Impossible Fairy Tales About The Police
By Laksiri Fernando -July 15, 2012
Kishali Pinto-Jayawardena
It is quite inane for government officials to say that no politician influences the police. Even in this land of impossible fairy tales, with proposed airports, cricket stadiums and expressways jostling each other in flagrant mockery of commonsense while basic governance flounders from the management of the economy, the pitiable state of education and the rampant rapes of children, such claims can only evoke considerable hilarity.
Extreme degeneration of law and order
The most recent such assertion is made by Secretary to the Ministry of Defence and President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s brother, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa who vehemently insists that the Inspector General of Police has been afforded the full reach of the law to arrest the culprits responsible for crime. He of course, denies that there is a high crime rate in the country.
These unconvincing disclaimers struck me even more forcibly than normal a few days ago when two brothers from the South, Muslim in ethnicity, came desperately seeking legal advice regarding a sequence of events that should not surprise anyone familiar with similar stories. Nevertheless these accounts still give rise to shock and awe at the extreme level of degeneration of law and order that we can see.
No ‘terrorists’ were involved here, depriving the police of a convenient excuse. Instead, this was a simple take of absolute greed illustrating yet again the precise nexus between the underworld, sections of the police and powerful politicians.
