America stops war games in South Korea, starts a new game in Sri Lanka

Rajan Philips-June 16, 2018, 8:43 pm 

The greatest admirer of President Trump is the man himself. No known political figure speaks more highly of one’s own achievements than Donald Trump. In Trump’s own estimate, his greatest presidential achievement could be his Singapore summit meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, even though it may not be enough to qualify him for a Nobel peace prize, that he covets so much if only because Barak Obama was given one for merely being elected as the first non-white American President. There is universal agreement that the Trump-Kim summit has at least removed the threat of a nuclear misadventure between the US and North Korea. The fact is that the imminence of a nuclear threat was in itself the work of Trump and Kim going mano-a-mano at each other and trading insults like two overgrown juvenile delinquents.

The summit, however, did show that the two men are capable of mature behaviour in the company of each other, although much of the American media take on the summit is that Kim Jong-un got most of what he wanted and that Trump got little or nothing in return. What surprised most commentators and caused much concern in defence circles in the US, South Korea and Japan, was Trump’s cavalier announcement after the summit that he was going to stop the ‘war games’ that American and South Korean armies periodically carry out as exercises for military preparedness in the Korean peninsula and the South China seas. Trump’s reasons, that they are provocative and expensive, left defence experts scratching their heads.

Sri Lanka is safely out of the way of anything that might happen in the Far East or across the Pacific, but that did not prevent the circulation of news stories about a different game that the Americans may be starting to play in Sri Lanka. As widely reported and re-reported in the media, the outgoing US Ambassador to Sri Lanka, Atul Keshap, apparently used the opportunity of the departing courtesy call on former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, to caution him about the advisability of the much touted Gotabhaya Rajapaksa candidacy for the next presidential election. Whether the reported conversation actually transpired or not, the news about it has been more than enough to let the game begin! That is the game of (alleged) US involvement in presidential prospecting in Sri Lanka.

The new Ugly American

By all appearances, the prospects for transforming (not abolishing) the executive presidency are withering away. They are giving way to the prospecting for potential candidates. Even as it is much touted, the candidacy of Gotabhaya Rajapaksa (GR) is also the most unusual as well as controversial. The unusualness is in his being a dual citizen of Sri Lanka and the US. As was suggested yesterday, delightfully tongue-in-cheek by Lucien Rajakarunanayake, the US government, the State Department and Foreign Service staffers may be concerned about one of their citizens aspiring to become the Head of State of another country. In the era of dual citizenships, the old caricature of the Ugly American might be taking different meanings. Is GR an ugly American, or a nice Sri Lankan? Conversely, is he a nice American and ugly Sri Lankan?

Plausibly, the American concern could be that from a Sri Lankan standpoint, the GR candidacy, insofar as he is an American citizen, could be interpreted as American interference in Sri Lankan affairs. More pungently, GR could be viewed as America’s Trojan horse in Sri Lankan politics. Even the Yankee-Dick UNP could raise that slogan. After all, GR took a sojourn in California while his younger brother Basil was doing all the leg work for the SLPP’s impressive victory in the local government elections in February. GR returned to the old island when it became evident that SLPP is not a lame horse but a good electoral race horse that you can safely bet your citizenship on. Could this have been the basis for Mr. Keshap’s reported admonishment to Mahinda Rajapaksa?

The more potent view, however, is that it is not GR who is being the agent for American interference in Sri Lanka, but it is America who is palpably interfering in Sri Lankan affairs by trying to veto GR’s efforts to secure nomination as the SLPP’s presidential candidate. At the same time, while Ambassador Keshap’s alleged views on GR should not be interpreted as the official views of the US government, there is also no escaping the fact that Keshap’s views are indicative of the general thinking among US Foreign Service officials. While Keshap might have been bold in taking a parting shot as the outgoing Ambassador, his successor, Aliana Teplitz, coming in from Nepal, will be more circumspect in the unfolding election period. Nonetheless, a shot has been fired across the embassy bow and no one is taking it as fake even though it was first sighted in news reports all the way north in Jaffna!

The US Embassy is reported to have issued the standard non-committal non-denial. There has been no reported denial directly by the other party to the discussion – Mahinda Rajapaksa. His spokespeople, notably GL Peiris – the Professor turned ventriloquist’s dummy, have issued muted denials. The man himself, GR, has been quoted as saying that if Atul Keshap "actually made the controversial comments he was reported to have made, he was not fit to be the US Ambassador." Is this the disapproval of an American citizen of his country’s envoy behaving badly in another country? Or, is that all for outrage by an aspiring Sri Lankan President at the highhandedness of an American Ambassador in Sri Lanka?

Anti-imperialism has provided more powerful manifestations in Sri Lanka when imperialism and nationalism, not to mention international socialism, were grounded in altogether and objectively different material conditions. The current manifestations in an entirely different set of global circumstances are not only muted but are also pathetic. Not surprising indeed when a dual American citizen aspires to be President in one’s old country and when America is constrained to send as ambassadors its citizens of non-American origin even though the current American President has his own xenophobic views about who is qualified to be a real American.

Polemics apart, are there other reasons for muted rejections of what in earlier times would have been vehemently condemned as unwarranted American interference? The absence of strong objections and unsolicited legal opinions about the ease with which GR could renounce his US citizenship, have given rise to other speculations. Soon after the 1956 elections, Prime Minister Bandaranaike was known to have made a joke of asking the local MI5, established by his predecessor, Sir John Kotelawala, if they had a dossier on him before proceeding to disband it. Jokes or no jokes, no current Sri Lankan politician, let alone the most well-known Sri Lankan-American dual citizen, will dare ask an American embassy official if there is a dossier on him. Any intelligence dossier on SWRD Bandaranaike would have been entirely political, for the man was scrupulously clean to have anything personal about him.

The same old question

Fast forward sixty years, hardly any SLFP/SLPP, or Sri Lankan, politician will have a dossier that is more political than personal. And for real dossiers on Sri Lankan politicians, you have to reach out not to foreign embassies, but to local finance companies. The alleged perpetual bondages of over a hundred parliamentarians have naturally given rise to questioning the wisdom of removing presidential powers and transferring them to parliament. The contemporary wisdom seems to be that it is easier to find one honest man and give him all the powers, rather than giving them to an assorted body of 225 members where finding an honest man would be more challenging that a picking a needle out of a haystack. What is conveniently forgotten in this assessment is that for a long time our parliament used to have far more honest parliamentarians than dishonest members. Historically, Sri Lankan parliament(s) have committed many political blunders but they were honest blunders and none of it was committed for the personal benefit of any of its members.

It is more than a coincidence that the corruption of parliament and parliamentarians began and was accomplished after Sri Lankan was dragged without too much kicking and screaming from a parliamentary system to the current, or pre-19A presidential system. The connections between the concentration of presidential powers and the corruption of parliament are more causal than co-relational. It is unfortunate that the latest JVP attempt to transform the presidency through the 20th Amendment is being viewed solely in terms of the ability of political alliances to win or lose presidential elections, and not at all in the light of experience of forty years of presidential rule.

So it is a case of sour grapes that the UNP, which brought in the presidential system, is now supporting its transformation because it has not been able to win a presidential election after 1988. And the SLFP that did not quite oppose the presidential system, except the provision for electing the president directly by the people, is now more for retaining the presidency and direct elections, because it has mostly successful in presidential elections after 1994. The cynicism in this assessment is further reinforced by the personal animus that only Ranil Wickremesinghe can manage to create among his many detractors.

Whether it is historical irony or poetic justice, the only political grandson of Sri Lanka’s biggest media magnate is now finding himself to be the main target of vituperative attacks by the more upstart media organizations. In the old days, whatever the UNP did through private entrepreneurs the SLFP nationalized. Bus transport and the Lake House are shining examples. The Rajapaksas did something clever which the older families of power would have found rather distasteful. Rather than nationalizing media outlets and creating a public hue and cry, the Rajapaksas sent their new rich henchmen to buy out noisy media critics. Everyone made money and there was no apparent cause for political grief. But the real result was creeping and stifling authoritarianism.

The only achievement of the yahapalanaya interregnum (Hector Abhayavardhana called the 1965-1970 UNP government an interregnum, without anticipating 1977!) is that it stopped the Rajapaksa authoritarianism in its tracks. Its consistent failures since winning power have made the return of the Rajapaksas a great deal easier than it should have been. They are cocky about winning even without having to show that they will be different in a new government than they were in their old government. Their main problem seems to be in deciding which Rajapaksa should be sent to open the innings. The outgoing American Ambassador, not familiar with cricket etiquette, chose to stomp on the pitch on his way out. But nobody is crying foul!