Editorial

They say if you believe in election manifestos, you will believe in anything. More realistically, it was Sri Lanka’s one-time ‘north star’, the late Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who famously said election promises in Sri Lanka were the ‘auctioning of nonexistent resources’. And so, the tradition continues.

The contestants for the country’s top job have, no doubt, with arguably good intentions, got their respective teams to burn the midnight oil and piece together their ‘wish list’ for the people of this country. How many can really say, with hand on heart, that they take a second look at these ‘manifestoes’ after the elections?

Unlike in many countries of the industrialised West, all the socio-economic-political theories have been put on offer to the people. From neo-liberalism to social democracy, there is also a Communist Party manifesto, which no one knows is Marx, Mao or Macao. They are so very utopian in nature, so voluminous and unrealistic that voters do not seem to take them seriously—at all.

The Chamber of Commerce is pleading for political parties to stop making false fiscal promises and extravagant offers without any clue of how to collect revenue based on the unknown. These pleas fall on deaf ears. There is an election to be won—by hook or by con.

On domestic issues, the promises are galore: salary increases for the millions in the public sector; tax cuts for the vast vote base of the middle class; and anything to do with education and health. Negotiations with the IMF are all about continuation, but “with our conditions”. Just like the borrower dictating conditions to the lender.

The Sri Lankan polity is not the type who will read the 250 pages of fiction that are contained in manifestos. They know they mean nothing—that it is a waste of paper and a waste of tongue discussing the contents. The abolition of the executive presidency has once again entered some of the manifestoes. The first time it made a grand entry into a manifesto was at the 1994 presidential election, and the one who was to become the Minister of Justice even set an exact date for it to happen—July 15, 1995.

When the date came, those who asked for that election promise to be implemented got teargassed and battered by the President’s security. Thereafter, the President clamoured to get one more year in the job and was stopped by the Supreme Court. The then Minister is still belting away promises—from a different platform these days. These politicians were called chameleons once, or political frogs. Now they seem to be called ‘colour-light’ politicians. Except that these have only three colours.

The more things seemingly change, the more they remain the same.

The Geneva challenge

One of the first foreign policy decisions a post-September 21 government will have to take is Sri Lanka’s position on the resolutions before the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), which begins its bi-annual sessions tomorrow with the country under the sword for the nth time since its human rights record was first taken up at this highly politicised world body.

The incumbent administration will have its Foreign Minister jetting to Geneva next week to defend the country’s brief.

A report on Sri Lanka’s track record by the UN Human Rights Commissioner preceded tomorrow’s sessions. The report made no effort to conceal his prejudices—as if his job depended on it—clearly fuelled by the anti-Sri Lankan diaspora and purported international human rights watchdogs in tandem with politicians in vote-bank-rich Commonwealth countries, viz., the UK and Canada, that have spearheaded the resolutions against Sri Lanka along with some pliant states from the Global South like Malawi.

The United States, the other member of the Core Group, has of late taken a more lukewarm stance on the crusade against Sri Lanka, given the fact that these three countries are currently facing the brunt of criticism for advocating human rights around the world, except in Palestine, where genocide is taking place with their tacit support. They, along with the UNHRC, preach ‘Gold Standards’ while practising double standards.

With Sri Lanka facing a crucial election in a fortnight, the country’s future approach in Geneva is still uncertain. No human rights programme can be implemented without the cooperation of a democratically elected government. Under the circumstances, it is probably likely that the Core Group will propose a mere ‘rollover’ of the existing resolutions against the country, which can be described as ‘mutually satisfied dissatisfaction’. In short, the case is not closed; both parties have to move for a postponement of the trial date.

This kind of pragmatism will not sit well with the UN High Commissioner’s office and the precis writers in it. They keep shifting goal posts and producing reports that contain ‘bottom trawling’ allegations and constructions, the latest being implicit suggestions that the IMF reforms and the related hardships further buttress Sri Lanka’s poor human rights violations track record.

This UNHRC ‘capture’ is very much the lack of a consensus of the Sri Lankan political system to meet the Geneva challenge. There is a massive vacuum in all the manifestoes on the subject. The NPP/JVP is in a dilemma as the UN High Commissioner has extended his self-made mandate to investigate disappearances even during the 1971 insurgency—more than 50 years ago. They have failed to make a public statement on whether they want such an investigation—or not—for obvious reasons.

As long as there is no such consensus, the West-led Core Group will continue to exert pressure on Sri Lanka. Human rights will continue to be the country’s Achilles heel. The UNHRC inventory will keep expanding from the LTTE ‘war’ period to governance issues, law and order, and now socio-economic issues concerning IMF reforms.

Some in the West may have realised that their selective ‘stick’ approach through Geneva exposes their Gaza double standards. There is more than one way to ‘skin a cat’ and adopt a friendlier approach to win over Sri Lanka—the carrot rather than the stick approach in a fast-evolving and changing world.