Features

Campus life at Peradeniya and some memorable teachers

Published

1 week ago

2026/09/13

(Excerpted from In Pursuit of Governance, autobiography of MDD Pieris)

I settled down after a while to both academic work and sports. At this time, those doing a general degree were not regarded as a lesser breed whose academic progress could be entrusted to the more junior and inexperienced lecturers and tutors. We should be grateful to the university for being responsible, diligent and concerned about our work and our standards. We were therefore taught by the best.

In Sinhala, the Professor Dr. D.E. Hettiaratchi took one of our courses. Dr. Sarachchandra lectured on modern Sinhala and drama for two whole years. Excellent teachers such as the brilliant linguist Dr. Sugathapala de Silva lectured on grammar and linguistics, whilst other very able teachers such as Mr. Peter Silva, Dr. Ranmandala, Dr. P.E.E. Fernando and Dr. M.B. Ariyapala took other courses. These were amongst the best in the Sinhala department, and all of them taught us.

It was the same in regard to the other subjects. In English, the able, experienced and precise Mr. Doric de Souza lectured to us for two whole years on certain aspects and periods of Poetry and Drama; Dr. Smale Adams, on attachment from Cambridge University taught Shakespeare, and later the brilliant and iconoclastic Dr. Craig on attachment from Edinburgh university took some courses.

The Professor, Dr. Passe, taught us part of the course in poetry and prose for two years, whilst we were taught for shorter periods, by teachers of the calibre of Dr. Yasmin Dias Bandaranaike, Dr. Gananath Obeysekera, Dr. Kamal De Abrew and Dr. Ashley Halpe. They were all able and good teachers in different ways. They naturally possessed different styles. But I found Doric de Souza to be the ablest of the lot. He would walk in with the bell, effortlessly lecture for 55 minutes, walking up and down, without once looking at a note or at the clock, and in the final five minutes rapidly summarize his entire lecture stopping with the bell.

His internal clock was perfect. His was a mellifluous flow of precision and relevance. He and Dr. Upali Amerasinghe, who taught us Shakespeare in the first year were the two best teachers of English literature who had taught me. The third was my teacher of English at St. Joseph’s College Mr. M.I. Kuruvilla who had a master’s degree in the subject. This is not to say that the others were bad. Sometimes it was not a lack of knowledge. It had more to do with selection and delivery.

To give an example, Professor Passe was very thorough, too thorough in fact, and he had a style of speaking without much modulation of tone. It was not easy to listen to him for one hour. The best comment on his style was made by a friend of mine at Marrs Hall. Professor Passe was about to commence lectures to us on D.H. Lawrence. My friend had been lectured to by him the previous year. I asked my friend, “‘how did Passe handle Lawrence?” His reply was instantaneous. “Passe speaks of sex in a monotone.”

This was most amusing. As we found out later, he was certainly not wrong. But it would be wrong to leave an impression that we didn’t learn from him and the others. We did. Nevertheless certain people just stood out and there was no denying their ability, even their brilliance.

The picture was the same when it came to History. For Ceylon History we had the conscientious and painstaking Dr. Lakshman Perera and the able Dr. Karl Gunewardene. For European history we had the brilliant Dr. Arasaratnam, who was the only teacher I had met, who had the ability to give us a clear understanding of the complicated strands of “The Eastern Question.” For British history, we had that institution, Dr. Labrooy, lecturing to us. These teachers were supplemented by other able academics. Father Pinto was talked about. But I was never in his class.

Some of us were also fortunate in those who presided over our tutorial classes. In my case and in my subject areas, I was very fortunate in having as my tutors, persons of the calibre of Dr. Sarachchandra; Dr. Sugathapala de Silva; Dr. Upali Amerasinghe; Mr. Doric de Souza; Dr. Arasaratnam, and others.

Tutorial classes

In the tutorial classes, we came into more intimate contact with first rate minds and our intellectual skills became sharper as a result. Intellectual rigour was insisted upon and any loose or shoddy work received short shrift. I remember with Doric de Souza, the best I could get for a tutorial was a B-. On numerous occasions I had received B- – or C++! With Dr. Upali Amerasinghe I had got upto B, once a B+ and with Dr. Arasaratnam, much to my gratification some Bs and B+s. In Sinhala, I was around the B level, sometimes dropping to C+.

In fact Mr. de Souza, was to give me an early intimation of the kind of standards expected in a university. During my very first week in the first year in the university, I found myself in his English tutorial class. It was in fact the first tutorial class I had to attend in English. Mr. de Souza distributed, a cyclostyled poem by Robert Frost. We had to do a critique of the poem. It appeared quite simple to me. After all, I had won the open English prize in school. I therefore dashed off an analysis and finished in about half an hour.

After a little while, Mr. de Souza observing that I had finished, said that I could hand over my paper and go. The next week when we met in the tutorial class, he gave us a prose passage this time for a critical review, and said that he would go to the back of the class and call us one by one to discuss the previous week’s assignment. When it came to my turn, what I saw was a mass of blue penciling on my paper. Mr. de Souza began his comments.

“Mr. Pieris,” he said. “Look at your first sentence. That is your first fallacy. Now, look at the second sentence. That is your second fallacy.” I was desperately looking at my paper, and spotted an area towards the bottom with no blue pencil marks. I asked, “what about that part?” “Frankly,” said Mr. de Souza, “The rest of your paper was not worth considering!”

Such was my introduction and fortunately early introduction to the rigours and standards expected in a university. During our time, the university of Ceylon did make every attempt to maintain high standards in the teaching, learning, as well as the examination process. Our final examination papers often went to reputed universities abroad, under a dual system of marking, for marking by external examiners.

It was common knowledge at the time that the external examiners were more liberal in their marking than the internal examiners, and what the candidate received was an average of the two sets of marking. Therefore, for example three years later when I received a good B for my English at the final examination, I had the satisfaction that my answer papers were moderated by Cambridge University in England.

The intellectual climate

The point of note in all this is that during our time students following General degree courses were taught both in the lecture room and the tutorial classes by the best there were. In every subject the Professor himself took a course or more than one course. We were never regarded or treated as second class. All these were supplemented by the intellectual climate prevailing on the campus. On several evenings, almost weekly, there were public lectures by distinguished academics, intellectuals, leading political personalities and others.

One was enthralled by the erudition, scholarship and the gargantuan memory of a Dr. Paranavitane, who would quote without a note from Pali, Sanskrit, Sinhalese, Prakrit, Tibetan, Tamil, and passages from inscriptions, books, manuscripts and heaven knows what else. No wonder that the arrogant Indian Professor of Indian history Professor Ray who had written a multi volume “Dynastic History of India,” and who regarded most other academics in the History department with an attitude of disdain, openly manifested the greatest reverence for Dr. Paranavitane.

Dr. Paranavitane was of slight, almost fragile build, and by now was old and walked with a pronounced limp. He was also a simple man with an impish sense of humour. One day he was carrying his massive two volume work on “Sigiri Graffiti” in his hands and limping towards the staircase to the large lecture hall known as “Room B,” when a sympathetic student volunteered to carry the tomes for him. “Thank you. If I wrote it, I can also carry it” was the reply accompanied by a mischievous smile.

Then there was Dr. H.A. de S. Gunasekera, Professor of Economics who attracted a much bigger crowd in the very large “Room A,” than his regular students. Some of us who had a little time on our hands used to occasionally sit at the back and listen to his clear enunciation of economic principles and economic theory. Political heavy weights of the calibre of Dr. N.M. Perera; Dr. Colvin R. de Silva; Mr. Bernard Soysa; Mr. Pieter Kaneuman; Mr. Tissa Wijeratne and others visited the campus for evening public lectures. These always drew a full house, sometimes with hardly standing room.

The fact that campus politics at the time was polarized between the Trotskyites and the Communists led to great drama at these lectures, which were often accompanied with shouting, booing, and heckling. Thus, when Tissa Wijeratne of the Communist Party began his lecture to a packed “Room A” with the deliberately provocative words “Trotskyites of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your brains,” the proceedings had to be halted for the next 10 minutes, before order was restored.

It was invigorating stuff and great fun. The important thing was unlike now we were not in an age of fisticuffs or any form of violent physical attack. That was not in the culture. But you hooted to your heart’s, if not your throat’s content. The English politely call this jeering. But we are more down to earth and see no need to use euphemisms.

Almost on every Saturday evening there was a film show organized for the Academic Staff and the students on campus. You paid a modest sum for a ticket. At these screenings we saw many of the film classics which were not available on the commercial screen, films such as “Citizen Kane”; Battleship Potemkin”; Dr. Caligari’s Cabinet”; “The Blue Angel”; “Les Miserables”; “The Grapes of Wrath”; and others. This led to serious discussion of the film as an art among the students, and some reading about the film. We became increasingly familiar with concepts and techniques such as symbolism, montage, the relevance and importance of background music, sometimes of total silence and so on.

In the halls of residence too there were lively debates and much wit and humour. The students were young, bright and irreverent. A poor American Professor on a Fulbright teaching programme was referred to as “half bright,” because according to his student critics he did not match up to many of our own academics. Halls too periodically invited various personalities to dinner at high table followed by a lecture. Life in Marrs hall like no doubt in the other halls of residence was great fun. We had one who sang “Oh! what a beautiful morning,” loudly on his way, to the bathroom at 11 in the night and others who sang “Moonlight and roses” at noon making romantic gestures at a burning sun. There were those who under the considerable spirituous influence of arrack suddenly turned spiritual and proclaimed loudly to the world, “I have the highest regard for the Buddha.” How he reconciled Buddhism’s fifth precept against the taking of intoxicants with his sudden regard for the Buddha was another matter.

Then there was one of our Muslim friends imbibing copious quantities of arrack who in answer to a question about drinking and Islam, vehemently challenged such impertinence with the peremptory direction “show me one place in the Koran where it is said not to drink arrack!” Others re-interpreted Christian theology. One of them was very disappointed with Lazarus. He bitterly complained that what Jesus said to Lazarus was, “Lazarus, come forth,” but that “The bloody fool came fifth.”

A speaker who innocently remarked that “He had nothing concrete to stand on,” was reminded by several voices that he had the temerity to make such a remark whilst standing on a solid concrete floor! Then, there were interesting speeches made at what was called the “Going down dinner.” This was a special high table farewell dinner to those who had passed their examinations and were leaving the university.

The Warden of the hall and Sub Wardens attended and outside visitors such as friends from the men’s and women’s halls were permitted on this occasion. During my time, the best “going down” dinner speech was made by a student, a graduate of Veterinary Science, who was also a good athlete and a fine sprinter. He had failed various examinations and spent some considerable time in the university. He was jovial and quite popular and much against his wishes finally persuaded to speak by public clamour.

He got up, and speaking slowly and clearly said, “Ladies and gentlemen, before I got into the university, I was told by many, how difficult it was to get in. But having got in, I found it exceedingly difficult to get out. Now, as specially the ladies in the audience will appreciate, after a heavy meal it is very difficult to stand and deliver. I shall therefore sit down.” This was spur of the moment, and brilliant. It brought the house down. In its context, this is still one of the best after dinner speeches I had listened to.

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Features

Odds and Ends: Horse racing and the business of sports betting – IV

Published

2 hours ago

2026/09/23

Sahan Weerasooriya

by Prof. C. A. Saliya
(The fourth instalment in a five-part series on
the business of gambling, legal and illegal)

Here’s a puzzle worth thinking about. For well over a century, Sri Lankan law has treated a village card game as a criminal offence, punishable by fine or imprisonment. In that same period, it has treated betting on horse racing as a perfectly legitimate, taxable business, one the state has actively collected revenue from for generations, under a Horse Racing Betting Ordinance older than most of the country’s other gambling law. Same basic activity, risking money on an uncertain outcome, one version illegal since 1889, the other legal the entire time.

Why? Follow the money, and the class lines, back to the colonial era. Horse racing arrived in Ceylon as a pastime of the British administrative and planter class, a “sport,” played and watched at clubs and racecourses, with betting bolted on as a respectable, even sophisticated, accompaniment. Card games played by ordinary people in villages, on the other hand, were exactly the kind of activity the same colonial authorities were eager to label a vice and criminalise. It’s the same pattern we saw with casinos in Part 2: gambling done by the wealthy tends to get called a sport, a tradition, or an investment. Gambling done by everyone else tends to get called a crime.

That history matters, but the economics of horse racing betting matter just as much, because once you understand how a bookmaker actually prices a race, you understand something that applies to almost every form of sports betting on Earth, from a Colombo racecourse to a global football sportsbook.

How a bookmaker guarantees a profit

Imagine a simple race with only two horses running, and imagine, just for the sake of the maths, that both horses genuinely have an exactly 50-50 chance of winning. A perfectly fair bookmaker, offering perfectly fair odds, would price both horses at even money: bet 100 rupees, win 100 rupees plus your stake back, on either horse.

No real bookmaker does this. Instead, they’ll price both horses slightly below their true odds, say, offering odds that imply each horse has a 55 percent chance of winning, even though the true chance is only 50 percent. Add those two implied percentages together and you get 110 percent, not 100. That extra 10 percent is called the “overround,” or sometimes the “vig” (short for vigorish), and it is the bookmaker’s guaranteed margin, built directly into the prices on the board before a single horse leaves the starting gate. It doesn’t matter which horse wins. The bookmaker’s overround wins regardless, on every single race, all day, every day.

There’s a second, subtler effect that decades of studying racing data has confirmed again and again, all over the world: bettors as a group are slightly too generous to favourites and slightly too generous to long-shots. Favourites tend to win a bit more often than their odds suggest they should, meaning betting on the favourite loses you money slightly more slowly than average over the long run, while betting on the rank outsider, the 50-to-1 shot that everyone secretly dreams will come in, loses you money considerably faster than average, because the public consistently overpays for that lottery-ticket dream. Bookmakers know this. It’s baked into their pricing, and it has a name: the favourite-longshot bias.

It’s not just horses anymore

Horse racing used to be the flagship product of the entire betting industry. It still matters enormously, including here in Sri Lanka, where it remains one of the very few genuinely legal betting products, but globally, its share of the total betting market has shrunk as sports betting on football, cricket, tennis and everything else has exploded, especially since a landmark 2018 United States Supreme Court ruling opened the door to state-by-state legal sports betting across America.

The newest and, frankly, most dangerous evolution of all this is “in-play” or “live” betting, placing bets not before a match starts, but continuously, in real time, on what happens in the next five minutes: the next corner, the next wicket, the next point. Regulators studying gambling harm consistently find that in-play betting produces worse outcomes fo bettors than traditional pre-match betting, precisely because there are so many more moments to place a bet, so much less time to think between decisions, and so much more opportunity to chase a loss five minutes after you made it.

Where the skill actually is, and isn’t

Now, a confession from this column, which has spent plenty of ink over the years analysing racecards: professional handicapping, studying trainer and jockey form, course and distance records, the draw, the going, the weight a horse is carrying, is a genuinely real skill, and it can meaningfully improve your chances of picking a winner compared to a random guess. That’s not a myth. Good handicapping works, in the narrow sense that it improves your odds of identifying the horse most likely to win any given race.

But “improving your odds of picking a winner” and “beating the house edge” are two completely different things, and this is the single most important distinction in this entire series. Even the sharpest, most statistically literate handicapper in the country is still betting into odds that already have the bookmaker’s overround baked in. Skill can narrow the gap. It essentially never closes it completely over the long run, for the simple reason that the house built the gap on purpose, and prices every race to make sure it stays open.

When the “form” is fake: Virtual meetings

One genuinely strange wrinkle worth flagging here: some betting products dress themselves up in the full costume of horse racing, trainer names, jockey silks, past form lines, even fake race commentary, while actually being nothing more than a random number generator behind the scenes, deciding the winner with no horses, no trainers, and no real race involved at all; just a computer simulation.

These “virtual racing” products exist specifically to borrow the credibility that real handicapping has earned over more than a century, and apply it to something that has no skill element whatsoever, chance and chance alone. It’s worth knowing the difference, because the two products look almost identical on a betting slip, and only one of them rewards the kind of analysis this column has always tried to teach.

Are manipulations possible?

Bookmakers don’t secretly insert horses into races to beat favorites instead they simply publish odds based on form and betting demand. The real risk comes from insiders with knowledge, such as trainers or syndicates, who can exploit undervalued horses to stage betting coups. These events are rare but welldocumented, leaving a lasting mark on regulation. In the past, bookmakers were reactive, allowing coups to succeed before odds adjusted. Today, they are far more proactive, using AI systems and integrity units to detect anomalies quickly. Even so, insider coups still occur, though they are rarer and swiftly investigated. The balance has shifted: bookmakers now lose less often, but punters continue to chase “value” in overlooked horses, keeping the contest alive between house margins and human ingenuity.

Betting Coups: When the Odds Tilt

Horse racing has always carried a mystique of glamour and risk, but behind the silks and starting gates lies a business model designed to ensure bookmakers never lose. As explained earlier, the “overround”, that invisible margin built into every price, guarantees profit before the first horse even breaks stride. Yet history shows that punters, syndicates, and insiders have occasionally turned the tables, staging coups that shook the industry and exposed its vulnerabilities. Timeline of such incidents are shown in the Table.

These stories remind us that while bookmakers build their margins into every race, the human element, ambition, deception, or sheer audacity, can still disrupt the system. Today’s safeguards, from AIdriven monitoring to integrity units, make coups rarer, but not impossible. And that tension between certainty and surprise is precisely what keeps the public fascinated. Horse racing is not just about speed and stamina; it is about the eternal contest between the house edge and human ingenuity.

The road ahead for racing in Sri Lanka

Horse racing’s legal status in Sri Lanka looks set to remain intact under the new Gambling Regulatory Authority, folded alongside casinos and licensed online sports betting operators. What’s new is that offshore online platforms, which have long taken bets from Sri Lankan customers without local approval, are now—at least on paper—being brought under the same regulatory umbrella as the racecourse. Whether this shift results in genuine oversight or simply adds a licence requirement that foreign operators quietly ignore remains an open question, one to be explored in the final instalment of this series as we assess what fair, joinedup gambling regulation would truly require.

Next week:

Part 5, the final instalment, Closing the Book, on what real gambling reform would look like, and whether Sri Lanka’s new law gets us there.

(Prof. C. A. Saliya, is a charted accountant, academic, researcher and former banker. He is the author of SAMAJA GAVESHAKAYA and Springer Publication DOING SOCIAL RESEARCH. He can be contacted at saliya.ca@gmail.com. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not necessarily represent those of the organisations with which he is affiliated.)

Features

When slogans meet scrutiny

Published

2 hours ago

2026/09/23

Sahan Weerasooriya

An unhealthy politics still rents the finished war — and that is why society stays divided

by Mahil Dole
Senior Superintendent of
Police (Retd.)

True national stability requires a transition this country has postponed for seventeen years: from a military victory to civic reforms that penalise divisive actors and build a unified identity. Last week showed, with unusual clarity, why that transition keeps failing. It was not a failure of slogans. It was a failure of consistency. Democracy, in the narrow sense of ballots and benches, is still standing. What is unhealthy is the use to which those ballots and benches are put. An unhealthy politics does not close a war. It rents it.

Three scenes, one week

In Chavakachcheri, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake told a housing gathering that racism would not be tolerated in any form, against Sinhalese, Tamils or Muslims, in the North, South or East. He named the old kindling: heritage sites and religious places still used to ignite tension. He spoke of houses for the displaced and a stadium for children in Jaffna. Those are the right words for a head of State. A country that meant them would be doing the unglamorous work of peace: making the next generation less useful to anyone who needs a quarrel.

In Anuradhapura, on an SLPP stage, a different performance was under way. Jaffna Member of Parliament Archchuna Ramanathan referred to himself as a “Tiger” and to the elected President as a “fox”. The name of a proscribed organisation was spoken in a town that carries the memory of the sacred-city attack. Party figures who have spent years treating any mention of the LTTE as contamination were reported to have cheered. By Monday a civil-society group styling itself the “Joint Opposition” had taken a complaint to the CID. The Police confirmed receipt. Opposition voices had already raised the alarm on Sunday.

Let the record be exact, because the rumour was not. The complaint now on the CID file is that remarks on an SLPP stage, and the cheer that met them, crossed from political insult toward promotion of a banned group. The government, for its part, has said there is no room for LTTE promotion and that remembrance of the dead is another matter. Those are two different files. Mixing them is itself a kind of politics.

A third voice belonged to the same week. Professor Savitri Goonesekere spoke with the clarity that public law, when it is still a discipline and not a campaign colour, can still produce: thoughtful, articulate, addressed to the country rather than to a faction. The speech deserves the praise it has received. The caution it invites is as important as the praise. Worthy slogans, unity, an end to racism, one law for all, are easily hijacked. They are most easily hijacked by those whose own conduct is under scrutiny, and who need the language of virtue more than they need the discipline of it. A speech of that quality raises the standard. It does not lower the duty to watch who picks the slogan up next.

What an unhealthy democracy does

People vote. Governments change. Parliament sits. That is not a failed democracy in the textbook sense. It is also not a healthy one. A healthy system converts a military victory into civic rules that bind the winners as well as the defeated, and that make division expensive. An unhealthy system keeps the war useful. It farms fear. It treats identity as a turnout machine. It issues a guarantee against racism in one district and applauds a banned name in another. That practice is not a lapse of taste. It is a structural reason society remains split.

Duplicity is the method. The same platform that built a career on the defeat of terrorism can, when the arithmetic of a rally requires it, tolerate the self-description of a Tiger. The same voices that demand a ban on LTTE propaganda can discover, the following week, that a rival’s meeting is the real offence. The same guarantee against racism can be issued in the North on one day and left unenforced in the South on the next. Two standards, again — not between Colombo and an overseas capital this time, but between the microphone and the statute book.

The LTTE remains a proscribed organisation. That is law, not a mood. Remembrance of the dead is a human act and must be protected as such. Glorification of the organisation that killed them is not remembrance. A serious State draws that line once, publishes it, and applies it without regard to who is speaking and which party owns the stage. Selective outrage is not law enforcement. It is campaigning.

The same is true of the word “racism”. No President can abolish it by declaring that he will not tolerate it. The declaration is necessary. It is not sufficient. Racism in this country has rarely been only a private vice. It has been a public business model: a way to harvest fear, postpone reform, and keep a constituency enlisted after the guns fell silent. Heritage sites and religious places become kindling because someone lights them. Universities become martyr theatres because someone books the hall. A Member of Parliament can call himself a Tiger on a southern stage because someone calculated that the cheer would be louder than the cost.

Why this divides a people

Division is not produced only by the last war and not only by those who live outside the island. It is produced, week by week, by a politics that cannot address a crowd except through Sinhala, Tamil or Muslim injury. A politics of that kind is not representing a community. It is farming one. The young, who have no memory of the last bunker, inherit the quarrel instead of a country. Serving officers watch the treatment of their predecessors and the theatre of their politicians and draw a rational conclusion about what the country values. Families who lost their own to the LTTE hear “Tiger” cheered and conclude that their dead have been repriced. Families who lost their own to the State hear a pledge against racism and wait to see whether the pledge runs south as well as north.

That is how an interval is mistaken for peace. The guns are silent. The inventory is not. “Tiger” and “traitor”, “racist” and “patriot”, remain stock in trade. So long as those words pay, in applause, in airtime, in a complaint that wounds an opponent, someone will keep them in circulation. Professor Goonesekere’s warning sits exactly there. Leadership means going beyond rhetoric. The law is not written for those who already respect it. It is written for those who violate it. When violation carries no cost, the slogan itself becomes a form of impunity.

What civic reform would actually look like

The work is unglamorous, which is why it is avoided. First, equal enforcement. If the organisation is proscribed, the prohibition travels with the speaker. An SLPP stage in Anuradhapura and a commemoration in the North are not two legal systems. The CID complaint now on the file should be treated as a test of that rule, not as a trophy for whoever lodged it.

Second, an end to ethnic first-identity as an electoral method. A civic identity, Sri Lankan first, faith and language held without being turned into a passport, will not appear by exhortation. It appears when the dividend for division falls and the dividend for competence rises.

Third, a cost for lighting kindling. Heritage sites and religious places are not campaign props. Universities are not martyr calendars. Media that carry a charge must carry the correction. Records that hold an untested allegation must not shadow a working life after the allegation has failed.

Fourth, one standard for those who served the State and those who fought it. Wrongdoers on every side belong in a court, not in a diplomatic weather system and not in a rally chant. Collective punishment of a profession is not accountability. A cheer for a banned name is not unity. A slogan against racism is not a policy until it binds the speaker’s own side.

None of this requires a new brand of commission. It requires a State that stops allowing division to be a career. South Africa’s imperfect bargain at least tried to bind both sides inside one process. Colombia wrote one jurisdiction for guerrillas, paramilitaries and State forces. We have preferred two international ledgers and a third, domestic one on which the war is rented out by the evening. Last week’s scenes, a guarantee in Chavakachcheri, a cheer in Anuradhapura, a serious speech that must not be stolen, are not opposites. They are the same unfinished settlement, spoken in three registers.

The President’s sentence should be kept, and then made expensive to break. Professor Goonesekere’s standard should be kept, and then applied to those who clap for it. Racism will not be defeated by a rally, and a proscribed organisation will not be dissolved by a complaint. They will be reduced only when the State, and the parties that live off the State, stop treating the finished war as inventory. True national stability is not the memory of a victory. It is the construction of a civic order that no longer needs that victory to be refought, in Anuradhapura or in Geneva, in order for someone to remain relevant.

The writer is a retired Senior Superintendent of Police who served in intelligence and counter-terrorism. He is the author of Security Beyond Enforcement: Practical Approaches for a Safer Nation. This column is a stand-alone extension of an earlier argument on two standards in one conflict. Views expressed are his own.

Features

Defend civic space upon which peace is built

Published

1 day ago

2026/09/22

Sahan Weerasooriya

by Jehan Perera

International Peace Day was observed on 21 September. It finds Sri Lanka with a genuine achievement to record and a demanding test to meet. The UN’s theme this year was “Invest in Peace: For Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day.” It also honoured the “everyday architects of peace”—people driving local action and building a lasting peace from the ground up. In the 2026 Global Peace Index, Sri Lanka rose 30 places, from 97th to 67th among 163 countries. Over the same period, global peacefulness declined for the twelfth consecutive year to its lowest level since the index began, and South Asia suffered the sharpest regional deterioration. The test is whether the government will protect the civic space in which those architects of peace work.

Sri Lanka’s improvement is real and deserves acknowledgement. In this year’s review, issued a few weeks ago, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights acknowledged progress in the form of action against corruption, arrests and investigations linked to political killings, enforced disappearances and the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks, and continued official denunciation of racism. A ranking, however, records conditions at a particular moment. It does not guarantee that they will last. Sustainable peace will depend on three factors. These are whether the government addresses the unresolved causes of conflict, whether it strengthens accountability for past and present abuses, and whether it protects the civic space in which peace is built from below. On the first two the record is incomplete. On the third, the draft NGO law threatens to weaken the very organisations that press for the other two.

What holds Sri Lanka back from a higher place are the same things that fed the war at home and also feed international conflict that rages elsewhere in the world. These are racism or ethnic nationalism that is narrow-focused, corruption and lawlessness. Equality, accountability and the rule of law are their remedies. The present government has committed itself to these, and is a significant improvement over governments of the recent past. But these pillars are not held up by governments alone. Peace is made in villages, workplaces and university campuses. It is made by families who insist on the truth about their disappeared, by journalists and lawyers who expose abuse, and by community organisations that bring Tamils, Muslims and Sinhalese into practical cooperation.

Unfinished Work

The UN High Commissioner’s report to the current Human Rights Council session, covering October 2025 to July 2026, shows how much remains to be done. The Prevention of Terrorism Act is still being applied, producing arbitrary arrests and long detention without charge. The report calls for a moratorium pending repeal and for the release of long-term detainees. Military-occupied land has not been released, memorialisation lacks support, and tensions over land and religious sites persist. The Batticaloa district illustrates how such problems endure. In the past three years, two Presidents, Ranil Wickremesinghe and Anura Kumara Dissanayake, have visited and instructed that the dispute over grazing land in Mailaththamadu and Mathavanai be resolved. It is a dispute between Tamil cattle farmers and outside Sinhala cultivators, and it has not been resolved. When two Presidents issue instructions and nothing changes, the fault lies in the machinery of State. An unresolved dispute does not stand still. It hardens into the next grievance.

Accountability shows the same pattern. The report documents torture and deaths in custody, and surveillance and intimidation of activists, journalists and civil society. Serious cases remain stalled for years, among them the killing of seventeen aid workers of Action Contre la Faim in Muttur two decades ago. Sharper still is the case of the Eastern University refugee camp at Vantharamoolai, where in 1990 the army took away 158 persons in a single day. They were never seen again. The camp’s officer-in-charge, Dr T. Jayasingam, later Vice Chancellor of the university, identified the officers responsible. More than three decades on, those officers have not been questioned. These cases are still remembered because families, survivors and independent witnesses have refused to let them be forgotten. Meanwhile several commissions of inquiry have completed their investigations but nothing further has happened.

What South Africa, Argentina and other post-conflict societies have found indispensable are four pillars of what is called “Transitional Justice” which are truth, accountability, reparations and non-recurrence. In Sri Lanka’s circumstances, truth means credible, independent investigation of what happened to the disappeared, and support for memorialisation. Accountability means prosecuting Muttur, Vantharamoolai and comparable cases, and removing credibly accused persons from senior office. Reparations mean compensation for victims and the return of military-held land. Non-recurrence means repealing the Prevention of Terrorism Act, releasing those held under it in the meantime, and resolving local disputes such as Mailaththamadu before delay hardens them. A country that buries its past does not escape it. The past returns in the next generation.

Civil Society

It is against this background that the draft NGO law is most troubling. The proposed legislation contains sweeping provisions for State oversight and control of civil society organisations. Among these are enforcing a licensing requirement on NGOs, which is to be renewed every three years, and severe penalties for not submitting reports on time, or for spending on emergency flood relief (for instance) when the NGOs mandate is peacebuilding (as an example) with possible sanctions including deregistration and having to shut down. Civil society groups have warned that it would confer excessive discretion over their registration and operations. Officials in Sri Lanka have abused such powers in the past. Additional power without effective checks invites further abuse. Sound regulation would have clear criteria for registration, an independent registrar and a right of appeal to the courts. What cannot be justified is a regime in which registration becomes a licence to be withheld from organisations that scrutinise policy, expose abuses or advocate for the rights of citizens.

Democracy is based on checks and balances. Those who press for accountability are part of those checks. The contradiction is plain. A government that has pledged accountability, equality and the rule of law ought not to be preparing to weaken the very organisations that press for their fulfilment. The organisations most exposed are those working on disappearances, land, memorialisation and reconciliation in the North and East, where the State’s record is weakest and the need for independent witnesses greatest. Silencing them would not remove the grievances they document. It would remove the channel through which those grievances are addressed peacefully. The government appears to be relenting, which is welcome, but a pause is not a withdrawal. The bill should be withdrawn and any replacement drafted in genuine consultation with those it would govern.

Investment in peace as called for by the UN in its International Peace Day theme implies commitment over time, with returns that come slowly. Sri Lanka’s 30-place rise on the Global Peace Index is a first dividend and nothing more. It can be built upon only if the government matches its commitments with action: withdrawing or fundamentally redrafting the NGO law, repealing or suspending the Prevention of Terrorism Act, and bringing Muttur, Vantharamoolai and Mailaththamadu to resolution. A higher place in a global index is not a certificate of success. Sri Lanka’s higher ranking is an encouraging start, but it will endure only if the space in which citizens speak, question and organise is protected. Peace is built from below, and a government that is serious about it will treat civil society as a partner rather than a threat.