There Is No An Alternative
By Emil van der Poorten –December 6, 2015
Emil van der Poorten
As one of those who welcomed the removal of a despot and his entourage on January 8th, I am also one of those who are sick and tired of a Maithri/Ranil (MR2) dispensation which seems only to be adept at issuing “motherhood and apple pie” statements from time to time and has displayed a capacity to turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to the rape and pillage this country was subjected to for better than a decade and the need to bring the guilty to justice. Not only do they keep trotting out excuses for their lack of action to make the guilty pay the price they owe Sri Lankan society, in more cases than I care to count, they have even appointed some of them to positions of authority and “respect,” and I am not even counting the “camp-followers” of the Mahinda Rajapaksa (MR 1) dispensation in this number!
At best, this can be attributed to naivety, but given the fact that that every one of the decision-makers is a seasoned politician it puts their conduct beyond the pale and implies complicity in what has probably been the most disgraceful chapter in Sri Lanka’s recent history.
Many moons ago, I wrote a piece expressing the opinion that, in the matter of Ranil Wickremesinghe, it was a case of TINA (“There is no alternative”). The title of today’s piece says something very different.
Let me explain why that is not, simply, a matter of me changing my mind.
When MR 1 had succeeded in cowing every media person, self-appointed “opinion-maker” and his mother into subservience, genuflecting metaphorically, if not literally, in the presence of and in respect of every utterance of that horde, it was popular to pillory Ranil Wickremesinghe and blame him for the lack of resistance to truly unbelievable behaviour in what was alleged to be a democratic country. In fact it was those very critics who bore the real responsibility for that state of affairs, displaying little less than abject cowardice before what they saw as MR 1’s wrath. I chose not to join their ranks for the simple reason that I believed that the problem was far bigger than any shortcomings of Ranil Wickremesinghe and the fact that it was patently obvious that the responsibility for lack of resistance to what MR1 was visiting on this country rested squarely on the shoulders of those who tacitly or otherwise gave the MR1 government free rein. I believe that January 8th bore out the accuracy of that evaluation and that of several (primarily female) members of the Sri Lankan “commentariat,” a small minority certainly but one that was distinguished by its adherence to principle and the journalistic skill to express that adherence.
Now, we have had MR2 at the wheel of the Sri Lankan ship of state and they have given no evidence of a real commitment to return this country to anything resembling good governance.
Yes, we acknowledge the fact that the wheels of justice must not be employed like those of a tractor thrashing through the mud of some paddy field. We share the distaste of MR2 for “White Van Justice.” We do not believe that the forces of law and order, be they the judiciary, the police or any of our security services, should be used simply to advance the interests of some ruling clique. We have no quarrel with the government on those matters.
