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Editorial

Guru-gola way of doing it

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Monday 31st May, 2021

The Covid-19 vaccination drive has got off to a bumpy start thanks to dirty politics; it has been politicised to such an extent that the SLPP politicians reportedly issue ‘chits’ to their supporters to receive the jab on priority basis, and publicly berate the health workers who are not willing to do their bidding, as was seen in a Colombo suburb, the other day. Moratuwa Mayor Samanlal Fernando went ballistic when a female medical officer refused to carry out the vaccination programme according to his whims and fancies. Undesirables in the garb of government politicians always want first dibs on everything given to them and their family members and cronies at the expense of the taxpaying public.

The brave police personnel who swoop on ordinary people for violating the health regulations and haul them up before courts, in double quick time, just looked on while the Moratuwa Mayor was hindering the vaccination programme. No action has been taken against them, but a constable has reportedly got into trouble for preventing the spouse of a superior officer from jogging in violation of the Covid-19 protocol, in Colombo!

The gutsy lady doc who stood her ground at the Moratuwa vaccination centre and told the barking Mayor where to get off deserves public plaudits. ‘And even the ranks of Tuscany could scarce forbear to cheer.’

It became too embarrassing for the government to defend the Moratuwa Mayor, who was arrested after his surrender to the police and remanded. A person who obstructed a group of Public Health Inspectors (PHIs) at Atolugama, last year, was sentenced to six years in jail, and it will be interesting to see what will or will not happen to the Moratuwa Mayor, who disrupted a vaccination programme. People without political connections are denied bail for such offences. The Atolugama man spat at the PHIs, and the Moratuwa man spewed out venom.

The blame for the ruling party politicians’ aggressive behaviour should be apportioned to their political masters. It is popularly said in this country that when a guru micturates while walking, his goloyas (pupils) do so while running. This is exactly what we are witnessing today. Ministers set a bad example by launching into tirades against state officials, who have the courage to tell them what they do not want to hear, and lesser politicians emulate them. How Minister Sanath Nishantha threw conniptions when a female Forest Officer, named Devani Jayathilaka, opposed a cretinous proposal to clear a mangrove forest for the construction of a playground in Negombo, last year, is a case in point. One may also recall that under the previous Rajapaksa government, Minister Mervyn Silva, who was on slipper-licking terms with the ruling family, tied a state official to a tree during a dengue prevention programme as ‘punishment’ for arriving late at a meeting; he also stormed media institutions and got away with his crimes including cheque kiting. It is this culture of impunity that emboldens government politicians to ride roughshod over state officials in public and do as they please.

Why should politicians other than the ministers in charge of health and pandemic control be allowed to visit the vaccination centres on the pretext of inspecting them or meddle with Covid-19 programmes? These are tasks that should be left entirely to health experts. There are some self-important political potentates who consider themselves more knowledgeable than doctors; they include Gamini Lokuge (MBBS–Piliyandala?) and Mayor Fernando (MBBS–Moratuwa?) They must be prevented from interfering in the work of doctors and other officials on pandemic control duties.

How the present-day rulers handpick the worst political dregs to head local government institutions is truly amazing; there are of course decent local council chiefs and members, but they are the exception that proves the rule. They also have a history of giving free rein to these notorious characters. Under the previous Rajapaksa government, the then Hambantota Mayor Eraj Fernando ran, brandishing a small firearm, behind a group of Opposition MPs, who visited the Hambantota Port. His bosses claimed he had been carrying a toy pistol! Tangalle Pradeshiya Saba (PS) Chairman Sampath Vidanapathirana together with his gang killed a British national, and raped the victim’s fiancée at a tourist hotel in Tangalle on Christmas Day in 2011. But for diplomatic pressure the UK brought to bear on Colombo, the perpetrators would have got away with those crimes. Vidanapathirana and three others were sentenced to jail, and the Attorney General filed an appeal seeking the death sentence for them. Kahawatte PS Chairman Vajira D. Silva along with SLPP MP Premalal Jayasekera was sentenced to death for murdering a UNP supporter in the run-up to the 2015 presidential election. The late Ven. Maduluwawe Sobitha, who led the yahapalana movement, and was instrumental in engineering the 2015 regime change, revealed at a public meeting that a UPFA PS Chairman in the South had raped hundreds of women and even celebrated those crimes. He demanded justice for the victims, but the rapist as well as the trigger-happy Hambantota Mayor later joined the yahapalana camp!

Going by the menacing behaviour of many ruling party politicians, we believe that the current leaders should have had their ministers, MPs and local government members inoculated against rabies a long time ago. Now, it is too late; many of them are already infected and pose a serious threat to society. The least the government can do by way of remedial action is to keep these dangerous elements on a tight leash.



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Editorial

Reform political parties and their leaders, too

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Thursday 28th March, 2024

The government is going hell for leather to bring forth electoral reforms as if there were no tomorrow. It would have the public believe that the current electoral systems are full of flaws, which need to be rectified as a national priority if the country is to be put right and progress ushered in.

System bashing, as it were, has become the vogue in this country. Everyone is calling for a system change these days. Even those who have ruined the economy and enriched themselves at the expense of the public are doing so obviously in a bid to deflect criticism directed at them. A country doubtlessly needs robust systems in all sectors, but what Sri Lanka needs more than anything else, at the present juncture, is the restoration of the rule of law.

Former Chairman of the Election Commission, Mahinda Deshapriya, at a discussion on electoral reforms, the other day, rightly pointed out that unsavoury characters must not be nominated to contest elections. Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs Dr. Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe, PC, was also present at the event. In response to Minister Rajapakshe’s criticism of the current electoral system, Deshapriya said the problem of miscreants being elected to political institutions had to be tackled at source. He argued that the political parties had to refrain from nominating malefactors. One could not agree with him more.

All political parties conduct interviews to select candidates, and, therefore, it is the party leaders who have to take responsibility for nominating political dregs to contest elections. They must sift out miscreants at that point. This will be half the battle in cleansing politics and raising the standards of political institutions, especially Parliament.

Minister Rajapakshe argued that the rogues who were rich enough to throw money around obtained the highest preferential votes at elections. This argument is not without some merit, but there have been numerous instances where moneybags could not overtake other candidates in elections.

In the 2004 parliamentary polls, several members of the JVP, which contested as a constituent of the SLFP-led UPFA, came first in districts such as Colombo, Gampaha and Kurunegala. Obviously, they fared so well in spite of being outspent by many other candidates. Dullas Alahapperuma conducts very clean and inexpensive election campaigns, which are free from polythene, posters, cutouts, etc. He has disproved the argument that the Proportional Representation system has made election campaigns extremely costly. He wins handsomely in the Matara District. Why can’t others emulate him?

There is also a campaign against the preferential vote or manape, which is made out to be a source of evil. If it is scrapped, political party leaders will be able to nominate their favourites to contest elections and enable them to enter Parliament, etc., at the expense of the popular candidates who deliver votes to their parties. It was to prevent the party leaders from resorting to such arbitrary action that the preferential vote system was introduced.

At present, people can decide who should represent them by voting for political parties of their choice first and marking their preferences for candidates. If manape is done away with, the party leaders will have unbridled discretionary power to ensure that only their favourites are returned. Given the sordid manner in which they manipulate the National List by engineering vacancies to smuggle their loyalists into Parliament, how bad the situation will be in the event of the preferential vote being abolished is not difficult to imagine.

That the preferential vote leads to election violence, especially internecine intraparty disputes, is also a big lie propagated by violent characters in the garb of politicians. The JVP has been free from preferential vote battles because its candidates put their party before self. They are worthy of emulation.

The government ought to tread cautiously when introducing electoral reforms. The mixed-member electoral system under which the last local government elections were conducted in 2018 plunged the country into chaos with the number of local councillors doubling to more than 8,000. Now, efforts are being made to change the new system!

The need, in our book, is for the political parties and their leaders to be reformed more than the electoral systems.

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Editorial

Vulpine praise for a Trojan horse?

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Wednesday 27th March, 2024

The mere sight of a notorious pickpocket usually prompts people to check for the safety of their wallets or purses even if he is not looking for prey. The SLPP-UNP government has the same reputation as a cutpurse, and therefore the public tends to view everything it does with a jaundiced eye. Its recent undertaking to introduce electoral reforms has therefore triggered howls of protests from those who cherish franchise. The Opposition has accused the government of trying to put off national elections on the pretext of introducing electoral reforms.

Government politicians are full of praise for the proposed electoral reforms, which are widely seen as a Trojan horse. Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs Dr. Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe has sought to dispel doubts and suspicions in the minds of the public about the proposed electoral reforms. He has said they will not cause elections to be postponed. He may be telling the truth, but Sri Lankans usually do not believe anything until it is officially denied. So, the government will have a hard time trying to convince the public that it is not trying to postpone elections again. It ought to explain why it announced its decision to reform the parliamentary electoral system ahead of the coming presidential election.

The blame for postponing elections should be apportioned to all self-righteous members of the current Parliament as well as President Ranil Wickremesinghe. They have suppressed the people’s franchise on several occasions.

In 1975, an SLFP-led government postponed a general election by two years. It abused its two-thirds majority in Parliament for that purpose, and dealt a severe blow to democracy; resentful electors voted overwhelmingly for the UNP at the 1977 general election. President J. R. Jayewardene abused his steamroller majority in Parliament to cause a general election to disappear in 1982 by conducting a heavily-rigged referendum. He did so because he feared that he would lose his five-sixths parliamentary majority if a general election was held. Wickremesinghe was a Cabinet minister in that repressive regime.

In 2017, the UNP, the SLFP, the TNA, the SLMC, etc., voted for the Provincial Council Elections (Amendment) Bill, which helped postpone the PC polls indefinitely. UNP leader Wickremesinghe was the Prime Minister and SLFP leader Maithripala Sirisena the President at the time. The incumbent SLPP government postponed the Local Government (LG) polls, in 2021, on President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s watch. The SLPP dissidents cannot absolve themselves of responsibility for that poll postponement, for they had not broken ranks with the SLPP administration by that time. The SLPP and the UNP postponed the LG polls last year by claiming that funds could not be allocated for an electoral contest owing to the country’s pecuniary woes.

In a previous editorial comment immediately after the announcement of the government’s decision to bring in new laws to elect 160 MPs under the first-past-the-post system and 65 MPs under the Proportional Representation, we pointed out that electoral reforms could entail long-drawn-out delimitation processes. Fear that it may not be possible for a general election to be held until the conclusion of the delimitation process pertaining to the proposed electoral reforms is therefore not unfounded.

The People’s Action for Free and Fair Elections (PAFFREL) has warned of the possibility of such a situation coming about. A government that fears elections will do everything in its power to postpone them. The SLPP-UNP regime is no respecter of public opinion and has no sense of shame; it therefore does not scruple to safeguard self-interest at any cost.

If the government is serious about allaying the people’s doubts and suspicions about the proposed electoral reforms, it will have to give a legal assurance that they will not lead to poll postponements. PAFFREL Executive Director Rohana Hettiarachchi has rightly called for the incorporation of a specific clause into the electoral reforms draft Bill, which is said to be on the anvil, to enable the Election Commission to conduct a general election under the existing PR system in the event of the delimitation process dragging on indefinitely. Nothing else will do.

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Editorial

Easter Sunday carnage: Vital aspect overlooked

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Tuesday 26th March, 2024

Former President Maithripala Sirisena, who declared last Friday that he was aware of the identity of the mastermind behind the Easter Sunday terror attacks, made a statement to the CID yesterday. His political opponents are baying for his blood; among them are those who were in the Yahapalana government at the time of the carnage. Some of them have even called for grisly penalties for Sirisena, such as drawing and quartering!

The ongoing political battle over the Easter Sunday terror mastermind’s identity, conspiracy theories involving local politicians, the vilification of Sirisena, etc., have eclipsed a critical dimension of the carnage—the possibility of an external involvement. Instances of bloody conflicts, uprisings, terror attacks and other forms of shocks being used to make feeble economies scream and jolt the developing countries, caught up in the great power rivalry, out of their strategic alliances and to engineer radical geopolitical shifts are not rare.

As for the Easter Sunday attacks, there are two major schools of thought. One is that they were engineered to catapult national security to the centre stage of politics in favour of wartime Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was planning to run for President in 2019. Gotabaya announced his candidature a few days after the carnage. The other school of thought is that there was a foreign hand in the Easter Sunday carnage, and the conspirators sought to destabilise Sri Lanka to compass their geopolitical ends.

The PCoI (Presidential Commission of Inquiry), which probed the Easter Sunday attacks, dealt with the alleged foreign involvement perfunctorily. Only an eight-page chapter in its bulky report has been devoted to the claim of a foreign hand in the attacks. The witnesses who expressly testified that there was ‘an external hand or conspiracy behind the attacks’, according to the PCoI, are Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith, former President Maithripala Sirisena, former Minister Rauf Hakeem, former Minister Rishad Bathiudeen, former Governor Azath Salley, SJB MP Mujibur Rahman, former SIS Director SDIG Nilantha Jayawardena, former STF Commandant M. R. Lateef, former Chief of Defence Staff Ravindra Wijegunaratne, former SDIG CID Ravi Seneviratne and former CID Director Shani Abeysekera. Dismissing their statements as mere ipse dixits (assertions made but not proven), the PCoI has said, in its report, that it did not find any such foreign link. It has, however, recommended that certain identified parties be further investigated. This recommendation has not been implemented.

We argued, prior to the release of the PCoI report, that it was possible that Zahran and his gang had taken orders from a fake ISIS created by a foreign spy agency. The PCoI has quoted SDIG Jayawardena as saying that an Indian named Abu Hind ‘may have triggered the attacks’: “He [Jayawardena] went on to imply that the intelligence agencies that provided him with the intelligence on 4th, 20th and 21st April 2019 may have had a hand in the attack.” According to the PCoI report an ‘international expert on terrorism, who testified in camera, said, “Abu Hind was a character created by a section of a provincial Indian intelligence apparatus, and the intelligence that the Director SIS received on the 4th, 20th and 21st April 2019 was from this operation and the intelligence operative pretending to be one Abu Hind. Operatives of this outfit operate on social media pretending to be Islamic State figures. They are trained to run virtual personas.” The PCoI report says, “The testimony was that Zahran believed Abu Hind was the Islamic State regional representative. Abu Hind was in touch with both Zahran and his brother, Rilwan, and had spoken to Naufer. This part of the evidence is confirmed by the testimony of Hadiya [Zahran’s wife].” It is mentioned on page 220 of the report that according to the aforesaid international expert, ‘the Indian Central Government was not aware of the intelligence obtained by the provincial outfit’.

The allegation that there was a conspiracy behind the Easter Sunday attacks to enable the SLPP to capture state power must be probed. Similarly, there is a pressing need for a thorough investigation to find out whether an external force was behind the carnage.

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