Untitled Document

By C.V.Vivekananthan

Federal tour: What our MP did not see

The international community, the self-appointed world policeman, seems to be having difficulties in conquering a country with a 20 million population. No, I don't mean Sri Lanka, but Iraq. Without a shot being fired they are succeeding with us. Our rulers, both he and to a large extent she, are bending over backwards to pay obeisance. Recently, our MPs were taken on a guided tour of European countries to teach them how they should change our constitution.

I am all for foreign travel that helps broadening our horizon.But the countries they were taken to were pre-selected by the policeman, who did what our forefathers did to the Portuguese: hiding key facts and taking them on a roundabout tour. Convinced that our MPs deserve a better deal, I have prepared another tour that I thought our intrepid travellers should undertake. Convinced of their extreme reluctance to be away from their electorate, I have chosen a virtual tour on the Internet.

In all these countries, as in Sri Lanka, freedom of religion is guaranteed and no one can be discriminated on grounds of ethnicity, language or religion. And in some, like Sri Lanka, special rights exist for linguistic minorities. But there are interesting differences in the case of language, land use, religion and federal/unitary status.

France has a highly centralized system while Germany is less so. Both have linguistic minorities of around 10 per cent, roughly comparable to Sri Lanka, but French is the only official language in France and German in Germany. And what about the country that arranged the package tour, Austria? There are nearly 12 percent non-German speakers, a figure again roughly comparable to our non-Sinhalese speakers. Yet the only official language is German. Austria is also a federal state - but without linguistic boundaries.

Although Italy has regions that speak French or German, Italian is the only official language. Portugal, our first European master has a unitary state and has an interesting provision for new migrants like our Estate Tamils. Her Constitution "secure[s] for emigrants' children the teaching of the Portuguese language and access to Portuguese culture". Although Spain's autonomous communities could use other languages internally, and only 74 percent of Spain have it as the mother tongue, its constitution requires that all its inhabitants have "the duty as well as the right" to use the official language, Castilian Spanish.

It is in religion that these "secular" countries have much to say. Denmark has a culture similar to our direct colonizer Norway, and like the latter is a constitutional kingdom where the King must be from the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Unlike in Sri Lanka, Denmark and Norway also have this Church as the "Established Religion". A special relationship exists between the Italian state and the Catholic Church. The Italian Constitution says, "The State and the Catholic Church shall be, each within its own order, independent and sovereign". And the tiny kingdom of Luxembourg's constitution goes further: the state pays the salaries and pensions of Christian priests.

As the Northern Ireland problem has been made an example to be studied in Sri Lanka, and possibly emulated, let me go to the Irish Constitution which the IRA - a far milder equivalent of the LTTE - wanted imposed on all Ireland. The Constitution opens: "In the name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred, We, the people of Ireland, humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial".

My tour, of course selective, shows: Many European countries are multicultural yet unitary. Several, like Portugal, Italy and Ireland, have centralized control of land. Unlike us, the majority do not allow complete equality for all languages. Many require recent migrants to know the majority language. Many have theocratic overlays. It is clear that the Policeman guide mistook our politicians for harak and fed them punnakku.

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