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President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s warning that he intends to order the Sri Lanka Army to transport rice from the mill to the stores if the owners of rice mills do not act according to Government directives, is less than reassuring. This awakens uncanny if not unsettling echoes of former President Gotabhaya Rajapaksa’s vain thundering in 2022 that the military will be deployed for organic farming after farmers and agriculture officials resisted his suicidal overnight ban on chemical fertiliser.

Reminders of past Presidential errors

To be scrupulously fair, the two situations are factually different in nature. In the present instance, a Government with an ‘unprecedented mandate’ has been rendered impotent by large scale mill owners resulting in rice shortages and price fluctuations in the market. The result is President Dissanayake’s threat to bring in the military to break the spine of the ‘rice mafia.’ Previously, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, (brought in also on an unprecedented mandate in 2019), embarked on a costly political misadventure later blamed by him on his advisors to achieve the goal of Sri Lanka being the ‘first country’ to eliminate the use of chemical fertiliser.

This crazed pattern that Sri Lankan political leaders exhibit, of boasting in being the ‘first’ in something or another defies ordinary comprehension, it must be said. Anyway, former President Rajapaksa himself was ‘eliminated,’ (politically speaking that is) though he escaped a far more dire fate at the hands of a raging mob by the ‘skin of his teeth’ as the biblical phrase nicely puts it. Even so, the point here is common to both situations.  Simply stated, the calling out of the military in matters of civil governance is entirely antithetical to the very idea of governance itself.

Perhaps the NPP (National Peoples’ Power) torchbearers hailing from the lofty realms of academia may explain this fundamental lesson to their comrades in the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) before we have a Gotabaya-style repeat. Indeed, a discordant feeling of deja vu emerges in other respects also. That includes President Dissanayake’s populist retort that if former President Mahinda Rajapaksa continues to ‘whine’ about the reduction of security allocated to him, even the remaining security will be withdrawn.

The ‘AKD charm’ factor is not governance

This is something on the lines of what Mr Mahinda Rajapaksa’s younger brother said while enthroned in the Presidential seat that there is no need for any law or circular but public officials must obey his word nonetheless. In other words, ‘it is the Law because I say so,’ Mr Gotabhaya Rajapaksa declared on the lines of the 17th century’s French King Louis XIV’s famed apocryphal edict of ‘L’Etat, c’est moi’ (I am the State). Here too, President Dissanayake must be sharply reminded that it is not his function to withdraw the security of a former President because he or she ‘whines.’

This truth is (legally) self-evident. There is procedure to be followed and the mandate of the law to be observed, including the assessment of a threat analysis in order to arrive at a decision. Such calls from the public platform by a sitting President is not conducive to the dignity of the office which he inhabits. This is entirely different to what a Presidential contender may say on an election platform, which included Mr Dissanayake saying at one point that a former President must send in an ‘application’ for a house to be assigned after leaving office.

Continuing jibes such as these only speak to the cheapening of serious matters of governance. Perhaps the President may focus more on his earlier promise to abolish the Office of the Executive Presidency rather than engaging in platform theatrics to cheering crowds. For that matter, his commitment to the NPP’s election manifesto must not be confined to exercising the ‘smiling AKD charm of a simple man amongst us’ as he met Tamil mothers who pleaded with him to clarify the fate of their disappeared children, this week in Jaffna.

Contradictions galore
by the NPP

First, this knee jerk reaction in ‘calling out the military’ regarding matters of governance regulation is worrying. That illustrates the extreme helplessness of a regime that was not given an overwhelming mandate to waffle as to why it is unable to effectively regulate rice mill operations including setting a guaranteed (fair) price for purchases of paddy. Furthermore, this Presidential threat runs counter to the pledge by the Deputy Minister of Defence, a retired Major General, that directives are being drafted restricting the Army ‘to their own duties,’ ie; to be employed ‘exclusively’ to ‘defend the country.’

Or does the President think that ensuring fairly priced supplies of rice for the Sri Lankan market falls within the ambit of ‘defending the country’? This question is not too far-fetched given that President Dissanayake justified his call for military intervention by claiming that ‘rice is a national asset.’ And so we descend from comedy to farce very quickly. On that same argument, the list of what can be pronounced as ‘national assets’ is endless. Will the military be tasked with overseeing the regulation of all these ‘assets’, pray?  This is not the only time that major contradictions have pervaded the NPP’s public spaces.

Secondly, prosecutions of emblematic cases of enforced disappearances and extra-judicial killings not only gross political corruption must be brought to a close instead of wilting away in the legal system. This includes most particularly prosecutions of killings at point blank range of five students in Trincomalee by military personnel (January 2006) with some eye witnesses being killed days later. That priority focus also includes the brutal massacre of seventeen Tamil and Muslim aid workers in Mutur allegedly at the hands of paramilitary and military groups in August that same year.

‘System-change’ goes beyond cosmetic factors

These incidents were extensively analysed by the Udalagama Commission (2006) and the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC, 2010-2011). At that time, I wrote that the two cases ‘expose the fault lines in Sri Lanka’s justice system in respect of investigations and prosecutions, including the failure of an effective witness protection system’ (‘Using the LLRC Report as a consensus mechanism,’ Focus on Rights, January 1st 2012). The LLRC had strongly urged accountability in regard to that ruthless mowing down of innocents far from the theatre of war.

More than a decade later, justice in these emblematic cases is long overdue. What we see however is the wearying charade of chasing after corrupt politicians and their sons, reflecting déjà vu again in full measure. But a ‘rogue system’ must be tackled at its systemic core, not just pursue individuals however despicable they may be. So as the President calls for a ‘system-change’ on the part of others, perhaps it is time that the searchlight is turned inwards.

That does not mean largely cosmetic measures, such as the reduction of the military by 40% in its participation at the forthcoming Independence Day Parade. Equally so, the assurance that the National Anthem will be sung both in Sinhala and Tamil at this event is scarcely the ‘system-change’ that was promised. These are every-day markers of a stable State, not extraordinary concessions in any sense whatsoever. That such matters are still subjected to public debate underscores the deep racism of the Sri Lanka State that the Rajapaksa legacy (et al) left behind.

The greater democratic good

Much more is needed for the bona fides of the Government to be proven. At the minimum, presidential calls to the military to ensure rice supplies or regulate civil governance in other ways should cease forthwith. To be clear, that imperative is irrespective of whether it concerns the North or the South.

This is essential for the civic health of the nation.