Editorial

The Presidential Commission of Inquiry (CoI) into the Easter Sunday bombings (April 21, 2019) must surely have set a world record by hanging out to dry the very person who appointed the Commission.

The Commission’s final report unfortunately has got embroiled in needless controversy by the President not releasing it immediately upon receipt. Only an ultimatum from the Cardinal to make it public, or face the consequences (whatever they were to be) fast-forwarded its release into the public domain. Still, the Attorney General says he is receiving it in bits and pieces and cannot act until he receives the entire report.

The CoI findings squarely pin the blame for the Easter Sunday attacks on former President Maithripala Sirisena for what they call criminal negligence in not acting fast enough to prevent the carnage of that fateful day when more than 260 locals and foreigners lost their lives and hundreds were injured in the coordinated explosions in several churches and hotels. It then spilled over to communal tensions.

An Executive President carries onerous responsibilities, not least the security of the citizenry for he is also Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and Defence Minister. As Shakespeare pithily wrote of a leader’s role in Henry V: “What watch the king keeps to maintain peace; Whose hours the peasant best advantages…” In this instance, President Sirisena was also the Minister for the Police. Merely because one has won an election, doesn’t mean he or she should take on specific ministerial responsibilities that cannot be handled.

When it came to this attack, it was clear the former President hardly kept any watch to maintain the people’s peace; displayed callous disregard for the security of the state, and presided over a dysfunctional government partly of his own making. He feigned ignorance of what was happening around him when things went wrong, and was quick to blame his officials who themselves ignored, tragically, prior Intelligence alerts to what devastation was in the making. The Police TID (Terrorism Investigations Department) was already on the tail of the bombers by 2018, but the then President went after the TID chief instead, accusing him of plotting to assassinate him. And there ended the search for these fanatical murderers.

The CoI has made some wide ranging recommendations as well. They have critiqued, and rightly so, the weakness of successive governments and major political parties in running behind ethno-religious minority parties to secure their vote base at the expense of the larger national interest.

The report’s findings on the extent to which the Eastern province town of Kathankudy has been transformed to look like an Arab city makes the happenings in the North pale into insignificance. Numerous media reports about permitting these minority party politicians to write directly to the King of Saudi Arabia or the Prime Minister of Pakistan seeking funds ostensibly for housing projects, bypassing the usual external resources protocols, allowing the felling of trees in national wildlife parks for such housing schemes and so on, are coming back to haunt those very politicians currently in high office.

The CoI has correctly pointed out that the rise of religious fundamentalism was given a Nelsonian eye by past governments the same way nascent violent separatism was allowed to grow in the North in the 1970s leading to catastrophic consequences for the country. There are rumblings of religious extremism, not just ethnic extremism raising its ugly head in the North these days, dragging another religion which has studiously kept out of the internecine communal battles all these years. These need to be nipped in the bud so that what can be removed by a finger-nail need not have to be removed later by an axe, as the local idiom goes.

The question of the political repercussions of the CoI report is also up for discussion. The President Sirisena-led SLFP has rejected the report and its members fear that the Government will use it as a bargaining lever to bring the already emasculated party of the Bandaranaikes to its knees before the new party of the Rajapaksas. The UNPers seem content that they have escaped the severity of the CoI even though they have been named for not being proactive, by ignoring growing religious fundamentalism — a charge they deny. The problem is, when the State pursues a proactive campaign to nip communal extremism or religious fundamentalism in the bud, there will be the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva complaining of persecution of the minorities.

It is a commendable provision in the Constitution that Presidential immunity is limited to the period a President holds office. This is an important safeguard against authoritarianism and a reminder to sitting Presidents that there is a life after their term in office. An attempt to remove the President as a party in Fundamental Rights applications through the draft 20th Amendment was judiciously shot down by the Supreme Court. It was because of this provision that former President Chandrika Kumaratunga was hauled up before the Supreme Court by two senior citizens, found guilty and fined for abuse of power in what is known as the corrupt ‘Waters Edge case’.

The CoI while finding fault with the local actors for their culpability through their inaction in the Easter Sunday attacks, has not been able to penetrate the other ‘big picture’ insofar as ascertaining if there was a foreign hand in the dastardly crime, and laid that question to rest, or whether the only foreign element was the influence by the Internet in the worldwide campaign of Jihadists against non-believers of their faith. Nor has it thrown light on the masterminds of the Easter Sunday bombings, and if they are still at large.

Almost two years on, the horror of the terrible violence unleashed that day should also be a grim reminder that evil forces are at eternally at play and the country and its citizenry must come to grips with all forms of extremism, sooner than later.