Editorial

19th April 1998

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Getting past the post

The last of the butchers

Getting past the post

In every dimension of life, rights are closely and inseparably linked to responsibilities. To the extent there is failure in responsibility, to that extent rights are forfeited.

Several trade unions in Sri Lanka are plunging towards the forfeiture of their rights through a gradual breakdown in their sense of responsibility especially towards the ordinary people of this country. The conduct of some of these unions is not only indisciplined and irresponsible, but also reckless and arrogant.

See what the postal unions are doing. Over a relatively minor issue such as overtime for staff officers, they are insensitively if not senselessly holding millions of ordinary people to ransom. Thousands of poor or middle class families did not receive their remittances for the New Year because of the pile up of mail. Brave troops on the battlefront and their family members could not exchange New Year greeting cards.

The well-to-do have courier services, fax, e-mail and all that for communication. It is the ordinary people who get nailed by the snail-mail policy of the political mafias in the postal unions. Now they are demanding that the Postal Chief be removed. If appointments and removals of top officers are decided upon by dubious unions, then we are on the brink of administrative disaster.

Among others high on the list of those using the strike weapon as a first option rather than the last are people who are supposed to be dedicated to the vocation of healing - nurses and doctors. Almost every month they create some rumpus in public hospitals. Again the well-to-do can afford private hospitals. It is the poor and oppressed who are made to suffer more, perhaps because medicine, which was once a vocation then became a profession and now is largely a business. They do more striking with the heel than healing.

We believe the time has come to crack the whip. Legislation needs to be introduced to ensure that the strike weapon is used only as a last resort when all other options have been tested and found to have failed.

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The last of the butchers

What did the notorious Hitler, Stalin and the late and unlamented Pol Pot have in common besides being the three principal satanic figures in the world's halls of hell? Even if they might have started with some degree of objectivity, blind and obstinate devotion to the party or creed turned objectivity into obsession and then into the horrible hell-holes of total possession by the Devil's own ideology.

In simple terms what the three worst mass murderers of the century had in common was bigotry. Mahatma Gandhi has said that bigotry is the main cause of most of the massacres that have marred human history.

Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and other bloody madmen thought that their concept was the absolute picture of what was necessary for the world. Absolutism leaves no room for accommodation. So anyone and anything that did not fit into their picture was first ostracized, then eliminated.

Pol Pot had studied radio electronics in Paris and Marx in Moscow. Strangely they produced for him an agrarian Utopia. Educated people did not fit into that preordained concept. So tens of thousands of teachers, doctors and other professionals were massacre the killing fields. Any person who even wore spectacles was thought to be educated and thus eliminated. Some two million people are known to have been slaughtered within three years of the Pol Pot holocaust. During that time the international community did little by way of intervention to save the innocent people of Cambodia.

For small countries like Sri Lanka the message or warning from the Pol Pot horror is the danger of bigotry or allowing a one-man or one-woman show. We came near to such a situation during and after the reign of terror in 1988-89. It is a process of collective decision making, participatory democracy and decentralisation that will ensure that no Pol Pot emerges from the war and violence here.

Political Column

Editorial/Opinion Contents