Columns

Sri Lanka’s Grand Old Party, better known as the UNP, which burst into flames not many months ago is calling for an independent investigation into what sent dark smoke curling up the heart of our justice system the other day.

As though the GOP is still somehow glued together, its other part now led by Sajith Premadasa and named the SJB, also urged the Government to hold an independent inquiry to unearth how and why the Hall of Justice behaved like a minor Visuvius just revving up its engine.

If travellers from Mars immune to the coronavirus landed in “this country like no other” bearing such gifts of goodwill as anti-Covid vaccines, they would find some strange happenings on our planet that throw minds back to the age-old farce of Mannapuwa and Josie Baba from the early days of Sinhala cinema.

A black-coated wag watching the billowing smoke with Attorney General Dappula de Livera surveying the scene from the steps some metres away like Peter Falk playing Lieut. Columbo eyeing a crime scene, fell back on an old cliché, saying there is no smoke without fire.

The cliché-spouting black-coat was correct. For when it came to UNP politics and still does at Hulftsdorp, maneuverability and tampering are an ancient art. There can be smoke without fire, fire without smoke and sleight of hand without hands that can transfer court files from the bottom of the pile to the top and vice versa, to resort to the Latin which is still used around Hulftsdorp where justice is dispensed and even dispensed with.

Why, some who have spent years wasting their shoe leather walking the wastelands of Hulftsdorp in search of justice, say that producing smoke without fire is but a simple illusion compared to the great illusionists that the one-time C-7 produced for the capital’s lamprais-eating and breudher-munching gliterrati.

As mentioned in this column a month or so ago, it was scant wonder that the Sinhala Royalty at the time sent jugglers from here to the Chinese Emperor’s court. It was not simply to court the Ming dynasty’s eternal friendship as we see from today’s Chinese largesse from anti-virus facemasks by the millions to the shiploads of newly-minted renminbi liberally distributed with the abandon of a Donald Trump facing a presidential election.

Not only did Lankan jugglers make ancient Chinese Royals and courtiers break into sustained applause but they could make Royal enemies disappear, a highly useful practice that the Middle Kingdom’s rulers employed frequently to get rid of dissidents from neighbouring fiefdoms and over-ambitious relatives from within the Ming dynasty.

It is a practice that the original practitioners have revived with great finesse and more recent ones are adapting with a dexterity that would have qualified them for high office before long  had the Great Mings set about training the Little Mings the disappearing act as the Saudi’s taught the Khashoggis more recently.

Unfortunately for the new aspirant to world superpowerdom many more lessons are necessary to catch up with the expertise of the Saudi Royal masters with saw and scalpel.  The lesson now being taught to the young dissenters and advocates of democracy are still too early to administer like our anti-virus decoction.

It will not be long before Tiananmen Square will be ‘practised’ at Hong Kong’s Chater Gardens and the remaining non-Chinese judges are bundled on to the last plane from Chek lap kok international airport. Hong Kong’s Legislative Council election results will be read out at the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee Office in Beijing just to make sure Hongkongers have not forgotten their arithmetic.

All that is by the way and tales of yore excavated from under the paving stone around Tiananmen. What is of concern in these last weeks of 2020 is who wants to disrupt our justice system and possibly supplant it with an Indo-Pacific hybrid courtesy of President Xi with Hitlerite ambitions of building a 1000 year Belt and Road like a Third Reich.

But few Germans today speak of Hitler or the Third Reich except perhaps some misconceived Buddhist monks from the Sacred City who in the early days exhorted our would-be leaders to goose step to the top of the political ladder.

Now that we are on the subject of burning buildings and Nazi-inspired arson, one is reminded of the burning of the Reichstag, the German parliament in 1933 that put paid to German democracy until after WW2.

But then it was divided Germany that faced the world until the notorious Berlin Wall that separated West Germany from the East was brought tumbling down and ended a period of tyranny and suffering to the East German people under Communist rule.

There are some hardliners embedded somehow in our political system who would like to see our own parliament ended one way or another. Some might prefer the Reichstag route to authoritarianism while some others would prefer to see a parliamentary system with new nuts and bolts to screw it to the sticking place.

Whatever it may be, it will not be long before we get an inkling of what lies ahead. In the meantime, we are still to learn what happened in and to our Hall of Justice. It is a common practice for political opponents and parties to urge — nay demand — the Government order an inquiry — an independent one at that.

It would seem rather insulting to call for an independent inquiry into a fire at the building that houses our highest court. Justice might be blind but surely not all that blind. At least one can say that whoever was responsible for this seemingly symbolic blow at our justice system started at the lowest level — the basement. He, she or it did have some concerns which merit consideration if ever they lay hands on the culprit or culprits.

After all, there are enough lawyers hanging around there to rush in and plead in mitigation. Whoever sparked off the fire has a cause to plead. What was damaged or burnt was waste — accumulated paper or unusable and discarded mechanical or electrical parts.

Why on earth are discarded parts being stored as though they were being kept in a safe room like a precious family boodaley? If the discarded are being carefully safeguarded or preserved how carefully they should be looking after those who dispense justice to the people?

Anyway Minister Ali Sabry has won a point. Now he can move with file, bag and baggage to the World Trade Centre and look at the world outside with a smirk. Who knows, he and his ministry may still be turning the wheels of justice come the next election.

(Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who was Assistant Editor, Diplomatic Editor and Political Columnist of the Hong Kong Standard before moving to London where he worked for Gemini News Service. Later he was Deputy Chief-of-Mission in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London before returning
to journalism.)