In the last couple of weeks I have been faced with two bizarre examples of what seems calculated falsehood in the cause of terror. Neither is direct, but both instances show how media freedom can be abused by the amoral, so as to suggest much more support than they really have for their insidious causes.

The first instance arose with regard to the Conference on Peace and Reconciliation in South Asia organized in Oslo two weeks ago by the International Association for Human Values. This organization is headed by the Indian guru Sri Ravi Shankar, who had invited Mr Vaiko, the principal political supporter in India of the LTTE. The guru explained to us that he felt such views should also be expressed and discussed, and there was certainly no harm in exchanges with Mr Vaiko, not least because they made clear his intransigence, and support for inhuman activities of the LTTE that all Sri Lankan Tamils repudiated.

After the Conference however Mr Vaiko and his supporters went into overdrive, and provided massive publicity for his performance at the event. This in itself cannot be criticized and, if their aim was to suggest that he was the star performer at the event, it was open to anyone else with similar resources to present themselves in a similar light, Sadly no one else there had such resources, and one hopes this will be an eye opener to the Norwegian government about the extent of terrorist fundraising in their happy land.

But what was more worrying than all the propaganda on well known LTTE sites was the fact that the video prepared by the Vaiko groupies appeared on an internet site called Ravi Shankar Videos, thus creating the impression that this was the official video prepared by the Conference organizers. After brief introductory shots, the video consisted entirely of Mr Vaiko’s speech.

When I wrote to the organizers about this, I found that they had no knowledge whatsoever of the site which was in their name. To quote from their response, ‘First of all let me tell you that this is not our site, it is a blog and we cannot trace the author. Moreover this is the same video which came in LTTE Tamilnet. This person has taken from that and put it in this blog and just named Ravishankar videos, that's all. As i had mentioned in my earlier mail, the clipping that has come in Tamil sites (in fact the same one) has not gone from us’.

Abuse of the hospitality of the organizers is perhaps nothing to be surprised about in  individuals and an organization that have engaged in ethnic cleansing and worse, but we can only hope it will lead to idealists such as Sri Ravi Shankar refraining in future from providing a platform to such individuals and the organizations behind them.

Meanwhile I found a similar exercise in sleight of hand on the part of ‘Groundviews’, the award winning website as it is described which engages in relentless attacks on the Sri Lankan government, descending to vituperation on the lines of claiming that Sri Lanka is ‘hostage to the whim and fancy of a President and his coterie of murderous brutes’. Its site proudly claims that amongst its partners and initial donors are the Canadian International Development Agency and AusAID. Investigations into whether the Australian government underwrote such attacks on the Sri Lankan government led to the categorical statement that ‘the Australian Government does not and has not provided resources to a website named ‘Groundviews’.

By then Groundviews had perhaps realized that it should not embarrass governments it had been using on its websites to suggest wider support for its partisan views. Now the website notes that ‘Since February 2007, Groundviews has not received any funding from local or international sources’. This may serve to underwrite its further claim that ‘Neither the organizations mentioned here nor any of its staff can be held responsible, in any capacity, for the thoughts and opinions expressed on this website’, but the claim that AusAID provided even initial support is odd given the official Australian denial of any involvement.

The point is that the wordsmiths, as Rama Mani so charmingly put it, who spin their entangling webs, crudely like Mr Vaiko or more sophisticatedly as with ‘Groundviews’, have to shore themselves up by claiming support from more respectable institutions. So Vaiko takes the name of Ravi Shankar in vain, Groundviews invokes AusAID. Most people will take such assertions at face value, and in any case the abused organizations do not have the time or energy to issue public denials. But for the future I hope that they will be more circumspect, in particular because their names are being used in the last resort to attack those who fight against terrorism – and thus to provide solace and relief for terrorists.

Prof Rajiva Wijesinha
Secretary General
Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process