Be it military or politics, President Percy Mahinda Rajapaksa, continues to be on a winning streak pushing his popularity to new heights.
In May, this year, he saw the military defeat of the LTTE. Just three months later, his Government has begun solving the mysteries behind the guerrilla group's international operations. This is with the arrest and rendition to Colombo of Kumaran Pathmanathan alias KP.
Less than a handful of senior Intelligence officials are interrogating Pathmanathan at a secret location. This is whilst the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has put in a request to the Ministry of Defence to see him, to determine the conditions under which he is being held. Tamil groups in some world capitals are also rallying support and seeking legal opinion to find avenues to secure his release. Some have even launched a propaganda campaign to say he is being tortured and forced to make "confessions."
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| Ranil Wickremesinghe |
Johnston Fernando |
Dayasiri Jayasekera |
That is furthest from the truth. Pathmanathan is relatively having more comforts than most of his compatriots whilst in detention. Even more interesting, he is reportedly saying it all, providing answers to questions posed to him. The initial phase of the interrogation, one source said, saw him trying to dissociate himself from LTTE leader Velupillai Prahbakaran. He had claimed that he did not speak to Prabhakaran directly and always dealt with him through intermediaries.
He was paid a monthly stipend in US dollars, making out he was a mere paid servant. It was increased by fifty percent upon his representations that it was not enough. Anandan, his aide in Malaysia, also received a monthly stipend in US dollars. Though he admitted he was responsible for procuring military hardware that helped the guerrillas sustain the separatist war, there was a time when he was sidelined. This was after Prabhakaran had believed in what his Intelligence chief, Pottu Amman told him. Pottu had obtained the help of other leaders. Their efforts turned futile.
It was in late 2008 that he was again re-instated as the key procurements man for the guerrillas. According to him, Prabhakaran had by then realised that Pottu Amman was wrong and had misled him. KP had identified the sources from which military supplies were obtained. Asked why a 'Provisional Transnational Government' was formed, KP had expressed the view that another group was trying to hi-jack their campaign to bring about a solution to Tamil grievances. This was the Tamil group in the United States that styled itself 'Tamils for Obama'. The interrogation, no doubt, will continue for many more days.
Some in the higher echelons of the security establishment feel the detention and interrogation of Pathmanathan was an "anti climax." If he was arrested before the successful conclusion of the military campaign against the guerrillas, it would have been of greater value. Most of his revelations now, in the light of the guerrilla military capability being destroyed, are not "actionable Intelligence."
However, there are exceptions like the workings of the vast LTTE shipping network, commercial ventures abroad and where their funds are stacked. In addition, in the backdrop of impending Presidential and Parliamentary elections, some of the information elicited is fuel for the campaigns. They relate to the period of the February 2002 Norwegian-brokered ceasefire and the goings on during that period.
The first local and provincial elections since the military defeat of the LTTE ended last week with a predictable victory for the United People's Freedom Alliance. The only exception was the defeat at the Vavuniya Urban Council polls by a mere 143 votes to the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Katchi (ITAK).
The ITAK is the label of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), widely regarded as a proxy of the Tiger guerrillas until the end of the separatist war. It secured five seats as against its close rival, the Democratic People's Liberation Front (DPLF), which won three seats. The DPLF is an offshoot of the People's Liberation Organisation of Tamileelam (PLOTE). The UPFA secured two seats and the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC) one.
Though the UPFA contested with Minister Douglas Devananda's EPDP and despite a campaign backed by all resources, that they failed to gain control of the Vavuniya UC was of some concern to the Government not accustomed to electoral defeat in recent times. The fact that the ITAK won reflected the political sentiments in the Wanni where the guerrillas have suffered a military defeat. During the 2004 elections, the DPLF had eight seats. However, accusations of its cadres extorting money and functioning as paramilitary groups had cost them public support. The UNP held two seats in the previous council but secured only 1.8 per cent of the 12,292 votes cast last Saturday. No doubt, it was an indication that minority Tamils were rejecting the UNP as much as the UPFA, the two mainstream political parties.
In the Jaffna Municipal Council only 22.2 per cent of 100,417 registered voters cast their ballot. That in itself was an indictment of its own against the Government. The ruling UPFA secured 13 seats while the ITAK won eight, one Independent and another one for the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF). During the 1998 elections, the TULF won nine seats as against the EPDP's six.
This has already raised issues over whether the EPDP leader Devananda, who showed interest in being a Chief Ministerial candidate at a future Northern Provincial Council election, would succeed. It also was a blow to veteran politician V. Anandasangaree whose TULF had secured only a mere one seat. Some senior Government leaders viewed these as poor performances by the two Tamil politicians.
Political analysts derive from these results that there must be some residual bitterness among the Jaffna voters despite all the rhetoric that they have been 'liberated' from the clutches of the ruthless LTTE. Some argue that by the Government rushing into elections before it could sort out the post-LTTE defeat problems, like the IDP (Internally Displaced People) issue and economic revival, it was too premature to expect the Northern voter to support the Government.
The result of the Uva Provncial Council, on the other hand, was a foregone conclusion. The UPFA won 25 seats whilst the UNP secured only seven. The JVP and the Up Country People's Front were able to win only one seat each.
The vote bank of the UNP shrunk drastically from 2004 when the party received 48 and 39 percent of the vote in Badulla at the General Elections and Provincial Elections respectively that year, dropping to a paltry 25 per cent last week, while in Moneragala the party received 36 and 33 percent of the vote respectively in 2004, and dropped to a pathetic 15 percent last week.
The JVP also saw its vote base in the UVA being shattered. It secured only 2.53 percent of the 452,712 votes cast. JVP leader Somawansa Amerasinghe conceded that a UPFA victory was inevitable. "No one can deny that. However, look at what it did to achieve such a big majority. It used state resources including state media, transport, thuggery and intimidation to win," he told the Sunday Times. He said the Government had not honoured its pledge to set up a Constitutional Council. Thus, there was no independent Elections Commission.
The Opposition UNP met on Wednesday for the first time after its dreadful showing in Uva. It must surely rue the day it introduced the provincial council system back in 1987 at which time it ruled the roost, and the then Opposition Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) was burning buses together with the JVP in vehement opposition to the introduction of the system.
The UNP's highest decision-making body, the Working Committee, met under the chairmanship of party leader Ranil Wickremesinghe and straightaway ran into troubled waters. The main item on the agenda was the appointing of nomination boards for organizers to various electorates in view of upcoming elections.
It was Kurunegala's young MP Dayasiri Jayasekera who fired the first salvo questioning the sidelining of two senior electoral organisers in Ja-ela and Kuliyapitiya. He asked why these two Praadeshiya Sabha members had not been given their due place, and whether it was because of their problems with the respective party organizers --. Jayalath Jayawardene and Akila Viraj Kariyawasam.
Jayasekera said the Working Committee was a "Yes man's" club and that decisions taken there were not implemented on the ground. Pointing out to a previous decision that the Pradeshiya Sabha leader (either the Chairman of the council where the UNP has won, or Leader of the Opposition where they have lost) should be the next in line to the electoral organizer, he said this decision was not being implemented. The only proviso he said was where there was a pending disciplinary inquiry against any of them.
To add weight to his contention he even threatened to quit the Working Committee. He later did so by sending a letter to W. Dayaratne, the party leader's private secretary, though he turned up for the next day's Political Affairs Committee meeting.
Jayalath Jayawardene responded by saying that the Working Committee had also decided that it was the party's electoral organiser who must be strengthened at all cost and should the second-in-command (head of the Pradeshiya Sabha) not be pulling with the organiser and instead working for someone else, then the organiser should be empowered to pick his own deputy.
Kariyawasam seemed to echo the same view. He said that he had written to the party chairman of the Local Government Committee, Vajira Abeywardene, complaining about the candidate who received the highest number of preferential votes and nominated the candidate who had come sixth. Abeywardene was to say that he had not done so, and instead, asked the person who came first to go and meet Kariyawasam and sort it out. He had not done so, and continued not to do so despite repeated requests. Abeywardene then nominated another name for the post, who was neither the candidate who came first, nor Kariyawasam's nominee.
This focused the issue on the recent developments in Matara, where the UNP's Pradeshiya Sabha deputy leader Justin Galappatti crossed over the other day and joined the Government because Matara district MP Sagala Ratnayake was given the party's organisership.
Several voices spoke on the issue at Matara, and the party leadership was blamed for making the changes at this stage, knowing well that the switch could be detrimental for the party at the forthcoming Southern Provincial Council elections. The argument being that Matara being a complicated social-based constituency, with the coastal areas supportive of Galappatti, the interior farming areas backing Ratnayake and the town area backing people like Mangala Samaraweera. The sidelining of Galappatti was going to cost the UNP a sizeable coast-line vote bank. Adding to the hurt, they may have felt, has been posters that have sprung up after Ratnayake's appointment saying "Matara Vansa-nayake pathkara" which has divisive connotations, especially in an electorate such as Matara.
Ratnayake for his part defended himself saying that he should have been appointed a year earlier because Galappatti was appointed for only a year, and served for two years. But the question remained, 'why now?' with an election looming, and why his appointment by-passed Working Committee sanction.
Party leader Wickremesinghe responded to the issues Jayasekera raised in respect of Ja-ela and Kuliyapitiya. Was Jayasekera correct or Jayawardene and Kariyawasam correct? Wickremesinghe took the position that they should strike a balance in such matters, and that the party organiser and the grassroots be equally cared for, but at the end of the day, it was imperative that the party organiser's hand must be strengthened and whoever did not support him had to be over-looked. An emotional Jayasekera, calling for drinking water, was to say that the party was only throwing more good people into the hands of the Government as a result of this policy.
Moneragala MP Lakshman Seneviratne, who has carried on an attritional campaign for a change in the party leadership for some time now, threw the gauntlet at Wickremesinghe by asking him who the party's Presidential candidate was going to be now that elections were being talked about in the open.
He was backed by his Moneragala colleague Ranjit Maddumabandara. There was a hiss inside the room that the subject was brought up to deflect from any post-mortems on the debacle in Moneragala at the recent Uva PC elections. Both, Seneviratne and Maddumabandara made it clear that they did not want any truck with the likes of Mangala Samaraweera. They were particularly critical of former President Chandrika Kumaratunga who they said was trying to make a return to politics through the UNP after doing her best to ruin the party. They asked their party leader about political commentaries in last Sunday's newspapers about their meeting at a birthday party hosted by Samaraweera.
Wickremesinghe said he went for the party as he was invited by Samaraweera, but spent less than twenty minutes with the former President. He said they spoke of no politics, and pointed out that the very next day Kumaratunga was seated next to President Mahinda Rajapaksa for more than an hour at a ceremony to honour Colombo's new Archbishop the Rt. Rev. Malcolm Ranjith, and he had to ask Kumaratunga if she was entering into a pact with her former Prime Minister (now President).
The UNP leader neither confirmed nor denied that he would be the party's next Presidential candidate. This itself left room for speculation. All that Wickremesinghe would concede was that they have only discussed a common platform with other parties such as Samaraweera's breakaway SLFP (M) among others. He said that the final decision would be taken only after a formal announcement was made about a Presidential election. The announcement is likely to be made sometime in October or November with a possible date for polling in late January or even February. The budget in December prevents MPs from campaigning any earlier.
It was at this point that all hell broke loose within the Working Committee on Wednesday. Vehement anti-Wickremesinghe protagonist Johnston Fernando entered the fray, almost on cue. He lunged forward from the back of the hall towards the head table and started making accusations against the party leader. He said he was not satisfied with Wickremesinghe's vague reply. At which point, party stalwart and one-time Health Minister Renuka Herath intervened to challenge Fernando.
A question had arisen on the prospective move by Herath from her long-time base in Walapane in Nuwara-Eliya to Galagedera in Kandy. The latter seat is currently being nursed by Provincial Councillor Shantini Kongahage and Herath is reportedly eyeing this move after her husband lost a recent bid to enter the Central Provincial Council from Nuwara-Eliya.
Fernando started berating Herath. This provoked the fiery Herath into retaliating. and let Fernando have it. They were going for each other, verbally and physically. Fernando's Kurunegala colleague Indika Bandaranayake came to support him, whereupon Wickremasinghe shouted into the microphone, "calm down, calm down, sit down".
Fernando then directed his fire at Wickremesinghe asking why he was only asking him to sit down, and had the temerity to point his finger at the party leader, saying "you are the one who has ruined this party", and many more things, as he walked out shouting at the top of his voice.
It was indeed a pathetic display by what is, for all intents and purposes, the country's alternate Government, however distant a reality that may be.
It prompted the likes of Rukman Senanayake to ask what on earth the UNP was doing. He said they had been listening to bickering and in-fighting for the past three and a half hours. The meeting had started at 4 p.m (and concluded at 7.50 pm), and yet, nothing substantial had been discussed or decided.
He pointed out that an election was round the corner and the party's highest decision-making body, the Working Committee, had not discussed strategies or plans on how to win these elections.
Senanayake had suggested that the in-fighting be waged elsewhere, and not at the Working Committee. He said the UNP won only 15 percent of the vote in Moneragala - and would win only 10 percent of the vote in Matara. The situation was that bad, he said.
But the former party Chairman's counseling had little impact. Another fight blew up between Kotte's Ravi Karunanayake and Maddumabandara, the latter accusing the former of entering Moneragala during the Uva elections and distributing leaflets without his permission. Maddumabandara pointed out to yet another Working Committee decision that anyone entering an electorate for campaigning should inform the sitting organiser of his intentions. Karunanayake said this was not a national election and that this decision had no relevance.
Such was the mood and tension inside the UNP's Working Committee that one of them told another as they walked out of an indecisive meeting, "we better wear body-armour and bring helmets the next time we come here".
The solitary decision that was taken at the near four-hour-long meeting was to challenge some of the new election laws that were to be introduced; but it seemed nobody really cared any more.
In that backdrop, these new laws have sent shivers among most political parties. Some of the political parties have already gone to the Supreme Court challenging the Parliamentary Elections (Amendment) Bill that was tabled in Parliament last week as reported exclusively in the front page of last week's Sunday Times.
The bill has some far reaching provisions which include the qualifications for the recognition of political parties and grounds on which they can lose that recognition, for instance, if they don't put forward candidates at two successive elections and the like. These amendments give wide powers to the Elections Commissioner; powers that he has been asking for sometime comparing the situation in India where a powerful commission not only supervises elections but also the day-to-day administration of political parties.
The UNP is going to challenge these laws that permit the Elections Commissioner to ask for "any information" from the party, and this could be construed to mean even party strategies on how to win an election. The draft laws refer to asking the party for the name of every donor. A person pays Rs. 1/- to become a member of the party. Should all the names of such members be submitted, or will the party have to face the consequences.
Samaraweera is saying that the SLFP will lose its recognition because the SLFP has not contested two successive elections. The Muslim Congress and the Tamil National Alliance are complaining on the grounds of having the race as part of the party name. Even inside the Government, parties have raised concerns about several issues, and an exasperated Chairman of the Select Committee of Parliament on Electoral Reforms, Dinesh Gunawardena says these parties say one thing inside the Select Committee and change their minds later. He seems to want to put the matter before the Supreme Court for a determination on its constitutionality.
Not all recommendations of the Elections Commissioner have been incorporated. Significant among them is the recommendation for the Elections Commissioner to be the one who decides on dates for Parliamentary and Presidential elections - and not the sitting President.
The effective banning of parties with a racial or religious name is not among the Elections Commissioner's recommendations, nor is it of the Parliamentary Select Committee. That appears to be a separate Government decision.
One of the most significant recommendations of this select committee is to introduce a hybrid electoral system, one that will be a mix between the existing proportional representation (PR) system where voting is district-wise and the former first-past-the post (FPP) system where the voting is electorate-wise.
These recommendations are to apply not only to Parliamentary elections, but also to provincial and local council elections, but what is probably noteworthy is that the fact that for Parliament, the recommendation is to keep the present number of MPs at 225, broken down as follows;
140 - Elected from 140 constituencies based on the FPP system
70 - Elected from the District PR system
15 - Elected from the National List.
If one were to read this with some of the comments made this week by ruling SLFP office bearers such as General Secretary Maithripala Sirisena that the Government is aiming to get a two-thirds majority at the next elections (150 seats), one might be justified in asking whether the Government is toying with the thought of bringing this hybrid system before the next elections. Given the results from recent Provincial Council polls, where the Government has romped home winning almost all the constituencies, and yet had to share some of the seats in these councils due mainly to the PR voting pattern, the Government is excused to think on those lines.
The problem, however, is that these new 140 constituencies need to be demarcated by fresh delimitation and this is going to take at least some months to execute.
A noteworthy fact is that of the 32 member Select Committee none of the Opposition MPs has signed the committee report, and instead submitted separate reports with their own recommendations for change of the electoral system.
Thus, with the military ending the separatist war and the Government unravelling the international operations of Tiger guerrillas, the focus turns to the political battlefields. More so with more elections ahead.
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