Wednesday 13th November, 2024

Prices of all varieties of rice are soaring and the large-scale millers are laughing all the way to the bank. Successive governments have vowed to tame the Millers’ Mafia, which always has the last laugh. The people, who expected the JVP-led NPP government to get tough with the powerful millers given to exploiting rice consumers and farmers alike, are utterly disappointed.

Instead of taking on the unscrupulous millers with might and main, the incumbent government is ‘floating like a bee and stinging like a butterfly’. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake met the large-scale millers in a bid to bring the prices of rice down, but in vain. His meeting with them reminded us of a powwow President Gotabaya Rajapaksa had with the same millers a few years before; a former military officer, Gotabaya roared like a lion before the meeting, but he was heard mewing afterwards; the millers’ Mafia continued to determine the prices of paddy and rice. All Executive Presidents have acted likewise despite their braggadocio.

President Dissanayake, in an interview with Derana TV on Monday night, spelt out some measures which, he said, his government had adopted to tackle the shortage of nadu rice and bring the prices of all rice varieties down to affordable levels. He said the government would do so through legal means and by building buffer stocks of paddy to make market interventions and prevent artificially created shortages of rice and unfair price increases. The government would purchase more paddy and the state-owned storage facilities would be developed, he said. Those measures may work on paper, but the reality is otherwise. The state machinery is geared to further the interests of the wealthy millers and other nabobs in the private sector. This is why the Paddy Marketing Board (PMB), Sathosa, etc., have failed.

What one gathers from the arguments of the millers’ Mafia and their critics’ counterarguments is that the shortage of nadu rice has resulted from the large-scale millers’ efforts to dispose of their unsold keeri samba stocks; rice wholesalers and retailers complain that the big millers refuse to sell them nadu rice unless they buy keeri samba. When nadu is in short supply, the people are compelled to consume expensive varieties of rice such as keeri samba for want of a better alternative.

Claiming that a stockpiling audit of the paddy and rice available in the warehouses of the millers in some districts and wholesalers had been conducted, President Dissanayake said in the aforesaid interview that overall there were enough stocks of rice, but there was a shortage of nadu rice because more land had been cultivated to produce keeri samba. His explanation corroborates that of the powerful millers like Dudley Sirisena. But independent agricultural experts and farmers’ organisations are convinced otherwise. They are of the view that the shortage of nadu rice has been created by the millers’ Mafia to increase the price thereof and sell their keeri samba stocks.

Former Director of Agriculture K. B. Gunaratne has exposed a ruse the powerful millers employ to mislead the Consumer Affairs Authority (CAA) and other state institutions. He has gone on record as saying that those millers keep part of their paddy stocks in the houses of some farmers. This is something President Dissanayake should look into.

Gunaratne, who is at the forefront of a campaign to safeguard the interests of the rice consumers and farmers, has challenged Dudley to a debate on the issues related to rice. President Dissanayake should seriously consider inviting experts like Gunaratne when he meets the crafty rice millers, who have had the leaders of successive governments eating out of their hands thanks to their political connections and slush funds.

No strategy to liberate consumers and farmers from the clutches of the millers’ Mafia will yield the intended results unless immediate action is taken to revive the small and medium-scale millers. No government has cared to ensure that banks, etc., make funds available to them for purchasing paddy in time for the commencement of harvesting seasons. The large-scale millers use their influence to delay loans for their smaller counterparts.

If the small and medium-scale millers are given state assistance while the PMB is revitalised, it will be possible to rein in the wealthy millers given to exploitative practices, and make the paddy/rice market more competitive––provided that the ruling party politicians have not benefitted from the largesse of the millers’ Mafia.

Tuesday 12th November, 2024

Another round of promise making has come to an end with two days to go before the next general election. Perhaps, the only thing Sri Lankan politicians do ‘as if to the manner born’ is to make promises to win elections, which have become promise-making contests in this country. If Machiavelli were alive, Sri Lankan politicians’ adeptness at making promises and breaking them would compel him to put out a revised edition of ‘The Prince’. The Opposition politicians are making new promises while President Anura Kumara Dissanayake and his team are promising to fulfil their election promises and making still more pledges.

It is only natural that all political parties in the parliamentary election fray are desperate and troubled by a gnawing sense of uncertainty. Elections held under the Proportional Representation (PR) system can throw up surprises. Given the electoral strengths or weaknesses of the parties in contest, and the way seats are allocated under the PR system, the prospect of a hung parliament is looming large and has left political parties and their leaders scrambling for alliances.

The JVP-led NPP did not succeed in getting off to a flying start after winning the presidency in September much to the disappointment of those who expected quick results. Sri Lankans are in a mighty hurry; they cannot even wait until traffic lights turn green! The NPP elevated the people’s expectations immeasurably, before the presidential election, promising many things including huge fuel price reductions and making other essential commodities freely available at affordable prices. Above all, its failure to win the presidency outright, despite its claim that it was riding a massive wave of popular support, has apparently affected its parliamentary election campaign, which has seen a drop in voter enthusiasm.

President Dissanayake, who stumped for the NPP throughout the country during the past several weeks, renewed a controversial promise in Vavuniya over the weekend. He pledged to release the ‘Tamil political prisoners’ in consultation with the Attorney General (AG). The Tamil Guardian has reported that JVP/NPP stalwart Bimal Ratnayake said in Vavuniya last month that President Dissanayake was “committed to releasing all political prisoners”.

Interestingly, successive governments including the Yahapalana administration, which Dissanayake’s JVP backed to the hilt, have insisted that there are no political prisoners. In 2015, Yahapalana Justice Minister Dr. Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe declared that Sri Lanka did not have any political prisoners. He said there were only some LTTE suspects in detention. The JVP did not take exception to his claim. Rajapakshe has reiterated his position on the issue, according to our main news item today. In 2021, Justice Minister Ali Sabry, in response to an inquiry ITAK MP Shanakiyan Rajaputhiran Rasamanickam made in Parliament about the total number of ‘political prisoners’ in Sri Lanka, denied that there was anyone in prison for political reasons. He said 12,848 LTTE members had been rehabilitated and released after the end of the war in 2009 and that 600 of them were child soldiers. He said some persons were being held in connection with ongoing legal procedures, which were time-consuming due to the complex nature of the cases. He said the government would expedite those cases with the help of the AG. The then SJB MP Mano Ganeshan accused the government of playing on nomenclature to evade the question of political prisoners, and called for the release of all those who were being held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. The NPP reportedly stayed aloof from the debate on ‘political prisoners’ at the time.

What President Dissanayake, who is also the Minister of Defence, has said about ‘Tamil political prisoners’ is likely to be considered official, and his pledge to release them has already been picked up by the international media and human rights groups. So, it is incumbent upon the President to substantiate his claim in question by revealing the number of ‘political prisoners’ in Sri Lanka, if any. It is antithetical to democracy to hold political prisoners. Has the government mistaken some hardcore LTTE cadres for ‘political prisoners’? An explanation is called for.

Monday 11th November, 2024

Almost all extrajudicial killings have remained unsolved in this country because they have been reduced to mere political slogans. During election campaigns, politicians gain a great deal of political mileage by shedding copious tears for the victims of barbaric violence and promising to ensure that justice is served, but they forget their promises after winning elections and being ensconced in power. This is the name of the game in Sri Lankan politics.

Genghis Khan (1162-1227) became the first warrior to weaponise corpses, as it were. He laid siege to enemy fortresses and catapulted rotting corpses into them thereby causing diseases to spread there. Sri Lankan politicians have mastered the art of politicising corpses to win elections.

It may be recalled that the UNP used the tragic death of a young woman, named Premawathie Manamperi, at the hands of some savages in uniform during the 1971 JVP insurgency to drum up popular support to win the 1977 general election, but 10 years later, it set in motion its ‘Caravan of Death’, which left streets strewn with the corpses of tens of thousands of JVP activists and suspects. In 1994, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga engineered a regime change by promising to eliminate state terror and corruption, but her government came to be characterised by rampant corruption and extrajudicial killings. In 2015, Maithripala Sirisena, backed by the UNP and the JVP, became President, promising to usher in good governance and bring to justice those who had committed crimes such as the killings of The Sunday Leader editor Lasantha Wickrematunge and famous rugby player Wasim Thajudeen during the Rajapaksa government. But that promise went unfulfilled, and Sirisena joined forces with the Rajapaksas three years later; Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was the Prime Minister in the Yahapalana government, became President with the help of the Rajapaksas in 2022!

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, addressing an election rally in Dambulla on Saturday, reportedly vowed to ensure that the killers of Wickrematunge and Thajudeen and those who were responsible for the involuntary disappearance of Pradeep Ekneligoda would be made to face the full force of the law. One cannot but agree with President Dissanayake on the need to expedite such emblematic cases or even launch fresh probes thereinto, if necessary. The killers of Lasantha and Thajudeen and those who made Ekneligoda disappear must not be allowed to go unpunished. The President can rest assured that all right-thinking people will be with him on this score although his pledge in question has come only a few days ahead of a general election and therefore smacks of a political motive.

Besides, high-level probes must be conducted into attacks on media institutions during the Kumaratunga and Rajapaksa administrations.

However, there is something President Dissanayake, who also leads the JVP, has to do to demonstrate his bona fides as a crusader for justice if he is to prevent his critics from casting aspersions on his sincerity. He will have to order a thorough probe into the extrajudicial execution of the founder of his party, Rohana Wijeweera, who was shot and burnt alive while in police custody in 1989.

The JVP’s November Heroes’ Day event, where the slain JVP leader Wijeweera and other party leaders/cadres who perished at the hands of counterterror operatives in the late 1980s are commemorated annually, cannot be held this year in view of the upcoming general election. The JVP offshoot, Frontline Socialist Party (FSP) has accused the JVP-led NPP of having scheduled the parliamentary contest in such a way that the November Heroes’ Day (13 Nov.) falls during the mandatory cooling-off period and the government can avoid the Wijeweera commemoration. What the FSP has chosen to leave unsaid is that the JVP-led NPP has done so because it is wary of doing anything that will evoke the people’s dreadful memories of the killing spree the JVP launched in the late 1980s purportedly to resist ‘Indian expansionism’ and abort the Indo-Lanka Accord and the 13th Amendment (13A). Today, the JVP in the NPP’s clothing has done a volte-face; it has reached a rapprochement with India, denied having conducted an initiation lecture on ‘Indian expansionism’ in the late 1980s, and accepted 13A and devolution of power.

Even the widow of notorious drug dealer Makandure Madush, who became Sri Lanka’s ‘Napoleon of Crime’, has called for a thorough probe into the killing of her husband in police custody in 2020. She has sought to dispute the claim that he was killed by a rival gang. It defies comprehension why the JVP has not launched a campaign, seeking justice for its beloved founder. Has it forgotten Wijeweera?