Clinton and rape of Sri Lanka

Clinton and rape of Sri Lanka

By Wendell W Solomons

Delivering a speech at the UN Security Council on Sept. 30th, 2009, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed that rape was used as a weapon of war in the Balkans, in Myanmar and in Sri Lanka.

She said that in too many countries and in too many cases, the perpetrators were not punished, and the impunity encouraged others to commit the same crime.

In Sri Lanka, Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama summoned US Ambassador Patricia Butenis to express his concern over the Clinton allegation.

Explaining Clinton’s remark, Ambassador Butenis said that the Secretary of State had not identified any group in the speech she had made. All that Clinton said was that during the 26-year long war in Sri Lanka, there were allegations of rape and sexual violence, just as in other conflicts. Clinton’s statement was to raise awareness of such brutality, and not to implicate specific perpetrators, Butenis said.

You see ambassador Butenis leap backwards into the nebulous, into clouding the Clinton declaration. Yet, this leap places her in the proposition that Clinton, a lawyer by training, has selected Sri Lanka for smearing without specific facts. By primary definition the missing facts for Clinton’s declaration of institutionalized rape worried Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister, himself a lawyer.

Plaint in US court

What motivates Clinton to become an attacker of a nation’s dignity?

Should Clinton, the perpetrator, be allowed impunity to get away with this attack, the rape of the honor of a people?

A plaint can be filed against Clinton in a US court where she could summon any facts that support her declaration on rape used as a weapon of war in Sri Lanka.

Who would file such a case in US courts?

Would we see the executives of one of the NGOs who have promoted their names in the press as defenders of Sri Lanka, financed by NATO Norway, come forward? Or financed by a similar step-and-fetch-it? Surely these mothers, like other mothers in an Asian civilization such as that of Sri Lanka, did not bring up their children to be rapists.

We speak of a civilization that used the franchise for the first time in the world to vote in a woman, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, as head of state.

Today, together with bringing up children, women have become important as family breadwinners. Women have to squeeze into market niches in a situation of high unemployment set off by the economic rape of Sri Lanka by US neoliberals. This economic rape began in 1977; the assembly lines in Sri Lanka for FIAT, Mazda and Mitsubishi cars were closed down after Wall Street cheerleaders promoted a prescription of imports and more imports as if on bankers’ credit card run.

Perhaps the NGO celebrities can make amends at last for the opinions they have not expressed in their newspapers forays? In three decades they might have exposed the economic rape of Sri Lanka by the neoliberals.

More on neoliberal rape

The neoliberal quack physicians lie exposed and bleeding in the US. Their staged diversion of fiddling with money supply and bank rate has not helped the US. Their prescription of imports on credit has blown back on the USA where the nation annually buys a critical excess of imports of $ 1,000 billion.

A 1998 quote on the results of decades of neoliberal diversion from famous NY billionaire George Soros:

“The USA’s influence has already begun to decline. For the past 25 years, we have been running a constant current account deficit. The Chinese and the oil-producing countries have been running a surplus. We [in the U.S] have consumed more than we produced. While we have run up debt, they have acquired wealth with their savings.”

In the face of potential US national bankruptcy, President Barrack Obama began in 2009 with measures that include a policy of “Buy American”. However, more blowback from the house of cards created on TV by neoliberals who promoted free trade, provides another complication. Canada and the European Union have cited free trade and registered their protests over President Obama’s 2009 policy.

The Obama policy of buying domestic takes us back to the 19th Century US bid for survival. The banking fraternity in London had used Lancashire textile-mill imports of cotton from US southern plantation states to embroil the nation in civil war. The purpose of the 1-sq.-mile financial city of London was to annul the 1776 US Declaration of Independence and to re-absorb the USA into Britain.

Yet, Abraham Lincoln fought the civil war and went on to develop the war-torn economy by implementing the economic policy of Henry Carey. This policy promoted domestic production by erecting high customs tariffs. Through this policy, the US matched Britain’s industrial production by the turn of the century.

South Korean-born Ha-Joon Chang of Cambridge University summarizes:

“... Americans knew exactly what the game was. They knew that Britain reached the top through protection and subsidies and therefore that they needed to do the same if they were going to get anywhere. Criticizing the British preaching of free trade to his country, Ulysses Grant, the Civil War hero and the US President between 1868-1876, retorted that ‘within 200 years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade’. When his country later reached the top after the Second World War, it too started ‘kicking away the ladder’ by preaching and forcing free trade to the less developed countries.’

“The UK and the USA may be the more dramatic examples, but almost all the rest of the developed world today used tariffs, subsidies and other means to promote their industries in the earlier stages of their development ...even Sweden, which later came to represent the ‘small open economy’ to many economists had also strategically used tariffs, subsidies, cartels, and state support for R&D to develop key industries, especially textile, steel, and engineering.”

When India gained Independence from the financial London in the mid-20th Century, it developed through the policy of buying domestic produce (“Swadeshi”.) Sri Lanka was also following a similar policy of increasing national productivity through developing local industry. Yet, pressure from the World Bank and the IMF was used by the bullying technocrats of Dr Milton Friedman to abort the policy of developing local production. In recent years a group of perceptive business leaders in Sri Lanka noticed Friedman’s browbeating and set up Maubima Lanka, a foundation that promotes the use of local produce.

Clintons as Lobbyists

The Clintons arrive not without their record. It was reportedly Robert Rubin, an associate for two decades of the private financial house Goldman-Sachs, who wined, dined, grilled and anointed the young Governor of Arkansas as US President. Upon being bankrolled in the elections and assuming office Bill Clinton gave this private financier the control of the US Treasury.

Supervising public finance allowed Rubin every opportunity for insider trading. Here was the proverbial fox left to guard the henhouse. Rubin already took pride in his citation as ‘risk wizard’ among money brokers who did not know that he collected tips on the side from agencies such as the World Bank and IMF that were conducting currency negotiations. On Rubin’s watch the speculative runs on Brazil’s currency, for instance, sometimes clocked $300m a day.

Rubin continued helping private Wall Street so remuneratively that he could announce his ‘retirement’ mid-way and jettison his Treasury post. The ‘retirement’ witnessed Rubin commute to the seat of Chairman of the Board at Wall Street’s Citigroup where his salary (without counting investment income) hit $17.3m by 2006. This sort of income had him saying “What meltdown?” in 2008 like a latter-day Nero though Citigroup floundered below him in the house-mortgage crisis.

Hillary Hubris - Jinx for Obama Administration

Basically, the Clintons, husband and wife, ran in the Presidential stakes with the support of orgiastic side-dealers such as Rubin. In the current election stakes, these dealers wanted Hillary to be compensated with the post of Vice President. However, author Christopher Andersen records of Michelle Obama, who was in-and-out of the home of Civil Rights activist Rev Jesse Jackson:

“Do you really want Bill and Hillary just down the hall from you in the White House?” Michelle reportedly told her husband. “Could you live with that?” Mr Obama later thought of the masterstroke of appointing the woman he narrowly defeated as his Secretary of State.

A previous move by Hillary Clinton earned a note on “Hillary hubris, a jinx for Obama administration”:

“Hillary Clinton’s unerring tendency to be fallible surfaced last week when she pronounced that Sri Lanka does not need an IMF loan at this time. Renowned for her disastrous Primary election campaign when she grounded to a halt, over one hundred million [dollars] in the red while loosing ignominiously to a rookie called Obama, Hillary is now dabbling in economics. Hillary hubris is jinxing the Obama administration according to many observers.” <http://www.srilankaguardian.org/2009/05/hillary-hubris-jinx-for-obama.html>

The ambassador in Colombo of Clinton-asterisked President Obama may not wish to finance NGO’s so as to let the perpetrators of the rape of Sri Lanka go unpunished. The ambassador, paid by a US taxpayer now with unredeemable Treasury debt to the world, may not wish to stand in the way of a case in a US Court that would make Hillary Clinton’s prospective deeds cater for the needs of the American people and not just those of the speculator. We know that the US House of Representatives chose at some point in time to assign special investigator Ken Starr to step in and deal with the caprices on taxpayer resources, of Hillary Clinton’s partner.