Ajit Randeniya

In August 1964, the CIA faked an incident during which they loaded up a boat with weapons, floated it off the coast of central Vietnam and shot it up. Then they brought in the American press and declared to America and the world that a fire fight had taken place during which North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked an American warship in the Gulf of Tonkin. This ‘incident’ became the ‘conclusive proof of North Vietnam’s aggression’ and the premise for the aerial bombing of Vietnam; an invasion that took three million Vietnamese lives!

 A similar ‘master illusion’ was perpetrated on 26 May 2010 by the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Seoul when she announced that she had ‘overwhelming evidence’ (a torpedo propeller) that the south Korean warship, the Cheonan, that sank in March with the loss of 46 sailors was in fact sunk by a torpedo fired by a North Korean submarine. She demanded that the international community ‘must respond’ to ‘North Korea’s outrage’.

 The Clinton lie is doubly preposterous because in April, South Korea’s national intelligence chief and the defence minister had told a parliamentary committee that there was no evidence linking the sinking of the Cheonan to North Korea. The South Korean head of military marine operations said, ‘No North Korean warships have been detected [in] the waters where the accident took place and the evidence suggested that the warship struck a reef and broke in two.

 Such examples of the CIA pioneered technique of ‘black propaganda’, referred to now as ‘news management’ provide the proof that the current wave of neocolonial campaigns are really based on ‘altering perception’, (read plain, old, deception) perpetrated through the western corporate media juggernaut. They religiously exclude words such as ‘colonialism’ and ‘imperialism’ from their lexicon and shed rivers of crocodile tears about human right and humanitarian issues. These ‘information warriors’ are the foot soldiers of neocolonialism.

It was apparent from the reaction of some Sri Lankans to the recent appointment of an ‘advisory committee’ by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon that they had been motivated by bewilderment, rather than an accurate appreciation of the ‘force dynamics’ that dictated Ban’s action; this is to be expected because not too many people are able to link neocon maneuvers in different parts of the world, involving different players.

 The assertion that the appointment of the committee was an act of ‘back scratching’ of the US by Ban was supported by another major act of back scratching, the declaration by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) presided by the former Japanese diplomat Hisashi Owada that there was nothing ‘illegal’ in Kosovo’s declaration of independence. Ten out of the fifteen judges of the ICJ come either from the US-UK-EU-Australia-New Zealand axis, or countries who are their cronies.

 Owada, who was elected to the post in 2009, has served at the neocon Meccas such as the Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School, New York University Law School, the Hague Academy of International Law, and at the University of Cambridge for good measure. His daughter is married to Crown Prince Naruhito, heir to the throne of Japan; in other words, Owada is an influential person.

 Japan is a dear and generous friend of Sri Lanka. But like in every country, there are people with submissive mentality, with and without vested interests motivating them. Ban and Owada have strong vested interests in ‘playing the fiddle’ for the neocons!

 Few people would have linked these two cases of cynical exploitation of two of the highest offices of the UN –the appointment of the Sri Lankan panel and the Kosovo decision- to the dastardly neocon enterprise of a four-day war drill in the Sea of Japan.

 But they are: neocons are hell-bent on heightening tensions in the Korean peninsula in order to achieve their sinister objective of keeping the 28 000 or so US soldiers in south Korea and another 8 000 in Okinawa, Japan, against popular sentiment in both countries. They managed, after nearly six decades of strong sentiment for ‘détente’ in south Korea, to appoint a militant government recently; in Japan, they saw the back of an independent minded Prime Minister Hatoyama who wanted the US army to vacate Okinawa.

 The neocon pretext for wanting to continue these military occupations is that the good, peace loving US is providing ‘security’ to south Korea and Japan; but in reality it is part of the neocon policy of menace China by ‘garlanding’. Weapons sales are of course, a major objective.

 The so-called Korean ‘drill’ was clearly aimed at provoking north Korea to an indiscretion, or to fabricate one, as grist to the black propaganda mill working overtime at demonizing them. The provocation involved 8,000 US and south Korean troops, 20 war ships including the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington, and some 200 fixed-wing warplanes including the F-22 Raptor fighter prowling off the east coast of South Korea. This violation of international peace is said to be the first in a series of such ‘maternal intercourse’ by the US neocons in the coming months.

 The black propaganda has already begun, with that ‘private, non-profit broadcasting organisation, the US Congress funded ‘Radio Free Asia’ reporting that the North has put its military and ‘hunger-stricken people’ on high alert!

 The prelude, the 22 July ICJ decision on Kosovo was merely an advisory opinion that the 2008 Kosovo declaration of independence did not violate international law. The division of the court 10 to 4 is indicative of its ideological bent. Notwithstanding the legal lameness of this opinion, Reuters, Voice of America, and other western corporate media was quick to portray this opinion as one of immense significance and precedent value to separatist groups the world over.

 This is their ‘wish’ rather than ‘fact’ flowing from the ICJ opinion. The facts are: the ICJ’s jurisdiction as ‘an advisory body’ to other UN bodies and agencies is not worth the paper the opinion was written on; secondly, the opinion related to the ‘announcement’ itself, and no possible reading of the opinion offers any kind of UN legitimisation of ‘statehood’ of Kosovo. Portraying this opinion as a ruling of immense precedent value is a fraud only the neocons would be capable of attempting.

 According to the international law (to the extent such a thing exists), Kosovo could become a state only through recognition at the UN. The US sponsored attempt to reverse the legal principle of this concept of the ‘constitutive theory of statehood’ through a document known as the Montevideo Convention (1933) has not been appreciated by the world due to the ulterior motives involved.

 So far, Kosovo has been recognised by just 69 UN states out of 192. Not surprisingly, the US, most EU nations and their lackeys comprise this group comp; Russia and China are unlikely to ever allow any moves to recognize Kosovo at the Security Council, and the developing world as a whole will block it at the General Assembly. Like the ‘Irish Republic’ and ‘Biafra’ before it, Kosovo will have trouble in commanding sufficient international support to establish the constitutive theory of statehood.

 The 10 judges from the very countries who sponsored the birth of the Albanian Muslim enclave of Kosovo as an illegitimate entity are merely pursuing their objective of pulverising former Yugoslavia, carried out in order to deceive the world with their false concern for Muslims, in preparation for the Iraqi invasion.

 Sri Lankans need to be smarter in reacting to such atrocities; acts that could result in self-harm and public display of emotion are only going to give the perpetrators the perverse pleasure of leading us astray. The effort needs to be directed not at getting ‘angry’ but at getting ‘even’.

 There is lot to be learnt from China in this regard: China combines dignified silence, and plain-talk on serious enough issues, sending the neocons the message that ‘we know the games you play, but we refuse to take part’; it is an effective and civilised way of saying ‘leave us alone’.

 China confronted the US regarding the Korean ‘drill’ and objected to the provocation, prompting the relocation of their drills from the sensitive Yellow Sea to the Sea of Japan. China also ‘urged’ the US and South Korea to tread very carefully and that It does not want tensions to rise further. North Korea on the other hand, warned of ‘a physical response’ and promised that it will use its ‘nuclear deterrent’ in response.

 Sri Lankans need to respond to the devious neocon provocations by adopting an approach similar to that of China’s: the game is ‘divide and rule’, and the new rules are ‘human rights’ of, and ‘humanitarian concerns’ about, our people. The play ground is UN headquarters.

 Pulling out the stumps and going home with bat and ball is a real option.

 By the way, why was Robert Blake in Colombo last week?