Clueless Govt. fights Tigers

Point of view

By Susantha Goonatilake

The attack was well timed psychologically. It came on the heels of President Kumaratunga herself highlighting the 1983 calamity by appointing a politically inspired commission to embarrass the UNP.

If it was a moral act then she should have appointed the commission during her first term. The President has herself deliberately distorted the origins of the Eelam movement stating several times, that the separatist war began only in 1983. The Tigers claim that separatism grew with her father's and mother's actions. More informed historians would however say that Tamil separatist moves began in the 19th century and had consolidated itself before the British left. In other words the government itself had prepared the propaganda for this attack.

The attack can be compared with the attack by Canadian based Sikhs on an Air India plane over a decade ago and those attacks on Western planes by Arab terrorists. One foreign headline said "Tourists dodge bullets as Tamil Tigers attack Sri Lanka's airport". And within hours, Sky News, was conducting a poll on whether tourists should go to destinations like Sri Lanka.

However the greater negative impact will be on the Tigers, who can now be easily identified as a transparent terrorist organisation.

This attack may close their remaining doors in the West. No country, not even those to whom G.L. Pieris showed his infamous package before he showed it to us, would now call for unconditional talks with the LTTE. Especially Canada which harboured the Sikhs that blew up the Air India plane — and now harbours Tigers — must demonstrate its friendly status by banning the Tigers. The Sri Lankan government in the meantime should demand the extradition of Anton Balasingham from Britain.

PA and UNP politicians who wished for a quick fix through various forms of separatist appeasement would have been rudely woken up by this attack. Yet, for a country that has a strong historical consciousness and nearly 2,500 years recorded history, this incident must necessarily be considered as a blip in a long historical march. On a short-term basis, this attack would further harden attitudes against the Tigers and marginalise Tamil parties which want the ban on Tigers lifted, from the Sri Lankan political scene. It was only last Sunday that a pro-Tiger columnist voiced at the increased marginalisation of Tamil parties from Sri Lankan politics. This process would now increase.

When the Tigers lost Jaffna, it was in a sense a geographical loss. But the continuing war has drained its human base more, pushing Jaffna Tamils out to Sinhala predominant areas or abroad. More Jaffna Tamils probably now live in Canada than in Jaffna peninsula. This attack will only accelerate this process.

But the attack is also an indictment on the armed forces. Last month a German who is familiar with the war in Sri Lanka told me that our army is only a death squad army. Its major "enemy deaths" were those innocents in the South who were picked up and summarily executed. 

An army is based on disciplined thinking and action. Last time when there was a similar setback and Elephant Pass was about to fall, many professionals volunteered to mobilise talent in the country. Some of them approached government politicians to give their services free. In one instance, a one-day workshop was organised by some professionals and attended by a minister to discuss ways and means by which engineers, scientists and others could do to help in the way the scientific community helped Britain's fight with Hitler. This is exactly the manner in which some expatriate Tamil professionals provide brains for the Tigers. But all these actions were in vain and a blind government did not respond in any earnest to these efforts.

In a highly centralised executive presidency, the rot begins at the top. Lack of earnestness and professionalism begins with the commander in chief, the President. It is a case of those holding the top office failing to give clear, unambiguous signals to the army for it to carry out the war effectively.

What have been the President's signals?

She hired the Tiger propagandist Vasantharaja as head of Rupavahini. The state radio broadcast the Sinhala BBC channel, manned by Vasantharaja acolytes. Her negotiators with the Tigers were those who had publicly sympathised with the separatist cause. No wonder the Tigers, after all this encouragement, are attacking.

The government blamed the UNP for allowing the Tigers to infiltrate during the opposition led pro-democracy demonstrations on July 19. The UNP was also blamed for the 1983 riots, justifying indirectly the Tigers's attack. Even at the height of calamity, government leaders cannot differentiate between friend and foe. 

The President has failed in her duty as commander in chief. 

When the Tigers attacked the Kolonnawa oil depots, she left for Europe the same day. Last week, she told the malwatte Mahanayake Thero that she was unable to take action against some of her ministers who were corrupt. In India, by now heads would have rolled and there would have been resignations. But not among this greedy, corrupt lot.

At the least for her own government's safety we must demand that Ms. Kumaratunga immediately sack those among her advisors and her media who have supported separatist positions. We must now insist that she immediately coop the university academics and the professionals into the war effort. Let us at least have the degree of brains that have marshalled for this attack.

Positive side of political crisis

By Victor Ivan

When a motion of no-confidence against the Chief Justice was being tabled, the government attempted to block, stirring a conflict between the judiciary and Parliament. When both opposition and government MPs rose against a Supreme Court order which restrained the Speaker from entertaining the motion, the Speaker gave a ruling saying the Supreme Court could not intervene in parliamentary affairs. The same day the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress broke away from the ruling coalition and joined the opposition. As a result the government lost its parliamentary majority.

A few weeks later, the President, in an apparent bid to avoid defeat at a vote on a no-confidence motion against the government, prorogued the Parliament and announced a referendum for a new constitution. 

When the opposition took to the streets peacefully, demanding that parliament be summoned, the government used excessive force to crush the demonstrations. It was another Black July.

When she set up a Truth Commission to investigate the Black July of 1983, the LTTE staged a devastating attack at the Katunayake Air Force Camp and the airport to coincide with the 1983 Black July commemoration and in response to air attacks on LTTE targets early this month. These rapidly unfolding events have not only posed new challenges to political parties but also affected social attitudes. 

A new political environment where ethnic divisions are forgotten and people are uniting for a common cause.

It may be presumed that the unfolding developments would create an environment necessary for the creation of a new social contract which would help Sri Lankans as a united people to find solutions to all their burning problems. This new social contract would bring about the social awareness required for the purpose.

Although the political aspirations of the minority communities are different from that of the majority community, the present crisis has directed them towards the need to act in unity. The religious divisions too are thinning out. If this crisis succeeds in strengthening the national unity and directs all of the people towards collectively seeking solutions to the existing fundamental problems, then it may be said that the process of building a united nation has begun.

The responsibility for ushering in democratic reforms and of finding a solution to the ethnic problem has been vested in the President. However, I feel she has failed to perform that duty, because she has little or no belief in democratic principles and values. What she did, instead, was to follow a policy of making the problems more complicated in the interest of her own survival. As a result, the President's popularity among people has begun to wane.

In a democratic polity, both the government and the opposition are people's representatives. It is through a just administration, trusted and respected by the people, that the leaders who come to office should strengthen democracy and achieve political stability. 

If the President had genuinely wanted, she could have abolished or reformed the executive presidency, effected democratic reforms and found a solution to the ethnic problem, in spite of her small majority, much earlier.

If a leader with only a small majority wants a large majority for some programme of action, it is essential that he or she acts in a manner that will earn the trust and the respect of the opposition parties. However, due to her a policy of oppressing the opposition parties, she forfeited her ability to enlist their support.

How can a leader who does not even respect that fundamental principles of democracy be expected to find a just solution to a more complicated problem like the ethnic problem?

The writer is the editor of Ravaya

We the People will remain silent

We are now witnessing a fragile hanging together of all that distinguishes us from collapsed democratic systems and total anarchy. At what moment, these too will crumble is anybody's guess. For South Asia's once most proudly paraded democracy, this is a desperately tragic but extremely inevitable fate.

Why inevitable, one would ask? The answer to this question is simple. One has only to look at the successive events of this month, which, in a peculiar sense, encapsulates all the tremendous tensions that Sri Lanka's democratic system has been subject to, particularly in the past three decades. 

By July 4, desperate to avert a defeat of its minority strength in Parliament during the monthly reading of the emergency in the House, the Kumaratunga administration let the emergency lapse. The state media had warned the public of dire consequences if this was allowed to happen, including the confining of the security forces to barracks with the checkpoints being manned by the police, the release of LTTE suspects, the de-proscription of the terrorist organisation and the vulnerability of key institutions such as ports, airports, power stations and telecom towers to terrorist attack.

Notwithstanding these warnings, the transferal of rule from one set of emergency provisions under the Public Security Ordinance (PSO) requiring parliamentary approval to another set of emergency provisions without such pre-conditions, under the Public Security Ordinance (1947) and the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act (1979), took place with nary a blink, best illustrating the manner in which Sri Lanka's dual emergency regimes have now completely replaced the normal law of the land.

Using the special powers entrusted to her as Executive President, Ms. Kumaratunga called out the three armed forces for the maintenance of public order and declared the administrative districts of the country as security areas under Part III of the PSO. This part had been added to the PSO in 1959. Meanwhile, proscription of the LTTE continued under the PTA, which also enabled the issuing of detention and restriction orders with regard to persons connected with or concerned in any unlawful activity. These were, without doubt, the most crucial enabling provisions. If invoking the PTA had not been possible, President Kumaratunga might well have been compelled to face a hostile Parliament and July would then have seen a different sequence of political events.

And in this context, it is no doubt historically very ironic that when the PTA was brought before Parliament as an urgent Bill on July 19, 1979 by a UNP Minister of Justice on the command of President J.R. Jayawardena, the chief objection of Kumaratunga's Sri Lanka Freedom Party was that the bill created dual and therefore unnecessary regimes of emergency power in the country. Thus, the member for Anuradhapura, Maitripala Senanayake remarked that, during the 1971 insurgency for example, the then government was able to maintain law and order by utilizing the PSO without enacting special laws. Accordingly, he pointed out that the prevalent UNP government ought to be able to do the same. We see however the immense disproving of his words twelve years later when the PSO became inadequate and the PTA became imperative to the SLFP-dominated Peoples Alliance, not in order to maintain public security in the country but in order to enable it to survive shifting winds of political change in Parliament.

Hard on the heels of this shift over of the emergency came, of course, the now infamous prorogation of Parliament by President Kumaratunga to circumvent a motion of no confidence against the government and the announcement of a referendum on a constitutional question as uncertain as it is bizarre. 

And immediately thereafter, an unprecendented show of force on the part of the police in curbing opposition demonstrations on the prorogation and proposed Referendum led to two deaths caused by live ammunition from a T56 automatic weapon.

The invoking of the 1981 Referendum Act which bans all processions between the calling of a referendum until after the result is announced, other than Mayday, religious or social processions, (which latter demonstrations should not contain anything that may affect the referendum result) was also condemned as an absolute infringement of the rights to freedom of expression and assembly.

As the month wore on, all it needed was this week's massively shocking attack by the LTTE on the country's international airport, to complete the cycle of disaster. An attack which moreover, took place, not as a result of the inadequacy of emergency laws but through the sheer incompetence and unpreparedness of our intelligence services, for which the Minister of Defence and her deputy is directly responsible. Nevertheless, they continue in all their glory and so the month closes its days, a month undoubtedly without parallel in the recent history of this country.

It is in this manner that we come to the heart of the issue. Despite these successive and gargantuan constitutional, political and security blunders, we, the People, also progress notwithstanding. If, such a month had occurred in any other country except the weakest of democracies, would they, the People, have reacted in quite this same way? In this country however, the appalling lack of public energy in calling both the Government and the Opposition to account is both shameful and disgusting. 

We have seen an association of university lecturers protesting at what is happening. Where are the others? We have seen a group of citizens protesting at this 'mockery of democratic politics' through a joint letter. Where are the others? Where are the intellectuals, apolitical as Garcia Marquez would have put it or otherwise? Where are the professionals? We have seen some sections of the clergy issuing calls for reason and consensus. But where are the others? Why this silence? Why this inability to get on to the streets or make one's protest publicly known at the devastation that this country continues to undergo? 

Instead, we have public protests only when they are organised by politicians, irrespective of whatever colour. Instead, we have a situation where those who do protest, such as the Organisation of Professional Associations (OPA) are labeled as UNP by none other than the Executive President herself. Can an even more farcical reality exist? Undoubtedly, we will see the answer to this question in the months to come when we the People will be left with the sad tatters of a country that we are ashamed to call our own.

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