Features
Preparing for the new era of Port City

By Jehan Perera
The debate over Colombo Port City will not end with the passage of the law, which will govern the new territory reclaimed from the sea through Chinese investment, technology and negotiations skills. The dream holds out billions of dollars of foreign investment that will be pumped into the national economy and a fast track to development. The Bill was passed last week into law even as the country prepared for emergency lockdown in the face of the rampaging Covid that has now even infected the Leader of the Opposition and his wife and compelled several parliamentarians to go into quarantine. The vote was 149 in favour with just 58 against, a large majority, but still less than the 2/3 majority needed to permit the enactment of laws that are inconsistent with the constitution.
In an unexpected turn of events the government is now claiming that the count in Parliament does not represent the true numbers and in fact more votes were cast in favour of the Bill. It appears that the government wants to show that the Port City Bill was passed with a 2/3 majority. This may be to reinforce in the public mind the overwhelming strength of the government and its ability to pass any law that it deems necessary even if it means that the constitution will have to be changed in one way or the other. In this time of crisis, with Covid and economic pressures on the one hand, and international pressures on the other, the government may feel it needs to impress upon the public mind that its political strength remains undiminished.
However, it may also be the case that the government’s concern about the number who voted in favour of the Bill is to have an insurance policy against future legal challenges to the Port City law as enacted. The Port City Bill was a controversial one for several reasons. Social media posts which are spreading like wildfire are rife with racism and hate speech that claim that China got the better of the deal and Sri Lanka will end up as a Chinese vassal. The more serious reason is that 25 of the 74 clauses of the Bill were judged by the Supreme Court to be in violation of the country’s constitution. The Supreme Court judgement meant that these 25 clauses needed to be approved by a 2/3 majority in Parliament and nine of them also needed to be approved by the people at a referendum.
ADVISERS FAIL
The Supreme Court used strong words on occasion in its judgement, such as the word “obnoxious” to describe a competitive advantage to be given to companies within the Port City over those outside. There was indeed a serious problem in how the Bill had been formulated. It could have resulted in huge infrastructure development taking place in the Port City but with all raw material and expertise being sourced from China through internal arrangements in Chinese currency between Chinese companies and the Chinese mainland. Such a situation would be of little gain to the Sri Lankan economy which is currently suffering from a deficit of foreign exchange.
The lack of feed-in to the national economy would have been made worse by the tax concessions given to those investing in the Port City. The Supreme Court judgment mitigates these one-sided concessions. The judgement of the court also includes a step-by-step commentary on how the offending clauses that violated the constitution could be amended to fall within the supreme law of the land. This has been a salutary contribution of the court as there have been instances where governments have previously gone on frolics of their own once the Supreme Court made its observations. In this instance, as the court has specified how the changes should be made, and the government did not secure a 2/3 majority in Parliament, there is less scope for deviation from the spirit of the court’s judgement. The question arises regarding the legal advice that the government received to submit a Bill so greatly flawed that it violated the constitution in 25 of its 74 clauses.
In its judgement the Supreme Court suggested, among many others, amendments to the Bill to ensure the power of Parliament over the Port City and that Sri Lankans are not discriminated against by the operation of law for the Port City and that their freedom of movement is not curtailed within the area. It also held that the authorities in Colombo Port City should always obtain the concurrence of the respective regulatory authorities and the powers of such regulatory authorities within the Area of Authority of the Colombo Port City should continue unimpeded. These include the Monetary Board of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, the Registrar General of Companies, the Director General of the Central Environmental Authority, the Controller of Immigration and Emigration and the Director General of Customs who had been given no role in regulating the affairs of Port City in terms of the Bill.
NATIONAL-MINDED
The continuing strength of Sri Lanka’s democracy and its system of checks and balances has enabled the Supreme Court to compensate for the failure of the government’s advisers to correctly guide the government leadership in terms of the law. However, the extent to which the court’s strictures will be followed in practice remains to be seen. The court observed ‘a clear distinction must be borne in mind between the law and the administration of the law. A law cannot be struck down as discriminatory because of the fear that it may be administered in a discriminatory manner. Mere possibility of an abuse of power is not sufficient to hold that a law offends the fundamental right of equality.’ The law which was finally passed by Parliament with the relevant amendments needs to be further analysed once it is available in the public domain.
There is no doubt that government leaders will endeavour to protect the national interest on issues brought to their notice. The leadership of the government, especially President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, are greatly trusted by the masses of people as being national minded. Their pledges to protect the national interest, and their demonstrated actions in the past, induced the national electorate to vote for them in record numbers. The sense of nationalism runs deep in the Sri Lankan ethos. The strength of national and religious identity has stood the test of millennia, and withstood invasions from India in the ancient past to Europe in the medieval period up to the modern era. There was also defiance of China whose naval fleet took away a king in 1411 but returned him a year later in a gesture of magnanimity.
This redoubtable Sri Lankan nationalism was seen most recently at the last election when the two issues pertaining to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva and the US offer of its Millennium Challenge Fund were depicted as betrayal of the country’s sovereignty. With 25 of the 74 clauses of the envisaged Port City Bill now modified to protect Sri Lanka’s national interest what exists now in terms of the Port City law will be very different from what was envisaged. It is to be hoped that the amiable and constructive relations that Sri Lanka has enjoyed with China since it signed the Rubber-Rice Pact in 1952 on mutually beneficial grounds when China was isolated as a communist country will continue to be a cornerstone of Sri Lanka-China relations even though China is now a superpower.
Features
USAID and NGOS under siege

by Jehan Perera
The virtually overnight suspension of the U.S. government’s multibillion dollar foreign aid programme channeled through USAID has been headline news in the U.S. and in other parts of the world where this aid has been very important. In the U.S. itself the suspension of USAID programmes has been accompanied by large scale loss of jobs in the aid sector without due notice. In areas of the world where U.S. aid was playing an important role, such as in mitigating conditions of famine or war, the impact is life threatening to large numbers of hapless people. In Sri Lanka, however, the suspension of U.S. aid has made the headlines for an entirely different reason.
U.S. government authorities have been asserting that the reason for the suspension of the foreign aid programme is due to various reasons, including inefficiency and misuse that goes against the present government’s policy and is not in the U.S. national interest. This has enabled politicians in Sri Lanka who played leading roles in previous governments, but are now under investigation for misdeeds associated with their periods of governance, to divert attention from themselves. These former leaders of government are alleging that they were forced out of office prematurely due to the machination of NGOs that had been funded by USAID and not because of the misgovernance and corruption they were accused of.
In the early months of 2022, hundreds of thousands of people poured out onto the streets of Sri Lanka in all parts of the country demanding the exit of the then government. The Aragalaya protests became an unstoppable movement due the unprecedented economic hardships that the general population was being subjected to at that time. The protestors believed that those in the government had stolen the country’s wealth. The onset of economic bankruptcy meant that the government did not have foreign exchange (dollars) to pay for essential imports, including fuel, food and medicine. People died of exhaustion after waiting hours and even days in queues for petrol and in hospitals due to lack of medicine.
PROBING NGOS
There have been demands by some of the former government leaders who are currently under investigation that USAID funding to Sri Lanka should be probed. The new NPP government has responded to this demand by delegating the task to the government’s National NGO Secretariat. This is the state institution that is tasked with collecting information from the NGOs registered with it about their quantum and sources of funding and what they do with it for the betterment of the people. Public Security Minister Ananda Wijepala has said he would deal with allegations over USAID funding in Sri Lanka, and for that he had sought a report from the NGO Secretariat which is operating under his Ministry.
Most donor agencies operating in Sri Lanka, including USAID, have rigorous processes which they follow in disbursing funds to NGOs. Usually, the donor agency will issue a call for proposals which specify their areas of interest. NGOs have to compete to obtain these funds, stating what they will do with it in considerable detail, and the impact it will have. Once the grant is awarded, the NGOs are required to submit regular reports of work they have done. The donor agencies generally insist that reputed audit firms, preferably with international reputations, perform regular annual or even six-monthly audits of funds provided. They may even send independent external monitors to evaluate the impact of the projects they have supported.
The value of work done by NGOs is that they often take on unpopular and difficult tasks that do not have mass appeal but are essential for a more just and inclusive society. Mahatma Gandhi who started the Sarvodaya (meaning, the wellbeing of all) Movement in India was inspired by the English philosopher John Ruskin who wrote in 1860 that a good society was one that would care for the very last member in it. The ideal that many NGOs strive for, whether in child care, sanitation, economic development or peacebuilding is that everyone is included and no one is excluded from society’s protection, in which the government necessarily plays a lead role.
SELF-INTEREST
Ironically, those who now demand that USAID funds and those organisations that obtained such funds be investigated were themselves in government when USAID was providing such funds. The National NGO Secretariat was in existence doing its work of monitoring the activities of NGOs then. Donor agencies, such as USAID, have stringent policies that prevent funds they provide being used for partisan political purposes. This accounts for the fact that when NGOs invite politicians to attend their events, they make it a point to invite those from both the government and opposition, so that their work is not seen as being narrowly politically partisan.
The present situation is a very difficult one for NGOs in Sri Lanka and worldwide. USAID was the biggest donor agency by far, and the sudden suspension of its funds has meant that many NGOs have had to retrench staff, stop much of their work and some have even closed down. It appears that the international world order is becoming more openly based on self-interest, where national interests take precedence over global interests, and the interests of the wealthy segments of society take precedence over the interests of the people in general. This is not a healthy situation for human beings or for civilisation as the founders of the world religions knew with their consistent message that the interests of others, of the neighbour, of all living beings be prioritised.
In 1968, when the liberal ideas of universal rights were more dominant in the international system, Garrett Hardin, an evolutionary biologist, wrote a paper called “The Tragedy of the Commons”. Hardin used an example of sheep grazing land when describing the adverse effects of overpopulation. He referred to a situation where individuals, acting in their own self-interest, overexploit a shared resource, like a pasture or fishery, leading to its depletion and eventual destruction, even though it is detrimental to everyone in the long run; essentially, the freedom to use a common resource without regulation can lead to its ruin for all users. The world appears to be heading in that direction. In these circumstances, the work of those, who seek the wellbeing of all, needs to be strengthened and not undermined.
Features
Dealing with sexual-and gender-based violence in universities

Out of the Shadows:
By Nicola Perera
Despite policy interventions at the University Grants Commission (UGC), university, and faculty levels, sexual- and gender-based violence (SGBV) is so entrenched in the system that victim-survivors seeking justice are more likely to experience concerted pushback than the empathetic solidarity of their peers. Colleagues and friends will often close ranks, rallying to protect the accused under misguided notions of safeguarding the reputation of, not merely the assumed perpetrator, but the institution. While gender and sexual inequalities, inflected by class, ethnicity, religion, region, and other characteristics, shape the identities of the perpetrator and victim and the situation of abuse, the hyper-hierarchised nature of the university space itself enables and conceals such violence. It’s also important to note that women are not the exclusive victims of violence; boys and men are caught in violent dynamics, too.
Similar to intimate partner violence in the private confines of home and family, violence attributed to the sex and gender of abusers and victims in our universities goes heavily underreported. The numerous power imbalances structuring the university – between staff and students; academic staff versus non-academic staff; senior academic professionals as opposed to junior academics; or, senior students in contrast to younger students – also prevent survivors from seeking redress for fear of professional and personal repercussions. Research by the UGC in 2015 in collaboration with the Federation of University Teachers’ Associations (FUTA) and CARE International Sri Lanka, and more recently with UNICEF in 2021, revealed discomfiting truths about the university as places of work and education. In naming oneself as a survivor-victim, even within whatever degree of confidentiality that current grievance mechanisms offer, the individual may also represent (to some members of the university community, if not to the establishment itself) a threat to the system.
Conversely, an accused is liable to not just disciplinary action by their university-employer, but to criminal prosecution by the state. Via the Penal Code, the Prevention of Domestic Violence Act (2005), etc., the law recognises SGBV as an offence that can take place across many contexts in the private and public spheres. (The criminalisation of SGBV is in line with state commitments to ensuring the existence, safety, and dignity of women and girls under a host of international agreements, such as the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, Vienna Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, the Sustainable Development Goals, International Labour Organisation conventions regarding non-discrimination in employment, etc.). Specific to the university, the so-called anti-ragging act (the Prohibition of Ragging and Other Forms of Violence in Education Institutes Act of 1998, in addition to UGC circular no. 919 of 2010, etc.) deems SGBV as a punishable offence. The rag is one site where SGBV often finds fluent articulation, but it is hardly the only one: this is not a problem with just our students.
As the apex body governing higher education in the country, the UGC has not remained insensible to the fact that SGBV harms the lives, rights, and work of students, staff, (and other parties) in university spaces. The Centre for Gender Equity/Equality sits at the UGC level, along with gender cells/committees in individual universities. Universities and faculties have elaborated their own policies and bylaws to address sexual- or gender-based harassment and sexual violence. Although variously articulated, these policies touch on issues of consent; discrimination against a person, or creation of a hostile environment, on the basis of their gender or sexuality; the spectrum of actions that may constitute harassment/violence (including through the use of technology); coerced or voluntary sexual favours as a quid-pro-quo for academic or professional benefits; procedures for making and investigating SGBV complaints; protection of witnesses to an investigation; the irrelevance of the complainant’s sexual history to the complaint at hand. And here begins the inevitable tale of distance between policy, practice, and effect.
Different faculties of the same university may or may not include SGBV awareness/ training in the annual orientation for new students. The faculty’s SGBV policy may or may not appear in all three languages and Braille in student handbooks. Staff Development Centres training new recruits in outcome-based education and intended learning outcomes may or may not look at (or even realise) the politics of education, nor include an SGBV component in its Human Resources modules. Universities may or may not dedicate increasingly stretched resources to training workshops on SGBV for staff, or cover everyone from academics, to administrative staff, to the marshals, to maintenance staff, to hostel wardens.
Workshops may in any case only draw a core of participants, mostly young, mostly women. Instead, groups of male academics (aided sometimes by women colleagues) will actively organise against any gender policy which they construe as a personal affront to their professional stature. Instead, the outspoken women academic is painted as a troublemaker. Existing policy fails to address such discourse, and other normalised microaggressions and subtle harassment which create a difficult environment for gender and sexual minorities. In fact, the implementation of gender policy at all may rest on the critical presence of an individual (inevitably a woman) in a position of power. Gender equality in the university at any point appears to rest on the convictions and labour of a handful of (mostly women) staff or officials.
The effect is the tediously heteropatriarchal spaces that staff and students inhabit, spaces which whether we acknowledge them as such or not, are imbued with the potential, the threat of violence for those on the margins. The effect, as Ramya Kumar writing earlier in this column states, is the inability of our LGBTQI students and staff to be their authentic selves, except to a few confidantes. Since the absence/rarity of SGBV complaints is no evidence that the phenomenon does not exist, perhaps a truer indication of how gender-sensitised our institutions and personnel are, comes back again to the reception of such complaints. Thus, a woman accuser is frequently portrayed as the archetypal scorned woman: abuse is rewritten not just as consent, but a premeditated transaction of sexual relations in exchange for better grades, a secured promotion, and so on. A situation of abuse becomes inscribed as one of seduction, where the accuser basically changes their tune and cries harassment or rape when the expected gains fail to materialise. Especially with the global backlash to MeToo, society is preoccupied with the ‘false accusation,’ even though there is plenty of evidence that few incidents of SGBV are reported, and fewer still are successfully prosecuted. These misogynist tropes of women and women’s sexuality matter in relation to SGBV in university, because Faculty Boards, investigative committees, Senates, and Councils will be as equally susceptible to them as any citizen or juror in a court of law. They matter in placing the burden of documenting abuse/harassment as it takes place on the victim-survivor, to accumulate evidence that will pass muster before a ‘neutral,’ ‘objective’ observer.
At the end of the day, when appointments to gender committees may be handpicked to not rock the boat, or any university Council may dismiss a proven case of SGBV on a technicality, the strongest policies, the most robust mechanisms and procedures are rendered ineffective, unless those who hold power in everyday dealings with students and persons in subordinate positions at the university also change.
(Nicola Perera teaches English as a second language 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
4th Feb. celebrations…with Mirage in the scene

There were celebrations everywhere, connected with our 77th Independence Day, and in the Seychelles, too, it was a special happening.
Perhaps, it was also the very first occasion where the group Mirage found themselves in the spotlight, at an Independence Day event, and singing the National Anthem, as well.
It all happened on Tuesday, 4th February, in Silhouette Island, in the Seychelles.
Sri Lankans, plus the locals, joined in the celebrations, which included the hoisting of the National Flag, by the General Manager of the Hilton Seychelles Labriz Resort & Spa, Marc Schumacher, the singing of the National Anthem, and the usual Sri Lankan delicacies, connected with such special occasions.
The National Anthem, led by Mirage, was sung with enthusiasm, and pride, by the crowd present, waving the National Flag.

Hoisting of the National Flag (L) / General Manager of the Hilton Seychelles Labriz Resort & Spa (R)
Mirage also did the Valentine’s Day scene, on 14th February, at the Labriz Lounge.
The group has turned out to be a favourite with the folks in the Seychelles. and the management at the Lo Brizan restaurant and pub, where the group performs six nights a week, is keen for the band to return, in December, for another stint at Lo Brizan.
This is the group’s second visit to the Seychelles and they are now due home on the 19th of this month.
They have already got a big assignment on the cards, in Colombo, where they would be seen in action at ‘Legends of Ceylon,’ scheduled for 19th March, doing the needful for some of the legends in the local music scene – Joey Lewis, Dalrene, Manilal, Gefforey Fernando, Mignonne and Sohan.
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