Sri Lanka: Coercion For Political Realism
Ayesha Siddiqa
The young Sri Lankan man in the audience did not like it as the former editor of a renowned newspaper The Sunday Leader’s Frederica Jansz spoke about her persecution at the hands of the dictatorial and authoritarian Rajapakse regime. The occasion was a seminar organised by a Sri Lankan professor at the University of Pittsburgh to discuss the issue of militarism and humanitarianism in Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The editor had to flee her country within a few days to avoid being killed as she was directly threatened by the defence minister, who is the brother of President Mahinda Rajapakse, and of meeting the same fate as her predecessor,Lasantha Wickrematunge, who was gunned down in 2009. In Jansz’s case, she was directly threatened by the defence minister; the transcript of the conversation was released as she left the country. The Sunday Leader was doing stories about the government’s human rights atrocities vis-a-vis the Tamils, such as the regime’s violation of an agreement made with the international community to allow peaceful surrender of the LTTE political leadership. They were butchered to death as they came out of hiding waving white flags.
Notwithstanding the achievement of having won a war, the government in Colombo must not be allowed to expand a sociopolitical system that had 30 years ago, divided the society into two: Sinhala south and Tamil north. Historically, the Sinhala leadership has not demonstrated tolerance, resulting in repeated mass carnages. As if the killing of 60,000 Sinhala youth in the south of the country during the 1980s for their involvement in socialism was not enough, the Sinhala leadership made policies that started ethnic strife in the island-state. In fact, what essentially was a class conflict was turned into an ethnic problem with Colombo introducing policies such as Sinhala, as the only national language, to replace both Tamil and English.
