Selective Application Of The Law In Rural Sri Lanka
Emil van der Poorten
I never cease to be fascinated by those who incessantly pillory “Colombians”, in reality those who seek to defend the concepts of law and order, the rule of law and basic human rights and who happen to live in our capital city. Their common place of residence provides the horde of Rajapaksa Sycophants with the opportunity to apply this “urban” stereotype to them.
What you will NEVER hear from these paragons of probity and virtue is so much as a reference to the plight of those they go to such lengths to pretend to represent, however obliquely.
What has brought this most forcibly to my attention recently has been the spate of headlines describing the prosecution of those (of lesser means and of rural origin) against whom the full force of the law is exercised, if local media is to be believed.
One of the more recent headlines had several villagers being taken into custody and charged for being in possession of porcupine flesh. While I am sure there is a law against the killing of any sentient being in this country – humans excepted in the matter of practice – this seemed a bit bizarre. As anyone who lives anywhere where co-existence with porcupines is a necessity of life will confirm, these rodents are the bane of anyone trying to grown anything for personal consumption or to earn a few rupees in the market place. The people throwing up their hands in holy horror at the killing of our oversized hedgehogs very obviously have no knowledge whatsoever of the fact that they are capable of completely husking seedling coconuts, ring-barking high-yielding rubber plants when they are barely out of the ground and being a monumental nuisance to anyone trying to grow whatever takes their culinary fancy! Ever since I remember, villagers who were able to locate porcupine “dens,” would smoke out these usually-nocturnal animals and dispatch them with a club and then, not to waste a source of very scarce (to the poor) and palatable animal protein, cook the meat in a form that would make it the centerpiece of a meal of rice. While this practice hardly seemed to make any serious dent in the porcupine population, it did affect some kind of control over their proliferation and provided a dietary diversion to (poor) rural people. To treat this practice as equivalent to the harvesting of rhino horn for the Chinese market is nothing short of ludicrous and provides yet another example of their absolute ignorance of rural life of these self-appointed guardians of it.
