Tuesday 11th March, 2025

The JVP-led NPP government engages in smoke and mirrors with the same finesse as a professional illusionist, slipping away from its unfulfilled election promises. It is now making the most of a combative Al Jazeera interview with former President Ranil Wickremesinghe. Everybody is currently talking about the Batalanda Commission report released way back in the late 1990s, and nobody is cursing the government for soaring prices of essentials, broken promises, etc. The NPP could not have hoped for anything better, with only a few weeks to go for the local government polls.

The Batalanda Commission was established, following Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga’s meteoric ascent to the presidency in 1994, to probe allegations of torture and extrajudicial executions, levelled against some key members of the previous regime, including Wickremesinghe. However, Kumaratunga stopped short of having the commission report tabled in Parliament, presumably because of serious flaws therein.

Curiously, after securing a second presidential term by defeating Wickremesinghe in 1999, she backed him in the 2005 presidential race, for all intents and purposes, at the expense of her party’s candidate, Mahinda Rajapaksa. How she tried to prevent Mahinda from winning the presidency has been revealed by former President Maithripala Sirisena in Aththai Saththai, a hagiography about him. Sirisena was the SLFP General Secretary in 2005. Would Kumaratunga have supported Wickremesinghe in the presidential race, albeit covertly, if she had believed the Batalanda Commission’s findings? Or, was she driven by expediency, which usually takes precedence over politicians’ moral compass? She owes an explanation.

In late 2014, the JVP joined forces with the UNP led by Wickremesinghe to ensure Sirisena’s victory in the 2015 presidential race, and subsequently opted for a honeymoon with the UNP. Anura Kumara Dissanayake served as a member of the National Executive Council of the UNP-led UNF (Yahapalana) government, in which Wickremesinghe was the Prime Minister. The JVP was instrumental in ensuring the survival of the UNP-led government and enabling Wickremesinghe to retain the premiership when President Sirisena and the Rajapaksas sought to topple that administration in late 2018. The JVP leaders closed ranks with Wickremesinghe in Parliament, where Dissanayake and Vijitha Herath fought against the Sirisena-Rajapaksa alliance tooth and nail in defence of the beleaguered UNP government. The JVP leaders were in and out of Temple Trees during the Yahapalana government. The dysfunctional UNF government, which survived like Miracle Mike, the headless chicken, thanks to the JVP’s support, neglected national security to such an extent that the National Thowheed Jamath carried out the Easter Sunday terror attacks with ease in 2019. Would the JVP and its leaders have supported Wickremesinghe so ardently if they had believed the findings of the Batalanda Commission? The Treasury bond scams had already been committed and the involvement of the UNP leaders therein was public knowledge, but the JVP leaders had no qualms about backing Wickremesinghe and the UNP to the hilt. The JVP owes an explanation.

No crime must be allowed to go unpunished. The Batalanda Commission report should not have been shelved. The NPP ought to table it in Parliament forthwith. In fact, it has a moral duty to do so because most of the victims of torture and extrajudicial executions in the late 1980s were its members and sympathisers. There were many other torture chambers, including the one known as K-Point at Eliyakanda, Matara, and a special presidential probe should be conducted and legal action should be taken against those responsible for running those hellholes. Most of all, the JVP is duty-bound to conduct a presidential probe into the extrajudicial execution of its beloved leader Rohana Wijeweera in 1989 and bring his killers to justice. Similarly, another presidential commission must be established to investigate the crimes committed by the JVP in the late 1980s, including numerous killings, abductions, countless armed robberies and the destruction of state assets.

A Supreme Court order has caused Sirisena and several others to pay compensation to the Easter Sunday carnage victims for their failure to prevent the 2019 terror attacks. So, it is nothing but fair to make all those who unleashed terror and counterterror in the late 1980s pay for their crimes and compensate their victims adequately either with their own money or with the funds of their political parties.

Monday 10th March, 2025

Unity is not a virtue Sri Lankans, especially their elected representatives, are known for. This fact has been borne out once again by the ongoing argy-bargy over a census of some depredatory animals to be conducted on 15 March. A plan is reportedly underway to enumerate crop-raiding animals, such as monkeys, giant squirrels and peafowl, countrywide. Environmentalists, animal rights groups and the Opposition have dismissed the scheduled animal census as a hare-brained project. Government politicians and their backers are defending the programme to the hilt. Arguments for and against the animal census are not without some merit, but they have only confounded the confusion of the public, whose cooperation is vital for the success of the scheduled enumeration of crop raiders.

Opposition to the animal census could be attributed to four factors—a manifestation of the rising anti-incumbency sentiments among people owing to their unfulfilled expectations; the public perception that the government has made a mistake or is trying to use the enumeration of crop raiders as smoke and mirrors to cover up its failure to look after the interests of the farming community, and the predilection of the NPP’s political rivals for gaining propaganda mileage by attacking the government, the way the JVP/NPP did when it was in the opposition.

In 2023, then Agriculture Minister Mahinda Amaraweera revealed, citing official statistics, that monkeys had destroyed as many as 200 million coconuts in 2022. The crop damage caused by animals, such as wild pigs, porcupines, monkeys, peafowl, elephants and giant squirrels amounted to about 30-35% of national food production in 2022 and 2023, according to Anuradha Tennakoon, Chairman of the National Farmers’ Federation. This shows the gravity of the issue of depredation.

The success of any programme to tackle depredation consists in the availability of accurate data. There have been numerous instances where official statistics were found to be erroneous. In January 2025, a group of senior officials of the Ministry of Agriculture apologised to the Committee on Public Finance for having furnished erroneous statistics about the country’s paddy stocks. Equally, no reliable statistics are available about the populations of crop-raiding animals. There are only ballpark figures. This may be the reason why the new government has decided to conduct a census of depredatory animals.

Successive governments have addressed the problem of depredation only half-heartedly, and adopted some ad hoc measures such as issuing guns to farmers. They have not cared to get all stakeholders around the table and discuss ways and means of formulating a comprehensive strategy to solve the problem once and for all.

The root causes of depredation have gone unaddressed. When their natural habitats shrink due to human development, wild animals turn to agricultural land, where crops provide an easy source of food. Similarly, many forest tanks or kulu wew have become derelict. Therefore, during dry spells, driven by their survival instincts, wild animals venture into villages in search of food and water, causing extensive crop damage.

It will be prudent for the government to put the animal census on hold and invite all stakeholders including its critics to a discussion on how to enumerate the crop-raiding animals scientifically and mitigate the impact of crop depredation, which has taken a heavy toll on rural agriculture. If depredation can be minimised in a sustainable manner, it will be possible to increase the national agricultural output without increasing inputs such as agrochemicals; that will also help obviate the need to develop more land for farming. This is what the government, the Opposition and other stakeholders should strive to achieve collectively. Let them be urged to swallow their pride, sink their differences, political or otherwise, and cooperate for the greater good.

Al Jazeera last week released, after some delay, an interview with former President Ranil Wickremesinghe, conducted in London some weeks ago. It is now on You Tube and is bound to go viral especially here in Sri Lanka. Both friend and foe must admit that the Al Jazeera interviewer, Mehdi Hasan, was most unfair to Wickremesinghe in this Head to Head interrogation duplicating the well known BBC Hard Talk show. Why the former president chose to expose himself to the grilling is anybody’s guess. We in this island are very familiar with the pithy Sinhala saying illagena parippu kanawa (literally asking for and eating parippu) meaning knowingly walking into a trap. This is exactly what Wickremesinghe did.

Given his very long political experience, having first entered parliament in 1977 at age 28 as one of the youngest MPs ever, he had served as prime minister on no less that five occasions and as leader of the opposition as many times before finally ascending the presidency in 2022. Though he was elected by parliament to serve out the balance of Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s term and not the people, nobody would have expected him to have willingly submitted himself to this ordeal in the presence of a clearly hostile audience. Hasan, sharply dressed, suave, incisive and an obvious believer in a no-holds-barred interview style reveled in roasting Wickremesinghe as presenters do at such interviews as Hard Talk has shown over the years over BBC. True, Ranil was able to fire some of his own shots (“I was in politics before you were born”) but they proved to be of little use before an obviously partisan audience.

Talk shows such as Al Jazeera’s are structured in a format that all the dice is loaded on the interviewer’s side. The respondents, unless they are specially skilled debaters who can stand up bravely to an unfair adversary, are too often cannon fodder. The questions are fired machine gun-style and the respondents given little opportunity to have their their say, the interviewer interupting before the victim, and we use that word advisedly, have the opportunity to get a few words edgewise. We remember one occasion when Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar acquitted himself excellently in a Hard Talk interview with BBC. But he was an exceptionally gifted debater having served Oxford Union as its president before launching on his legal and political careers. Wickremesinghe is himself not a spring chicken. There were occasional flashes of his parliamentary debating style during the show but these were lost on the hostile audience who frequently applauded Hasan.

Given the treatment respondents receive in these high pressure talk shows, why do politicians, both serving and retired, and others who would obviously anticipate a hard time in an unequal encounter subject themselves to such indignities? The answers to this question may be many, one being over confidence in oneself to withstanding a grilling however daunting. Another may be that most politicians believe that bad publicity is better than no publicity. Politics being art of the possible, there will be those who delude themselves that they can give as good as they get as as Kadirgmar demonstrated so many years ago. Another possibility could be the fees such appearances command. Many global leaders, post-retirement, have entered the international lecture circuit at high fees as President Obama has done while others have written international best-sellers.

Whatever it was in Ranil Wickremesinghe’s case, he certainly did not emerge unscathed from the Al Jazeera program. This was equally true when he appeared in an interview some months ago with the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle. However bad a battering respondents in such programs receive, there is no dearth of participants in these talk shows as their frequent telecasting and rankings show. They will, no doubt, continue to be part of the entertainment scene for many years to come. Like audiences at boxing matches show, there is no lack of people to enjoy watching the inflicting of pain upon fellow human beings. Blood lust, after all, is part of human nature.

Post-retirement plums for judges

Justice for All, an organization of senior lawyers, academics and public interest activists including several respected and well known names a few days ago raised a matter that has for many years agitated the public mind. This relates to the appointment of retired superior court judges to various positions, particularly diplomatic, that we have seen in recent years. The trigger that sparked the instant discussion was the naming of the recently-retired Chief Justice Jayantha Jayasuriya, PC, as Sri Lanka’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations. He succeeds Mohan Peiris, also a former chief justice.

That justice must not only be done but be seen to be done, however threadbare a cliché, nevertheless remains as true as it always was. Thus the question is that will the public be convinced that plum appointments are not rewards for favours from the bench granted to the appointing political authority by serving judges? Also, would such favours be done with an eye on a post-retirement appointment? Apart from the two appointments to the UN in New York of two former chief justices, there was also a retired supreme court judge who was posted to London as Sri Lanka’s high commissioner. He raised many diplomatic and other eyebrows by calling himself Justice so and so in his visiting cards. There was also a retired chief justice who became the governor or the western province and others who became chairmen of banks who functioned with great acceptance.

Nobody can say that all such appointments of retired judges, and there have been many over the years, were bad. Judges of the highest integrity like Justice T.S. Fernando many years ago served this country well as high commissioner in Australia. The Justice for All statement widely publicized in the media covered most aspects of the problem which are many. Hopefully what has been said there will register where it matters and necessary action taken as soon as possible on an undoubtedly urgent matter.