Who Was The Finger On The Trigger In The Rajapaksa Regime?
By Vishwamithra1984 –March 14, 2016
“A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.” ~ Thomas Paine
The multiple misdeeds, alleged crimes ranging from abductions, assaults to even murder, acts of corruption and nepotism, providing wrong and deceitful information on the economy etc. belong, as already alleged, in the right domain – the Rajapaksa regime. These were all acts of commission. When one adds the acts of omission to this lot, the list rises nauseatingly high and the scope of investigation into them becomes excruciatingly tough.
However, at the very outset, allow me to emphasize: ‘Finger on the trigger’ should not be assumed literally as one holding a gun against someone’s head. The writer uses the metaphor, not to sensationalize the various allegations that are being dangled against some prominent members of the ruling cabal of the last regime, but merely as a figure of speech. The real question that the writer is asking is: Who was really and wholly responsible and accountable? Where did the proverbial buck stop?
Yet again, it is, as I wrote in my earlier columns, redundant to keep beating the same drum as the Rajapaksa regime was defeated in the January-2105 Presidential Elections and that defeat has passed down to history. But keeping them as part of history and not allowing the average citizen to be intimidated, abused and violated by the same perpetrators is as important as protecting what was gained.
For quite some time, allegations have been flying and the average citizen every now and then made a very legitimate inquiry as to why nobody is getting punished for the alleged misdeeds; they expressed utter frustration at the snail’s pace at which the so-called investigations were being dragged on; wild rumors made their usual rounds in drawing rooms inside homes, crowded bars in Colombo clubs and even inside three-wheelers which the average citizen uses for his or her daily regular/irregular commuting. That frustration reached a peak and may have died a natural death as they always do, when a sense of resignation dawns and day-to-day workloads overtake indulgences in unnecessary yet interesting pastimes.
But there is no circumventing the fact that the members of the former First Family were deeply entrenched in almost all the alleged misdeeds; their names came up as the first culprits of corruption, not so much as smalltime dealers of the trade of wheeler-dealing, but as major players of some mega deals, sometimes involving foreign governments. The deals were alleged to have been consummated not to the benefit of the country or its citizenry; engineering estimates of infrastructure projects were way over the engineer’s estimates so that the contract price was artificially bloated and the extra millions were siphoned out to illegitimate stakeholders. Not once, nor twice but multiple times this exercise was repeated and there was no way in which one could even guesstimate what the actual costs were and what really went into the pockets of the powers that be.
