United States caught in the act of attempted rape on Sri Lanka: State Department story changes

First, it was secretary of state Hillary Clinton addressing the UN Security Council accused Sri Lanka using ‘rape’ as a tool of war.

She did not even use the qualifying term ‘alleged use of rape’. She was positive. And, the statement tarnished the international image of Sri Lanka focusing on the timeline the nation seriously went to war with the ruthless Tamil Tigers since Mahinda Rajapaksa took office in November 2005.

Even before the Government of Sri Lanka summoned American ambassador Patricia Butenis to the foreign ministry in Colombo to lodge a protest and 24 hours before others expressed their opposition to Clinton’s statement Asian Tribune carried a headline report how the U.S. was using ‘rape as a weapon of war’ in Iraq with the display of three near ‘expletive’ photographs of American soldiers raping Iraqi women.

That put, to some extent, the U.S. to the wall.

Then, Patricia Butenis, American ambassador in Colombo, attempting to lessen the impact said “During the 26-year long war in Sri Lanka, there were allegations of rape and sexual violence, just as in other conflicts. Secretary Clinton’s statement was to raise awareness of such brutality, not to implicate specific perpetrators. As reference, allow me to include a link to the Secretary’s remarks in which she mentioned Sri Lanka. She made no reference to the Sri Lankan Army or to the LTTE.”

“When our diplomatic and intelligence reporting from the post is inadequate, analysts in Washington are left to make judgments from ambiguous and frequently conflicting information and assessments.” The Madeline Albright-William Cohen Genocide Task Force Report

Soon thereafter, the State Department issued a clarification through its Ambassador-at-Large for global women’s issues Melanne Verveer absolved Sri Lanka’s Rajapaksa administration that rape was used as a war tool getting deeper into the mess Secretary Clinton created saying that “it had no recent evidence of women being raped while in Sri Lankan government custody.”

Melanne Verveer in her letter to Sri Lanka’s foreign ministry has said that they have “not received reports that rape and sexual abuse were used as tools of war in Sri Lanka in the most recent phase of the conflict, from 2006 to 2009.”

The U.S. attempted rape on Sri Lanka is getting different from statement to statement.

Now a new statement from another assistant secretary of the State Department made Wednesday, October 07 at Washington’s Foreign Press Center.

Philip J. Crowley, assistant secretary for public affairs told this as a further clarification of Clinton ‘rape’ remark to a question “I hope you are aware about the strong anti-U.S. statements coming from the Sri Lankan government, on Secretary Clinton's remarks at the U.N. Security Council earlier this month, about the use of rape as a tool -- a war weapon. How do you view the relationship between Sri Lanka and the U.S. now? It's going down.”

Mr. Crowley: I wouldn't say that. You know, just to clarify what you mentioned, you know, when -- right at the end of the General Assembly a couple of weeks ago, the secretary had a very important intervention at the United Nations, where the U.N. Security Council passed a unanimous resolution for -- regarding violence against women and girls in conflict areas.

It follows up on very specific actions that the secretary has taken -- her trip to Africa earlier this summer and her trip to Goma in particular -- to highlight the fact that in these conflict areas, you know, the most vulnerable of our population are the ones that bear, you know, the brunt of the impact of these conflicts.

You saw it this -- you saw it last week in Guinea, where you had violence perpetrated by members of the military or presidential security forces allied with the junta. And there was systematic rape there as well.

There were some questions raised by the Sri Lankan government, because in the intervention at the Security Council, the secretary did -- among -- in pointing out a number of countries where we've had this concern in the past, she mentioned Bosnia. She mentioned Sri Lanka.

The Sri Lankan government sought to clarify, you know, that particular reference. Melanne Verveer, who is our ambassador at large for women's issues, sent a letter over the weekend to the Sri Lankan government clarifying that the reference that the secretary made, you know, was to, you know, very well-documented reports of significant levels of rape that were documented through, I think, 2002 or 2003 in a variety of reports, including State Department reports and also reports done by Amnesty International.

At the same time, Ambassador Verveer did clarify that the reference was not specifically to the most recent phase of the tragic conflict in Sri Lanka. That said, you know, in her letter Ambassador Verveer, you know, indicated that Secretary Clinton has a significant interest in looking to see how the United States can help Sri Lanka move forward.

There are a significant level -- significant number of displaced persons, you know, still in camps in Sri Lanka. It is vitally important for Sri Lanka to move forward and help to deal with the refugee population and to try to help stabilize that situation. It is very important for the government to expand a dialogue with various ethnic groups, try to help move the country forward, get past -- now that the military conflict has ended; find ways to get past and move Sri Lanka, you know, forward aggressively. So I think that there's an opportunity here for a stronger relationship between the United States and Sri Lanka going forward. (End Crowley Quote)

Crowley shifted the blame from current Rajapaksa administration to 2002-2003 era where he said “very well-documented reports of significant levels of rape that were documented through, I think, 2002 or 2003 in a variety of reports, including State Department reports and also reports done by Amnesty International.”

The focus here, by the U.S. State Department, European Union, international rights groups, and others is the manner in which the Rajapaksa administration conducted the military offensive against the Tamil Tigers. The current administration has been in power since November 2005, and it cannot be held responsible for what happened in 2002 or 2003. The international scrutiny is not on previous Kumaratunga or Wickremasinghe administrations but on the current Rajapaksa regime and its conduct of the battle against Tamil Tiger terrorism.

Mr. Crowley took a de-tour to 2002-2003 era to which the current Sri Lanka administration has no responsibility.

The ‘rape’ story is getting ‘refined’ from statement to statement, and U.S. attempted rape on Sri Lanka is thus exposed.

Where did Secretary Clinton receive the report that Sri Lankan armed forces used rape as a tool? As said, scrutiny is on the current Sri Lanka administration’s conduct of military offensive against the Tamil Tigers so obviously State Department received reports from its diplomatic post in Colombo and from those who periodically meet assistant secretary Robert Blake in his Washington office who claim to be representing the Tamil Diaspora in north America.

The distorted and misinformed reports gave rise to Secretary Clinton’s UN statement that explicitly gave the impression that the current Sri Lanka administration used rape as a war tool.

The Madeline Albright-William Cohen Genocide Task Force Report released last December cautioned the State Department “When our diplomatic and intelligence reporting from the post is inadequate, analysts in Washington are left to make judgments from ambiguous and frequently conflicting information and assessments.”

What the Report meant by ‘Post’ is the overseas diplomatic posts like the American embassy in Colombo.

Here is the relevant part of the Genocide Task Force report which clearly said what happens when credible reports are not obtained from the field and how the judgments in Washington become garbled due to it. In Secretary Clinton’s ‘rape’ charges against Sri Lanka it was clear that credible information was not fed to the State Department and to Secretary of State Office, and that, as the Genocide Task Force report says, the State Department does not have adequate reach to the publics of the host countries, less professionalism to obtain credible reports from the fields and lack of expertise to assess the reports it receive from overseas diplomatic posts and from contacts/individuals with who it maintain contacts.

Here’s the relevant part of the Genocide Task Force report which is now before the Obama administration that refers to that aspect of reporting requirements and dissemination of information:

(Begin Quote) While it is the responsibility of U.S. embassies and missions to know what is happening in their host country, the tendency has been to report on developments in the capital rather than more remote rural areas, if only because of resource constraints. This was reportedly the case with the U.S. Embassy in Kigali, Rwanda in 1994, during the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the late 1990s, and with diplomatic reporting from Nairobi prior to the violence in Kenya in 2007-08. The State Department's transformational diplomacy initiative, still in its early stages, aims to relieve some of these problems by shifting U.S. diplomats to developing countries and encouraging them to travel beyond the capital city.

The availability of news reporting on even remote parts of the world has tempered the information problem significantly. Counterintuitively, how ever, the bounty of information-which can only be expected to grow in the future-does not necessarily ease the analytic challenge. First, the amount of material can be overwhelming, and second, it is hard to judge the accuracy of the reporting. For example, a crucial and difficult task for analysts is to distinguish systematic killing of civilians from more generalized background violence, as most if not all mass atrocities occur in the context of a larger conflict or a campaign of state repression. When our diplomatic and intelligence reporting from the post is inadequate, analysts in Washington are left to make judgments from ambiguous and frequently conflicting information and assessments. (End Quote)

Read the last three lines: When our diplomatic and intelligence reporting from the post is inadequate, analysts in Washington are left to make judgments from ambiguous and frequently conflicting information and assessments.

The State Department officials are moving away from the ‘rape’ story but the manner in which Butenis, Verveer and Crowley endeavor to give ‘new meanings’ to Secretary Hillary Clinton’s original UN statement is nothing but the U.S. State Department getting caught in an attempted rape on Sri Lanka.

- Asian Tribune -