation; it is simply an administrative manoeuvre by Ban, designed to keep the American Zionist monkeys and the EU off his back.

America badly needed a diversion or two to break the disastrous news cycle that has circled the empire for the last fortnight or so: it started with their ‘mate’ Benyamin Netan-Yahoo’s murder of nine unarmed people who accompanied the peace-flotilla.

Since then, politically things have become simply catastrophic for Barack Obama: Afghanistan is fast becoming a quagmire much deeper than Vietnam ever was. The number of NATO and American soldiers killed has been steadily increasing every year since the unjust and unnecessary war began. There were 275 deaths in 2009, and 156 deaths so far in 2010, with June recording the highest number of NATO and US deaths of 86 and 52 respectively.

The military ‘strategy’ of the just-sacked war criminal Stanley McChrystal that formed the basis of the ‘surge’ of troops to blitzkrieg the southern Taliban stronghold of Kandahar is dead in the water due to lack of support by the Afghani people, and by the puppet government of Hamid Karzai.

Obama broke his campaign promise to wind up the murderous Afghanistan war, succumbing to the neocon conspiracy to send more troops, and his withdrawal date of July 2011 is becoming increasingly rubbery by the day, on the excuse that things have not gone according to plan, and he is due to face fresh presidential elections in 2012.

Judging by the Vietnam experience, before the nightmare is all over, the coterie of White House backroom boys, from Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod to the last White House intern, the hidden arm of the Israeli lobby who keep offering Obama ‘Hobson’s choices’ on important war decisions will be gone; they will be busily selling their ‘memoirs’ through Rupert Murdoch owned publishing houses, each one of them blaming Obama for all the failures!

At times like these it is quite usual for the CIA, diplomatic missions, State Department and UN ambassadors to receive informal orders for ‘announceable’ good news stories; and they create them! Neocon agents such as Lynn Pascoe and the Bush family favourite Susan Rice would have quickly explored unfinished businesses at the UN for a way out. The announcement of the panel was one of Ban’s responses to pressure from the US.

Ban Ki-Moon, like every other Secretary General before him, by necessity, is compliant to US demands; Ban was appointed essentially by John Bolton, the disgraced neocon who knew him well, and hated North Korea with gusto for calling him ‘human garbage’. Ban’s appointment helped serve the neocon objective of periodically inflaming tensions in the Korean Peninsula in order to justify keeping nearly thirty thousand US soldiers there, more than fifty years after the last war. A bit of UN assistance is always helpful in international affairs!

Ban gave the Americans another concession by despatching Lynn Pascoe to Colombo, giving him a chance to thumb his nose at the Sri Lankan government by announcing the appointment of the panel in Colombo!

Pascoe himself suggested however, that “there have been many misunderstandings about this panel about what its going to do, but there is no cause for concern at all. I also hope that the panel would be useful to the Sri Lankan side.” But in the usual duplicitous American way, he issued a mild threat when he said that “the responsibility for carrying out a credible process that meets international standards rests first and foremost with the Sri Lankan authorities and the UN would follow with interest in the progress made by the Presidential appointed committee.” Susan E. Rice, the Bush appointed US Permanent Representative to the United Nations, ‘welcomed’ the panel

The composition of the panel clearly shows that Moon was keen to please the Americans and at the same time, the panel will serve no useful purpose. The only reason why Ban appointed Marzuki Darusman of Indonesia to head up this panel was because his appointment would not attract any objections by the Americans: Darusman is a well known former US agent, used by Paul Wolfowitz to undermine the Suharto regime in Indonesia in the late eighties and early nineties, from within Suharto’s Golkar party by promoting religiously-based dissension and by surreptitiously promoting a plethora of NGOs.

But Darusman’s performance since securing the job of Attorney General in the Kafkaesque government of Abdurrahman Wahid and more recently as the UN independent commissioner appointed by Ban to investigate the ‘facts and circumstances surrounding the 2007 assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhuto’ shows that he is not a man known for producing results.

The other two members, Steven Ratner, an American ‘friend’ of the neocon establishment who advised the UN intervention in Cambodia during the heyday of interventions in the early nineties, and the professional human rights activist from South Africa, Navanethem Pillay’s nomination perhaps, Yasmin Sooka are not worth talking about. Darusman is obviously the key US instrument here.

Marzuki Darusman (65) can best be described as Mangala Samaraweera of Indonesian politics. Coming from the miniscule, yet influential, Catholic minority in Indonesia, he holds a law degree with a major in international law of the sea from an Indonesian catholic university. As the son of an Indonesian diplomat he spent his formative years in Europe and is reputed to be a ‘slave’ to ‘European values’.

He served as a ruling Golkar party Member of Parliament, representing Bandung, West Java for 15 years until 1992, when he appeared to have outgrown his shoes: he revealed to an Indonesian news magazine that he had presidential ambitions. The problem was, his party boss Suharto was still very much in power and Indonesian culture does not take such loose talk kindly. Golkar struck his name from the list of party candidates in the 1992 election.

Darusman then managed to work his way in to the National Human Rights Commission, and started investigating complaints against the army of alleged kidnappings, mass murders, and gang rapes. In reality, he was creating and collecting data for the Americans. He held that position for seven years.

Darusman is known to have been firmly cultivated as an ‘agent provocateur’ by the corrupt, leading neocon conspirator Paul Wolfowitz who worked as US Ambassador to Indonesia between 1986 and 1989. Wolfowitz later admitted to “quietly pursuing political and economic reforms in Indonesia while he was Ambassador.” During this period the CIA, USAID and all other US clandestine agencies were working hard to destabilise the Suharto regime that was making Indonesia economically strong, receiving widespread public support for its ‘Panca Sila’ based national development plan. America simply couldn’t allow an Islamic country of over 200 million people to become too powerful!

The means by which they tried to achieve their objective was by creating and financing a wide variety of bogus fronts, disguised as ‘NGOs’ undertaking development work, with the hope of creating social disharmony. However, this strategy failed to yield desired results for them: they had to stage the 1997 ‘Asian Fnancial Crisis’ and implement a full capital withdrawal with the assistance of George Soros (of the International Crisis Group!), followed by the IMF and World Bank belt tightening ‘advice’ to create the social unrest they were looking for. The non-availability of cooking oil was the crucial factor that ultimately triggered social unrest.

Darusman’s handy work yielded results when the Golkar party was torn apart by a rift between Suharto loyalists and the so-called reformists who were American agents, during the crisis. Using the turmoil, Darusman put himself in charge of a pivotal committee to ‘remake’ the party and he helped galvanise support for the idiotic Abdurrahman Wahid from outside the party, as a presidential candidate and to be appointed interim president following President Suharto’s resignation in 1998. Darusman secured the job of Attorney General for his troubles!

Darusman started a corruption investigation of Suharto, his family and friends, and the former armed forces commander General Wiranto for crimes against humanity in East Timor and human rights violations in Aceh. He took the unprecedented, illegal and high-handed step of placing Suharto under ”city arrest” allegedly to keep him from tampering with evidence. President Wahid and his Attorney General Darusman achieved no headway in bringing any of the 23 army generals accused of atrocities in East Timor to books.

Darusman still maintains close contacts with a number of veteran and powerful US intelligence agents through his position as a Trustee of a shady organisation known as The United States-Indonesia Society (USINDO). His handlers at USINDO are all former USAID and State Department intelligence agents such as Stapleton Roy, Stanley Roth and Karl Jackson, with decades of experience in Asia. The president of the Board of Trustees of USINDO, David N. Merrill is the biggest of them all. Merrill is a former ambassador to Bangladesh and was Mission Director of USAID in Indonesia from 1987 to 1990. His tenure coincided with that of Wolfowitz’s, showing the level of importance the neocon ‘rulers’ who controlled US foreign policy unchallenged at the time placed on Indonesia. After government service he joined Dick Cheney’s former employer, the US Army contractor Halliburton and Enron!

Wahid, the ‘accidental president’ passed away in December 2009; Paul Wolfowitz appeared to have been so moved that he wrote an obituary in the ‘Wall Street Journal of January 6, 2010, titled ‘Wahid and the Voice of Moderate Islam’. The corrupt neocon Zionist lamented that “ Wahid was one of the most impressive leaders I have known.”

Darusman is alive, and is trying to kick, through meaningless but lucrative UN jobs he keeps securing with the assistance of his US masters.

Sri Lanka should not have to dance to the tune of spies like Darusman and Roth, or entertain Pascoe again for that matter!

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