CIVIL cases against Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapaksa and Shavendra Silva, an ex-army commander and currently Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations (UN) are waiting the next round of decisions from the District Court of District of Columbia and District Court of Southern District of New York respectively.
The Rajapaksa case awaits decision if the court can ‘force’ Rajapaksa to answer and engage with the Court. Shavendra case awaits decision from the SDNY judge on Silva’s Motion to dismiss.
A third case in a US court (SDNY) is against Mahinda Rajapaksa, by attorney Rudrakumaran, and this case has not proceeded further than filing according to court records.
Attorney to the DC case, Bruce Fein, acting for three Tamil plaintiffs, in the case K. Manoharan et al. v. Mahinda Rajapaksa, told TamilNet that he is optimistic about a favorable decision from Judge Kotelly, a judge with experience in Federal Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA).
Fein added that if the Judge agrees that plaintiffs have satisfied the attempts at Service of Process having acted according to the latest order, Rajapaksa will risk a default judgment against him if he continues to ignore court order.
Fein said he is also contemplating to advise his clients to include Sri Lanka’s President’s brother Gothabaya Rajapaksa as a co-defendant in the DC case.
The process to add another defendant will not be a complicated procedure as we have surmounted the service of process hurdles and that since the additional defendant is a US citizen, the plaintiff and the court will have less complex mechanisms at hand to effect service of process, Fein said.
Ali Beydoun, lead counsel for the plaintiffs in the Shavendra Silva case, said he is hopeful that the SDNY judge will likely not rule before scheduling a hearing for oral arguments from the attorneys.
However, if the judge considers the legal argument in the motion from the defendant convincing on the issue of diplomatic immunity, the Judge may dismiss the case without a hearing.
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Tamils Against Genocide (TAG), a US-based activist group, told TamilNet that two legal efforts are currently in progress, one involving postsurrender mass rape of Tamil women, and the other involving complicity of Colombo in white-van abductions, torture, and incarceration.
A legal document that will serve to press charges against a serving Sri Lanka diplomat in Europe for culpability in mass rape is under preparation for filing with the prosecutor of the relevant EU state.
The document is reported to include detailed graphics on where and how the crime occurred during March 2009 when the refugees were trickling out from the demarcated No Fire Zone and surrendered to the SLA, spokesperson added.
• During a special undercover investigation by UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, executives from Public Relations firm, Bell Pottinger, were caught on camera boasting of employing ‘dark arts’ to burnish reputations of countries accused of human rights violations, and were accused of ‘reputation laundering’ using contacts in high levels of the British Government.
The Independent newspaper reporting on the investigation also revealed that Bell Pottinger wrote the UN’s speech for Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapaksa, and quoted a senior executive saying that the speech went a long way taking the country accused of rights violations where it needed to go.’
David Wilson, chairman of Bell Pottinger’s Public Relations, when asked what they have done to Sri Lanka, told the undercover reporters: ‘We had a team working in the President’s office, we wrote the President’s speech to the UN last year, which was very well received.
‘We were writing a speech at the same time as President Rajapaksa was asking his foreign office to write a speech as well, and he chose to use our speech despite several attempts by the foreign office to change the tune. And it went a long way to taking the country where it needed to go.
‘Fundamentally, though, they’ve set up something called the Peace and Reconciliation Commission, which has got one fundamental flaw in its remit in investigating what has gone on in the past, to try to bury the past, and unfortunately because that is the case, media like Channel 4 and The Times find the whole Peace and Reconciliation Commission is flawed.
‘And it’s not flawed but it doesn’t go that extra step that it needs to go to fully embrace Western opinion or Western concern about the entire situation.’
Bell Pottinger executives also attend Tamil function to collect information to support Pottinger’s campaign in assisting Colombo to whitewash its war crimes image, according to a British Tamil Forum (BTF) representative.
The BTF claims Bell Pottinger representatives also attended a Tamil Remembrance event at London’s Excel Centre on November 27, 2010. The firm has not confirmed this, according to the report.
The firm sub-contracted its work in the US to the firm Qorvis, which placed an op-ed by President Rajapaksa in the Philadelphia Inquirer in December 2009 entitled ‘How Sri Lanka Defeated Terrorism’.
In the piece the president suggested Sri Lanka had provided a ‘workable model’ for defeating terrorism, from which the international community could gain ‘valuable insight’, the paper said.
A few months later in February 2010, the Wall Street Journal published a piece that discussed the ‘peaceful’ election which returned Rajapaksa to power, and prompted several letters complaining of government violence against its critics, the report added.
On the firm being able to manipulate internet search engines to bury unfavorable facts on the clients appearing at the top of search lists, Mr Collins, a senior executive, said, ‘we’ve got all sorts of dark arts,’ adding ‘I told him he couldn’t put them in the written presentation because it’s embarrassing if it gets out.’
The firm also provides assistance to ‘create and maintain third-party blogs’ – blogs that appeared to be independent. These would contain positive content and popular key words that would rank highly in Google searches, the paper quoted executives as saying.
Wilson and Collins also explained how the firm enables government videos and articles to move to the top of internet searches, while less favourable stories can move down the rankings.
Reporters from the Bureau posed as agents for the government of Uzbekistan – a brutal dictatorship responsible for killings, human rights violations and child labour – and representatives of its cotton industry in a bid to discover what promises British lobbying and public relations firms were prepared to make when pitching to clients, what techniques they use, and how much of their work is open to public scrutiny, the paper said.
