A cycle ends:the moral-ethical fall of Mahinda

By Dr. DAYAN JAYATILLEKA

“By oneself is one defiled”-The Dhammapada

I write this with sadness as one who supported Mahinda Rajapaksa for 20 years, from 1999 to 2019, which stand I do not regret given the challenges, circumstances and choices of those times.

I did not expect to witness, as I did last night (April 11th 2022), the self-propelled collapse of the moral, ethical and historical stature of the Mahinda Rajapaksa. “By oneself is one defiled”, indeed. The lesson is clear: a man who is the best leader in the face of one type of challenge can be its opposite in the face of another.

Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa’s address to the nation in this time of the peaceful uprising of the youth, symbolized the moral-ethical fall of the figure who was the country’s greatest wartime leader. It represented the degeneration and political decadence of a family clan, and the trajectory of steep, accelerated descent of a great man. It is the end of the Mahinda cycle.

Mahinda and My Father

I must confess there was a personal emotional contributory factor for my initial support of Mahinda Rajapaksa. My father, Mervyn de Silva, died in 1999. Mahinda Rajapaksa wrote a sensitive, personal commemorative piece to the newspapers in which he disclosed:

“…Whenever I met him, which happened to be at least twice a month during the last 25 years, I always made it a point to have a serious chat even for a minute. I valued his ability to provide an unbiased interpretation of the current political issues and his forecast on such matters were always accurate. It is with a very heavy heart that I recollect some past meetings and I begin to feel that I have lost a very useful and genuine friend. First I came to know Mr.de Silva through my cousin the late Lakshman Rajapaksa. Both of them were regulars at the Orient Club. Being a Royalist, he was also very close to the late George Rajapaksa, his fellow alumni.

Being only a student of politics, I remained a passive participant at the meetings Mr. de Silva had with my cousin, Lakshman and George, gathering valuable points. However, I came still closer to him after I became a Member of Parliament in 1970. The frequency of meetings grew after the formation of the Sri Lanka Committee for Solidarity with Palestine, when the journalists who launched this organisation elected me as its President. Mr. Mervyn de Silva was one of the Patrons…”

(‘He Wrote What He Wanted’, Mahinda Rajapaksa, Ceylon Daily News of July 3rd, 1999)

Moral Collapse

Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa’s addressed to the nation, on the night of April 11th 2022, will go down as the worst speech he ever made and marks the nadir of his political career and more tragically, the manner he will be seen by history. Most seriously of all, his speech—the one he agreed to read out—may signal a round of repression that sends the country plunging into the abyss.

For a man who had a romantic political history as a dissident and rebel, Mahinda’s speech failed utterly to empathize with or even understand the sentiments and aspirations of the young protestors. A politician who always had his finger on the pulse of the people, he has now completely lost touch with their sentiments.

He has also lost his touch as a communicator. His speech was cold, stony, and slightly sinister. He was no longer the appealing rascal of many decades. No longer the exception to the Rajapaksa rule, he looked and sounded like a harshly admonitory spokesperson for the family oligarchy which is determined to rule, overriding the sentiments of a vast majority, most especially the island’s youth.

He unblinkingly defended the regime’s economic record, with the single exception of promising to restore the fertilizer subsidy. If the ongoing mass movement achieved something it was that. It took the recent mass protests to secure even a pledge of the return of that which had been snatched away cruelly by the regime.

Attempting to give himself and the regime an air of moral superiority, Mahinda Rajapaksa took the moral low road. Knowing full well that the Jayawardene regime falsely accused the JVP of the attacks of July ’83 and repressed it, thereby driving the country into civil war, Mahinda echoed that false propaganda, accusing the protestors or the alleged organisers of the protests of proceeding on the same road as the violent JVP insurrectionists of the 1980s and worse, the LTTE in the North.

He then went on to say that every second that the protests went on, obstructed the dollars that could be coming into the country. What the logical connection was, remained unexplained. How the protests could be a greater causative factor of the dollar shortage than his kid brother the President crashing food production thereby requiring imports, as well as ruining tea production which was a traditional foreign exchange earner, with his zany fertiliser policy, wasn’t explained either.

As the BBC explains to its global audience: “…the government tried to stop the outflow of foreign currency by banning all imports of chemical fertiliser, telling farmers to use organic fertilisers instead. This led to widespread crop failures. Sri Lanka had to supplement its food stocks from abroad, which made its foreign currency shortage even worse.” (Why are Sri Lankans protesting in the streets? – BBC News)

Where Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa enacted his very worst moment so far in politics and history, indelibly tarring his great historical contribution of winning the war, was in his remarks about the military.

He said that everything the protestors said and did, including insulting his family may be excusable. What is worst is the disrespect and harassment of the military; the war heroes to whom we owe so much. He gave absolutely no evidence of such disrespect or humiliation and harassment by the protestors, failing to cite any person or place. As far as I can tell, as a keen observer of the reportage of the protests, is that there was never any disparaging by the protestors anywhere, of the military, present or past. That is of course, unless of course, a girl in dungarees giving a rose to men in uniform was such a disparaging act.

Consequences of a Crackdown

In short, Mahinda Rajapaksa was making at best,a fake insinuation; at worst, making an insidious and false accusation. It seemed and sounded to me like this falsehood was uttered for two purposes. Firstly, to rouse the ire of the armed forces towards the peaceful—if verbally impassioned— protestors. Secondly, to pre-emptively justify the deployment of the military in a crackdown on the protests.

Taking the totality of his speech, the dangerous logic of threats was clear. The protests prevent, by the second (“hama thathparaya”), the inflow of much needed dollars. The organisers of the protest are proceeding on the path of the armed insurgents of the 1970s-1980s in the South and North. The protestors are trashing the armed forces.

I have heard this kind of thing before. National Security Minister Lalith Athulathmudali made such a
speech on TV in 1984. The very next day two university students were shot dead by the Police, one in Peradeniya the other in Colombo, before my eyes.

I have also heard this type of discourse all over the world. I was in Indonesia accompanying my parents the month before the military coup that massacred 1 ½ million people. (My father was the last foreign journalist to interview DN Aidit of the PKI, the unarmed Indonesian Communist Party, murdered months later by the army). I was with my parents in 1967 when my father smuggled in a clandestine communication from the BBC London to the BBC correspondent in Athens, where the Colonels had just seized power.

Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa’s speech could be a curtain-raiser on a military crackdown on the
protests.

If there is such a crackdown, it will wreck the negotiations with the IMF which now cares about governance criteria. It will ruin tourism and foreign investment. It will lose Sri Lanka GSP Plus. It will shrink markets for our products in the West. It will turn international opinion totally against the Government. It will accentuate the nearly planetwide protests by the Sri Lankan Diaspora from Poland and Estonia to the USA and New Zealand. The Sri Lankan born winner of the most prestigious award in British theater, the Laurence Olivier award, Hiran Abeysekara, gave a shoutout in Sinhala to the protestors in Sri Lanka at the glittering awards ceremony in London.

It will isolate Sri Lanka. It may lead to sanctions. It will crash an already free-falling economy. A crackdown will in short, lose many times more dollars than Prime Minister Rajapaksa accuses the protestors of causing the country to lose.

A crackdown on the peaceful protestors, who are no more or less forceful than the ones Mahinda Rajapaksa was prominent in, back in the day, which include the demonstrations of 1987, will simply not restore order. Like a tsunami wave it may recede momentarily but will return with irresistible force and mass, sweeping away the Rajapaksa regime.

[Dr Dayan Jayatilleka is a former Vice-President of the United Nations Human Rights Council and a former Chairperson of the ILO. He is the author of Fidel’s Ethics of Violence: The Moral Dimension of the Political Thought of Fidel Castro, Pluto Press, London /University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2007.]