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yajitha's Blog
An Eye for an Eye, a Bomb for a Bomb
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A bomb on a train in Dehiwela killed 9 civilians, including a pregnant woman. The Sri Lankan government blames the LTTE; they deny it. Three days earlier, a claymore attack on van deep in LTTE territory killed 16 civilians, including 5 children. The LTTE blames the Deep Penetration Unit of the Sri Lankan army; they deny it. In February, a bomb on a bus in Dambulla killed 20, while a bomb at the Colombo Fort railway station killed 12, including 8 children from the baseball team at D.S. Senanayake College and a 12-year-old girl. The LTTE was blamed for both attacks; they denied it. A few days earlier, a claymore mine attack on a bus in the LTTE-controlled area of Madhu killed 20 children. The LTTE blamed the Sri Lankan army; they denied it. And on and on it goes.
Life in Sri Lanka seems to follow the Old Testament of the Bible: “eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.”
We can add: “bomb for bomb.”
It has been this way for some time. It started with the Sinhala Only Act of 1956, a blatantly racist piece of legislation passed by the Sri Lankan Freedom Party, which made Sinhala the sole official language of Sri Lanka. Tamil politicians protested peacefully that it was unfair; they were ignored and ridiculed. The racism fermented by the act exploded in anti-Tamil riots in 1958. By the 1970s, pissed off young Tamils in the North armed themselves and formed militant groups. In May 1981, Tamil militants killed two Sinhalese policemen. The response was swift: that night, policemen and goons from the then ruling United National Party burnt the Jaffna Public Library, destroying a priceless collection of books and documents. In July 1983, the LTTE ambushed and killed15 Sinhalese army soldiers in Jaffna; the response was a massive nationwide anti-Tamil riot that killed over 1000 Tamil civilians. Tamils fled Sri Lanka en masse, creating a Diaspora that willingly (at first) funded the Tamil militancy. The LTTE, a little known group in the 70s grew in to a brutally efficient beast that breathed hatred and bombs.
It’s been 25 years since the race riots of 1983, and it’s been a tit for tat game of them killing us and us killing them. A part of that game has been played on the battlefield with conventional forces, but innocent civilians are often caught in the crossfire. Bullets and artillery can’t tell combatant from non-combatant. And bombs, smart as they are today, are not that smart-the occasional ‘surgical strike’ by our air force does kill civilians too.
So how do we find our way out of this mess? Some politicians speak of military victories, others of political settlements. But it really comes down to us, the ones who vote for them. For it wasn’t Mr. S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike who passed the Sinhala Only Act-it was the people who voted for his communal brand of politics. The fact is that those who fight this war now are too young to remember 1983, let alone 1956. Who started what doesn’t matter any more. We just remember the last bomb, and most of us want to give it back to them in kind.
The government tells us that these acts of terror should strengthen our resolve to fight harder, to defeat and vanquish the LTTE forever. In the aftermath of our terrorist acts against them, the LTTE tells the people of the North that their only hope is to fight until they achieve Eelam. Both sides say the same thing: fight to the end, fight to win. Will this really solve anything?
Perhaps we should try something different. Perhaps it’s time to think about the words of a man that many in this island claim to follow, but few bother to understand:
“Victory breeds hatred. The defeated live in pain. Happily the peaceful live, giving up victory and defeat.”
Verse 201, The Dhammapada, uttered by the Buddha
Some links for those with strong stomachs:
29th January: Attack on bus carrying children in LTTE-controlled Madhu
2nd February: Dambulla bus bomb blast
3rd February: Colombo Fort Station bomb blast
23rd May: 16 civilians killed in blast in N Sri Lanka
26th May: Dehiwala train blast kills eight
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Jaffna: Retrospect and Prospect
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Most of what I reveal below has been lying concealed in my notes and diaries deposited in the Government Achieves. I have decided to focus on them out of my belief that they may throw some light as we grope through the darkness covering our arduous trek towards national reconciliation. Read between the lines with insight, they may perhaps point the way to peace and prosperity.
I started my career in the then Ceylon Civil Service in 1957 as a Cadet in the Jaffna Kachcheri. My thoughts of Jaffna are nostalgic, prompted by the happy life I led among a hospitable, and peace-loving people, nurtured in the best traditions of a noble culture. I always looked forward to returning the ample help and courtesy I received from them in whatever little way I could.
The opportunity came my way unexpectedly, soon after the “Riviresa Operation”. I was suddenly summoned to Temple Trees to see the President immediately. The Lady told me that the Government had a problem in running the civil administration in Jaffna as all the public servants there had left with the population to the Vanni, following the retreating LTTE cadres. A couple of retired army officers were holding the fort and there were no takers to take over the administration.
Trying to allay my presumed apprehensions, the Lady explained that I could run the set up from Colombo and visit Jaffna occasionally. Could I think of the offer and let her know my response soon. I told the President there was no need to think. I was prepared to go immediately. The situation demanded an immediate and hands-on response. I left for Jaffna by the next available plane telling my family I was going to Polonnaruva, for they would not have allowed me to go if I told them the truth.
On arrival, I was shocked and dismayed to see Jaffna turned into a ghost town. It was not the warm and vibrant environment I cherished as a Cadet. The streets were deserted; only a few stray dogs were seen here and there. Visible humanity was limited to members of the armed forces dangerously exposing themselves to unimaginable risks. Nor was I sure that I would reach my destination as I travelled from the Airport.
Old and disabled members of certain families had been left behind. White flags marked the houses in which they lived. Retired army officers were dutifully looking after them. The only government institution functioning was the General Hospital, once the pride of the district, now reduced to a temporary ward attended to by a couple of septuagenarian retired Apothecaries.
I was in Jaffna when “Riviresa II” commenced and the influx started from the Vanni. Over 250,000 persons marched back to Jaffna in a continuous procession of men, women and animals. They were walking for miles and miles, destitute and exhausted. There could have been persons of high achievement among them. Calamity is no respecter of persons. It was a pitiable sight, a people reduced to nomads and refugees in their own land!
I have also stood by in agitated silence when bodies of men in the prime of their youth were brought back from the battlefield to Palaly. I have travelled in planes transporting soldiers with amputated legs holding up their saline bottles in their own hands. It is my direct personal experience of human suffering like this that has prompted me to look at our ethnic conflict beyond the dividing fence.
My first task was to feed the returning hungry masses. In this I was ably assisted by the ex-army officers who maintained a round the clock kitchen at Wembadi. While the returnees rested, the army checked their homesteads for land mines and owners of cleared lands were transported to their homes.
But life had not yet started in Jaffna. Vegetables were hard to come by; an egg sold at twenty five rupees, a tablet of Panedol cost ten rupees. There were no onions in Jaffna! Schools were deserted. The University was closed.
The G.A. had returned with the masses along with his men and I helped him to re-establish the administrative machinery. All this time I was operating from the Army barracks where officers looked after me right royally. But I realized that I had to move with the people if my services were to be effective and meaningful.
I took up residence in an abandoned house in town. There was apprehension that my shift of residence was fraught with danger. Nevertheless I did not face the slightest interruption when I toured the district by day and slept the night in my room with all windows open.
Arrangements were made to get down seed onions from the South by plane. Day old chicks were similarly transported and distributed. All teachers’ transfers out of the district were stopped without exception. Returning doctors were supplemented by Internees from the South. The district was slowly but steadily limping back to normalcy. In the next season Jaffna was sending onions to the South and selling eggs cheaper than in Colombo.
Encouraged by the resurgence, Ministers tried to capitalize on the situation by coming on inspection to the North, until such visits ended abruptly with a suicidal explosion. The only person I had got down from Colombo to help me, a retired SSP lost his life in the attack. He had forgotten my advice that our mission was to grant relief to our siblings in distress, not to get involved in politics.
In retrospect, I see that my survival in Jaffna owed much to the apolitical policy I followed. Once a reporter from Udayan asked me what my own response was to the ongoing conflict. I replied, “I have not come to choose a king for the Tamils. My mission is to see that the king would have living subjects when he finally arrived after the conflict is resolved”.
Convinced by my commitment to the cause and my honesty of purpose the GAs stood by me through thick and thin. They became so close to me that they insisted on my staying with them whenever I was on circuit in their districts. Later I discovered regretfully that one of them had been secretly sharing the store-room with his family, having placed the only comfortable bedroom in the ancient building at my disposal. Other officers who attended my regular Progress Control meetings and accompanied me on circuit developed strong personal attachments to me. Their tireless application to their assignments significantly stepped up the rate of recovery.
Citizens who were able to get through to Colombo made it a point to visit my Colombo office though they had no particular business there. They told my Secretary that they had come to see ‘Nambada Aal’, - ‘Our Man’. Such identification was presumably the natural result of my own genuine sympathy for their lot.
My sights were equally focused on the citizens on the other side of the divide. They were where they were by accident of birth and could not be held responsible for the actions of those who were in power over them. Presumed to be subjects of a unitary State, they were entitled to all the rights and privileges of those across the bunker line. I realized that the discriminatory treatment meted out to them had made them aliens in the country of their birth, even without a unilateral declaration of independence!
For example, their rice ration was brought all the way from Colombo by contractors who were making mints of money on the deal. In the meantime, rice produced in the Vanni had no market. I put an end to this discriminatory anomaly and got the cooperatives in the Vanni to buy and distribute rice locally. Though this step was vehemently resisted by vested interests, it granted relief to the impoverished farmers of the Vanni while conserving State funds.
This decision had been highly appreciated in the Vanni. UN officials who had unrestricted access to the area got wind of the changing climate arising from my attitude and approach to the conflict. In their anxiety to settle the ethnic dispute, they saw in it, an opportunity to bring about rapport between parties to the conflict.
The officials were exited about the emerging possibility and negotiated with the late Thamil Chelvam for a meeting with me in the Vanni, thus far closed to all Sinhala visitors. But Prabhakaran was understandably cautious. He had presumed that I was a political stooge appointed by the President.
Nevertheless I believed that trust in my credentials would grow as I continued to execute my assignment, winning hearts and minds. But that was not to be. I was suddenly called to the South to meet a crisis that had arisen on the collapse of the grandiose plans of the SDA. I still feel confident that placed in a strategic position, I would be able to narrow the gap between the warring parties through negotiation and consensus.
Somapala Gunadheera
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Tags:
english, humanrights, humansecurity, jaffna, peaceandconflict, politics, conflict, groundviews, ltte, srilanka, tamils, war
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THE EASTERN PROVINCIAL COUNCIL ELECTIONS: A BRIEF POST-MORTEM
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As the much hard-sold elections to the Eastern Provincial Council came to an unseemly and acrimonious conclusion last week, it was already becoming abundantly clear that its political and constitutional ramifications may well turn out to be anything other than what the government’s triumphalist claims would have us believe.
Perhaps the most disturbing political upshot of these elections was the sharp and violent polarisation of ethnic and religious communities in this most pluralistic of provinces. Electoral politics was conducted unashamedly as a form of antagonistic communal competition and outbidding, paralleling without much overstatement that nonpareil of political disintegration, the general elections of 1956. In the years before the watershed of 1956, the gross ineptitude of Sir John Kotelawala’s UNP with regard to any notion of nation-building on the cusp of independence, coupled with S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike’s miasmic, if highly equivocating, opportunism gave rise to a situation in which politics came to be fundamentally dominated by a hysterical and chauvinistic ethnic-nationalism based on language and religion. Likewise in 2008, the Eastern Provincial Council election was an example of the debilitating ethnicisation of politics from which we seem so utterly incapable of liberation. Compounded with the patent illegitimacy of the manner in which the election was conducted, of which the most significant factor of course was that the central government’s principal proxy in the East was armed and was not diffident about displaying the fact, it is difficult to share the government’s sanguinity about the re-establishment of a great New Jerusalem of democracy in the East.
And there are other less immediately visible, but in the longer term perhaps more serious, constitutional consequences that are indicated by the relationship between the central government and its client, Pillaiyan. The latter’s democratic mandate is fundamentally contested both on ethnic and legitimacy grounds, not least by his erstwhile UPFA ally, M. L. A. M. Hisbullah. Assuming his capacity to do so, Pillaiyan’s economic programme as Chief Minister will depend on the largess of the central government, his physical safety on the arms and security provided by the central government, and there is little hope that the central government will allow him to develop and deliver a political programme of his own, independent of those which are politically so pivotal to the central government’s own national electoral prospects such as Nagenahira Navodaya. Even in provinces which are less of a problem case than the East, the central government’s rural development agenda through programmes such as Gama Neguma has undeniably usurped provincial autonomy, and it is highly likely given its composition, that the same goes for the Task Force mechanism for the North.
This shows the extent to which the government is dismissive of the principle of devolution and provincial autonomy. In its worldview, provincial level politics are a matter of central patronage and control, and thereby firmly within the nationalist discourse of unitary centralisation. The tenacious hold of this discourse on Sri Lankan politics has ensured political disintegration on ethnic lines in the past, and the discontented Muslim factor in the East will now add an incendiary religious dimension to this in the future.
In the shorter term, however, what the Eastern Provincial Council election has demonstrated, once again, are the extremely serious challenges which confront the legitimacy and integrity of our electoral process. The politicisation of the electoral process has been a problem in this country since the establishment of universal adult franchise in 1931, if not before. Factors such as the gerrymandering constituency boundaries, the abuse of public resources including in the early days the headman system, vote buying and patronage have been common since the days of the State Council, as have been the use of thuggery, intimidation, caste repression and the phenomenon of the ‘Bus Mudalali‘ that played a distinctly insalubrious role in our electoral history (and which is now active in a multiplicity of different and infinitely more malevolent incarnations). Even before 1931, electoral malpractice seems to have come quite naturally to us, as for example, the contest between S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike and A. E. Goonesinghe for the Maradana ward in the Colombo Municipal Council elections of 1926 shows. Therefore, it is only through surpassing ignorance of the history of elections and electoral politics that some in Sri Lanka are wont to indulge in the nostalgia for a halcyon past of free and fair elections.
However, it is precisely in acknowledgement of and in response to this deeply flawed nature of the electoral process that Parliament enacted the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution in 2001. It is significant that this has been the only amendment to the Constitution of 1978 that has been passed with cross-party support (all the others having been steamrolled in through J. R. Jayewardene’s colossal, and after 1982, illegitimate parliamentary majority).
A new Chapter XIVA was inserted into the constitution, which abolished the old office of the Commissioner of Elections and replaced it with an Elections Commission, the object of which is ‘the conduct of free and fair elections and Referenda’ (Article 103 (2)). The new independent Election Commission was to be appointed by the President on the recommendations of the Constitutional Council (Article 41B (1)), the plain meaning of which provision explicitly deprived the President of any discretion on appointments. The Council was to recommend nominees ‘from among persons who have distinguished themselves in any profession or in the fields of administration or education’ (Article 103 (1)), which indicated that de-politicisation of the conduct of elections was to be achieved by enlarging stakeholder representation in the new and empowered mechanism of electoral administration.
The Commission is vested with a wide range of powers in order to enforce the law relating to elections and referenda. It is empowered to prevent the misuse of public property by prohibiting the use of movable or immovable property of the State or of a public corporation to promote or prevent the election of a political party or candidate. It can issue guidelines to the media to ensure unbiased and fair elections coverage. In the case of contravention of such guidelines by the Sri Lanka Rupavahini Corporation and the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, the Commission has the power to appoint a Competent Authority to take over the management of political or other broadcasts impinging on the election until the conclusion of the election. The Commission is further vested with powers to deploy police and the armed forces to ensure a free and fair election.
The Election Commission, however, remains unconstituted to this day, reflecting not merely the persistence of the culture of politicisation and centralisation, but also, the splendidly insouciant attitude to fulfilling constitutional obligations on the part of our chief executives. President Kumaratunga unconvincingly imputed political partisanship to one of the nominees to the Elections Commission recommended by the then Constitutional Council and refused to appoint the Commission, even when it was clear that she had no legal discretion in the matter.
President Rajapakse, going a step further, has refused to appoint the Constitutional Council itself on grounds that are spurious and which have changed according to convenience. In this, he has been typically and regrettably iconoclastic, where like in the case of the broad political consensus around the need for devolution that had painfully emerged during the 1990s, he has been entirely willing to the smash the consensus around good governance embodied in the Seventeenth Amendment.
Nonetheless, it is perhaps in prescient anticipation of just such presidential behaviour that Parliament inserted a savings clause, section 27 of the Seventeenth Amendment Act, which entitled the Commissioner of Elections holding office prior to the amendment to exercise the powers of the Commission until such time as the Commission was constituted. This legislative intent has largely been frustrated, because Commissioner Dissanayake, who is by all accounts an essentially decent civil servant, simply does not have the wherewithal with which to assert his will against the State and ruling party in highly-charged and politically zero-sum elections as in the East. He has merely rubberstamped what has been achieved through a mixture of political patronage and force of arms, despite detailed information being published by monitors and opposition parties about violence and malpractice necessitating an exercise of his constitutional and statutory powers over the annulment of polls.
The broader lesson and the critique regarding the electoral process are two sides of the same coin. The constitution of Sri Lanka has provided an institutional framework for the conduct of free and fair elections. This is critical to ensuring the integrity and legitimacy of the electoral process, the most basic formal feature of a functioning democracy. Political refusal to activate these institutions undermines the electoral process, the fundamental human right of the citizen to an uncoerced vote and choice of government, erodes public confidence in democracy, and in circumstances of ethnic antagonism, robs the constitutional order of the State of pluralistic legitimacy. All this of course has been pointed out before in relation to many similar flawed elections. What is nevertheless surprising, however, is that the Rajapakse regime’s conception of political self-interest did not extend to seeing the value of a free and fair election conducted through independent institutions, from the windfall of legitimacy of which, it could have been the primary beneficiary.
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Tags:
batticaloa, constitutionalreform, english, peaceandconflict, politics, trincomalee, easternprovince, electionviolence, elections, pilliyan, srilanka, tmvp
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EU withdrawal of GSP+ to enforce Human Rights - Part 2
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I received a comment from one Mr. Perera from Cairo, who lamented about my opinion on the EU and the GSP+ issue published on Groundviews.
Fortunately for him he is in Cairo and not here. Had he been here he would know about the breakdown of the Rule of Law - the abductions, the extra-judicial killings, the disappearances taking place. The victims are largely Tamil civilians and even if they were LTTE sympathizers we don’t expect the State to act like the LTTE and deal with them according to the law of the jungle. Who does these things we don’t know for sure but only have suspicions. But they are done with impunity and the state law enforcement agencies have failed to investigate and charge a single suspect.
Lawless acts committed by Dr. Mervyn Silva on Rupavahini employees show that the victims will not be confined to Tamils & Muslims but anybody who runs foul of the powers that be. The whole edifice of the rule of law is threatened by constant attempts by the executive branch of government to do whatever they deem useful to maintain or increase their power.
People don’t feel that they have any interest in making self-sacrifices to promote or protect the rule of law. This may be because of fear, supported by constant intimidation and occasional violence a la Dr Mervin Silva. People are so frightened that they are very hesitant to speak out for the common good, or even to protect their own rights.
Even lawyers and other professionals as those in the OPA, who are well educated and have a fairly high social standing in society, have been hesitant to speak up, even when they realize what has been happening. Whether out of fear or passivity, prompted by concern for their personal income or safety, they remain silent.
The EU stand is for the greater good of the people of the country for there can be no lasting economic growth without good institutions that safeguard the Rule of Law as argued so cogently by Professor Amartya Sen.
R.M.B. Senanayake
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