Editorial

As President Ranil Wickremesinghe headed East to jump-start stalled or abandoned Japanese projects in Sri Lanka and seek support from the Asian Development Bank (ADB), news from the West, i.e. the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was not particularly encouraging.

Hopes that the IMF would fast-forward its bailout package for Sri Lanka appeared moving at a lukewarm pace as delays in getting the country’s creditors on board for a debt servicing deal seemed to stall progress. Thus, an early approval by the IMF’s Executive Board for the USD 2.9 billion dangled before the Government by its staff-level team that was in Colombo last month is unlikely to be sealed by this month or even November. A Central Bank team heads next week to Washington (IMF) to try and break the logjam.

At the root of the problem is China — lagging behind in giving a firm commitment on how it intends giving any moratorium to Sri Lanka on its loan repayments, notwithstanding repeated assurances by its envoy in Colombo of friendship and hosannas to China on the 73rd anniversary of the creation of the modern People’s Republic of China by the Prime Minister who went as far as referring to that country as a ‘kalyana mithra‘ (noble friend interested in the other’s prosperity).

Sri Lanka is yet to reach out to China at a high political level, as that country readies for its upcoming annual congress of the Chinese Communist Party.

In the meantime, the Japanese political leadership was eager to find out from the visiting Sri Lankan President his take on China. The baggage left behind for President Wickremesinghe by his predecessor including the cancellation of 13 Japan-funded projects in Sri Lanka, some of which went to China and the granting of permission to a Chinese surveillance vessel that docked at Hambantota recently seemed to require reassurances that relations with Japan would revert to the status quo ante.

Japan has also been a longtime kalyana mithra of Sri Lanka, and has come forward to co-chair a meeting with China in an ad-hoc mechanism on Sri Lanka’s debt sustainability issue as a forerunner to the Paris Club which includes the major subscribers to the IMF, mostly the Western powers. However, Japan would be hesitant to put additional financing into a country like Sri Lanka that can’t service its debts.

A neutral Sri Lanka has got caught in the vortex of geopolitics (the West plus India and Japan versus China) and is being used as the bait to goad China to the debt sustainability table. The President made a reference to this global power play affecting smaller countries. Addressing the ADB he quoted a local idiom; “When the elephants fight, it is the grass that gets crushed”.

The IMF’s attention has lately been drawn to the sudden strengthening of the US Dollar causing convulsions in major economies from China to Japan, and in Britain, whose Pound has crashed to a record low. How Sri Lanka navigates itself in this turbulent economic weather is not going to be easy.

Dusting an archaic law and embarrassing the Govt.

 Sri Lanka’s ‘peaceful protesters’ seem blissfully unconcerned about events unfolding in the outside world; their target is to keep agitating at home. To arrest this trend the Government went and needlessly declared high-security zones (HSZ) throughout the capital city and compounded the matter by imposing them under, of all laws, the outdated Official Secrets Act. The impulsive move originating from the beleaguered Public Security Ministry in conjunction with high officials of the MoD (Defence Ministry) was unfortunately signed into law through a Gazette by the President as Defence Minister.

It was a textbook case of insensitive officials looking with blinkers how they can stem the vexed issue of weekly demonstrations mainly by politically motivated left-wing student unions with the tacit encouragement of Western embassies. These officials are now peddling the excuse that there is a bigger plot to overthrow not just the Government, but to incapacitate the State by taking over key institutions like Parliament, the Supreme Court etc., and that the cost of teargas canisters used and deployment of riot squads, court time and swelling of remand prisons were all at state expense.

The Official Secrets Act is archaic and has the hallmarks of a ‘police state’ or a state at war. It is limited to preventing government officials who are in possession of ‘state secrets’ from passing such information to ‘enemies of the state’. Often the Media is lumped as such an enemy whenever inconvenient truths come into the public domain. But this is ‘old hat’ now and a new culture has come about in unlocking hitherto classified public information through the ground-breaking Right to Information (RTI) Act. The irony of it all is that it was President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s Government that was instrumental in bringing about this new open-government culture in 2016. In any event, HSZs appear prima facie, ultra-vires the Official Secrets Act.

International human rights watchdogs have jumped on the bandwagon of concerned local parties that have red flags about what is clearly a faux-pas by the Government on the HSZ Gazette. The timing of it while the UNHRC sessions are in progress and the Government is under the pump for its human rights record, and curtailment of public dissent, could not have been worse.

Apart from the legality of it all, the HSZ Gazette is thoroughly impractical to implement. It is best for the President to issue to over-enthusiastic ministry officials and greenhorn ministers a separate Executive Order asking them to kindly consult the Attorney General and get some free legal advice on what laws to use for which purposes before embarrassing the Government further. The decision to revoke this extraordinary  Gazette Extra-Ordinary is most welcome.