US is tightening the screws

EDITORIAL

2013-04-17

It is no secret that the US Government is not impressed with the performance of the Sri Lankan Government. If one was disillusioned into thinking otherwise, news reports of the proposal by the new Secretary of State, John Kerry, to cut down American aid to Sri Lanka by 20%, would have put paid to that. The proposal is akin to a sanction of sorts, and reflects the discomfort in the US-Sri Lanka relations over issues associated with human rights, reconstruction and political integration in the country after the end of the near three-decade war. This is also a telling reflection on the erroneous judgments of those pseudo-pundits who claimed that Kerry would be a better bet than Hillary Clinton and would be more amenable to Sri Lanka's cause.

Let us be practical. The US Government is no Iran, Myanmar or North Korea. Nor is it the 'bully' most of those in the ruling circles deign and describe it to be. At the helm of the US Administration is one of the most powerful rulers of the world, a friend of the commoner, so to speak. If Sri Lanka, presumed to be ruled by a populist President and populist Cabinet of Ministers, catapulted into power on a populist platform, cannot make friends with such a 'great friend of the Third World,' it certainly is Sri Lanka's loss and someone else's gain.

Especially in the context of the current more-than-cordial relationship between the United States and India, a far-thinking ruler would have made it a point to go the extra mile to make friends with the biggest and the sole Super Power of the world. The doctrinaire thinking that has inhibited some of the elements inside the ruling circles has obviously entrapped them into a corner. The sad irony of it all is that a self-described people's government has become more and more divorced from the very basic concepts of the common notions of decency, tolerance and co-habitation.

On the one hand is a Super Power that could boast about the killing of the most ferocious terrorist of the modern world, Osama Bin Laden, and on the other is another tiny island-nation that mastered another terrorist organization, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Ideally, they should be able to get on with each other quite amicably and without any self-imposed inhibitions. But our side obviously has caved into its own warped rationale rooted in archaic and regressive thinking, and even more regressive governing. Here is a text-book case for generations to study, dissect and deduce, as to how not to govern a people after an immense military victory over a murderous terror group.

Yet our leaders have failed, not because they are inept and incapacitated, which they are sometimes not, but more because they are refusing to see the light of the day.

The cut in the US aid package for Sri Lanka is the highest drop for any South Asian country in Kerry's budgetary proposals, which was sent to the Congress last week for its approval. It is believed to be in actual terms of dollars and cents, a cut of USD 11 million, which according to a senior State Department official, is a 'drop of 20 per cent' from the actual fiscal spending in the year 2012. Their reservations expressed in their statement are even more accusatory in that it says: "But in several cases, we had programmes that we were trying to support, to which the government — the military, got quite involved and so we were not able to pursue those programmes."

If that wasn't indictment enough, there is the recent assertion of the US Ambassador to Sri Lanka, about the likelihood of the country returning to a conflict state. Given the massive propaganda unleashed by the government-backed media outlets that the amity between the minorities and the majority Sinhalese Buddhists is on an upward trend, this assessment by the United States of America is not so encouraging to the people, not to mention what it would entail to the ruling circles.