To be or ‘knot’ to be

Editorial-September 20, 2015, 7:26 pm 

The crime rate continues to rise with no all-out effort being made to curb it. There are public protests against the recent murder of a five-year-old girl. Whenever a savage crime is perpetrated against a child or a woman, all hell breaks loose in this manner but the public outcry fizzles out with the passage of time and nothing is done to address the root causes of the problem thereafter.

All governments react to street protests against heinous crimes in a predictable manner. Instead of taking action to rectify the systemic flaws that have resulted in this sorry state of affairs they adopt the same ruse to pacify the protesting public; they pretend to be mulling over the re-implementation of the death penalty and have the gallows dusted and tested and the paraphernalia for hanging imported.

The incumbent government consists of holier-than-thou individuals who made a hue and cry about the increasing crime rate under the previous government which pathetically failed to bring it down. Today, they themselves are drawing heavy flak for their failure to prevent brutal crimes being perpetrated against vulnerable sections of society.

Meanwhile, the SLFP is reportedly working on its local government election nominations. Its General Secretary Duminda Dissanayake has recently told the media that the politicians responsible for anti-social activities won’t be fielded. He seems to have taken the people for suckers. Among the SLFP politicians rewarded with ministerial positions recently is a person whom the champions of good governance condemned as a drug dealer and extortionist! The yahapalana government worthies have obviously succumbed to political expediency and, therefore, the people cannot expect them, especially the SLFP leaders, to weed out the anti-social elements in the garb of local government politicians. So, it is up to the people to do everything in their power to prevent these monsters from being nominated again to contest polls.

A University of Columbia graduand, Emma Sulkowicz, who was allegedly raped by a fellow student a few years ago, grabbed international media attention recently. She, with the help of some of her friends, carried a mattress to the university graduation ceremony in protest against what she called failure on the part of the law enforcement authorities to bring the perpetrator to justice. It looks as if the people had to react in a similar manner in this country. If the perpetrators of sexual violence against children and women are not dealt with legally because of their power and wealth at least they must be named and shamed in public. People can make use of the upcoming local government polls for that purpose.

Opinion is divided on the call for re-implementing the death penalty with one school of thought claiming that it constitutes a deterrent. Others pooh-pooh this claim. The present government has craftily revived this debate again and distracted the attention of the irate public from its failure to combat crime the way it should. While declaring in Geneva that the capital punishment won’t be re-introduced, it pretends at home that it is planning to resume judicial hangings. Ironically, politicians who do not want to sully their hands with the reimplementation of judicial executions have no qualms about turning a blind eye to extra-judicial executions!

Judicial executions can wait and what needs to be done urgently is for the government to concentrate on crime prevention and make the justice dispensation system efficient. It is no exaggeration that the best way for a criminal to get away with his offences is to get caught. For, thanks to the inefficiency of the long arm of the law and the state prosecutors, the conviction rate remains as low as four percent. This may explain why the country has become a criminals’ paradise.

It is high time the government was asked to grasp the nettle in trying to protect the citizenry against criminals without pulling the wool over the eyes of the public.