Acts of great betrayal by Lanka’s leaders

Sri Lankans have, with good reason and from bitter experience, learnt to distrust wildly extravagant and acrimonious statements routinely made by the two quarrelling heads of the ‘yahapalanaya’ ( good governance) coalition, President Maithripala Sirisena and Ranil Wickremesinghe even as their entanglement unravels amidst acute distaste on both sides.

Pantomimes played for our benefit

But personal bickering aside, this has led to shifting and chameleon-like instability at the very highest levels of the State, intertwined with the serpentine workings of an entrenched ‘deep state’ security apparatus. This is what should worry all those who are concerned with the democratic nature (or lack thereof) of the Sri Lankan State. Only some security heads and policement are disciplined and reprimanded over the cataclysmic Easter Sunday failure to act on intelligence while others escape without a reprimand. Agreements on defence and national security are signed with foreign governments by both the President and the Prime Minister, the contents of which are kept secret. As the Republic implodes in multiple ways post-April 21st Easter Sunday attacks, each political faction recoils to protect its own loyalists.

Meanwhile a pantomime is played for our benefit, including at the Parliamentary Select Committee to inquire into the Easter Sunday massacres. Agents and double agents of the state retained by different power blocs and politicians apparently deaf, dumb and blind to the tentacles of terrorist jihadism growing in their midst, protest that they are not guilty of any wrong in dewy-eyed innocence. These are, of course, explanations that will not be believed by many. Indeed, the parliamentary select committee process is primarily useful for demonstrating the process by which blindingly unbelievable lies are told and retold, which then becomes the ‘truth’, in superlatively Gobbelsian political propaganda.

Above all, there is carefully designed internal chaos. This week, a local court had to go to the unprecedented extent of ordering that traders of all communities must be allowed to participate in a weekly fair. This was following a directive issued by a local area politician belonging to former President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s Podujana Party that Muslim traders must not participate in the weekend fair. This was just one example. In the wake of the jihadist attacks on churches and hotels, systematic discrimination against Muslim traders was documented in various areas, spearheaded by local ‘ trade associations’ with political clout, where Sinhalese traders had prevented them from putting up their shutters.

A continuing vacuum in government

Clearly this had to do more with economic trade-offs rather than with maintaining the ‘ public peace’ as the Wennappuwa Pradeshiya Sabha chairman had advanced as a reason for his offending actions. In this case and after the matter became public, the Podujana Party moved swiftly to distance itself from the offending actions of its local level member. But the party has yet to show that it has done more than merely issuing statements in regard to prohibiting racist actions of its party faithful. This ugly racist growth in Sri Lankan has meanwhile sprouted in many different directions. A charitable foundation providing food to patients and their family members visiting hospitals in Colombo had to close after baseless allegations of providing contaminated food were leveled against them.

In yet another instance, the Criminal Investigation Department informed court following detailed investigations that all sensationalised accusations against a doctor in regard to forced ‘ sterilisation’ of Sinhalese women were not substantiated by real evidence. So who is accountable for destroyed lives and bereft communities? Are these to be estimated in pure monetary terms? As tensions simmer, a continuing vacuum in government is underpinned by a peculiarly self-sabotaging thrust that directly puts the country at peril. We saw this in the aftermath of the Easter Sunday attacks in April as the President and the Prime Minister pulled in different directions.

In the weeks that have followed, there is no lessening of the tension but rather, a ratcheting up of the rhetoric. There is breathless suspense as to what new calamity would fall on people’s heads each day. This week, it was the sardonic announcement by President Sirisena to editors and media heads that he has signed the death warrants of four convicted drug traffickers and ordered the executions to be carried out within the next two weeks. This announcement was presaged by his startling approval of Philippines’ President Rodrigo Duterte’s shoot-to-kill orders in regard to suspected drug traffickers.

Side-shows and diversions are a betrayal

As many rebounded in panic, the question arose as to whether this was just another side-show and a planned diversion with the effect of taking the national debate in a different direction to where it is supposed to go. In any event, the procedure for carrying out capital punishment cannot be just with one careless flick of a Presidential hand. Rather, there is a meticulous procedure in place where case records of prisoners sentenced to death have to be called for and reviewed on a case by case basis. The observations of the judge who tried the case have to be forwarded to the Attorney General for instructions and thereafter sent to the Minister of Justice who is required to make his or her recommendations and in turn pass it on to the President.

It is only after completion of all these mandated procedures and if all three reports are adverse that the presidential signing of the death warrant must take place. These procedures must be evidenced on record, not subjected to executive whim. Yet in truth and if the President’s threats are to be taken seriously, it is ludicrous to claim that reactivation of the death penalty will arrest the spread of drug trafficking, as he thunderously proclaims. Sri Lanka demonstrates the classic example of a country where crime/drug kingpins are situated at the highest levels of the political and law enforcement machinery. They are the ‘untouchables’, by the law.

One or four demonstrably showpiece executions of luckless sprats will only further brutalise Sri Lankan society and achieve little in terms of actual crime prevention. As a Commission on Capital Punishment in Sri Lanka in the late 1950’s rightly pointed out, it is falacious to believe that the activation of the death may deter people from resorting to violent crimes. As sideshows preoccupy the public attention, more than two months have passed since the deplorable failures of state security and political leadership resulted in more than two hundred and fifty deaths with countless critically injured as jihadists hit churches and hotels. Each week, the slow drip of those injured, dying from their wounds impacts on our hearts and minds, as time passes.

This is where the sole attention of the country and its political leadership should be focused. But that is not the case. These are acts of great betrayal by the nation’s leaders.