Dear Russia: An Enemy Is Not A Partner

Why did Washington show its outlaw face to the world?

by Paul Craig Roberts-Sep 7, 2017

( September 7, 2017, Washington DC, Sri Lanka Guardian) Russians are concerned about Washington’s arbitrary closing of their San Francisco consulate and the illegal searching of diplomatic properties. There is no question that Washington has violated diplomatic protections and international law.

Why did Washington show its outlaw face to the world?

Was it to show that as strong as Russia is, Russia cannot protect herself from Washington? No international law, no diplomatic immunity can stand in Washington’s way. Washington can violate all law with no consequence.
Washington’s view is that might, and only might, makes right. Law is thrown out of the window, so why does Russia rely on law in her dealings with Washington?

Was it to plant some fake evidence in the Russian properties of Russian complicity in the US presidential election that elected a candidate that prefered peace over conflict with Russia?

Russia’s foreign minister Lavrov has told the US Secretary of State that Russia is going to sue over the seizure and search of Russia’s diplomatic properties. So, here we see again the Russians trying to deal with Washington through law, courts, diplomacy, whatever, and not facing the real issue.

What is the real issue?

The Real Issue is that the US military/security complex, the most powerful component of the US government, has decided that Russia is the ENEMY that justifies its $1,000 billion annual budget and the power that goes with it.

In other words, Russia is designated America’s Number One Enemy, and there is nothing whatsoever Russian diplomacy, Russian measured responses, and Russian references to her enemy as her “partner” can do about it.

Dear Russia, you must understand that you have been assigned the role of “the Enemy.”

Yes, of course, there is no objective reason for Russia being designated America’s enemy. Nevertheless, that is Russia’s designation. Washington has no interest in any facts. Washington is ruled by a shadow government and the deep state, consisting of the CIA, the military/security complex, and financial interests. These interests support US world hegemony, both financial and military. Russia and China are in the way of these powerful interest groups.

The case against Russia becomes more absurd by the day. Newsweek just published a story that suggests Russia is behind the Boston Marathon Bombing. https://sputniknews.com/politics/201709061057119169-newsweek-claims-russia-boston-bombing/

Russia can’t do anything about her designation as Enemy Number One.

So, what can Russia do?

All Russia can do is to turn her back to the West, while watching very closely for the coming suprise attack. There is nothing in America for Russia. Any American investment in Russia will be used to damage Russia. Russia does not need any American capital. The Russian central bank’s belief in Russia’s need for foreign capital is proof of the successful brainwashing of Russian economists by American neoliberalism during the Yeltsin era. The Russian central bank is so brainwashed that it is incapable of understanding that the Russian central bank can finance Russian development without any foreign loans. The Russian government still doesn’t seem to understand that the only reason sanctions can be imposed on Russia is because Russia is ensnared in the Western financial system. The economic advice that the Russian government gets from its brainwashed neoliberal economists serves Washington’s interests, not Russia’s.

Russia should not be using Western financial clearing mechanisms that serve Washington’s interests.

When will the Russian government cease pretending that its enemy is its partner?

Why can’t the Russian government recognize the reality that stares her in the face, that continually insults and abuses Russia?

Why is Russia so determined to be part of the corrupt and declining West that Russia accepts every insult, every abuse?

The West has room for only one autonomous power. There is no room for a second.

China, intent on being rich like capitalists, also seems unrealistic in its dealings with Washington.

The orchestrated “Korean crisis” is not about North Korea. It is an orchestration that lets Washington put nuclear missile bases on China’s border, just as the orchestrated “Iranian crisis” was the excuse for putting nuclear missile bases on Russia’s borders.

Russia cannot be both sovereign and part of the West, and China cannot afford to confuse self-preservation with economic deals with America.

If the two powers capable of constraining Washington’s unilateralism show confusion over the consequences, they will make war more likely.

The Kurds Are Not Children

They have earned their independence, and the West must get out of the way

BY BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY-SEPTEMBER 6, 2017

The timidity of the international community in the face of the Sept. 25 referendum on an independent Kurdistan is a trifecta of shame, absurdity, and historic miscalculation.

We are talking about a people who have been deported, Arabized by force, gassed, and pushed into the mountains where, for a century, they have mounted an exemplary resistance to the tyranny their Baghdad masters successively imposed on them in defiance of geography and of the Kurds’ thousand years of history.

Theirs is a region that finally gained autonomy with the fall of Saddam Hussein — a region that, when the tsunami of the Islamic State crashed over Mesopotamia in 2014 and the Iraqi Army took flight, was the first to organize a counteroffensive. Since then, over a front 600 miles long, the Iraqi Kurds held off the barbarians and thus saved Kurdistan, Iraq, and our shared civilization.

And it is the Kurds again who, in the run-up to the battle of Mosul, went on the offensive on the Plains of Nineveh, opened the gates to the city, and, through their courage, enabled the coalition to strike at the heart of the Islamic State.

But now that the time has come to settle up, the United States remains stubbornly opposed to the referendum, urging the Kurds to put off their aspirations for independence to an indeterminate date in the future. Instead of thanking the Kurds, the world is telling them, with thinly veiled cynicism, “Sorry, Kurdish friends, you were so useful in confronting Islamic terror, but, uh, your timing is not so good. We don’t need you anymore, so why don’t you just go on home? Thanks, again — see you next time.”

* * *

It is said the referendum will distract attention from the common fight against the Islamic State and interfere with the Iraqi elections scheduled for next year. But everyone knows, except when they choose not to admit it, that the military part of the battle ended with the fall of Mosul, thanks largely to the Kurds themselves. Moreover, who can guarantee that the Iraqi national elections will take place as scheduled rather than being adjourned, just as we are asking the Kurds to adjourn theirs?

An independent Kurdistan, the commentators continue, would imperil regional stability. As if Syria, mired in war; Iran, with its revived imperial ambitions; and decomposing Iraq, that artificial creation of the British, are not dangers far greater than little Kurdistan, a secular and democratic friend of the West with an elected parliament and free press!

Independence, the talking heads insist, would threaten the territorial integrity of the four nations — Iraq, Iran, Syria, Turkey — across which the Kurdish nation is spread. It is as if these voices are unaware that the present referendum concerns only the Kurds of Iraq, who have no ambition to form a greater Kurdistan with their “brothers” and “sisters” in Turkey and Syria, whose crypto-Marxist leadership is ideologically incompatible with that of the Iraqi Kurds.

But what about the reaction of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, one asks? What about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s reported threat to cut the pipelines that connect Iraqi Kurdistan to the rest of the world? I do not believe that it is the role of the West to act as a press agent for two dictatorships that detest us, nor do I see why the blackmailing of one’s neighbors should be condemned when practiced by Pyongyang but facilitated when it comes to Tehran or Ankara.

Sadly, however, no argument is too feeble to be used to justify our request to “delay.”

Sadly, however, no argument is too feeble to be used to justify our request to “delay.” It feels like an Orwellian nightmare, or a festival of bad faith, in which all arguments are turned into their opposites.
What of the Kurds’ organizing themselves into an autonomous island of democracy and peace, even after the Peshmerga had not been paid by Baghdad for three years? That should be enough for them, claim U.S. State Department experts who cannot seem to grasp why the Kurds should want to take the last step from autonomy to independence. What of the Kurds’ controlling oil in the Kirkuk region? Instead of seeing this as a boon, which should provide immediate assurance of their ability to finance the development of their new country, observers seem to think only of the covetousness that these riches might stimulate.

And when the two major parties scramble for votes — which anywhere else would be seen as a sign of healthy republican civic culture — this is suddenly viewed as the seeds of divisions and disputes to come!

* * *

We are dealing with the old colonialist drivel that holds some people are never quite ready to govern themselves, not yet grown up, not adult enough.

It is the familiar tragedy that befalls nations that, as Charles de Gaulle used to say (and he knew whereof he spoke), have no friends. Yes, yes, services were rendered, vague promises were made when we needed you and when you alone stood between us and the barbarians, but now that the time has come to keep our word, the evasion begins. “Bad timing,” “not part of the plan,” “the world has an agenda, and we regret to inform you that you are not on that agenda,” and so on.

I witnessed a similar situation at the end of the Bosnian War some 20 years ago. The 7th Corps of the Army of Sarajevo was on the verge not only of liberating the besieged Bosnian towns but of reunifying the country, forcing the surrender of the Serbian goons loyal to Radovan Karadzic and Slobodan Milosevic, and bringing peace and justice. But the United States applied the brakes. Under the leadership of Ambassador Richard Holbrooke at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, the United States convened the aggressor (Serbia), the arbiter (Croatia), and the victim (Bosnia). The victim was threatened that if it did not comply, it would be left to its fate — and thus the West’s Bosnian friend was partitioned, sacrificed on the altar of a convenient but poorly crafted peace that remains shaky to this day.

May similar sorry machinations not produce, in the case of the Kurds, the same sad effects. May the descendants of the survivors of Saddam’s chemical attack on Halabja find the strength to resist the intimidation of all their well-wishers. May they remember Gen. de Gaulle, who in the summer of 1944 overrode the plans of his American and British allies and, rather than pushing directly into Germany, insisted on liberating his capital first, thereby claiming his share of the Allied victory.

* * *

The Kurdish referendum is not an act of force. It is a right.

The Kurdish referendum is not an act of force. It is a right. It is a debt. It is a major landmark for a great people who have given immeasurably to the world. Yesterday, they were among those who saved Jews; in our day, they have given us the Peshmerga, who liberated and now protect the last Christian populations of the Middle East. And, for centuries, they have been one of the wellsprings of the enlightened Islam that, in the secret recesses of the soul no less than in the fury of battle, remains the best response to the curse of radical Islam. It is time for the world to honor the Kurdish people as they have honored us.

Translated from French by Steven B. Kennedy. 

Photo credit:SAFIN HAMED/AFP/Getty Images

Bell Pottinger has toxified political debate in South Africa

The disgraced PR firm did not create our racial problems but it exploited them ruthlessly, giving our struggle for justice a sinister tone
Jacob Zuma reacts during a question and answer session in parliament, Cape Town, on 31 August. Photograph: Nic Bothma/EPA



Image: Indian businessmen Ajay Gupta and younger brother Atul Gupta in 2011. The family of Indian-born tycoons are close to president Jacob Zuma. Photograph: Gallo Images/Getty Images. 

Justice Malala-Wednesday 6 September 2017

You don’t have to look for racial inequality when you land in South Africa. It is everywhere. It is in the spatial arrangements: the pristine formerly whites-only suburbs (where a few of us black people now live) and their high walls, sitting miles away from the sprawling black squatter camps and townships that provide labour for the still – two decades after democracy – white-dominated economy.

The face of unemployment, poverty and poor education is black. The face of prosperity and privilege is white. The numbers are staggering: half of all South Africans are living below the poverty line, and three out of five black people are poor, while poverty is almost nonexistent among white people. In June unemployment among black people was 31%; among white people it was just 6.6%.

This is the powder keg in which Bell Pottinger founder Tim Bell arrived two years ago, when he met the Gupta family, notorious friends of the president, Jacob Zuma. The family is described by academics from four of our top universities as having staged a “silent coup” in South Africa by “capturing the state”.

The academics asserted that the Gupta family – which is in business with Zuma’s son Duduzane and whom the president defends as his “friends” – appoint ministers and senior civil servants to pass government contracts on to them. (Though the Guptas and Zumas all deny any wrongdoing.)

Cynically, Bell Pottinger invented, hyped and disseminated a message that it described as “economic emancipation” of blacks. An “us and them” strategy was devised, based on race: the “whites” are wealthy, racist and benefit their own to the exclusion of blacks. Its aim was to divert South Africa’s attention and deflect criticism away from President Zuma.

They chose the Afrikaner billionaire Johann Rupert as their fall guy, and used him in Twitter messages, Google and Facebook advertisements, newspaper articles, television features and in political messages and speeches by key Zuma allies. The scale of it was incredible. The Times reports that “participants in the fake news empire spread 220,431 tweets between July 2016 and July 2017”.

Did the campaign work? Bell Pottinger and the Guptas did not invent our racial problems. But they exploited them ruthlessly. They threw a match at the tinderbox of inequality and frustration that has persisted since 1994.

 Lord Bell’s Newsnight interview: the most excruciating moments

Where the South African people sought to build, they sought to destroy. Where we sought to unify, they divided. The match caught, but didn’t become a wildfire. We are not racial enemies in South Africa, but there is certainly a new racial edge to our discussions.

Our political discourse has been infected. The struggle for economic justice for South Africa’s black majority has taken on a sinister tone. It has an edge to it. The hardline party Black First Land First, for instance, has attacked journalists and demonstrated outside the homes of political activists who have spoken out against the Guptas’ hold over the presidency and the state. The atmosphere echoes Uganda under Idi Amin’s presidency during the 1970s, when citizens of Indian origin were cast as the “monopoly” capitalists of the time.

We are a resilient nation, and we did not swallow the Bell Pottinger line whole. However, refocusing and getting back to rebuilding our nation will take a long time, because Bell Pottinger and the Guptas have left us a toxic gift.

If Bell Pottinger is so sorry about what happened here, why hasn’t it disclosed who briefed it, what the briefs were, and how they operated with these organisations?

The struggle for a united, nonracial, non-sexist and democratic nation, with full social justice for the formerly oppressed, continues. Bell Pottinger distracted us. South African civil society is not defeated. But we are limping.


• Justice Malala is a political commentator and author

Rodrigo Duterte’s son forced to deny ties to $125 million narcotics bust as Philippines' war on drugs rages on

Ruthless President's eldest offspring Paolo, 42, Vice Mayor of Davao City, brands accusations linking him to illegal trafficking from China 'baseless'

Davao's Vice Mayor Paolo Duterte and son of President Rodrigo Duterte takes an oath as he testifies at a Senate hearing on drug smuggling in Pasay, Metro Manila Erik De Castro/Reuters

 Sep 7, 2017

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s son has told a Senate inquiry he had no links to a seized shipment of $125 million worth of narcotics from China, dismissing as “baseless” the allegations of his involvement in the drugs trade.

Opponents of the President, who has instigated a fierce crackdown on a trade he says is destroying the country, say they believe his son Paolo may have helped ease the entry of the drug shipment at the port in Manila, the capital.

On Tuesday Duterte said he had told Paolo to attend the senate investigation if he had nothing to hide, besides advising him not to answer questions and invoke his right to keep silent.

“I cannot answer allegations based on hearsay,” Paolo Duterte, the vice mayor of the southern city of Davao, told the Senate.

“My presence here is for the Filipino people and for my fellow Davaoeños whom I serve,” he added, referring to the people of Davao, where his father served as mayor for more than two decades before being elected President in 2016.

The Philippine leader has repeatedly said he would resign if critics could prove any members of his family were involved in corruption.

Senator Antonio Trillanes, a staunch critic of the President, displayed to the Senate panel photographs of Paolo Duterte beside a businessman who was behind the shipment in which the alleged drugs were found.

The President’s son-in-law, Manases Carpio, who has also been accused of links to the May drug shipment from China, told the hearing he had no involvement.

Duterte unleashed his bloody campaign the day he took office on 30 June last year, after promising Filipinos he would use deadly force to wipe out crime and drugs.

Police records show more than 3,800 people have died in police operations since July last year, and more than 2,100 other reported murders are linked to drugs.

Police reject activists’ allegations that they are executing suspected drug users and dealers and say officers shoot only in self-defence.

Trillanes said he had intelligence information from an undisclosed foreign country that Paolo Duterte was a member of a criminal syndicate, citing as proof a “dragon-like” tattoo with secret digits on his back.

Asked about the tattoo, Duterte said he had one, but declined to describe it, invoking his right to privacy.

Asked by Trillanes if he would allow a photograph to be taken of the tattoo and sent to the US Drug Enforcement Agency to decode secret digits, Duterte said: “No way”.

He refused to respond to questions about his bank accounts, calling them “irrelevant”.

Presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella said the attendance of Duterte and Carpio “demonstrates that both gentlemen are willing and ready to face malicious allegations intended to impugn their character and credibility.”

Aung San Suu Kyi’s Nobel Peace Prize: 3 things you should know

For some, Suu Kyi's actions now look like a betrayal of all the hopes she inspired with her Nobel award. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

By Lee Lian Kong | 7th September 2017

NATIONAL leaders get criticised all the time for not doing the right thing.

But when it comes to Aung San Suu Kyi and the backlash she now faces for her reaction to the recent Rohingya crisis, the backlash has an added dimension to it: She’s a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

More than thousands have fled their homes in Burma’s Rakhine State after an attack by a few Rohingya insurgents late August prompted the country’s military to retaliate by burning their homes and opening fire. Many are wounded and in dire conditions, as they set on an exodus to neighbouring Bangladesh – a situation the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warn is a risk of ‘ethnic cleansing’.

SEE ALSO: ‘This is a true crisis’: UN calls for shelter for Rohingya fleeing violence

Suu Kyi was supposed to fix this when she became the country’s de facto leader after the country’s 2015 general elections. Yet, the crisis has escalated into what is being called the ‘deadliest bout of violence’ to hit the persecuted minority in decades.

As pressure from states, rights bodies and even a fellow Nobel laureate on Twitter builds against Suu Kyi to halt the violence, so are calls for her Nobel Peace Prize to be revoked. There’s even a petition filed to confiscate her prize on Change.org -at the time of writing, supported by 361,344 people.

GeorgeMonbiot‏ @GeorgeMonbiot

A Nobel peace laureate complicit in crimes against humanity: for how long can this be sustained?

2:55 AM - 6 Sep 2017

But what’s the deal with her Peace Prize anyway? Are these calls justified? To help you make sense of this, here are three things you should know:

1. Why it was awarded in the first place

The Nobel committee conferred the honour on her in 1991 “for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights” and to draw the world’s attention to the struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma.

“In awarding the Nobel Peace Prize … to Aung San Suu Kyi,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said it wished “to honour this woman for her unflagging efforts and to show its support for the many people throughout the world who are striving to attain democracy, human rights and ethnic conciliation by peaceful means”.

They then added that Suu Kyi was “an important symbol in the struggle against oppression”.

Aung San Suu Kyi: Nobel Peace Prize Lecture

Suu Kyi had been placed on house arrest for almost 15 of the 21 years from her arrest in July 1989 after her movement to restore democracy to the country was deemed too popular by the military junta. She did not see her husband and sons for years. Her struggle was one of patience and resilience despite the costs to her and her family in the name of freedom. She was a hero then, and rightly so.

2. Not the first time people are calling for her award to be revoked

Doubts over Suu Kyi’s award have been made as early as May 2015 when thousands of Rohingya refugees began arriving in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. This sent the region into a humanitarian crisis as nations scrambled to decide who shall let them take refuge while thousands lay stranded on rickety boats with their lives at risk.  Hundreds died.

Suu Kyi did not condemn or fully acknowledge this. Penny Green, a law professor at the University of London wrote in an op-ed in The Independent that her silence makes her complicit, saying the opposition leader then could have challenged “the vile racism and Islamophobia which characterises Burmese political and social discourse”.

Journalist Mehdi Hasan wrote in Al Jazeera: “Shouldn’t we expect more from a Nobel Peace Prize laureate?”

Listen 2 Mehdi Hasan carefully & U also raise your voice 2 help stop the genocide of Rohingya Muslims @foreignoffice @StateDept @mfa_russia pic.twitter.com/RWGFE2GVBG

— Mohammad Anwar (@MAnwarMQM) September 5, 2017

Mohammad Anwar‏Verified account @MAnwarMQM

Listen 2 Mehdi Hasan carefully & U also raise your voice 2 help stop the genocide of Rohingya Muslims @foreignoffice @StateDept @mfa_russiaSuu Kyi isn’t the first laureate to stir controversy either. Awards to former US President, Barack Obama (2009) and former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (1973) were deemed a mockery of the prize. As did the joint award to Israeli leaders Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, and the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

But Hasan made an important distinction between them and Suu Kyi:

“Rabin, Arafat, Obama … ultimately, of course, they’re all politicians. Suu Kyi was supposed to be something else, something more; a moral icon, a human rights champion, a latter-day Gandhi.”

Anwar Sha, president of Burmese Rohingya Community, who held protests in Sydney, Australia this week told Asian Correspondent: “She could do more”.

3. Award will most likely stay

In the 116-year history of the prize, no prize had ever been rescinded. According to Gunnar Stalstett, a former committee member, the committee will not be doing so in Suu Kyi’s case either.

Speaking to New York Times, Stalstett, who was also a deputy member of the committee in the year Suu Kyi received her award, said: “A peace prize has never been revoked and the committee does not issue condemnations or censure laureates”.

It’s not possible to revoke even, as laid out in Section 10 of the statutes of the Nobel Foundation which reads:

“No appeals may be made against the decision of a prize-awarding body with regard to the award of a prize.”

Stalstett said the award is not “a declaration of a saint” and the committee does not hold any responsibility after the award’s been given.

To Maznah Mohamad, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore’s department of Southeast Asian Studies, Suu Kyi’s Nobel Prize isn’t the issue. Speaking to Asian Correspondent, Maznah said the media attention on her human rights award was a “distraction” in the midst of more pressing issues.

“I don’t think revoking the prize would be the right way to solve the issue. I think the most immediate issue is to solve the problem.”

Spiral drawing test detects signs of Parkinson's

RMIT UNIVERSITYI-Computer software measures drawing speed and pen pressure to diagnose Parkinson's

6 September 2017

 

A test that involves drawing a spiral on a sheet of paper could be used to diagnose early Parkinson's disease.

Australian researchers have trialled software that measures writing speed and pen pressure on the page.

Both are useful for detecting the disease, which causes shaking and muscle rigidity.

The Melbourne team said the test could be used by GPs to screen their patients after middle age and to monitor the effect of treatments.

The study, published in Frontiers of Neurology, involved 55 people - 27 had Parkinson's and 28 did not.

Speed of writing and pen pressure while sketching are lower among Parkinson's patients, particularly those with a severe form of the disease.

RMIT UNIVERSITYI-Treatment options are effective only when the disease is diagnosed early

In the trial, a tablet computer with special software took measurements during the drawing test and was able to distinguish those with the disease, and how severe it was.

Poonam Zham, study researcher from RMIT University, said: "Our aim was to develop an affordable and automated electronic system for early-stage diagnosis of Parkinson's disease, which could be easily used by a community doctor or nursing staff."

The system combines pen speed and pressure into one measurement, which can be used to tell how severe the disease is.

David Dexter, deputy research director at Parkinson's UK, said current tests for the disease were not able to accurately measure how advanced someone's condition was.

"This can impact on the ability to select the right people for clinical research, which is essential to develop new and better treatments for Parkinson's.

"This new test could provide a more accurate assessment by measuring a wider range of features that may be affected by Parkinson's, such as co-ordination, pressure, speed and cognitive function."

He added that the test could be a "stepping stone" to better clinical trials for Parkinson's.

Forfeited Wellawatte Residence Case Plight of the Citizenry under Emergency Laws

Journalist J. S. Tissainayagam, a Tamil was arrested under the PTA in 2008  and later indicted on charges of inciting communal hatred.

2017-09-06

The recent Supreme Court order handing over a Wellawatte property -- forfeited during the Rajapaksa regime on the instruction of the Police and taken over by the Terrorist Investigation Division -- to its rightful owners, is a typical indicator of the manner in which emergency regulations impinged the legal rights of the citizenry and the excesses that could be carried out with seeming impunity.

The Emergency (Proscription of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) Regulations 2009 allowed the Minster of Defence (who incidentally was the President)to declare as forfeited any property supposedly used by terrorists and to be appropriated by the state. Although the section itself required due prior investigations to be made, but it transpired otherwise.

“All attended facts and circumstances considered, I hold that the forfeiture of the petitioners’ property by the order (P10E) made by His Excellency the President in his capacity as the Minister of Defence has infringed the petitioner’s fundamental right under Article 12(1) of the Constitution, and the said order forfeiting the premises bearing assessment no. 18/1 Chapel Lane Wellawatte, Colombo 6, in terms of Regulation 7(1) of the Emergency (proscription of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam) Regulations 2009, is null and void and is hereby quashed,” Justice B P Aluwihare ruled, with Justices Priyasath Dep and Anil Gooneratne agreeing.

The fundamental Rights enshrined in Chapter 3 of the Constitution do allow restrictions, under emergency regulations as well as the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Yet Superior Court decisions have urged that such wide and sweeping powers vested on the state security apparatus be exercised only according to law and not otherwise. The law lays down procedural safeguards when encroaching upon the constitutionally guaranteed rights of subjects of the Supreme Law which is the Constitution itself. Besides, there are universally accepted rights which are absolute i.e. right to be free from torture, that could not be deprived by any domestic law.

In a constitutional democracy, which we supposedly are, citizens are not susceptible to arbitrary action by the State, be it with regard to their physical person, civil rights or property rights. The classical definition being so, one is not oblivious to the extraordinary circumstances wherein the State found itself and the attendant need to take swift, drastic, not necessarily democratic decisions. The citizenry were not totally averse to being compelled to sacrifice a degree of their Constitutional freedom in face of a dangerous and murderous enemy warring against the state and posing a threat to the very democratic mode of governance the Constitution envisaged; hence the putting up with restriction of their rights. When Chandrika Bandaranaike told the country to tighten their seat belts, it was not merely an allusion to the economical hardships attendant with war, but to this curtailment of civil rights as well.

The judiciary too seemed to have fallen in line with the Legislative and Executive arms of the State allowing the security apparatus sweeping and wide discretion in dealing with those suspected of involvement with terror. The plight of Tamil youth produced before law courts for obtaining detention orders is a case in point of the judiciary becoming a mere stamp of official endorsement of detention orders. As I have pointed out in an earlier article, not only the judiciary , but the entire criminal justice system capitulated to Executive action, to the detriment of the rights of the citizen. It appeared as if a Tamil terrorist suspect was, firstly, not a citizen of this country in terms of whose rights the justice system was a guardian and secondly, found guilty even before trial. A report by the International Bar Association raised concern over this state of affairs and lamented that their right, inter alia, for access to the law was blatantly denied where even the Legal Aid Service, which otherwise does a laudable service, had pursued a silent policy of not representing those youth, who, being brought to Colombo had very slim chance, if any, of being legally represented.

Bleak also, was the Fundamental Rights horizon for of those who had come in to contact with the Emergency Regulations and the PTA provisions. A ‘deferential attitude’ towards the executive , as Jayantha De Almeida, Kishali Pinto Jayawardena and Gehan Gunatileke point out in their excellent book The Judicial Mind in Sri Lanka: Responding to the Protection of Minority Rights, was the order of the day and rarely did the Judiciary wish to remonstrate on behalf of the citizenry, whose judicial power, it happens to exercise.

One might retort firstly, that it was the past and such occurrences are not the order of the present day and secondly, that those were extraordinary times. But the draconian Emergency Regulations as well as the PTA still constitute part of our law book and could be resorted to any time. If times of war were extraordinary in nature, should it necessarily trigger an extraordinary collapse of the Criminal justice system, which in effect seems to be the case viz a viz all security calamities the nation has faced since independence.

At a time of much hype on Constitutional reforms and talk about the PTA being replaced by alternative counter terror legislation, it is crucial that the legislators are constantly reminded of the excesses committed during periods of civil turmoil under an emergency law regime in dealing with terrorism. Conceded, one must not be oblivious to modern day realities of the threats that terrorism, separatism, extremism and anarchy pose to the nation state and the consequent need to counter them firmly and swiftly; yet the proven delicateness of the judicial and criminal justice components of the rights equation in times of such pressure, too, must send red signals when drafting such legislation for the future.

The rightful owners of the property at Wellawatte are an extremely lucky minuscule portion of our citizenry, hard done by the draconian actions of the State during emergency times; the overwhelming majority have hardly had access to, let alone success in, a court house to vindicate their rights. Some have lost their lives, others their loved ones, yet others have left even their ancestral homes preferring self-imposed exile over persecution. Some youth rounded up on no definite charges at all, languish in detention, seeking either prosecution or release, neither of which , seems forthcoming.

The Supreme Court decision emphasizes that the discretion vested in any State authority, should be exercised cautiously, based on facts and after investigation, which in this case were blatantly absent. As regards drastic measures depriving individuals of their property, in particular, the authority should be doubly sure, as it could impinge on the right of a person to equal protection under the law in terms of Article 12 (1) of the Constitution.   Yet again, and invariably, it bottles down to the question of the political will of the authority concerned; whether it is concerned about the rights of the subjects or in utter disregard to them. If the general modus operandi is more reflective of the latter, the outcome is hardly surprising.

Does any one beg to differ?

The Supreme Court decision in Case No. SC FR Application 15/2010 is available online athttp://supremecourt.lk/images/documents/sc_fr_15_2010.pdf
(nothingbutthetruthdm@yahoo.com)