Features

Civil- Military Relationships are Breaking Down

Published

4 years ago

2022/04/17

Dr Sarala Fernando

For some time now, civil- military relationships had been increasing around the world for several different reasons. Even a military superpower like the US is witnessing diminishing voluntary recruitment since many years which has led to increased reliance on fourth Industrial Revolution technology dominated by private contractors, including new weaponry such as unmanned drones and covering underwater, space, cyber and information areas.

However recent events have shown that civil-military cooperation in the US is not without in-built perils. The US military dependence on civilian contractors failed the test of raising morale leading to a quick collapse of the Afghan forces and revelations of the thousands of pieces of weapons and equipment valued at tens of billions of dollars, left behind in the confusion of the exit from Afghanistan. The debacle has sharpened domestic public criticism in the US of such “forever” foreign wars and “nation building” exercises.

Even as the public consensus grows in the US that defence must be oriented towards national security in the homeland territory, a new fissure has opened with the January 6 attack or “insurrection” on that main pillar of American democracy, the Capitol, where investigations have revealed that over 80 of those persons charged by the Justice department had ties with the military including many veterans and a handful currently serving in the military. US planners must be worried now as to the extent of this “anti-democracy” sentiment within the active military and how it should be monitored and countered.

Some of the same fears are now coming to surface in Sri Lanka with the escalating economic crisis and discontent with the government. The Mirihana incident where thousands of people surrounded President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s private residence and reference to an “Arab Spring” uprising has led a senior politician to speak of a possible conspiracy to bring in a military government. How did a peaceful protest turn into a destruction of public property and who actually did that damage remains to be investigated.

In the meantime it is sad to see suspicion raised as to the military role and hidden “conspiracy” theories floated. The clash outside parliament a few days ago between police and the army motorbike squad wearing full face helmets is indicative of the rising tensions. It may be time for the military to resume its traditional role of protecting national security and roll back its extended involvement in government in key areas from ports to education, health, agriculture and construction.

At the end of the 30 year armed conflict, a grateful nation gave its support to the armed forces which had fought with scarce domestic resources, supplemented by assistance from longtime friends like China. As a result, settlement of debts post conflict, including through land transfers, was non-controversial given the priority of managing the terrorist threat. In the same way, after the conflict ended in 2008, despite the many needs in the South, there was no objection raised to diverting national resources towards humanitarian assistance and reconstruction in the North and East and to entrust this work to the armed forces.

Who else but the military could have handled the rehabilitation and restored so quickly critical infrastructure like roads, bridges, schools and hospitals as well as the essential clearing of mines, dumped weapons, ammunition and war debris, thereby permitting the conflict affected people to return to their homes?

Vulnerable to both human and natural disasters, Sri Lanka has not only come out of a thirty year war, it has faced an unprecedented Tsunami which devastated the Indian Ocean region, where the military had taken a leadership role in managing the government response to these disasters. But this had been accomplished in cooperation with other associated organizations, both government and private, foreign and international agencies, such that no controversy had arisen.

Before the Mirihana incident the question was whether it was possible to recreate that “whole of society” approach seen after the tsunami in order to deal with the present economic crisis post -Covid, including the huge debt problem, lack of foreign exchange, looming food crisis etc? Now it seems with anger rising and impatience with the problems of facing daily life with shortages of power, fuel supplies and escalating food prices due to the foreign exchange crisis, there is more likelihood of conflict rather than a possibility of cooperation. Even the Indian assistance package ostensibly for “confidence building” seems not to have achieved that purpose due to the hasty signature of defence related agreements pushed by the Indian side.

The heart of the problem is the lack of a peace dividend so many years since the ending of the armed conflict and the continued lion’s share of the budget being devoted to defence while essential public services like education and health are being cut. Press reports have revealed that our teachers and principals are apparently among the worst paid in the region, yet the government has given priority to improving facilities at the military university placing it even outside the existing regulatory framework. All over the public service, promotions and benefits have been curtailed while press releases regularly inform of promotions and new ranks bestowed on service personnel – poor public diplomacy?

Retired military officers appointed to high government positions have been met with scathing press coverage. One striking example comes to mind of that fine public servant Mr S.B. Divaratne who held the position of Commissioner of Essential Services during the years of armed conflict, coordinating diplomatically behind the scenes with the international community as well as the local agencies to maintain essential supplies to the conflict affected areas, in stark contrast to a recent military Commissioner of Essential Services shown on live TV raiding stores and warehouses.

A central problem is that the military has a different style of leadership and enforced top- down discipline which is in total contrast to Sri Lanka’s untidy public administration with loose administration of rules and regulations complicated by over-politicization from the top and union actions at the bottom. One can appeal to good sense but it will not be possible to weld together these two systems or even enforce one on the other given the long standing democratic traditions in the country. Furthermore, having moved from a socialist planned economy to an open market economy as far back as 1977, any Government effort for example to re-establish price controls on essential foods and rationing is bound to provoke push back from a vigilant private sector.

Civil- Military Relationships

Sri Lanka’s health service has always been a leader in the region held up as an example by international agencies, and its professionals had successfully led the management of many crises and dealt with the unions unlike today when the Ministry is headed by a military officer. Today there is a complaint that government funds are being liberally bestowed on construction and running of military hospitals, while the government public hospitals are facing shortages of funds, drugs etc. This has reinvigorated public calls for the military to step back from leading the Covid campaign and return its administration to the health authorities with its established system of government hospitals, MOHs and PHIs which remain in close contact with the public and have gained their confidence over the years. A new controversy is looming on the unutilized mainly Pfizer vaccines which were earlier controlled by the military, now likely to go to waste with public apathy as the expiry date of the doses approaches. Who will take the blame for any excess orders and is there a tale of hidden corruption?

Most recently there are proposals that the military should take the lead in the grow- more- food national campaign and there is even a proposal to raise a new division to do construction work. Will these proposals not bring unnecessary conflict with those traditionally leading these sectors, especially national research and development organizations and the vibrant private sector? In the conflict- affected areas, will not the small traditional farmers dependent on credit and local pawning come to resent the large military farms with access to technological know- how, labour, markets and largely unaudited public funds? How can that help reconciliation efforts? Growing food for the troops is one thing but growing food with public money to influence markets is another and bound to provoke more controversy.

So how can the civil-military relationship be repaired? On human rights there are some lessons to be learned from the UK where this year will mark 50 years since the Bloody Sunday incident in Northern Ireland which is said to have escalated the armed conflict there. The Bloody Sunday incident relates to a civil rights march which was met with gunfire by the British police and seven members of the public were killed. Initially there was the trumped- up explanation put out by the police which was later found to be false by independent Commissions of Inquiry. This then led to public apologies in the UK parliament by the Prime Minister. It seems the prosecution of the police officers involved could not be pursued due to the passage of time and lately there is speculation of new legislation being drafted in the UK to give amnesty to those involved.

Dealing with events such as Bloody Sunday underscores the need to strengthen the internal legal infrastructure within the armed services which involves not only training in human rights and humanitarian law but also to publicize action taken to try and punish military offenders for criminal offenses. If not, an impression will be created of impunity which is what has led foreign governments, pushed by an active diaspora, to sanctioning military leaders for command responsibility. From time to time we hear of armed forces personnel arrested for crimes of murder, extortion and drug deals, yet rarely do we hear of penalties and sentencing.

On the contrary, recent Presidential pardons have only added to the climate of impunity. In that climate, one must not fail to recognize the courage of a senior Foreign Service officer then serving in Washington who brought Ambassador Jaliya Wickremasuriya’s corruption to the notice of his superiors in Colombo only to find these allegations swept under the carpet until vigilant US officials filed action and the Ambassador now being tagged in the internet as a “close relative of then President Mahinda Rajapaksa”, admitted his own guilt to defraud the Sri Lanka government, in a US court .

(Sarala Fernando, retired from the Foreign Ministry as Additional Secretary and her last Ambassadorial appointment was as Permanent Representative to the UN and International Organizations in Geneva . Her Ph.D was on India-Sri Lanka relations and she writes now on foreign policy, diplomacy and protection of heritage).

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Features

Recruiting academics to state universities – beset by archaic selection processes?

Published

9 hours ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

by Kaushalya Perera

Time has, by and large, stood still in the business of academic staff recruitment to state universities. Qualifications have proliferated and evolved to be more interdisciplinary, but our selection processes and evaluation criteria are unchanged since at least the late 1990s. But before I delve into the problems, I will describe the existing processes and schemes of recruitment. The discussion is limited to UGC-governed state universities (and does not include recruitment to medical and engineering sectors) though the problems may be relevant to other higher education institutions (HEIs).

How recruitment happens currently in SL state universities

Academic ranks in Sri Lankan state universities can be divided into three tiers (subdivisions are not discussed).

* Lecturer (Probationary)

– recruited with a four-year undergraduate degree. A tiny step higher is the Lecturer (Unconfirmed), recruited with a postgraduate degree but no teaching experience.

* A Senior Lecturer can be recruited with certain postgraduate qualifications and some number of years of teaching and research.

* Above this is the professor (of four types), which can be left out of this discussion since only one of those (Chair Professor) is by application.

State universities cannot hire permanent academic staff as and when they wish. Prior to advertising a vacancy, approval to recruit is obtained through a mind-numbing and time-consuming process (months!) ending at the Department of Management Services. The call for applications must list all ranks up to Senior Lecturer. All eligible candidates for Probationary to Senior Lecturer are interviewed, e.g., if a Department wants someone with a doctoral degree, they must still advertise for and interview candidates for all ranks, not only candidates with a doctoral degree. In the evaluation criteria, the first degree is more important than the doctoral degree (more on this strange phenomenon later). All of this is only possible when universities are not under a ‘hiring freeze’, which governments declare regularly and generally lasts several years.

Problem type 1

– Archaic processes and evaluation criteria

Twenty-five years ago, as a probationary lecturer with a first degree, I was a typical hire. We would be recruited, work some years and obtain postgraduate degrees (ideally using the privilege of paid study leave to attend a reputed university in the first world). State universities are primarily undergraduate teaching spaces, and when doctoral degrees were scarce, hiring probationary lecturers may have been a practical solution. The path to a higher degree was through the academic job. Now, due to availability of candidates with postgraduate qualifications and the problems of retaining academics who find foreign postgraduate opportunities, preference for candidates applying with a postgraduate qualification is growing. The evaluation scheme, however, prioritises the first degree over the candidate’s postgraduate education. Were I to apply to a Faculty of Education, despite a PhD on language teaching and research in education, I may not even be interviewed since my undergraduate degree is not in education. The ‘first degree first’ phenomenon shows that universities essentially ignore the intellectual development of a person beyond their early twenties. It also ignores the breadth of disciplines and their overlap with other fields.

This can be helped (not solved) by a simple fix, which can also reduce brain drain: give precedence to the doctoral degree in the required field, regardless of the candidate’s first degree, effected by a UGC circular. The suggestion is not fool-proof. It is a first step, and offered with the understanding that any selection process, however well the evaluation criteria are articulated, will be beset by multiple issues, including that of bias. Like other Sri Lankan institutions, universities, too, have tribal tendencies, surfacing in the form of a preference for one’s own alumni. Nevertheless, there are other problems that are, arguably, more pressing as I discuss next. In relation to the evaluation criteria, a problem is the narrow interpretation of any regulation, e.g., deciding the degree’s suitability based on the title rather than considering courses in the transcript. Despite rhetoric promoting internationalising and inter-disciplinarity, decision-making administrative and academic bodies have very literal expectations of candidates’ qualifications, e.g., a candidate with knowledge of digital literacy should show this through the title of the degree!

Problem type 2 – The mess of badly regulated higher education

A direct consequence of the contemporary expansion of higher education is a large number of applicants with myriad qualifications. The diversity of degree programmes cited makes the responsibility of selecting a suitable candidate for the job a challenging but very important one. After all, the job is for life – it is very difficult to fire a permanent employer in the state sector.

Widely varying undergraduate degree programmes.

At present, Sri Lankan undergraduates bring qualifications (at times more than one) from multiple types of higher education institutions: a degree from a UGC-affiliated state university, a state university external to the UGC, a state institution that is not a university, a foreign university, or a private HEI aka ‘private university’. It could be a degree received by attending on-site, in Sri Lanka or abroad. It could be from a private HEI’s affiliated foreign university or an external degree from a state university or an online only degree from a private HEI that is ‘UGC-approved’ or ‘Ministry of Education approved’, i.e., never studied in a university setting. Needless to say, the diversity (and their differences in quality) are dizzying. Unfortunately, under the evaluation scheme all degrees ‘recognised’ by the UGC are assigned the same marks. The same goes for the candidates’ merits or distinctions, first classes, etc., regardless of how difficult or easy the degree programme may be and even when capabilities, exposure, input, etc are obviously different.

Similar issues are faced when we consider postgraduate qualifications, though to a lesser degree. In my discipline(s), at least, a postgraduate degree obtained on-site from a first-world university is preferable to one from a local university (which usually have weekend or evening classes similar to part-time study) or online from a foreign university. Elitist this may be, but even the best local postgraduate degrees cannot provide the experience and intellectual growth gained by being in a university that gives you access to six million books and teaching and supervision by internationally-recognised scholars. Unfortunately, in the evaluation schemes for recruitment, the worst postgraduate qualification you know of will receive the same marks as one from NUS, Harvard or Leiden.

The problem is clear but what about a solution?

Recruitment to state universities needs to change to meet contemporary needs. We need evaluation criteria that allows us to get rid of the dross as well as a more sophisticated institutional understanding of using them. Recruitment is key if we want our institutions (and our country) to progress. I reiterate here the recommendations proposed in ‘Considerations for Higher Education Reform’ circulated previously by Kuppi Collective:

* Change bond regulations to be more just, in order to retain better qualified academics.

* Update the schemes of recruitment to reflect present-day realities of inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary training in order to recruit suitably qualified candidates.

* Ensure recruitment processes are made transparent by university administrations.

Kaushalya Perera is a senior lecturer at the University of Colombo.

(Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies.)

Features

Talento … oozing with talent

Published

9 hours ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

Talento: Gained recognition as a leading wedding and dance band

This week, too, the spotlight is on an outfit that has gained popularity, mainly through social media.

Last week we had MISTER Band in our scene, and on 10th February, Yellow Beatz – both social media favourites.

Talento is a seven-piece band that plays all types of music, from the ‘60s to the modern tracks of today.

The band has reached many heights, since its inception in 2012, and has gained recognition as a leading wedding and dance band in the scene here.

The members that makeup the outfit have a solid musical background, which comes through years of hard work and dedication

Their portfolio of music contains a mix of both western and eastern songs and are carefully selected, they say, to match the requirements of the intended audience, occasion, or event.

Although the baila is a specialty, which is inherent to this group, that originates from Moratuwa, their repertoire is made up of a vast collection of love, classic, oldies and modern-day hits.

The musicians, who make up Talento, are:

Prabuddha Geetharuchi:

Geilee Fonseka: Dynamic and charismatic vocalist

Prabuddha Geetharuchi: The main man behind the band Talento

(Vocalist/ Frontman). He is an avid music enthusiast and was mentored by a lot of famous musicians, and trainers, since he was a child. Growing up with them influenced him to take on western songs, as well as other music styles. A Peterite, he is the main man behind the band Talento and is a versatile singer/entertainer who never fails to get the crowd going.

Geilee Fonseka (Vocals):

A dynamic and charismatic vocalist whose vibrant stage presence, and powerful voice, bring a fresh spark to every performance. Young, energetic, and musically refined, she is an artiste who effortlessly blends passion with precision – captivating audiences from the very first note. Blessed with an immense vocal range, Geilee is a truly versatile singer, confidently delivering Western and Eastern music across multiple languages and genres.

Chandana Perera (Drummer):

His expertise and exceptional skills have earned him recognition as one of the finest acoustic drummers in Sri Lanka. With over 40 tours under his belt, Chandana has demonstrated his dedication and passion for music, embodying the essential role of a drummer as the heartbeat of any band.

Harsha Soysa:

(Bassist/Vocalist). He a chorister of the western choir of St. Sebastian’s College, Moratuwa, who began his musical education under famous voice trainers, as well as bass guitar trainers in Sri Lanka. He has also performed at events overseas. He acts as the second singer of the band

Udara Jayakody:

(Keyboardist). He is also a qualified pianist, adding technical flavour to Talento’s music. His singing and harmonising skills are an extra asset to the band. From his childhood he has been a part of a number of orchestras as a pianist. He has also previously performed with several famous western bands.

Aruna Madushanka:

(Saxophonist). His proficiciency in playing various instruments, including the saxophone, soprano saxophone, and western flute, showcases his versatility as a musician, and his musical repertoire is further enhanced by his remarkable singing ability.

Prashan Pramuditha:

(Lead guitar). He has the ability to play different styles, both oriental and western music, and he also creates unique tones and patterns with the guitar..

Features

Special milestone for JJ Twins

Published

9 hours ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

Twin brothers Julian and Jason Prins

The JJ Twins, the Sri Lankan musical duo, performing in the Maldives, and known for blending R&B, Hip Hop, and Sri Lankan rhythms, thereby creating a unique sound, have come out with a brand-new single ‘Me Mawathe.’

In fact, it’s a very special milestone for the twin brothers, Julian and Jason Prins, as ‘Me Mawathe’ is their first ever Sinhala song!

‘Me Mawathe’ showcases a fresh new sound, while staying true to the signature harmony and emotion that their fans love.

This heartfelt track captures the beauty of love, journey, and connection, brought to life through powerful vocals and captivating melodies.

It marks an exciting new chapter for the JJ Twins as they expand their musical journey and connect with audiences in a whole new way.

Their recent album, ‘CONCLUDED,’ explores themes of love, heartbreak, and healing, and include hits like ‘Can’t Get You Off My Mind’ and ‘You Left Me Here to Die’ which showcase their emotional intensity.

Readers could stay connected and follow JJ Twins on social media for exclusive updates, behind-the-scenes moments, and upcoming releases:

Instagram: http://instagram.com/jjtwinsofficial

TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@jjtwinsmusic

Facebook: http://facebook.com/jjtwinssingers

YouTube: http://youtube.com/jjtwins