federalidea.com

by Rohini Hensman

When fifteen high-ranking former commanders of the armed forces have to meet the President to discuss the grave military and political situation in the country, we can only conclude that the country is facing a crisis of political leadership. According to a news report, ‘The former service chiefs made it clear to the President that their move was completely non-partisan, and that they were only worried that even after facing a challenge from terrorism for 30 years, the country was still to get united and draft and implement a national plan to eliminate terrorism and bring about a political settlement.’ They are absolutely right: there is still no implementation of a national plan that can eliminate terrorism and bring about a political settlement. And that is entirely due to the failure of political leadership in Sri Lanka.The President and the SLFP

President Rajapaksa seems to have put all his eggs in the military basket, which is a dangerous thing to do in the midst of a war where eggs can easily be shattered. The most optimistic characterisation of the current situation, as the former military chiefs recognised, is that it is a stalemate. Both the government and the LTTE can win some battles, but neither can win the war. We need only look at Iraq and Palestine, where two states with overwhelming military superiority (the US and Israel) are unable to quell the Iraqi and Palestinian insurgencies, to realise that a purely military strategy in Sri Lanka will never defat the LTTE. So long as Tamils are embittered by the daily humiliation, privation and bereavements they are forced to suffer, there will always be some who are ready to undertake suicide missions like the attack on Anuradhapura Air Base in October, or terrorist attacks against innocent civilians. The LTTE will always have new recruits to replace their dead.

Who was responsible for the debacle at the Anuradhapura Air Base, in which, according to Iqbal Athas, eight aircraft and two Unmanned Aerial Vehicles were destroyed and many more aircraft damaged? We must remember that this was not a terrorist attack aimed at unarmed civilians, but an attack on a legitimate military target in the midst of an ongoing war, so the LTTE cannot be blamed for it although the LTTE leadership can be criticised for sending their cadre on a suicide mission.If the President and Defence Ministry claim credit for the victory at Toppigala, they must also accept blame for this defeat, in which the lives of several military personnel were lost, along with destruction and damage costing well over $ 30 million. It would not have occurred if they had given priority to defending the installations and territory controlled by the government instead of embarking on a reckless adventure in the North.

Who will pay the cost? The people of Sri Lanka, of course. Inflation has been described as a way in which the government robs the people, and that is indeed what is going on in Sri Lanka. At a 20 per cent rate of inflation, a wage will be worth one-fifth less at the end of a year than it was worth at the beginning. That is one way in which the government funds its war. Borrowing money at high rates of interest – which, again, the people will have to pay – is another. Meanwhile the garment industry – Sri Lanka’s biggest foreign exchange earner – is going down the drain. Workers are demanding a wage increase of Rs 2500 and there are tens of thousands of unfilled vacancies because inflation has cut into real wages so badly. At the same time, hundreds of factories have closed, and employers are complaining of ruinously high costs, due to the same sky-high inflation. To add to the economic problems, Sri Lanka could lose European Union trade incentives because of its deteriorating human rights record.

Yet the government adamantly refuses to accept the help offered by the UN to improve protection of human rights. Politicians carry on their profligate spending, the elite continue to enjoy their expensive life-styles, corruption is rampant at the highest levels of government, and those who report on it are penalised. Votes and political support are openly bought and sold. The President hands out political posts to family members and supporters like a feudal ruler rather than the leader of a modern democratic nation; indeed, many feudal rulers cared more for the welfare of their subjects than the president cares for the welfare of workers and the poor in Sri Lanka. In this context, COPE chairman Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe’s demands that ministers and top officials found guilty of corruption should be fired, that the allocation of Rs 23.6 billion for the president and his ministers be cut to 5 billion and the rest of the money used to improve health and education services, and that there be transparency and accountability in government spending, sound like eminently reasonable demands for good governance and democracy.

Last but not least, the only measure initiated by the president that could lead to the final defeat of the LTTE – the All Party Representative Committee (APRC) process to formulate proposals for political reform – has been delayed and sabotaged time and again by none other than the president himself and his party, the SLFP. The latest obstacle put in the path of the process was their demand for a unitary state. His claim that this was the will of the majority of the Sinhalese people simply does not hold water. On the contrary, a poll sponsored by the National Peace Council and carried out by the Marga Institute in May/June this year showed that 70 per cent of the respondents, who did not include Tamils, were ready to support a three-tiered system of devolution which came close to a federal system and certainly could not be described as unitary. It is time the president stopped passing off his own bigoted views as the views of the more enlightened Sinhalese majority.

Mahinda Rajapaksa came to power courtesy the LTTE: without its enforced boycott of the presidential elections in the North and East, he would not have been elected. He and his hardline Sinhala chauvinist allies within the SLFP, JHU and MEP have repaid the favour many times over. Prabakaran wanted war because he cannot survive a just peace, and President Rajapakse has given him what he wanted; the LTTE needs human rights abuses and a refusal to implement a just political solution to justify its call for a separate state, and there, too the president has obliged them. It looks as if he were willing to go on doing so until tens of thousands more are dead and the economy of Sri Lanka goes bankrupt. It would be easy to conclude that it is time for a change of government, but before coming to that conclusion, we need to look at the alternatives.

The UNP and its Leader

Does the UNP under its current leadership offer a viable alternative? While in Opposition, Ranil Wickremesinghe repeatedly sabotaged earlier efforts, especially in 1995 and 2000, to implement political reforms that could not go through without the cooperation of his party. If those reforms had been implemented, the war might have been over by now, and thousands of lives might have been saved. Even during the period he was Prime Minister, there was little progress towards a political solution. His declaration, along with Balasingham, of support for a federal solution to the conflict was a courageous move. But it lost steam when Prabakaran quickly denied LTTE support for such a solution, and he made no effort to pursue discussions with other representatives of minority parties. The ceasefire did provide a breathing space to a war-weary population, yet the provisions of the CFA and the way in which it was implemented made it inevitable that war would break out once more.

More recently, his attitude to the APRC process, which held out the promise of bringing about a political solution to the conflict, has been opportunistic in the extreme. It is understandable that he was piqued by the SLFP poaching UNP MPs and offering them Cabinet posts in violation of the Memorandum of Understanding signed between the two party leaders, but to respond by undermining the APRC process was childish and shortsighted.

In fact, the SLFP’s thoroughly unprofessional proposal, making the district the unit of devolution and contradicting itself on the subject of the executive presidency, gave him a chance to upstage it by making clear the UNP’s support for the consensus that was emerging in the APRC, thus demonstrating greater political maturity than the SLFP. Instead, he first took the UNP out of the APRC discussions on the pretext that a final consensus had not emerged within the deadline he had given it, and later back-tracked on his earlier support for a federal solution. That in itself would not have been a problem, since the minority parties had agreed to a state that was neither federal nor unitary, but his silence on this issue led to speculation that he was contemplating an alliance with the JVP which, of course, was insisting on a unitary state. His failure to contradict such rumours suggests a leader who is totally devoid of all principles. His economic policies were as callous towards the majority of the population as those of the current government, and his record of human rights violations in an earlier UNP administration still hangs over him. Hardly an alternative that inspires confidence!

It is a pity that the SLFP rebels chose to align themselves with a political outfit that is so unprincipled. Their decision to split from the SLFP was understandable, but they have undermined their own credibility by the alliance.

The TNA and JVP

The TNA MPs have discredited themselves by being representatives of the LTTE rather than of their own constituents, who have not had an opportunity to vote in free and fair elections for a long, long time. They cannot be seen as part of a democratic alternative so long as they remain bound by the fascist politics of their LTTE mentors. The JVP, on the other hand, can claim to have been elected democratically. It has also been reported that in a finance committee meeting chaired by President Rajapakse, two JVP MPs had protested against political appointments to state banks that bypassed standard qualifications for these positions. After the meeting, the President told the MPs that these types of appointments were a necessary way of rewarding ‘apey minissu’, and invited them to forward the names of their supporters for appointments as well. Much to their credit, they resisted the all-pervasive culture of nepotism and corruption, and declined the offer.

However, the politics of the JVP are as dishonest and hypocritical as those of the SLFP. They claim to defend the living standards of workers, yet they are at the forefront of the demands for a military solution to the conflict which entails an endless war, which in turn slashes workers’ salaries due to inflation; thus they must share the blame for falling real wages. They claim to be anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, yet they collude in the divide-and-rule policies of capitalists and imperialists with their Sinhala nationalism and refusal to defend the rights of Tamil workers. Worst of all, they claim to oppose the LTTE, yet their consistent opposition to human rights monitoring and a democratic political solution acceptable to Muslims and Tamil moderates sustains the credibility of the LTTE and its effort to divide the country. So long as Tamils are not treated as equals in a united Sri Lanka, the demand for a separate state where their democratic rights will be respected has legitimacy, and the JVP is at the forefront of those who provide legitimacy to the LTTE and their demand for a separate state. Thus, they support the LTTE in a different way from the TNA, but support it nonetheless.

Conclusion

We can conclude that an election at this point in time would be a colossal waste of time and money. Whether the same government comes back to power or is defeated,we would end up in the same mess that we are now. Going through an expensive exercise that will inevitably be accompanied by violence and possibly even bloodshed just in order to come back to our present position is not a good idea at all.

On the other hand, continuing to slide inexorably towards bankruptcy and the kind of barbarism that gripped our country in the late 1980s is not an acceptable option either. So what is the alternative?

The two biggest parties need to listen to the former service chiefs, and make it a priority to arrive at and implement democratic political reforms that address the legitimate grievances of minorities. Once this is done, the LTTE leadership will lose support very quickly, and the war can be ended. Unless Mahinda Rajapaksa follows their advice, he will face increasing popular anger and hatred as the war drags on, the death toll mounts, and living standards plummet. Unless Ranil Wickremesinghe follows their advice, he faces political oblivion; if he wants to have the hope of winning an election in the future, he needs to demonstrate a capacity for statesmanship now. It is in the interests of both leaders to put aside their egos for the moment in order to save the country, not by forming a national government but by both pledging support for the APRC proposals. If they are too selfish to do this, their supporters should serve notice on them that they will withdraw support unless they do the right thing.

The government in addition has to restore the rule of law, which is all but non-existent thanks to its own lawlessness. Restoring democratic rights and freedoms would also be a good idea if it wishes to continue claiming that Sri Lanka is a democracy – a claim that is becoming increasingly laughable every passing day. It is already facing huge embarrassment for breaking both Sri Lankan and international law by giving Karuna a fake passport and obtaining a British visa for him under false pretences. A week ago, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour said in an interview with the BBC that members of the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka had been appointed directly by the President in violation of the Constitution, and its international accreditation could therefore be withdrawn, bringing further shame on our country. She repeated her public request that the government of Sri Lanka consider allowing her own office to have a presence in Sri Lanka. Perhaps, the government should accept her offer in order to avert further embarrassment. If it holds itself in such contempt, how can it expect anyone else to have respect for it?

The people of Sri Lanka and civil society organizations, too, have a role to play. They need to make it clear that they reject the Sinhala nationalist allies of the LTTE in the JVP, JHU, MEP and SLFP, who advocate policies that help to divide the country. The deliberative poll conducted by the Marga Institute is a model that should be followed more widely, since it seeks an informed opinion from its respondents and provides them with the information that is required for such an opinion. An interesting finding of this poll was that when Sinhalese people realised that devolution could bring government closer to the people – i.e. that it could promote democracy – they supported it. A three-tier system of government combined with a Right to Information Act like the Indian one could be a potent weapon against corruption as well as an instrument of democracy that would serve the interests of all the people of Sri Lanka. We have to go forward to genuine democracy or slip backward into dictatorship: that is the choice facing us today