Will Sri Lanka get another bashing?
The current and three former US ambassadors to Sri Lanka will take the stage at a colloquium titled ‘Whither Sri Lanka’ at the Washington DC branch of the Asia Society on June 16. They are: Patricia A. Butenis, Ambassador to Sri Lanka from 2009 - Present, Ashley Wills, Ambassador to Sri Lanka from 2000-03, Shaun Donnelly, Ambassador to Sri Lanka from 1997-2000,and Teresita Schaffer, Ambassador to Sri Lanka from 1992-95.
No Sri Lankans are slated to speak. The Sri Lankan Ambassador in Washington has not even received an invite. Neither has the next closest Sri Lankan representative, Dr. Palitha Kohona at the UN in New York.
With the deck so blatantly stacked, suspicion that this is yet another excuse for Sri Lanka bashing is inevitable.
“I’m totally baffled as to why the panelists on this seminar on Sri Lanka’s future are confined to only US diplomats, especially, when relations between the two countries are at their worst. Looks like it’s a set up to further discredit the Sri Lankan government,” said Mr. Sunil Jayasinghe, PhD, a consulting engineer living in California.
He believes that the presence of the current US Ambassador to Sri Lanka, Patricia Butenis, at the event should at least have prompted an invitation to her counterpart.
Ambassador Jaliya Wickremasuriya’s secretary confirmed (June 10) that he had not been invited and that a staffer might attend the ticketed event as a member of the public.
Serendipity Group
Asia Society, which has a budget of around $25 million dedicated to “strengthening relationships and deepening understanding among the peoples of Asia and the United States” (its New York exec director’s annual compensation is around $700,000!) would not accept responsibility for any aspects of the event, not even the obvious slap-in-the-face exclusion of the Sri Lankan envoy. A young intern at the Society gave the condescending assurance that he had met and found the Sri Lankan ambassador to be a ‘very nice man’ but the speakers and invitees had been decided by the entity organizing the event. As it turns out, it’s a little-known, exclusive, and secretive cabal of former US envoys and other Americans with ties to Sri Lanka, the Serendipity Group.
While it was launched by a Sri Lankan ambassador to the US more than 15 years ago and its tagline is “Friends of Sri Lanka,” Serendipity has just a handful of (wealthy) Sri Lankans in its fold and has managed to keep the hoi polloi, including prominent anti-Eelam activists, out. It has no website and is not registered under the District of Columbia’s Corporate Registration regulations, which shelters it from public scrutiny and accountability. Mr. Donald Camp, who served as Sri Lanka desk officer at the State Department in the mid-1980s and later as principal deputy assistant secretary for South and Central Asia is the group’s public face. He will also act as moderator of ‘Whither Sri Lanka.’
Responding to our queries with a rather laconic email, Mr. Camp, described Serendipity as a self-funded group of ‘private individuals’ whose objective is to ‘build awareness and understanding of Sri Lanka.’ However, he would not reveal the names of the group’s office bearers nor address questions as to the exclusion of Sri Lankan representation from the panel and the objectives and expected outcomes of the June 16 discussion. As to what makes the four members of the panel qualified to be predictors of Sri Lanka’s future: “Our panelists all know Sri Lanka well from years of experience there, and are dispassionate observers, without an axe to grind.”
How qualified are the panelists?
While Mr. Camp might genuinely subscribe to that notion, it rings hollow in the face of several facts, prominently, Ambassador Butenis’s pugnacious diplomacy. The Wikileaks revelation of Ambassador Butenis’s unsubstantiated and mischievous accusations against the Sri Lankan government, her stated preference for Gen. Sarath Fonseka as president (a choice for the Sri Lankan voter not a US envoy), and the eagerness with which she took the lead in getting together foreign diplomats stationed in Colombo and a select coterie of NGO figures to discuss the controversial Darusman don’t point to ‘dispassion.’
As for the panelists “know[ing] Sri Lanka well from years of experience,” Ambassadors Willis, Donnelly, and Schaffer have been removed from Sri Lanka for many years and whether they are able to comprehend the country’s shifting dynamics, especially if they depend on their information on the Western media, is up to debate. Even when they were serving in Colombo, their reading of the tea leaves was often skewed. Purveyors of the ‘unwinnable war’ notion, the US envoys leaned hard on Sri Lanka to capitulate to what they said was the LTTE’s undefeatable military might.
In fact, in April 2009, when the Tigers were cornered into that narrow slit of land in Nandikadal and on the verge of total elimination, Teresita Schaffer, as an ‘expert’ on Sri Lanka was quoted by Fox News as saying: “although the Tigers are in retreat, their tenacity should not be underestimated.”
"When you’re dealing with asymmetric warfare, insurgents are a weaker power by any normal measure, but the Tigers have nothing to lose …President Rajapaksa is all tactics and no strategy." Obviously, Schaffer will need to adjust her lenses as she peers into the ‘Whither Sri Lanka’ crystal ball.
Camp promises it will be a ‘fascinating discussion’ and that he envisions the June 16 program “as an opportunity to tap US policy expertise on Sri Lanka.”
Who will do the tapping he did not say.
(Story by SriLanka Express-USA)
Related Links
Asia Society Rude to Sri Lankan Prime Minister
No Sri Lankans are slated to speak. The Sri Lankan Ambassador in Washington has not even received an invite. Neither has the next closest Sri Lankan representative, Dr. Palitha Kohona at the UN in New York.
With the deck so blatantly stacked, suspicion that this is yet another excuse for Sri Lanka bashing is inevitable.
“I’m totally baffled as to why the panelists on this seminar on Sri Lanka’s future are confined to only US diplomats, especially, when relations between the two countries are at their worst. Looks like it’s a set up to further discredit the Sri Lankan government,” said Mr. Sunil Jayasinghe, PhD, a consulting engineer living in California.
He believes that the presence of the current US Ambassador to Sri Lanka, Patricia Butenis, at the event should at least have prompted an invitation to her counterpart.
Ambassador Jaliya Wickremasuriya’s secretary confirmed (June 10) that he had not been invited and that a staffer might attend the ticketed event as a member of the public.
Serendipity Group
Asia Society, which has a budget of around $25 million dedicated to “strengthening relationships and deepening understanding among the peoples of Asia and the United States” (its New York exec director’s annual compensation is around $700,000!) would not accept responsibility for any aspects of the event, not even the obvious slap-in-the-face exclusion of the Sri Lankan envoy. A young intern at the Society gave the condescending assurance that he had met and found the Sri Lankan ambassador to be a ‘very nice man’ but the speakers and invitees had been decided by the entity organizing the event. As it turns out, it’s a little-known, exclusive, and secretive cabal of former US envoys and other Americans with ties to Sri Lanka, the Serendipity Group.
While it was launched by a Sri Lankan ambassador to the US more than 15 years ago and its tagline is “Friends of Sri Lanka,” Serendipity has just a handful of (wealthy) Sri Lankans in its fold and has managed to keep the hoi polloi, including prominent anti-Eelam activists, out. It has no website and is not registered under the District of Columbia’s Corporate Registration regulations, which shelters it from public scrutiny and accountability. Mr. Donald Camp, who served as Sri Lanka desk officer at the State Department in the mid-1980s and later as principal deputy assistant secretary for South and Central Asia is the group’s public face. He will also act as moderator of ‘Whither Sri Lanka.’
Responding to our queries with a rather laconic email, Mr. Camp, described Serendipity as a self-funded group of ‘private individuals’ whose objective is to ‘build awareness and understanding of Sri Lanka.’ However, he would not reveal the names of the group’s office bearers nor address questions as to the exclusion of Sri Lankan representation from the panel and the objectives and expected outcomes of the June 16 discussion. As to what makes the four members of the panel qualified to be predictors of Sri Lanka’s future: “Our panelists all know Sri Lanka well from years of experience there, and are dispassionate observers, without an axe to grind.”
How qualified are the panelists?
While Mr. Camp might genuinely subscribe to that notion, it rings hollow in the face of several facts, prominently, Ambassador Butenis’s pugnacious diplomacy. The Wikileaks revelation of Ambassador Butenis’s unsubstantiated and mischievous accusations against the Sri Lankan government, her stated preference for Gen. Sarath Fonseka as president (a choice for the Sri Lankan voter not a US envoy), and the eagerness with which she took the lead in getting together foreign diplomats stationed in Colombo and a select coterie of NGO figures to discuss the controversial Darusman don’t point to ‘dispassion.’
As for the panelists “know[ing] Sri Lanka well from years of experience,” Ambassadors Willis, Donnelly, and Schaffer have been removed from Sri Lanka for many years and whether they are able to comprehend the country’s shifting dynamics, especially if they depend on their information on the Western media, is up to debate. Even when they were serving in Colombo, their reading of the tea leaves was often skewed. Purveyors of the ‘unwinnable war’ notion, the US envoys leaned hard on Sri Lanka to capitulate to what they said was the LTTE’s undefeatable military might.
In fact, in April 2009, when the Tigers were cornered into that narrow slit of land in Nandikadal and on the verge of total elimination, Teresita Schaffer, as an ‘expert’ on Sri Lanka was quoted by Fox News as saying: “although the Tigers are in retreat, their tenacity should not be underestimated.”
"When you’re dealing with asymmetric warfare, insurgents are a weaker power by any normal measure, but the Tigers have nothing to lose …President Rajapaksa is all tactics and no strategy." Obviously, Schaffer will need to adjust her lenses as she peers into the ‘Whither Sri Lanka’ crystal ball.
Camp promises it will be a ‘fascinating discussion’ and that he envisions the June 16 program “as an opportunity to tap US policy expertise on Sri Lanka.”
Who will do the tapping he did not say.
(Story by SriLanka Express-USA)
Related Links
Asia Society Rude to Sri Lankan Prime Minister