Stephen Sefton *, Tortilla con Sal, June 7th 2021
People in North America and Europe depend for international news on a small number of media outlets effectively dominated by Western corporate elites and the governments they control. Social media too, when not outright manipulated by intense intelligence agency psychological warfare campaigns, generally reflect corporate media coverage in a mutually self-reinforcing infinite feedback loop. This enables a very small number of well-placed individuals to shape the public opinion of whole countries. Ireland offers a good example of this anti-democratic reality.
Irish government policy has long contradicted the country's ostensible neutrality. During the US “war on terror” Ireland shamefully facilitated CIA "extraordinary rendition" torture flights and has always facilitated the transit of US troops to their illegal military aggression in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere. Ireland supports European Union and United States foreign policy justifying Ukrainian neo-nazi forces attacking civilians in Donbass, pseudo-Islamist terrorist proxies destroying Syria and extreme right wing forces destabilizing Venezuela. Well funded corporate and government networks of patronage ensure supposedly independent media outlets, non profits and academic centers defend these illegal policies and and set the limits of acceptable reporting. Especially in the area of foreign policy, the intellectual managerial class of writers, editors, NGO directors and academics seldom deviate much from those networks' guidance.
Thus, as in all the EU countries, Irish cooperation for development as often as not serves an unacknowledged but strongly political agenda. Irish government foreign policy closely supports the aims and objectives of North American and European corporate elites that include prominent Irish business leaders. Peter Sutherland is by far the best known example of an Irish corporate executive playing an influential, even decisive, role in international policy. But other, lesser figures abound, from Tony O'Reilly and Tony Ryan to Michael Smurfit and Dennis O'Brien among many others. Self-evidently, such powerful corporate figures, just like corporate interests in the US and the EU, lobby central government for their country's policies, including foreign policy, to favour their overall agenda.
A principal means to do so has been exploiting their control of media, patronage of NGOs and academic research and, increasingly, influence in institutions like the United Nations. Among other things, they use this control and influence to attack countries resisting the policy agenda of the US and allied governments. One such country is Nicaragua where the Sandinista Front for National Liberation has defied US and allied governments ever since it was founded in 1961. Even before the violent failed coup attempt of April 2018, Nicaragua's sandinista government was constantly unjustly attacked in reporting by Western media, NGOs and academics, especially on human rights issues. These attacks have intensified greatly since the violent 2018 coup attempt, especially now, prior to the presidential elections in November.
Practically all North American and European reporting on Nicaragua has always depended on the country's opposition media. The US investigative reporting outlet, the Grayzone, has now confirmed that for over a decade all the main opposition media in Nicaragua, far from being independent, have been funded with many millions of dollars either directly by the US government and its allies or by satellite corporate funded non profits. Two recent attacks on Nicaragua by figures from Ireland share very similar talking points. They encapsulate insidious Irish collusion in faithless government and corporate exploitation of human rights issues so as to promote anti-democratic, anti-humanitarian policies aimed at destroying nation states defending their sovereign right to self-determination, as they have done on Syria and Venezuela.
This first example is from Mary Lawlor, a veteran manager of Irish human rights NGOs and an academic at Dublin's Trinity College, currently UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders. She was quoted by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on June 3rd calling "on the Government of Nicaragua to put an end to increasing attacks by its security forces against human rights defenders, and to stop detaining them arbitrarily. There has been a new spate of arrests and attacks following the third anniversary of widespread protests that broke out in April 2018 over planned social security reforms, the lack of state response to the fire in the Indio Maíz Nature Reserve and in response to the violent repression of protesters.” The UN's OHCHR is notorious in Nicaragua for falsely claiming that the 2018 opposition protests in the country were entirely peaceful despite abundant evidence of the deaths and destruction they caused.
Mary Lawlor's talking points are curiously similar to those in an article by Valerie Roche, a management and programme consultant, well known and influential in the NGO sector both in Ireland and the UK. In an article from April 27th this year, Roche writes that the 2018 protests “were sparked by two specific events: the apparent wilful destruction of the Indio Viejo natural reserve where fires resulted in thousands of acres of natural forest being destroyed while the government refused to accept assistance from neighbouring countries and delayed efforts to combat the fire. And the introduction of new policies which would cut the state pay-outs to pensioners while also significantly raising the pension contributions by all registered workers....Escalating street demonstrations and demands for the resignation of the presidential couple were met by ever-harsher police brutality,”
The striking repetition by Lawlor of the same talking points made by Roche is characteristic of the feint-left go-right class of pseudo progressive NGO managers and academics. It points to a well established false class consensus strikingly at odds with the available facts. In Mary Lawlor's case, the antecedents for her false remarks about Nicaragua are tied up with her collaboration with Denis O'Brien to set up the human rights NGO, Frontline Defenders. Over the last five years, Frontline Defenders has promoted as human rights paragons three leading figures aligned with Nicaragua's political opposition, namely Francisca Ramirez, Medardo Mairena and Lottie Cunningham. But irrefutable testimonies by victims of Ramirez and Mairena demonstrate conclusively that these two individuals are guilty of very serious organized crime, including extortion and murder, as well as terrorism. As for Lottie Cunningham, she runs CEJUDHCAN, an opposition aligned human rights organization in Nicaragua's Autonomous Northern Caribbean Coast Region. She has been denounced by the elected indigenous people's leaders of five separate territorial governments for spreading malicious lies, promoting community violence and falsely claiming to represent indigenous peoples.
Frontline Defenders has exalted these individuals as genuine human rights defenders, which they are not. Rather they have learned from organizations like Frontline Defenders how to promote their political agenda by exploiting human rights issues. However, when challenged about this disgraceful record of untruth, Frontline Defenders have simply refused to engage well supported criticism. This has also been the experience of people challenging Amnesty International or asking the Inter American Commission for Human Rights to explain their false reporting of the violent failed coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018. Total opacity is the norm among the international human rights managerial class, and, more generally, a thorough betrayal of the principles they falsely claim to uphold of democracy, accountability and transparency.
While Valerie Roche misrepresents the violent 2018 coup attempt in Nicaragua and subsequent events in the article she wrote for the Irish NGO Comhlámh, more interesting in relation to Irish collusion in the West's human rights industry is the reply Comhlámh unexpectedly offered in response to a complaint about Roche's article. That exchange is available here. Comhlámh evaded answering the complaint that Roche outright lied about events in Nicaragua in April 2018 and that she dishonestly cloaked her support for Nicaragua's political opposition under human rights concerns. Comhlámh's reply evaded those criticisms, suggesting the matter was merely one of interpretation, while also noting that various other people shared Valerie Roche's human rights concerns. Comhlámh has not replied to a further message noting that the NGO seems unwilling to abide by its own Code of Good Conduct.
The other people sharing Roche's concerns whom Comhlámh mention are all individuals who, like Valerie Roche, are also long standing supporters of Nicaragua's political opposition. They are mostly associated with Ireland's Latin American Solidarity Committee (LASC). LASC plays down the fact that Nicaragua's political opposition is almost entirely funded by the US government and its NATO country allies and is aligned with Nicaragua's most reactionary Catholic Church hierarchy, the country's wealthiest business interests, and Nicaragua's right wing political parties. LASC has supported this political opposition in Nicaragua for over a decade, depending for their information on the same opposition media funded by US and allied governments and associated corporate funded non profits.
Frontline Defenders, Comhlámh and LASC all receive significant funding from the government's development cooperation arm Irish Aid and in this context it may be worth remembering too that part of Irish Aid's program funded Irish writer Michael McCaughan to visit Nicaragua in 2019. McCaughan then wrote an attack piece against the Nicaraguan authorities which appeared in the Irish Times. In relation to a complaint about that article, the Irish Press Council, rather than finding for or against the complaint as it would normally do, issued an extremely unusual ruling to the effect that it could neither vindicate the complaint nor find in favour of the Irish Times. That whole exchange is available here with a briefer rebuttal here of McCaughan's false reporting.
What all this indicates is an Irish version of the very well understood marriage of corporate and government economic and political power, inducing collusion in their policies by NGOs, news media, academics and international institutions. Indeed, Denis O'Brien is a donor to and close friend of former US president Bill Clinton and his wife former US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Mary Lawlor's relationship to that power elite network and O'Brien's patronage of Frontline Defenders suggest that her own political agenda is not simply one of promoting human rights, in Nicaragua or anywhere else. Similarly Valerie Roche's pretence that her concern is simply to promote human rights in Nicaragua veils her long standing support for Nicaragua's political opposition for over a decade. Mary Lawlor and Valerie Roche's apparent lack of good faith in reporting on Nicaragua, as well as the behaviour of Frontline Defenders, Comhlámh and LASC are representative of Irish neocolonial collusion in the West's phony human rights industry.
* Stephen Sefton currently accompanies community development programs in Estelí, in northern Nicaragua. Since 1986, he has done human rights research and assisted community development programs in Nicaragua, and for a while, in Honduras. After returning from Honduras in 1991, he worked in Comhlámh's Dublin office between 1991 and 1994. He has lived in Nicaragua since 1994. From 1995 to 2000, Stephen served in the Irish government's technical cooperation programme to Nicaragua and subsequently has continued assisting the education and training activities which that programme began. As well as that community work in Estelí, he has coordinated the Tortilla con Sal media collective in Nicaragua since 2008.