PC Elections: Rajapaksa Economics And TNA Politics
Rajan Philips
The voting is over in the three Provincial Council elections that concluded yesterday. The news over the coming days and weeks and even months will be saturated with election results analyses and commentaries, especially the results of the Northern Provincial Council election. If predictions hold, the UPFA will triumph as usual in the North Western Province and the Central Province, but it is the TNA that is expected to topple the UPFA cart in the Northern Province. So there will be one part of the country where the Rajapaksa regime will not be total control. After trying everything to cancel the Northern PC election and to dilute PC powers pre-emptively, government leaders, i.e. Rajapaksa brothersand their inner circles, seem to have conceded the North to the TNA.
With defeat staring at them, the government cheer leaders led by the President himself, went on the attack against the TNA. The President even played the other North-South card, i.e. the Jaffna Tamil vs Colombo Tamil card, poking mock fun at the TNA leadership for inflicting a Colombo Tamil, Justice Wigneswaran, on the hapless Jaffna Tamil voters. Aren’t there good enough people in Jaffna, he has asked, clearly enjoying holding the wooden spoon to stir the Jaffna pot. Good for him, but it would be better for the Tamils if President Rajapaksa would similarly be concerned about the Sri Lankan State’s inflictions on Jaffna and everywhere else in the North and East.
To wit, the President cannot find suitable Tamils, Muslims, or even civilian Sinhalese, to be Governors of the Northern and Eastern Provinces. He is either unaware of or does not care about the continuing military intrusions in the lives of ordinary people in the two Provinces. A President who can fire his Chief Justice has shown no willingness to step in and address the basic request of the people of Jaffna to get their homes and properties back. They have to go to the court instead. And the Tamils of the North and East are not to be given a civilian police force with whom they can talk without translation. Read More
In Memory Of Lasantha: Media And The Self-Preservation Policy Of Rajapaksa
J.S. Tissainayagam
Ladies and Gentlemen: good afternoon. I’m happy to be here with you and speak at this event. I would like to thank the organisers for putting together the Lasantha Wickrematunge Memorial Lecture.
I worked with Lasantha at the Sunday Leader between 1999 and 2002. It is tragic that media censorship and political oppression against which Lasantha struggled valiantly then, and for which he died in 2009, persist four years after his death.
Following the military campaign, there are fundamentally two ways whereby the present Sri Lanka government has imposed censorship. One is through legislation; the other by physically targeting journalists. I am not going into detail about these legal measures due to the paucity of time. There is of course the notorious Prevention of Terrorism Act. But more importantly, there were new regulations that came into effect after armed combat ended in May 2009. They mostly pertain to restricting the dissemination of news on the internet and via telecommunication networks.
I now come to the second form of control – terrorising journalists. There are a number of ways whereby this happens: disappearance, abduction, imprisonment threat and torture. Prageeth Ekneliayagoda, for whom this empty chair is dedicated, disappeared from the capital city of Colombo eight months after the military campaign had ended. Today the government’s only answer to his disappearance is to orchestrate a smear campaign against his wife and refuse to conduct a credible investigation into the incident.
