Editorial

Ayes, Noes and duplicity

Published

4 years ago

2020/08/24

Monday 24th August, 2020

Chief Opposition Whip Lakshman Kiriella has demanded to know how come those who supported the 19th Amendment are now trying to scrap it. His reference is obviously to his political opponents in the SLPP government bent on getting rid of the 19th Amendment. The answer to his question is that they are doing so because Sri Lankan politicians act out of expediency rather than principle.

The 17th Amendment, which was a progressive legislation regardless of its flaws was passed without a division in 2001. Mahinda Rajapaksa was a minister in the Chandrika Kumaratunga government at that time. So were most SLPP and SLFP seniors who are currently savouring power. But Rajapaksa introduced the 18th Amendment after securing a second term as the Executive President and effectively neutralised the 17th Amendment in the process. Many others who had voted for the 17th Amendment unflinchingly helped him secure the passage of the 18th Amendment. In so doing, all of them made a mockery of their commitment to good governance.

As Kiriella has said, in 2015, all UPFA/SLFP MPs who had backed the 18th Amendment, save one, voted for the 19th Amendment, which strengthened the independent commissions created by the 17th Amendment. In so doing, they helped limit the number of terms a President can serve to two and strip the President of the power to hold Cabinet posts. The UNP, which captured power in Parliament, after defeating President Rajapaksa, had only 46 seats and the ousted UPFA a two-thirds majority. How did the UNP achieve that goal?

The defeat of President Rajapaksa left the UPFA MPs shell-shocked. They were too scared to stand up to the new government, which the newly elected President Maithripala Sirisena had formed. They took the path of least resistance without ruffling the feathers of the new leaders; many of them even joined forces with the new government for fear of reprisal.

Some yahapalana grandees including former President Sirisena, who backed the 19th Amendment, and flaunted it as an achievement of theirs, are now in the SLPP administration, and they will back the 20th Amendment to be presented to Parliament soon. It is only natural that their erstwhile yahapalana colleagues accuse them of duplicity. However, these critics are behaving just like the proverbial crab which asked its offspring to walk straight while he was moving sideways. Among those who are campaigning against the executive presidency, calling it a threat to democracy, are some senior politicians who voted for the 1978 Constitution, which created that institution. Prominent among them is former Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. It has been a case of political sour grapes for them; a UNPer has not been able to secure the executive presidency since 1994—for more than a quarter century and, therefore, they want it done away with. Ironically, the UNP was instrumental in clipping the wings of the Executive President in 2015. They have proved that they are as hypocritical as their SLPP counterparts who condemned the executive presidency as a curse while they were in the Opposition.

Meanwhile, the JVP plunged the country into a bloodbath in a bid to scuttle the 13th Amendment, which paved the way for the establishment of the Provincial Councils, in the late 1980s. Their reign of terror and equally ruthless counterterrorism operations by the UNP governments during that period left tens of thousands of people dead and many others missing. But the JVP later had representation in the Provincial Councils. Strangely, the 20th Amendment it proposed with a view to having the executive presidency abolished did not call for doing away with 13th Amendment!

Meanwhile, SJB MP Harin Fernando has told Parliament that President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s Policy Statement gave him the creeps; he has said he believes that it marks the beginning of the country’s journey towards a dictatorship. If so, he and his party should have called for a division and made an attempt to prevent the ratification of the President’s policy statement.

The history of the 1978 Constitution and the 19 amendments thereto has been one of duplicity and capriciousness. If Machiavelli were alive today, he would add to The Prince a new chapter on the Sri Lankan politicians.

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Editorial

Brutal suppression of a nation’s conscience

Published

5 hours ago

2024/04/25

Sahan Weerasooriya

Thursday 25th April, 2024

What Washington asked Sri Lanka not to do in the name of democracy, during Aragalaya in 2022, is being done in the US! There have been police crackdowns on US university students engaged in protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. Hundreds of undergrads have so far been arrested and their encampments in university premises broken up. Columbia University has cancelled in-person classes in view of student protests.

According to international media reports, the New York police descended on a student protest at a plaza near New York University after nightfall, the other day, arrested dozens of protesters, and pulled down their tents. They used force to neutralise the protesters who offered resistance. What the New York police did was similar to the crackdown we witnessed at Galle Face immediately after the elevation of Ranil Wickremesinghe to the presidency in 2022. Have the US police taken a leaf out of their Sri Lankan counterparts’ book, or is it the other way around?

American higher education institutions shaken by student protests against Israeli aggression in Gaza and police crackdowns in the US include Yale, Boston University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California, Berkeley, Princeton, and University of Michigan.

The unfolding drama in the US reminds us of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. The New York police crushed protest marches, using as they did pepper spray, etc., on protesters. Hundreds of OWS protesters who rose against growing inequality owing to corporate influence on the US government were arrested. However, they inspired people to hold similar protests in more than 900 cities in 82 countries across the world. Eleven years later, the US government took up the cudgels on behalf of those who were engaged in ‘occupy’ protests in Sri Lanka!

Why is the US, which pontificates to the rest of the world on the virtues of democratic rights, and even makes interventions to ensure that they are protected, crushing student protests ruthlessly instead of heeding the youth’s call for an end to the massacres in Gaza. After all, the Biden government itself has been compelled to declare that it is contemplating sanctions to rein in Israel, which continues its military operations in Gaza in spite of their enormous human, social and economic costs.

Washington censured President Wickremesinghe for chasing away protesters to clear Galle Face and enable the Presidential Secretariat to reopen in 2022. The Biden administration urged Colombo to tolerate democratic dissent and heed the voice of protesters. The question is why it is not practising what it preaches to others.

American university students have demonstrated that they have a sense of justice and a concern for human lives. They are right in holding protests to crank up pressure on their government to step in to stop massacres in Gaza. True, Hamas must be condemned for its acts of terror in October 2023, when it invaded some parts of Israel, killed many Israelis and took hundreds of civilians hostage. It must release all hostages without further delay. Israel’s right to self-defence cannot be questioned. But the Netanyahu government is using the Hamas atrocities as an excuse for its brutal campaign against Palestinian civilians. Its killing spree must be stopped forthwith, as the US students are rightly demanding.

Some Jewish students have reportedly complained of antisemitic harassment in recent days, and their complaints must be probed and action taken against the culprits, but crackdowns on protests against Israeli attacks on civilians in Gaza cannot be countenanced on any grounds.

The civilised world wept for Jews during Hitler’s reign of terror. Today, a hawkish Jewish government is making the world weep for Palestinians. The voice of moderate Jews who detest violence is suppressed.

The protesting US university students, we believe, represent America’s conscience, which is being systematically suppressed by the Washington-based hawks who thrive on bloody conflicts around the world. There is no way the Biden administration can cover its nudity.

Editorial

Needed: Action, not talkathons

Published

1 day ago

2024/04/24

Sahan Weerasooriya

Wednesday 24th April, 2024

There seems to be no end in sight to debates on the Easter Sunday carnage (2019), the latest being the one Parliament is scheduled to commence today. Chances are that the House will be thrown into turmoil, with the sittings descending into a three-day slanging match. If experience is anything to go by, nothing is likely to come of the debate.

It may be recalled that on 23 Oct., 2019, a Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC), which looked into the Easter Sunday terror attacks submitted its report to Parliament. The SJB MPs, who claim to have pressured the government to hold the debate to kick off today, were members of the Yahapalana government, which appointed the aforesaid PSC. One can only hope that parliamentary time will be utilised productively in the next few days.

As for the Easter Sunday attacks, there are several schools of thought, the prominent being that they were engineered by the SLPP to win the 2019 presidential election; ISIS had them carried out; Moulavi Mohamad Ibrahim Mohamad Nauffer, who is in custody, masterminded them, and they were part of an external conspiracy to destabilise Sri Lanka. The general consensus is that there was a conspiracy, as former Attorney General Dappula de Livera is reported to have said.

The claim that ISIS was responsible for the Easter Sunday terror attacks is widely considered far-fetched. Nobody seems to have taken it seriously.

A possible connection between the terror strikes and the SLPP was hinted at by the aforesaid PSC, which said in its report that a probe had to be conducted to find out whether they had been aimed at creating conditions for a regime change in the latter part of 2019.

The story that Nauffer is the terror mastermind is floated by the SLPP. In 2021, the then Minister of Public Security Sarath Weerasekera told Parliament that the FBI (of the US) had confirmed that Nauffer was the mastermind. But National Thowheed Jamaath (NTJ) leader Zahran Hashim’s wife, Fathima Haidya, told the Presidential Commission of Inquiry (PCOI), which probed the Easter Sunday carnage that Zahran and Nauffer had been in contact with a person called Abu Hind in India. Hind has been identified by an international expert of terrorism as a character created by a section of a provincial Indian intelligence apparatus. Zahran believed that Hind was an ISIS representative, according to the PCOI report. Pulasthi Mahendran aka Sara Jasmine, the widow of Muhammadu Hasthun, who blew himself at St. Sebastian’s Church, Katuwapitiya, in 2019, is believed to be privy to the NTJ’s secrets. Initially, it was claimed that she had died in a blast in a house in the East during a raid conducted by the army and the police, but it is now believed that she fled the country with the help of a foreign intelligence outfit. If she is still alive and can be arrested, it may be possible to ascertain information about the terror mastermind and the NTJ’s foreign links.

Politicians, religious leaders, high-ranking military and police officers, terrorism experts and Archbishop of Colombo His Eminence Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith himself have categorically stated in their testimonies before the PCOI that there was an external hand in the terrorist attacks.

Those who claim to have identified the Easter Sunday terror mastermind/s or ascertained vital information to prove who masterminded the carnage are heaving like the proverbial blind men who tried to figure out what an elephant was like by touching different parts of the animal’s anatomy, came to different conclusions and quarrelled. The Easter Sunday attacks, we believe, have not been investigated properly from all angles. Above all, former President Maithripala Sirisena’s claim that he knows who masterminded the carnage must be probed, and action should be taken against him if he has sought to mislead investigators.

Minister of Public Security Tiran Alles has renewed his offer to have the leaders of the Catholic Church briefed on the status of the ongoing police investigations into the Easter Sunday tragedy. Claiming that the Catholic prelates have not responded to his offer, he has said he is willing to take on board their views and even make adjustments to the probe, if necessary. Why his offer has not been accepted is the question.

There is no need for the Easter Sunday terror attacks to be debated in Parliament. What is needed is a thorough, credible investigation thereinto. The PCOI report has some flaws, as we have argued in a previous comment, but it is based on an extensive probe painstakingly conducted for a long time and contains valuable information. It can be the basis for a future probe besides the one being conducted by the police.

Editorial

Voters taken for a ride again

Published

2 days ago

2024/04/23

Sahan Weerasooriya

Tuesday 23rd April, 2024

Old habits are said to die hard. Although the leaders of the incumbent dispensation promised to heed the resentful youth’s strident call for a ‘system change’, in 2022, and mend their ways, they have, true to form, reneged on their pledge and shown signs of a relapse into the previous mode of behaviour, if the manner in which they are conducting their election campaigns is anything to go by.

Sri Lankan politicians, like their Indian counterparts, have earned notoriety for handouts-for-votes schemes. The SLPP-UNP government has embarked on a campaign to curry favour with poor voters by distributing free rice, state-owned lands/houses, etc. The people are being bribed with their own money, again! The distribution of free rice is likely to continue until the upcoming presidential election.

President Ranil Wickremesinghe is traversing the country as if there were no tomorrow, giving away rice, distributing title deeds for state land, and making various promises, obviously with an eye to the next presidential election. The UNP politicians who suffered ignominious electoral defeats in 2020 are trying to come in from the cold by taking part in the free rice distribution ceremonies, which must be costing the public more than the rice stocks being given away. Shouldn’t they use their personal funds, most of which were raised while they were in power, to grant relief to the public and gain political mileage?

The SJB is also giving away things. It says it is using its own funds for its vote-catching welfare programmes; however, it ought to reveal where funds for such projects come from. All political parties ought to maintain utmost transparency about their funds and transactions if they are not to be accused of benefiting from the largesse of unsavoury characters, who use their black money to bankroll political campaigns. None of them care to do so. Instead, they accuse each other of corrupt practices.

The JVP does not believe in giving; it only receives donations including designer clothes for its leaders, whose sartorial elegance seems to compare favourably with that of the young members of the Medamulana family. It has not even given back to the people what it grabbed from them during its reign of terror in the late 1980s. It should at least return their national identity cards!

The SLFP ought to curtail its expenditure and utilise the savings to enable its leader, Maithripala Sirisena, to pay compensation to the Easter Sunday victims in keeping with the Supreme Court order for his pathetic failure to prevent the terror attacks in 2019.

The practice of politicians doing political work at the expense of the public must end forthwith. There is absolutely no need for the President or the ministers or the members of the UNP to attend the rice distribution ceremonies. In fact, there must be no ceremonies at all. The distribution of free rice can be done through the Divisional Secretaries, Grama Niladhari and other state employees. That is what public officials are there for.

Equally, the public must not be made to pay for the Opposition Leader’s transport and security when he conducts political campaigns. The same goes for the ministers running around like headless chickens. A state minister’s official vehicle caught fire recently while he was zipping about in his electoral district to attend Avurudu sports events. He was not doing any official work, and therefore the cost of the fire-damaged vehicle must be recovered from him.

Whenever useless state functions are held in faraway places, to boost the ruling party politicians’ egos, the President, the Prime Minister, Ministers and military bigwigs fly there in separate helicopters, and the public has to foot the bill. They must be made to pay for such chopper rides from their personal funds.

Today is Bak Full Moon Poya Day. Politicians who live off the public, flaunt what they make out to be their piety, and sermonise, on days of religious significance. Let them be urged to make a resolution today to cease to be a burden on the hapless public, who are practising austerity and struggling to keep the wolf from the door.