National security and Defence Secretaries

These days there is a plethora of articles painting a rosy feature of the 19th Amendment and the alleged draconian nature of the 20th Amendment, written by legal luminaries, retired professors of Political Science and retired rebels, ex-Presidential Secretaries and High Commissioners, and constitutional framers of yesteryear. Since there are more than a dozen petitions before the Supreme Court, let the learned judges decide the constitutionality of the said Amendment.

Merits and demerits of constitution and how the constitutional provisions were violated by our rulers, especially after the promulgation of the 1978 constitution of JRJ, can be understood by examining previous security fiascos, and the information that overload us from the evidence given by the people testifying before the Presidential Commission of Inquiry investigating the Easter Sunday attacks.

Against this background, “The Island” article by Shamindra Ferdinando (SF) on 30 September titled “Playing politics with national security” is a grim reminder for all those legal luminaries, academics, constitutional experts and general public, who tend to forget what has happened in the recent past. SF’s article emphasises that our Defence Secretaries from the tenure of JRJ up to MS-RW, whether they were retired Generals or civil administrators, were failures and misfits. The only exception was GR under the tenure of MR. The statement that “it is not mandatory for the Defence Secretary to have an intimate knowledge of the role played by the Ministry” is sheer bravado amounting to grandiloquence. When we were young, we said that you should not be a shoemaker to say that the shoes you were wearing hurt you with shoe-cuts and cones. If the shoe offered to you does not measure to your size do not accept it, whether given as a gift or recognition of the services rendered to your political masters.

In my novel “Nirmala Mala” (the immortal story of a dead soldier), I have dealt in detail the security fiascos under RW, Norway- drafted CFA, so-called Ceasefire Monitors, of providing high frequency satellite equipment to Tigers by the then government, and of course carrying a basket of apples and grapes and flowers to Pulidevan, a terrorist leader who was receiving treatment at a Colombo private hospital and allowing his wife to visit him, a sign of ‘building informal contacts”, “halting offensive action” and “normalisation”. Further, I have examined that there cannot be two types of Defence Secretaries, “war-time” and “peace-time”. I am very much grateful to SF for his review of this book on 18 March 2020, titled “Chagie’s predicament inspires novel, highlights Lanka’s pathetic response to external threats”.

The evidence given by the security bigwigs under the previous regime at the Presidential Commission of Inquiry is nothing more than crying “My belly is white”, to quote a book title. Many dress rehearsals were held with different actors with the final appearance of Hemasiri Fernando as the Defence Secretary. These mandarins also can write their Memoirs as celestial beings, giving them esoteric titles such as “My belly is white”. To sum up, all these had taken place under different Constitutional Amendments and any previous Amendment had not guaranteed the security of the people and the state.

SENA THORADENIYA