Editorial

The public spat over official housing for ex-presidents spilling over to the security provided to them is not a good sign.

Some, not all, presidents, when in office, weaponised the issue of providing security details to cabinet ministers and others, doing so when they didn’t get along with the president. The security was either reduced or withdrawn purely on political grounds. Former Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar paid with his life when repeated requests for extra security were denied to him.

Some of the security contingents for elected representatives were no doubt bloated and attracted negative attention. However, others required proper security while in office, and after.

The fact that a former president had to flee from a mob advancing on his official residence during the ‘Aragalaya‘ despite having the ‘best’ of security, or the then prime minister’s private residence was set on fire with guards watching does not speak much for ‘security’ anyway.

And yet, to announce at a public rally the numbers of a VIP’s security contingent is counterproductive to the very purpose of providing security. When it was first said that security to ex-presidents would be provided based on threat assessments by professionals and then announced in public that if anyone ‘talks too much’ the numbers would be reduced, it is a political statement, nothing to do with threat assessments.

That former presidents, Mahinda Rajapaksa and Gotabaya Rajapaksa (as then Defence Secretary), saw to conclusion a three-decade-long separatist insurrection and brought normal civilian life back to the country is a fact. Whatever their politics, that they need a certain amount of proper security is a given. The numbers are a threat assessment factor.

The public debate on the occupation of government bungalows by ex-presidents is a different issue. Clearly, one ex-president splurged on public funds to renovate his official residence, but at least it remains government property. There was another who uses a state bungalow while her private residence is ‘just next door’. One sitting president at the time laughed when the widow of a former president asked that the government house she was occupying be transferred to her daughter. Though stating that when he quit the presidency he would return to his village and watch the world go by sitting by the tank bund, he too remains today in a government bungalow in Colombo.

Today’s leaders are trying to set a good example on financial prudence of public funds—particularly getting rid of the ‘entitlement’ mindset of elected politicians. Still, when they also pick on what appears to be a witch-hunt on political grounds, it gives a twist to their motives.

The Rohingya question

A boatload of stateless Rohingyas landed in Sri Lanka by unscrupulous traffickers has created a headache for the new Government. Sri Lanka is not party to the 1951 Refugee Convention overseen by the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and is not therefore bound by its principle of non-refoulement that aims to protect refugees against forcible return to dangerous situations.

Nevertheless, Sri Lanka has provided safe haven to groups of Pakistani Christians and Ahmadi Muslims who have stayed as asylum seekers. Like the Rohingyas from Myanmar, they want the UNHCR to find them permanent homes in the West. Yet the Pakistanis have been here for years awaiting the West to call on them, their children already schooling around Negombo. Will this be the fate of the Rohingyas too?

The UNHCR ended its presence in Sri Lanka last year. It puts the onus on the relevant government agencies to deal with the Rohingya issue. Many call upon the Government to abide by international law ‘principles’. The Rohingyas’ horror stories could indeed have an element of truth, but clearly they are also coached by their traffickers.

The 1983 race riots saw a mass exodus of Sri Lankans to Europe, North America, and South India. Sri Lankan Governments’ weak counter-propaganda had little chance against the dominant liberal humanitarian political ethos of the Western states then.

This week, a UK court held that a 52-year-old Lankan asylum seeker who arrived there in 2000 “was prepared to tell lies” about life back home, but added that “any court or tribunal must be very careful not to dismiss an appeal just because an appellant has told lies”. They allowed him to stay as he had already been there for 25 years. Even British MPs, usually sympathetic to these horror narratives from Sri Lanka, are appalled at such judicial decisions, now that this is a full-blown political issue in their country, and have called for new laws on bogus asylum-seekers. The court also held that the Sri Lankan man’s sister who lives in England lied to bolster her brother’s claim.

These are all part of a multimillion-dollar industry of human trafficking international syndicates. In Australia and in the West, groups even work around domestic staff in residencies of foreign diplomats to claim the right to long-term stay status.

Such incidents also speak of the hypocrisy and double standards on refugees, asylum seekers and illegal migration. The new US President has cancelled all refugee travel to the US and set in motion the mass deportation of illegal immigrants on the grounds that America cannot absorb large numbers of migrants and refugees. Relevant UN agencies—the UNHCR and the International Organisation of Migration (IOM) are yet to comment, beyond saying they are ‘analysing the situation’.

The dire situation of thousands of Palestinian refugees continues and UNRWA, the UN agency mandated to provide for them on the basis of their ‘right of return’, will receive a near fatal blow when Israel bans it from January 30, crippling aid flows and jeopardising the ceasefire.

The Sri Lanka Government which is now seemingly calculating the amount of rice fed to pet dogs, will need to feed these uninvited Rohingya newcomers too—and due to the prevailing shortage, have to import further stocks—even from Myanmar.