United they fall: What led to the Yahapalana crash

The Commission of Inquiry (COI) now sitting into last year’s Easter Sunday massacres has seen a blame game publicly exchanged between the former President Maithripala Sirisena and former Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe apportioning responsibility for the incident on the other.

The evidence so far in the public domain has spilled over to sparing of a political nature ranging from name-calling to contempt of each other. The ruling coalition has not only profited electorally from this public spectacle but also exploited the sharp divisions to showcase the nature of a dysfunctional Cohabitation Government resulting from two power-centres -- Parliament (Prime Minister) and the Executive President. Thereby it has used the occasion to blame the 19th Amendment to the Constitution and promote and justify its pro

posed 20th Amendment that seeks to strengthen one power-centre, the Presidency.

The Sunday Times publishes today extracts of the evidence given before the COI over the past few days by President Sirisena and former PM Wickremesinghe and how the two secretaries of theirs monitored the initial honeymoon between the leaders of the country’s two largest political parties which quickly turned sour and later developed into personal animosity, leading to breaking point of the experimental National Unity Government.

In EXCLUSIVE interviews granted to the Sunday

Times, Austin Fernando, onetime Secretary to President Sirisena and Saman Ekanayake, then Secretary to former PM Wickremesinghe speak candidly of the way they saw the work and later the cracks that led to the downfall of the Yahapalana Government of 2015-2019.