Editorial

And so, another Independence Day negotiates the corner. Next week, Sri Lanka celebrates the 72nd anniversary of the Ceylon Independence Act that was passed in the British Parliament setting the people of this country free after 450 years of foreign rule, to determine their own future, their own destiny and their place in the comity of nations of the world.

Is there much to celebrate? Despite the criticism, and some nostalgically yearning for the past, the country’s positives are many.

For one, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa taking the salute on February 4 at Independence Square in Colombo (built at the site of an old Royal Air Force hanger) to commemorate Freedom is significant in that the former Sri Lanka Army colonel who will be dressed in civilian attire is the second Head of Government of independent Lanka who served in the military and then came to lead this nation through the democratic process – second to Sir John Kotelawela, also a colonel in the Ceylon Defence Force later made a General of the Sri Lanka Army while on his deathbed by President J.R. Jayewardene.

The flamboyant Sir John was an anglophile, with a house in Kent, UK but a patriot nevertheless, the donor of the property that now houses the Defence University bearing his name and whose motto is “siya ratamai kawadath” (For the Motherland Forever).  President Rajapaksa also temporarily took citizenship in the United States, but his love for his motherland was never in question.

The point being that the two soldier-politicians, from yesteryear and the present, made their way to lead the nation through the ballot, and not the bullet and that the people of Sri Lanka have displayed their commitment to the democratic way of life, with all its faults, rejecting over the years two aborted military coup d’états, and two armed insurgencies, one home-grown and one instigated from abroad. Sri Lanka’s democratic edifice has never collapsed.

Given the declining standards of the country’s elected representatives, and legitimate questions on the fallibility of the ‘one man; one vote’ universal adult franchise, Sri Lankans have nevertheless kept their faith in the ‘noise and chaos’ of democracy rather than be tempted to fall prey to other forms of government to which many newly independent post-colonial nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America fell victim.

In all this, it was the Armed Forces that came to the rescue of democracy in Sri Lanka at its most perilous times. As they parade next Tuesday it is the nation that must salute them. And it is by this strange quirk of fate that these same Armed Forces are getting roasted in international fora by the very democracies of the world for doing what they did in defending the democratic way of life in Sri Lanka.

The nagging question of how free is Sri Lanka as we celebrate 72 years of Independence, however, persists. This question arises in the backdrop of the twin issues of getting the ‘monkey off the back’ insofar as the UNHRC resolution is concerned, and the entrapment by way of the foreign debt crisis to which Sri Lankan leaders past and present walked into – more than 80 percent of Government revenue goes to service loans, both local and foreign.  The country and its cash-strapped Treasury are at a virtual standstill with all mega development projects suspended for the time-being.

Sri Lanka has got sucked into many mega projects by foreign agencies, especially by the Chinese, offering unsolicited proposals that have left the country unable to pay back in cash and instead offering its real estate, compromising even the country’s territorial integrity in the process.

This has sent off alarm bells in neighbouring India which wants a similar foothold to offset Chinese influence over the country, and the US offering bait in the form of a Congress approved grant so that it too is not left behind. History is replete after all, with US Congress approved funds for covert CIA operations around the world during the Cold War and thereafter, but Sri Lanka’s economic dependency is such that it just cannot afford to kick a gift horse in the mouth so easily. That is the predicament the country is in.

The ongoing impeachment proceedings against the US President deftly shows how the US President can strong-arm a foreign country like Ukraine, so dependent on foreign aid like Sri Lanka to fight an adversary in Russia, to do his bidding – and for a whole bunch of US Congressmen to argue that it is perfectly in order for an American President to do so.

Western powers talk of free trade, but use trade, and economic sanctions as ‘weapons of war’ to browbeat economically dependent countries using preferential GSPs and the like to tow their line. When a country is economically weak, come the predators hovering like vultures to grab a piece of the pie. They feel they can still run countries like Sri Lanka that has got itself into a state of economic dependency and then start preaching human rights, devolution, reconciliation, even the death penalty and LGBT rights when their own homes are anything but in perfect order.

In the charged and extremely nuanced world order an independent Sri Lanka must not just survive, but thrive. There is, therefore, a greater need to lay emphasis on keeping abreast of unfolding events around the world. The Strategic Studies Institute must be upgraded and put to better use to research, monitor and recommend to the country’s decision-makers, options on how to deal with current trends specific to Sri Lanka. The country will then be better prepared than it is today, where ad-hocism and short term objectives, often having long term consequences seem the order of the day whichever Government is in office.

Sri Lanka was a success story at the time of Independence; universal adult franchise, free education and a good health care system in place, and then came even free rice, but the well-meaning welfare state the politicians wanted for the people could not sustain itself. Somebody had to pay the bill. What followed was galloping inflation, ethnic issues, unemployment, giant loss-making state corporations, bribery, corruption and to hell with a meritocracy.

The Sri Lankan Exchequer relies heavily on the seven billion US dollars remitted by its citizens working abroad, especially in West Asia. It is not a matter to be proud of for a country that prides itself on its great civilisation. And the State’s contribution towards these workers is paltry. It is a subject that must come under the President or the Minister of Finance.

As we stated in our editorial this time last year, “There’s no doubt that the country has not lived up to the bright expectations with which it woke to the dawn of Independence on February 4, 1948.  But there’s always hope, and despite the naysayers, the country’s positives are many. That hope will be fulfilled only when the political leadership of this country stops thinking of one party, and instead looks to – one nation”.

We can say that again.