Columns

Between politics and Mohamed Ali Sabry, there is an unfortunate disconnect. Each time Sabry is elevated to the cabinet, be it as Justice Minister, Finance Minister or Foreign Minister, trouble appears to follow him.

Remember the public ha-ho in early November 2021 when President Gotabaya Rajapaksa appointment of that highly controversial monk Galagodaatte Gnanasara Thera to head a commission to draft the “One Country, One Law”.

That caught Justice Minister Sabry quite by surprise for it appeared that he had not even been consulted. It surely was quite an insult to the minister who promptly sent his letter of resignation and followed it by throwing in the towel and preparing to pull out of politics.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa refused to accept the letter and the issue was sufficiently defused to allow Sabry to main in his post.

Then came a cabinet reshuffle and his appointment as finance minister which he accepted, then apparently had second thoughts overnight and turned down the appointment the next day. But that U-turn, like what seems to be happening right now here in London where a highly over-rated politician became prime minister by a quirk of the political system (shades of Sri Lanka some might say), did not last long for Sabry was back in the Finance Minister’s saddle.

The other day he was telling the media that he is now a respondent in a court case filed to determine who was responsible for Sri Lanka’s near economic collapse brought about by misguided and short-sighted policies from which the country will take years to recover. Sabry believes he was dragged into this legal confrontation because he was minister at the time.

But what has sullied Minister Sabry’s political record and will remain so in the country’s history is the ignominious defeat that Sri Lanka suffered at the Geneva sessions of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) earlier this month when we could muster a mere 7 votes of the 47 member-states with voting rights when the resolution on Sri Lanka was put to the test.

In the series of resolutions critical of Sri Lanka presented to the UNHRC for a vote in the last 10 years this was the lowest number of votes the country has ever received and the highest number of member-states that abstained.

Perhaps Foreign Minister Sabry might derive some solace from a vote that took place at the UN General Assembly a few days ago condemning Russia’s annexation of four Ukrainian regions with a staged “referendum”.

The one-time superpower now under a dictatorial leader secured only five votes-two less than Sri Lanka. But that was from a 193-member General Assembly whereas Colombo’s seven votes came from a 47-member Council.

Of course, if the theories of mathematical maestros in ministerial and temporary diplomatic garb who make the ancient Egyptian mathematicians look so simplistic, are to be accepted, then Russia had garnered not five votes but 40 because 35 countries abstained, showing clearly they were against the resolution condemning Moscow by our interpretation.

That was Sri Lanka’s advanced mathematics that claimed last year that we had defeated the western sponsored resolution 46/1 by 25 votes to 22 in favour. And that interpretation was advanced by the then Foreign Minister Dinesh Gunawardena, now prime minister.

One of the countries that abstained at the New York voting was Sri Lanka. Now if the Sri Lankan government theory is to be pursued to its logical conclusion, then Sri Lanka has voted against the resolution that condemned Putin’s Russia for the fraudulent and illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory.

Think of a possible future scenario where India is ruled by a modern Genghis Khan or a new Hitler who has established an Indian dictatorship and decides to annex a part of Sri Lankan territory. The 1987 “parippu drop” was only a violation of Sri Lankan air space for a “humanitarian purpose”. After all history does repeat itself and it does not always have to end up as farce.

Could Sri Lanka, which according to its own theorists has supported Russian aggression and annexation by abstaining, go crying to papa in New York or wherever?

One cannot blame Foreign Minister Sabry for the promises Sri Lanka’s leaders made over the years to the UNHRC and the world and failed to meet them. He was nowhere in the political scene when the country’s leaders launched their concerted attempts to mislead and even lie to the international community in order to consolidate themselves in power and protect those who allegedly breached human rights and other international covenants the country is signatory to.

But when Sabry as foreign minister joins the cacophonous leaders of the past and present singing from the same song sheet then he becomes a party to defending the violations of the rights and freedoms guaranteed to the sovereign people under the constitution that he keeps bleating about.

At the recent Geneva sessions he not only held forth about the progress Sri Lanka has made in meeting commitments held out to the UNHRC on previous occasions. He referred to Sri Lanka’s amendments to the PTA and its intention to abolish the outrageous Act and replace it with another.

The problem Mr Minister is not a question of replacing it with a new law. What is vital is whether that new law eschews the obnoxious provisions contained in the PTA and conforms to international human rights standards, a new law that cannot be abused by the executive and officials entrusted with maintaining law and order, not abusing them.

If the minister cannot promise that and ensure such abusive laws will not enter the statute books and will not be used by official thugs entrusted with power, the less he promises progressive changes the less damage will be done to the image of a country that has already been heavily tarnished by politicians determined to cling to power.

The world has also been told of the appointment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a step forward in dealing with violations of human rights and other abuses. The South African experience is to serve as the model.

Space does not permit me to expand on this. But let me say that I happened to be in South Africa during at the last days of the apartheid regime. By then President FW de Klerk had lifted the ban on liberation movements, released Nelson Mandela and set the stage for drafting a new constitution and the dismantling of the apartheid structures.

I had long and extensive discussions with the varied political parties, journalists, academics and those involved in constitutional making. That was in the early years of the 1990s when initial thoughts were being exchange on a transparent commission to deal with abuses in the last decades of apartheid. I wrote several articles to the Hong Kong Standard newspaper I was working for then.

The emphasis of the commission was on gathering evidence and uncovering information and not on prosecuting individuals for past crimes. This turned out to be a major stumbling block as it evaded the question of accountability.

Moreover the higher echelons of the armed forces and police who were responsible for much of the atrocities through command responsibility and abuse themselves refused to come before the commission leaving only the foot soldiers to come before the commission, confess and plead for compassion.

If that is what the government means by a Truth Commission and the guilty are allowed to go free and perhaps commit more horrors as we could be heading for, then could the government now or those in the future decry international efforts whether by the UNHRC or other bodies, from establishing judicial mechanisms that would undertake the task of accountability on behalf of those who rights have been violated? Should the guilty go scot free, as they say.

(Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who was Assistant Editor of the Hong Kong Standard and worked for Gemini News Service in London. Later he was Deputy Chief-of-Mission in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London)