Sunday, March 17, 2019

Dissecting the 52-day saga: A forensic analysis by a forensic expert

Monday, 18 March 2019

A Presidential shocking of a nation

It was 7:30 in the evening on 26 October 2018. The day being a typical Friday, Sri Lankans had been settled for yet another uneventful weekend. Many had sat in front of TV sets watching their favourite teledramas. Suddenly, viewers got alerted by a news flash that started blinking on their TV screens. Later, when the full details were out, it was shocking news. It said that President Maithripala Sirisena had appointed his arch rival, former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, as Prime Minister sacking his partner in politics for four years, the sitting Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.

Giving birth to a 52-day saga

This executive action which the President and his supporters maintained as an exercise of the discretionary powers which he has got under the constitution gave birth to a man-made constitutional crisis unprecedented in the history of the country. For 52 days, two people, Mahinda Rajapaksa and Ranil Wickremesinghe, claimed to be the Prime Minister of the country. It not only confused Sri Lankans but also the international community.

All the major embassies and international organisations kept a watchful eye on the political and constitutional developments in the country. Both the International Monetary Fund and the US based Millennium Corporation even suspended two credit lines already approved for the country. Strangely, the new Prime Minister appointed by President Sirisena was congratulated only by one country – the unknown African nation called Burundi. China too which has a significant economic stake in Sri Lanka did not accept the new Prime Minister though its Ambassador to Sri Lanka had reportedly met Rajapaksa in his private residence.

The bureaucrats who have to run the country on the direction of the political leadership too were confused since there were two governments. Though they sided with the President because he was the Executive President, it was done only as a call of duty. Thus, it was a period of chaos as well as suspense.

Rajapaksa Government

Rajapaksa who had the backing of Sirisena went on to appointing a Cabinet of Ministers from the political group he had been leading called the Joint Opposition initially and later from the official Sri Lanka Freedom Party or SLFP. This was made possible because those who had held positions under Wickremesinghe had lost their posts when he was sacked. When some of them attempted to visit their ministries, they were manhandled by those who claimed to be the supporters of the Rajapaksa government. The new Cabinet, in order to bid the support of the public, made mid-night announcement of a series of reliefs which were not affordable, given the country’s perilous state of finances. But the public at large was aloof to the announcements since there was a feeling that they could be removed at any time.

A holed up Wickremesinghe

Meanwhile, Wickremesinghe got himself holed up in the Temple Trees, the official residence of the country’s Prime Minister, supported by his party men. The purpose was to continue the agitation against what his party termed as an unconstitutional decision by Sirisena and regain the lost premiership.

It was a chaotic time marked by uncertainty about the future, on one side, and mistrust in everyone, on the other. The original battle was between Sirisena and Wickremesinghe. But it soon became a battle between Sirisena and the UNP side in Parliament. The UNP side was led by Speaker Karu Jayasuriya and therefore, it also became a battle between Sirisena and Jayasuriya. When the matter was taken up in courts, it soon became a battle between Sirisena and the judicial system. Finally, it was resolved by courts in favour of Wickremesinghe compelling Sirisena to re-swear him after 52 days as the Prime Minister despite his earlier pronouncements that he would not do so under any circumstance.

A forensic dissection by a forensic expert

While this story is still hot news, a forensic expert – Emeritus Senior Professor Ravindra Fernando – has dissected the 52 day saga and incorporated his findings into a book titled ‘The Fifty Two Day Saga: Political Crisis in Sri Lanka’ just published by Vijitha Yapa Publications. This is the first authentic book on the so called saga. It is also the 25th book which Fernando has authored during his second career as a writer.

Saga from beginning to end

The book contains 11 chapters covering the entire saga from the beginning to the end. It is a report providing facts as they are without taking a side. The analysis into the chain of events during the 52 day period by the author is limited. But it has reproduced all the source material such as the determination of the Supreme Court, press notices and press interviews given by the main contenders – Sirisena, Rajapaksa and Wickremesinghe – to enable any other researcher to come up with his own analysis.

Derangement of two political allies

Chapter 1 is a long essay on the beginning of the political crisis that led to the sacking of Wickremesinghe and the appointment of Rajapaksa. An English rendering of President Sirisena’s address to the nation explaining the reasons from his side for his actions has been fully reproduced in this chapter.

It appears that his main grudge had been against Wickremesinghe and not the United National Party per se. This is a strange development since Sirisena and Wickremesinghe were thick political pals immediately before the Presidential election in January 2015 and in the few months following it. During this period, Sirisena in fact played an accommodating role rather than a dominating one. He took a back seat in the administration of the country allowing Wickremesinghe to have a free go in designing and implementing policy. When the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was before Parliament, there was doubt that it could get the necessary parliamentary majority for safe passage. At that time, he stepped into supporting Wickremesinghe by securing the votes of the UPFA faction in Parliament in its favour. But he always maintained that it was a team effort giving due credit to Wickremesinghe.

This executive action which the President and his supporters maintained as an exercise of the discretionary powers which he has got under the Constitution gave birth to a man-made constitutional crisis unprecedented in the history of the country. For 52 days, two people, Mahinda Rajapaksa and Ranil Wickremesinghe, claimed to be the Prime Minister of the country. It not only confused Sri Lankans but also the international community.

The battle between Sirisena and Wickremesinghe is continuing to the dismay of the all civic minded citizens of the country. The public display of the conflict between the two heads of state is not salutary for the future of the country. No nation can progress if the two leaders seek to drag the country in the opposite direction. But the two leaders behave as if they are totally oblivious of the damage they are causing the country.

It is on record that he even went to extent of dissolving Parliament hours before a report on a COPE inquiry into the infamous bond scam in the Central Bank suspected to be embarrassingly implicating Wickremesinghe was to be released. Before the Parliamentary Elections of August 2015, when Rajapaksa was closing on the ruling UNP, he directly supported Wickremesinghe by publicly announcing that even if Rajapaksa got majority in Parliament, he would not appoint him as the Prime Minister.
That was the type of political cohabitation which Sirisena and Wickremesinghe had in this initial period. Hence, it is interesting to identify how this derangement occurred between them after the elections.

Reasons for derangement

Sirisena has attributed two reasons for the breakup with Wickremesinghe. One is the cover-up of the infamous central bank bond scam by Wickremesinghe despite the many warnings given by him as the Head of the State. The other is the purported inaction by Wickremesinghe administration regarding an alleged coup attempt at the life of Sirisena and that of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, brother of the former President Mahinda Rajapaksa. According to Sirisena when the coup details were revealed, instead of taking prompt action, the government led by Wickremesinghe had just sat on it pretending that it was a fake story. Sirisena is of the opinion that this was a serious dereliction of duty given the seriousness of the complaint made. While there is evidence to suggest that Sirisena is justified in his assertion regarding the first charge, the second one is yet to be proved. However, the complaint against the life of the President may be a fake as was held by UNP. Yet, it is the duty of the Wickremesinghe government to present the true facts to the people after conducting a proper inquiry into the complaint. In this respect, the Wickremesinghe government had failed.

Wickremesinghe’s inaction on the bond scam

In the case of the infamous bond scam, Sirisena had given enough warnings to Wickremesinghe. When the story was out immediately after the first scam on 27 February 2015, Sirisena who was abroad at that time had instructed his Secretary to take action to appoint a Commission of Inquiry into it. But, it is felt by the public that this was thwarted by Wickremesinghe by appointing an administrative committee of three lawyers from the inner circles of UNP.

Though the committee had given a clean certificate to the Governor Arjuna Mahendran, it had recommended that the scam should be properly investigated since there had been an irregularity in the issue of bonds on that occasion. This was not attended to by the Wickremesinghe government.

Then, before the elections in August 2015, Sirisena came on TV and said that he had advised Wickremesinghe to remove Mahendran and have his name cleared. This too was not adhered to. Finally, a special presidential commission was appointed by Sirisena to inquire into alleged bond scams from February 2015 to April 2016. The Commission, while reporting that there had been bond scams, did not find evidence against Wickremesinghe. However, it had recommended action against Arjuna Mahendran and the primary dealer in question. While the top leaders in the primary dealer in question have been taken to courts on a complaint made by the Central Bank, no action has been taken to apprehend the former Governor of the Central Bank. Any action on the recommendation of the Bond Commission is yet to be initiated. This was the grievance which Sirisena had against Wickremesinghe with respect to bond scams.

Violation of the Constitution?

However, the question is whether they were sufficiently justifiable reasons to sack a Prime Minister without going through the provisions of the Constitution and place the country at risk with respect to the economy, politics, good governance and international reputation. This is what Fernando has tried to answer in the rest of the book on the 52 day saga. He has documented in minute detail the events that took place during this dark period of the country.

The determination by the Supreme Court

Sirisena was supported in his action by the members of the new political party, Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna or SLPP, Sri Lanka Freedom Party or SLFP, the minor political parties representing the left and a few civil society leaders. Wickremesinghe was supported by UNP, all other constituent parties in the United National Front or UNF, Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna or JVP and the Tamil National Alliance or TNA. Hence, Wickremesinghe had the Parliamentary Majority whereas Rajapaksa had to still gain it.

There were reports that several of the MPs belonging to this group had been coaxed to join the Rajapaksa camp on the offer of numerous gratifications. Despite these moves, Wickremesinghe managed to keep them united under his leadership and that was the main strength which he showed throughout the saga. When the matter could not be resolved through Parliament, it was brought before the country’s highest level of judiciary, namely, the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court. Fernando has reproduced the judgment of the Supreme Court in full so that any interested reader could make his own conclusion about the constitutionality of the action taken by President Sirisena on the dissolution of Parliament and setting dates for a new general election.

The Supreme Court had found that the President has no powers to dissolve Parliament under the 19th Amendment to the Constitution of which he himself was an architect before the expiry of a four and a half year period from the date of the election. Hence, the dissolution of Parliament was unconstitutional and the status quo prior to 26 October 2018 was restored. It compelled Sirisena to reappoint Wickremesinghe as the Prime Minister and swear in a Cabinet of Ministers according to his recommendation. That saw the end of the first phase of the 52 day political saga in Sri Lanka.

The battle continues

However, though Fernando has not touched upon it, the saga is not yet over. The battle between Sirisena and Wickremesinghe is continuing to the dismay of the all civic minded citizens of the country. The public display of the conflict between the two heads of state is not salutary for the future of the country. No nation can progress if the two leaders seek to drag the country in the opposite direction. But, the two leaders behave as if they are totally oblivious of the damage they are causing to the country.

Fernando should be commended for bringing this story in book form for the benefit of all those interested in knowing what happened during this dark period in Sri Lanka’s history. His reader-friendly writing style has made the book more valuable. The only weakness I observe is that he has chosen to use the respectful address ‘Hon’ in front of all the key players in the saga. In a book like this, the tradition has been to call them by their name and it is not a show of disrespect to them. The wise do not get offended if they are addressed by their name.
(The writer, a former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, can be reached at waw1949@gmail.com.)

ACTING APPOINTMENT TO CA – LAWYERS FOR DEMOCRACY GO TO SC AGAINST SIRISENA

16/03/2019

(DM/16.03.19)Lawyers for Democracy yesterday filed a rights petition in the Supreme Court challenging the acting appointment made to the post of Court of Appeal President.

Petitioners Lal Wijenayake, G.A. Sunil Jayaratne, Luxman Jothikumar and R.A. Namal Rajapakse allege that the 12th respondent Justice Deepali Wijesundera has been repeatedly and successively appointed as the Acting President of the Court of Appeal from January 9, 2019 up to date.

They state that Justice Wijesundera is made party to their application on account of the fact that the actions mentioned in their application impacts on her as well, having been designated by the President.

The Attorney General, Members of the Constitutional Council, Justice Deepali Wijesundera and President’s Secretary Udaya Ranjith Seneviratne were cited as respondents.

They named the Attorney General as the 1st respondent and a party to the case in terms of the law as he is the Chief Legal Officer of the country and that action can be filed against the Attorney General in respect of anything done or omitted by the President in his official capacity.

Petitioners claim that from January 9, 2019, the Court of Appeal is without a lawfully and duly appointed President as mandated by Article 137 of the Constitution.

The Article 137 reads, “The Court of Appeal shall consist of President of the Court of Appeal and less than six and not more than eleven other judges who shall be appointed as provided in Article 107.”

The petition state that the Constitutional Council had not approved the initial acting appointment and that the several consecutive “acting appointments” to the Court of Appeal is arbitrary, capricious, irrational and ultra vires the Constitution.

They said such action have an adverse impact on the dispensation of the administration of justice.

The petitioners said the President is constitutionally bound to make a permanent appointment to the position of President of the Court of Appeal with the approval of the Constitutional Council as required by the Constitution. (S.S. Selvanayagam/Daily Mirror)

Roads not taken and their destinations

Featured image by NewsFirst

“Not only our actions, but also our inactions, become our destiny.”

Heinrich Zimmer (The King and the Corpse)

TISARANEE GUNASEKARA- 03/17/2019

On the night of January 2nd, 2006, five students were killed in Trincomalee. Shanmugarajah Gajendran, Lohitharaja Rohan, Thangathurai Sivanantha, Yogarajah Hemachandran and Manoharan Rajihar, all of them either engaged in or about to engage in higher studies, had gathered near the sea front to celebrate the New Year. A bomb was thrown at them from a passing three-wheeler, and the injured youth were gunned down, allegedly execution style, about 20 minutes later.

The authorities claimed that the young men were LTTE operatives, and died when the bomb they were carrying exploded. The truth came out to thanks to the courage of the District Medical Officer, Dr. Gamini Gunatunga. Dr. Gunatunga, a Sinhalese, did the post-mortem and testified that the victims had been shot to death.

At that point, the Rajapaksa administration had a choice – ensure an impartial investigation, protect the witnesses, allow the courts to do their job. It wasn’t as if the political authorities were unaware of the truth. According to a Wikileaks cable, in a conversation with the then American Ambassador, Basil Rajapaksa said, “We know the STF did it, but the bullet and gun evidence show that they did not. They must have separate guns when they want to kill someone.”[i]

The government had nothing to do with the murder. But it had everything to do with the subversion of justice. The political authorities took a political decision to banish law and install impunity in its stead. As a result, the suspected killers, after a brief stint in remand, roamed free while the families of the victims faced harassment and threats.

The Trinco-5 case was an early warning of what was to come, the myth of a humanitarian operation with zero-civilian casualties. That myth was enabled by a consistent policy of banding every dead or injured Tamil a Tiger-victim or a Tiger. That policy began in earnest with Trinco-5. From then on, impunity would be not partial (as it was previously) but absolute. The result was a permissive environment in which even preventable crimes and avoidable mistakes became inevitable. When the aid workers massacre in Muttur happened a few months later, the UTHR pointed out the connection. “One thing is certain about the ACF killings. They would not have happened if minimally, timely disciplinary action had been taken against SP Kapila Jayasekere once his role in the Five Students outrage became widely known. Instead he was promoted to SSP in July 2006.”[ii]

Ending impunity and bringing about justice was a key promise of the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe administration. But the steps taken in this regard were small and hesitant. Instead of prosecuting at least some of the crimes vigorously, the government dragged its feet, sent mixed signals, and allowed a section of the defence establishment to blatantly ignore court orders. As a result, justice remains undone, killers roam free, and the foundation of future crimes are laid.

One of the most pernicious myths peddled by populist leaders is that justice can be compartmentalised, that injustice can be rendered non-contiguous. The Sinhala majority believed that the carte blanche given to ‘war heroes’ would pose no threat to their own safety. Under Rajapaksa rule, indifference to injustice in the North and the East was turned into a patriotic duty. But impunity cannot be dammed or guided, as the abduction-murder of two businessmen in Rathgama demonstrates yet again. Had the victims been Tamil, they could have been called Tigers; had they been Muslim, they could have been called Islamic fundamentalists. Since they were Sinhala, there are attempts to claim that they were members of the underworld, a euphemism used during the Rajapaksa years to justify extra-judicial killing of Sinhalese.

Had the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe administration acted decisively to bring justice to at least some victims of uniformed killers – such as the 12 young men suspected to have been abducted and murdered by a for-profit Navy gang – the Rathgama crime might not have happened. The lesson is clear; so long as members of the armed forces and the police are placed above the law, and attempts to prosecute them for crimes committed is depicted as acts of anti-patriotism, impunity will survive, and claim its victims from anywhere in Sri Lanka, from any ethnic or religious group, any walk of life, any profession, including the military and the police.

The indivisibility of Injustice

During the Fourth Eelam War, General Parakrama Pannipitiya headed the victorious Eastern offensive against the LTTE. In early 2009, he was arrested by the police on a charge of treasure-hunting. The real reason for the arrest was his ongoing conflict with Gen. Sarath Fonseka. In 2008, Gen. Pannipitiya’s security was withdrawn suddenly, and he was forced to seek judicial intervention. The Supreme Court, overruling the objections of the Attorney General, issued an interim order allowing General Pannipitiya to use his staff quarters and retain vehicles and escorts he was entitled to as Commander of the Security Forces (East). In delivering the order, Justice Nimal Gamini Amaratunga said, “Over the media, Api Wenuwen Api is aired every half an hour but people like the petitioner don’t even have themselves.”[iii]

That was 2008, when the Mahinda-Gotabhaya-Fonseka triumvirate ruled the roost. Post-war, the triumvirate fell apart, reportedly for the same reasons Gen. Fonseka developed an enmity towards Gen. Pannipitya, the division of spoils. Gen. Fonseka wanted his share of the glory, and the Rajapaksas were not in a sharing mood. With himself out of favour, Gen. Fonseka was unable to keep Gen. Pannipitiya incarcerated. After all, it was not he but the Rajapaksa brothers who controlled the police and the AG’s Department. In mid-2008, charges against Gen. Pannipitiya were dropped, and he was freed. In a few months, Gen. Fonseka himself was jailed on spurious charges.

In February 2010, Gen. Pannipitiya’s wife, in an interview with the state owned Daily News, revealed how her husband was persecuted by Gen. Fonseka, and called Gen. Fonseka’s own incarceration a “retribution of Kamma.”[iv] The real reason for both miscarriages of justice was impunity. If the rule of law prevailed, neither general would have been arrested for a crime he didn’t commit. Sarath Fonseka could persecute Parakrama Pannipitya because the rule of law had been replaced by the law of the rulers; the Rajapaksa brothers could persecute Sarath Fonseka for the same reason.

Lord Acton in his famous letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton argued against bestowing immunity on men in power: “You say that people in authority are not to be snubbed or sneezed at…. I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong.”[v] The argument remains more valid than ever today, especially in places in Sri Lanka beset by all too many sacred cows.

Impunity corrodes morality and encourages crime. Eventually, impunity saves none and can endanger all, including those who once enjoyed its protection. In 2012, Minister Mervyn Silva’s son, Malaka Silva and his friend Rehan Wijeratne assaulted Major Chandana Pradeep of the Military Intelligence. Eventually the major was forced to take the blame on himself, because the Rajapaksa brothers, those crusaders for the safety and honour of war-heroes, opted not to back this particular war-hero. Malaka Silva’s father was a favoured stooge; and Rehan Wijeratne’s mother was the chairperson of the Ranjan Wijeratne Foundation which funded the book, Gota’s War.[vi]

A similar outcome might be in the making today, concerning the killing of a police inspector in Borella. The suspects are all politically-connected brats, driving at breakneck speed. When the case was taken up, journalists were not allowed to enter the court, an indication of political interference. The President, who has appointed himself as the guardian of the military and the police, is yet to condemn this incident, or to visit the bereaved family. A similar silence prevails in the UNP and the SLPP. In the end, the family members of the inspector might find themselves in the same company as the family members of Trinco-5 and innumerable other victims of impunity and injustice.

Economic injustice lives on

Almost a decade after the war, defence continues to claim the largest chunk of government expenditure. For the year of 2019, defence has been allocated Rs. 393 billion, while health gets Rs. 187.4 billion and primary and secondary education Rs. 105 billion.

To prevent a new Southern insurgency, Sri Lanka needs lower living costs and higher living standards, better paying jobs and greater hope, not more warships. To prevent a new outburst of separatism, Sri Lanka needs reconciliation and reconstruction and a workable political solution, not more military helicopters. Spending more on defence when the priorities are clearly otherwise, will not make us safer; it will make us more unsafe.

The Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government could have explained the reality to the people – more money for guns means less money for everything else – education, health, a decent system of public transportation, better roads and other basic infrastructure, more research and development. In a war situation, such a trade-off makes sense; it is necessary. In a time of peace it is criminally stupid.

In Sri Lanka, there’s no military-industrial complex. What is there is a military-commercial complex. That military-commercial complex is as much of a bar to reducing military expenditure as the military industrial complex is in a country like the US. When expensive military hardware is imported, local agents and their political backers benefit, and benefit enormously. No wonder that we are buying helicopters instead of building houses in the North, buying warships instead of upgrading education in the Deep South.

Economic justice was a top promise of the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe administraiton. The leaders spoke about the iniquitous system of taxation prevalent in Sri Lanka, blamed the Rajapaksas for imposing a proportionately greater tax burden on the poor and the middle classes than on the rich, and promised to correct the imbalance. Under Rajapaksa rule, the ratio between indirect to direct taxes was a morally unacceptable and economically damaging 80:20. By reducing the purchasing power of a majority/plurality of people, such extreme levels of taxation undermines the prospects of small and medium scale enterprises, and thereby economic growth, and income and employment generation.

Budget 2019 provided the government with a last chance to deliver a measure of fairness, of justice in the all important realm of economics. It failed. And so long as that fundamental inequity remains unchanged, the government will have no option but to impose more and more indirect taxes on people who are less and less able to absorb the resultant economic shocks. In the fortnight since the budget was presented, the prices of fuel and bread has gone up, and the price of milk powder is slated to follow suit. This is a path to greater inequality, a path which will eventually veer away from democracy and carry Sri Lanka back to the autocratic past, with the freely given consent of a majority of her people.

Inequality is a choice, as Joseph Stiglitz pointed out.[vii] When open democracies fail to address – or even acknowledge the gravity of – inequality, an antithetical narrative gains ground, like now. According to this narrative, the rampant and persistent inequality many countries are afflicted by doesn’t stem from Hayek’s triumph over Keynes, the codification of the Washington Consensus and the transformation of trickle-down economics into an article of faith. Inequality, this narrative claims, is a result of policies which favour the ‘Other,’ over ‘Us,’ The solution is the enthronement of a tough leader who can pack off immigrants, keep minorities in place and return the country to its ‘real owners.’

In Sri Lanka, this trend is evident in the putative presidential campaign of Gotabhaya Rajapaksa. His political platform is built on a carefully constructed narrative against liberal democracy. Rights are dismissed as counterproductive, freedoms excoriated as dangerous and democracy ridiculed as soft, flabby and ineffective. Complex problems are simplified, depicted as solvable through the ruthless exercise of Will by a powerful leader. In this narrative, warfare state is what a country needs to stay safe and get ahead. If the war on terror is over, there is always the war on crime, on drugs, on alien influences. And Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, reportedly chosen by Brother Mahinda as the SLPP presidential candidate, is definitely the man to drive us to that future of unending wars against eternal enemies.

[i] https://www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/wikileaks-stf-murdered-trinco-students-basil-to-us/

[ii] Special Report No. 30: Unfinished Business of the Five Students and the ACF Cases – 1.4.2008

[iii] Daily Mirror – 1.3.2008

[iv] http://archives.dailynews.lk/2010/02/13/news11.asp

[v] https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/165acton.html

[vi] http://dbsjeyaraj.com/dbsj/archives/10627

[vii] New York Times – 13.10.2013

Christchurch Massacre, White Supremacism & Islamophobia: Some Pertinent Reflections!

By Mohamed Harees –MARCH 17, 2019

Lukman Harees

“A monument will never change how she feels. It’s unfair that victims should have to forgive those who raped, tortured, and killed, or burned villages to the ground. On an Island of World Peace, shouldn’t those who inflicted terrible harm on others be forced to confess and atone, and not make widows and mothers pay for stone monuments?” ― Lisa See, The Island of Sea Women

For Muslims specially in the West, Friday Prayer is a day of community prayer, where families also travel to their local mosques – their religious sanctuary, where they gather in the early afternoon to pray as a community while their kids run through the halls as the imam recites the Quran in Arabic. On this fateful Friday just gone, the Muslim families in Christchurch in the idyllic New-Zealand were, on the contrary, preparing for funerals. As a shocked world awoke to the nightmare of the toll of New Zealand’s most deadly shooting and massacre at two mosques in Christchurch, in a carefully planned and unprecedented atrocity, with at least 49 people being gunned killed in cold blood and 20 being seriously injured, there were prayers around and political leaders across the world issued laudable statements of condemnation appearing as front line news. But a perplexed world began to ask: Is it mere the vile machinations of a deranged white supremacist terrorist or is it hate rhetoric of the politicians and media who has enabled anti-Muslim prejudice to become mainstream leading to their self-interested words helping to slay?

Massacre by its definition means ‘an indiscriminate and brutal slaughter of many people’. Many parallels could be found in the recent history all over the world. As Sri Lankans, who lived through the 30 year old civil war in the Island , we are quite familiar with these types of massacres. However, this deplorable mosque massacre in Christ-church will definitely bring back sad emotional memories of another which occurred in the East within the hallowed precincts of mosques in Kathankudy in 1990 carried out by the Tiger terrorists, killing 141 and injuring many. In fact, more than others, those fortunate ones who survived this Kathankudy massacre and experienced those deadly moments while prostrating in prayer to their Lord, could realistically empathize, and feel the fear and agony of those in the Christchurch mosques who were in a similar situation even 28 years later. They did not spare even a kid in the congregation, as some survivors then recounted. All of this type of hate attacks came from the brand of Fascism and Nationalism upheld by the Tigers, whose movement preached segregation and hatred rather than brotherhood, and that anyone different has “colonized” (a key Tiger nationalist code word for pointing out who to hate) the “Tamil Homeland”. Politics of division!

Writer and television co-host Waleed Aly in a recent Aussie TV discussion on the Christchurch tragedy captured the feelings in these types of massacres which happens within places of worship, quite succinctly. He said ‘’And I know the people who did this knew well enough how profoundly defenseless their victims were in that moment. This is a congregational prayer that happens every week like clockwork. This was slaughter by appointment. And it’s scary because, like millions of other Muslims, I’m going to keep attending those appointments and it feels like fish in a barrel’.

Hate-based attacks are never spontaneous because hate is something constructed, learnt, and normalised and based on raw extremist ideologies and political expediencies. It is a reality that those who committed these dreadful acts came to believe what they were doing was right, that they were protecting their group, their country, their loved ones from an outside threat, which makes acts of identity-based violence different to other forms of violence. In fact, the Christchurch killer clearly was a white far right supremacist who held extremist views about immigration and bore anti-Muslim hatred, as the manifesto he laid bare proved and showed no remorse in respect of his crime against humanity. In fact, he felt it was part of his life mission to do what he did. His role models and patrons included Trump and few other Western prominent Islamophobes and the likes of Australian Senator Anning who blamed the victims for the tragedy in horrid language. He was inspired by Anders Breivik, the far-right Norwegian terrorist who murdered 77 people in 2011, He live-streamed his despicable killing spree as he knew that he had a captive audience out there in the social media who were enthralled, motivated and enthused by his vile antics. He also played a song praising war criminal Karadzic as he drove to one of the mosques. To many youngsters and kids who were so used to video war games, this live streaming would have been sheer entertainment giving a sense of realism, rather than raising any remorse.

The New Zealand Massacre was thus made to go viral and the attack marked a grim new age of social media-fuelled terrorism. The horror was designed specifically for an era that has married social media and racism — a massacre apparently motivated by white extremist hatred, streamed live on Facebook and calculated to go viral. How well the online community worked in the gunman’s favour was quite scary! By providing oxygen by allowing this on their platforms, the many TV stations and internet platforms too became accomplice to the Christchurch killer.

The world is witnessing an era of worsening social disintegration, political polarisation, and rising prejudice. It’s clear that the dangers of white nationalism are growing and aren’t limited to the US as seen in the Trump era. This attack is a reminder that this dangerous ideology also threatens immigrant communities worldwide, and that it’s fuelled by leaders around the world. As Waleed Aly further echoed in the aforesaid Aussie TV discussion, ‘There’s nothing about what happened in Christchurch today that shocked me. I wasn’t shocked when six people were shot to death at a mosque in Quebec City two years ago. I wasn’t shocked when a man drove a van into Finsbury Park mosque in London about six months later and I wasn’t shocked when 11 Jews were shot dead in a Pittsburgh synagogue late last year or when nine Christians were killed at a church in Charleston. If we’re honest, we’ll know this has been coming’. Thus, there is an imperative need to tackle a growing and globalized ideology of white nationalism that must be addressed at its source, of which the Christchurch tragedy is only the latest manifestation. — which includes the mainstream politicians and media personalities who nurture, promote and excuse it. Thus, many have blood in their hands and should equally bear responsibility for this unforgivable tragedy.

Among white nationalists’ major motivators is “the great replacement” conspiracy theory. They fear that Jews, blacks and Muslims will replace white people and eventually subordinate them. Jews are often viewed as the diabolical head of the cabal, the nerve centre, who use their infinite wealth and power to reduce and weaken the white man. Standard white supremacist and far-right nationalist tropes, like fears of a “white genocide,” are sprinkled throughout the manifesto the gunman owned. There are also references to centuries-ago battles between Christians and Muslims ,which is certainly for a wider reach. The primary goal of the manifesto’s author was to prevent Muslims and non-whites from taking over Western society, calling on white-majority countries to “crush immigration,” deport non-whites and have more children to stop the decline of white populations.

#MeToo in Sri Lanka: Why it’s needed

Solution is to hit the problem in the face

women’s movement in Sri Lanka has been largely one still coping with and moderately reforming the structural anomalies in the system

15 March 2019

Ranbanda Seneviratne will be remembered, more than anything else, as the writer of ‘Landune.’ In the course of that song, Ranbanda compares the titular girl, a prostitute, to Patachara and Kisa Gotami, “without a husband,” “aimlessly wandering,” “sinning in secret,” “with only your breasts, and not soul, to see.” It’s one of the most poignant descriptions of a prostitute (and it reminds me of how the filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi treated such an outcaste in The Life of Oharu) that I’ve come across, and it was born, as with all such poignant works of art, from personal experience.

But then Ranbanda also wrote “Oba Gedara Enna,” which evokes sympathy for a married woman in a very different way: by emphasising how the belaboured wife, waiting for her husband, doesn’t at all care about what that husband (a womaniser, it is strongly implied) has done, and promises to prepare food for and tend to him when he returns home every night. It’s more searing than ‘Landune’ because she knows the true character of her husband (as we do) yet “will not ask where you went”; moreover, if in that other song the woman has been wronged by the public in the open, here the tragedy is taken into the private, domestic sphere.
Ratna Sri Wijesinghe once argued that the latter work “would not cut much ice with feminists.” At one level, I think he has a point. “Oba Gedara Enna” is not about an empowered woman or a woman who seeks empowerment. Like the protagonists of Sumitra Peries’ films, she exists, suffers, and exists to suffer: there is a turning away from her plight. But in the context of the time in which it was written – when feminism in the West had entered its third wave, but was yet to made inroads here – it was daring. And here I think Wijesinghe was wrong: it has a relevance that is at once contextual, and timeless. It reverberated then, and it reverberates now.

"Women who break the glass ceiling, by a miracle, are celebrated by the same media that denigrates them whenever they venture out of their prescribed zones"

Then as now, women in Sri Lanka continue to make giant strides – limited to a certain milieu, but occasionally, as Parami Wasanthi and Tharjini Sivalingam have shown, emerging from other backgrounds – in every field. But these giant strides, exceptional as they are and hyped by the media, hide certain unpalatable realities. For instance, while more than 57% of females in the public sector are professionally-qualified, they make up only 45% of the workforce. The picture is more disconcerting when it comes to national statistics: women comprise around 56% of the population, yet only 33.4% of them are economically active, leaving nearly 70% inactive.
What these numbers make clear is the systemic marginalisation of a segment of the population that (quoting another figure) makes up almost 65% of the professionally-qualified. The woman has been, and continues to be, relegated to the household; when she gains employment she has to play a dual role: employee and wife.
We are hypocrites. Women who break the glass ceiling, by a miracle, are celebrated by the same media that denigrates them whenever they venture out of their prescribed zones (I recall that obnoxious incident where a soprano’s voice was compared to the screeches of a dying cat); they are held up as “beacons of hope” in the same corporate sector that escapes scot-free whenever a woman who has been groped, threatened or assaulted goes unheard to a point where she, not her boss, has to leave the workplace (entering a world of insecurity); their

capacity for agency and autonomy is ignored in an education system in which sex education never goes beyond the identification of reproductive organs and memorisation of their functions.

In that sense, the women’s movement in Sri Lanka has been largely one still coping with and moderately reforming the structural anomalies in the system. For all their faults, Western countries – which incidentally embedded this system in countries like ours through colonialism – progressed not because they put mechanisms in place that shielded women in the household and office, but because women’s rights went beyond what we were tackling here: equality in employment, protection from marital rape and so forth. The fight for empowerment does not end in that sort of equality; it extends to other more complex issues. What we need, consequently, is a feminist narrative that goes beyond the usual, male-centric criteria of achievement.

It is my contention that Sri Lanka, sadly, is not yet ready to go beyond. We realise that there is a problem, and we have all come up with reasons for it: colonialism, religious conservatism, nationalism underscored by the image of the female as being fit for the household and kitchen (“a woman’s place”), and an education system that promotes ignorance of sexual matters on the one hand and promotes, by inaction, the culture of misogyny that’s rampant among schoolboys on the other. We are ready to indict these causes, to write essays on them, to come up with statistics as proof of the culture of toxic masculinity in the country. That is not enough.
We live in a country where we know what we do to our women is wrong even if it’s not illegal. We know that something as simple as wolf-whistling or flirting can evolve into something insidious. We know that referring to girls with derogatory epithets is disgusting. We know this, and many of us, when we grow up and become activists (or social justice warriors), take up the cause of women. But the subsection to which “we” belong is either a minority, or if it is not, is not willing to intrude on the root causes on which the issues it is combating rest.
Here I am not trivialising or marginalising the many people who put up a fight. I am criticising the inability of a great many of those many men who are not ready to take the narrative forward, since taking it forward would mean questioning the structures that gave rise to their cause. This has been buttressed by another issue: the movement for women’s rights, though representative of the country, has been largely limited to a specific milieu. These problems continue to eat away at our feminist movement, and it has undone the achievements we’ve clinched there.

To be fair, the second problem has been more or less solved. It’s been more than 40 years since Kumari Jayawardena observed that “all women do not as a whole belong to a separate homogeneous class,” and that they are not subject to the same forms of exploitation and oppression. Even if we have failed to grasp it, and concentrate the movement in the middle-class, we have come to terms with the fact that feminism in a country like ours cannot progress without accounting for the many sections of the community that exist and flourish with each other.
But even if we have – and this won’t happen for a long time – completely come to terms with this fact, we continue to look into equality of opportunity and protection from marital rape as the ultimate, only valid criteria of female empowerment, without delving into the underlying causes of such problems. We are cautious about elephants in the room: the culture of conformity that marginalises those who think differently in the classroom; the hooting and the wolf-whistling that have been normalised in gender differentiated schools; and the objectification of women as pieces (“kali”) and things (“badu”) that’s part of the schoolboy argot.

Again, people realise the ramifications of not addressing these issues. A survey I recently conducted unearthed an interesting anomaly. The results were, on the whole, rather characteristic and to be expected: a vast majority (88%) think that using those aforementioned demeaning epithets is unacceptable, though a significant percentage (41%) have used them, with a slightly smaller yet as significant percentage (32%) having tossed them around; it should be added here that more than two-thirds of the respondents were schoolboys around the ages of 17 and 18.
And yet, surprisingly, many of them believe that this is not necessarily a reason for us to regulate the way(s) in which female objectification emerges in the classroom. They realise it’s wrong, that it is not acceptable, and they have done it, but they don’t think it’s really bad; in fact they do not believe that the school culture we have at present, even if it does perpetuate such a culture, should be faulted for what it is and what it does. One person even suggested that such terms are normal when used jokingly, or justifiable when describing a schoolgirl “who has multiple guys.”

It is for these reasons that I don’t think we have really improved. We have improved from the time that Ranbanda wrote his song about the oppressed wife, when the West had progressed into the third wave of feminism and feminism was making its way to the country. But that is hardly a reason for complacency.
What’s the solution, then? The solution is to hit the problem in the face. It comes with a hashtag, ladies and gentlemen. #MeTooSL.

When Disenchantment Turns Radical

Tisaranee Gunasekara-March 16, 2019, 7:10 pm
"Inequality is a choice."
Joseph Stiglitz (New York Times – 13.10.2013)

"Godfather of inequality research," The Economist called Sir Anthony Atkinson. The sally came in a review of Prof. Atkinson’s book, Inequality: What can be done? Prof. Atkinson begins the book by defining what he means by inequality: "I’m not seeking to eliminate all differences in economic outcomes. I’m not aiming for total equality... Rather the goal is to reduce inequality below its current level in the belief that the present level of inequality is excessive." The aim therefore was not the peddling of a utopia but seeking ways to evade dystopia.

As open democracies fail to address – or even acknowledge the gravity of – income inequality, an antithetical narrative is gaining ground, again. According to this narrative, the rampant and persistent inequality many countries are afflicted by doesn’t stem from Hayek’s triumph over Keynes, the codification of the Washington Consensus and the transformation of trickle-down economics into an article of faith. Inequality, this narrative claims, is a result of policies which favour the ‘Other,’ over ‘Us,’ the national, the organic, the real. The solution is the enthronement of a tough leader who can pack off immigrants, keep minorities in place and return the country to its ‘real owners.’

This, for example, was the narrative adopted by the Trump campaign in the 2016 US Presidential election. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, 75% of American voters who went to the polls early on election morning said they want a "strong leader who can take the country back from the rich and the powerful."i Of course, as President, Mr. Trump has worked to help the rich and the powerful, at the expense of the poor and the powerless. For example, his recent budget include proposals to slash retirement benefits for federal workers, reducing allocations for food stamps, farm subsidies, crop insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, and education. The new Trump budget, if passed, will have a punitive effect on poor and middle class – and mostly white - Americans who voted for him in the belief that he will return the country to them.

In 2018, a group of European and British economists, historians and former politicians led by economist Thomas Piketty published a blueprint for a fairer EU. The Manifesto for the Democratisation of Europe identified four main issues which need to be prioritised if Europe was to remain united and democratic - inequality, migration, climate change and disenchantment. The inclusion of disenchantment in the list is timely. History, especially 20th Century history, demonstrates that disenchantment with the status quo can be a radical thing. There is every reason to believe that in the 21st Century too, disenchantment will play a key role in upending countries.

In Sri Lanka, this trend is evident in the putative presidential campaign of Gotabhaya Rajapaksa. His political platform is built on a carefully constructed narrative against liberal democracy. Rights are dismissed as counterproductive, freedoms excoriated as dangerous and democracy ridiculed as soft, flabby and ineffective. Complex problems are simplified, depicted as solvable through the ruthless exercise of Will by a powerful leader. In this narrative, warfare state is what a country and a people need to stay safe and get ahead. If the war on terror is over, there is always the war on crime, on drugs, on alien influences...

If the space has reopened for this anti-democratic narrative in Sri Lanka, it is thanks to the failures of the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe administration. A government, any government, is elected by multiple constituencies for multiple reasons, some mutually compatible, others not. This was particularly so in the case of both President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. But a majority of these divergent constituencies had one demand in common – reduction in their economic burden which had grown to unbearable levels thanks to Rajapaksa economics. According to an opinion poll carried out by the Centre for Policy Analysis in August 2014, cost-of-living was identified by a plurality of respondents as their number one problem. This was true for all Lankans, as well as for Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims and Upcountry Tamils.

Had the government kept its promise and worked to bring about a degree of economic fairness, economic justice, the electorate might have forgiven it for other failures. But the government opted not to, opted to implement a slightly sanitised version of Rajapaksa economics - sparing the rich, taxing the poor and spending on military hardware and physical infrastructure.

Four years on, the payback time is drawing near.

Clueless Economics

When statistics don’t reflect reality, policies made on the basis of those statistics too become unmoored from reality. This is the case in Sri Lanka in the realm of income statistics. The gap between the official figures and the observable reality is so wide, that the official figures seem more like fiction than fact. For example, in 2016, the richest 20% of the households (not individuals but households) was categorised as households receiving a monthly income of Rs. 81,372 or above.ii This categorisation is indicative of a problem that has a bearing both on economic policies and political outcomes – the extremely high levels of unreported income in the country.

Unreported income is also untaxed income. If the government was serious about shifting the country to a less economically unjust path, it should have made a concerted effort to correct this massive hiatus between official and really-existing realities in terms of income levels. But no such effort was made, a clear indication that that the government was never serious about economic fairness, that it was nothing more than a catchy slogan, like good governance.

The opposition of late 2014 and the government of early 2015 spoke about the iniquitous system of taxation prevalent in Sri Lanka, blamed the Rajapaksas for imposing a proportionately greater tax burden on the poor and the middle classes than on the rich, and promised to correct the imbalance. Under Rajapaksa rule, the ratio between indirect to direct taxes was a morally unacceptable and economically damaging 80:20. By reducing the purchasing power of a majority/plurality of people, such extreme levels of taxation would undermine the prospects of small and medium scale enterprises, and thereby economic growth, and income and employment generation.

The Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government had four years and four budgets to correct the imbalance. This was not a demand for giveaways; or for welfare; this was a necessary correction of a deliberately imposed structural imbalance which hurt the poor and helped the rich. As Joseph Stiglitz pointed out, inequality is a choice, and the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government chose it, just as the Rajapaksa government did. Four years on, the 80:20 ratio between indirect and direct taxation still remains unchanged.

Military-Commercial Complex and the Warfare-state

The Fourth Eelam War ended almost a decade ago. The eagerly expected peace dividend has not materialised.

The Rajapaksas implemented a policy of guided militarisation aimed at creating a financially endowed but politically flaccid military that is completely in thrall to the Rajapaksas. The military was encouraged to enter the economy in a major way, while pubic officials such as school principals were turned into military auxiliaries. Mammoth military spending thus became a financial black hole which consumed a considerable proportion of the peace dividend.

The Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government scaled back the economic involvement of the military and restored the necessary dividing line between civilian and military bureaucracies. It has returned some military-occupied land to the people of the North and the East. But it did nothing to reduce the huge military expenditure. Four years on, defence continues to claim the largest chunk of government expenditure. For the year of 2019, defence has been allocated Rs. 393 billion, while health gets 187.4 billion and primary and secondary education 105 billion.

It is important to emphasise that Sri Lanka continues to spend huge amounts on defence in the absence of any external and internal threats. Since loans are taken to purchase military hardware, it adds both to indebtedness and to the debt-service burden.

Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government could have explained the reality to the people – more money for guns means less money for everything else - education, health, a decent system of public transportation, better roads and other basic infrastructure, more research and development.... In a war situation, such a trade-off makes sense; it is necessary. In a time of peace it is criminally stupid.

The Sirisena-Wickremesinghe administration could have broken this logjam, but opted not to. A system of voluntary retirement, based on the ‘golden handshake’ model’ could have benefited ordinary soldiers and sailors, and would have had many takers since poverty and unemployment are the two main reasons most youth join the military. But such a scaling down would not have benefited the commercial and political operatives involved in the importation of military hardware, a process that continues to lack even a modicum of transparency.

The inability to produce the peace dividend and the failure to address the taxation issue have already created a blowback effect. The defeat suffered by both the UNP and the SLFP at the 2018 Local Government elections was a direct result of this failure. That defeat in turn paved the way to the anti-constitutional coup of October 26th.

Neither the SLFP nor the UNP has learnt the lessons of the twin disasters. This is evident in Mangala Samaraweera’s latest budget. It has several innovative and positive proposals, but without addressing the twin and interrelated issues of taxation and military expenditure, these proposals will either become unworkable due to financial constraints or be rendered irrelevant by sweeping political tides.

i https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-poll-mood-idUSKBN1332NC?il=0

ii http://www.ft.lk/opinion/A-balancing-act—Can—Sri-Lanka-overcome-regional-income-inequalities-/14-669644#.XCnkLNEngKs.twitter