Worrying developments

by Kath Noble

(June 09, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Somebody asked me the other day why there has been so little coverage in the local press of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It is said to be the worst ecological disaster in the history of the United States. And it concerns an industry into which Sri Lanka is about to jump headfirst. That would seem to be reason enough for journalists to follow developments. But they aren't. My interlocutor wanted to know whether a reporting ban had been imposed by the Government.

I will get to BP in a moment.

Media freedom has been discussed at such length in this country that most people are deeply confused about the issue. Questions like this are put to me all the time. They are so prevalent that it is actually quite hard to keep things in perspective.

Of course there are problems. I have written about them in previous columns, and I am sure there will be plenty of opportunities in the future to add to those words.

But it isn't that bad.

The Government doesn't control what is published. Anybody who believes there to be a blackout on particular subjects is welcome to send me the details.

Having cleared that up, let's return to oil exploration.

In the Gulf of Mexico, all is very far from well. An oil rig called Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank - killing 11 crew members - nearly two months ago, and it has been leaking between 500,000 and 800,000 gallons per day into the ocean. We aren't exactly sure. That's up to 40 million gallons in total so far. And it hasn't stopped gushing yet. BP - the company that uses the platform - finally managed to put a cap on the leak this weekend and is now siphoning off a proportion of the oil to a tanker on the surface, but it doesn't expect to be able to stop the flow altogether until a couple of relief wells it is digging are completed, another two months from now.

That means serious damage.

To put it into perspective, remember the Exxon Valdez. That devastated thousands of miles of coastline when it ran aground in Alaska. Hundreds of thousands of birds and thousands of marine animals were killed, and they continued to die for years afterwards. A study released by the authorities on the 20th anniversary of the accident stated that toxic materials could still be found in some places, and that it might even take centuries for them to disappear. Many species had yet to recover. Fish stocks were badly hit and tourism suffered.

About 10 million gallons were released on that occasion. That's about a quarter of what has already escaped in the Gulf of Mexico.

I won't go on about the impact, because I suspect that many people in Sri Lanka regard environmental destruction as just an unfortunate and indeed inevitable result of activities that are necessary for the development of the country.

There is a feeling that only the rich can be interested in protecting the environment.

I see it rather differently. I think it is people who have money who can afford to do what causes the most damage to our world.

It is certainly so with oil exploration.

BP made $14 billion in profits last year. It was not through lack of funds that it ended up in its current rather sorry predicament, but through desire for even more.

The Guardian has reported that internal safety records dating back nearly a year show problems with the very equipment that went awry. The company opted for a higher risk at lower cost. A congressman is quoted as saying that it then chose a particularly unpleasant and yet less effective chemical for use in the clean-up operation simply because a former BP executive is on the board of the company that makes it - it is banned in the UK. Meanwhile, the Huffington Post says that the wife of one of the crew members who died in the blast has filed a lawsuit claiming that the company didn't provide suitably competent staff for the oil rig and didn't properly supervise their work.

It also reports that BP had been resisting proposed strengthening of industry safety rules.

The worst case scenario in the plan for Deepwater Horizon that was submitted to the regulators - the Minerals Management Service - involved a leak of just 162,000 gallons per day. BP claimed to have the capacity to respond to any eventuality.

In reality, they have needed the assistance of the Coast Guard and a host of federal agencies, not to mention thousands of volunteers.

Throughout the history of the industry, it has been only in the aftermath of major disasters that advances have been made in its oversight. Given the number and severity of incidents that have occurred in other countries, Sri Lanka ought to be in a good position to manage activities in its waters effectively. There is plenty of experience to learn from, coming so late to the work.

However, we know how ineffective regulation has been in other sectors.

What's more, even in the United States it has proven difficult to keep the oil companies in check. The main problem has been politicians, who tend to get far too cosy with them.

It will not be through lack of funds that BP fails to hand over the compensation it is now promising the affected people either.

The Exxon Valdez settlement was supposed to be $5 billion. That was what a jury decided soon after the accident happened. But the company then spent two decades fighting it in court, during which time the 33,000 Alaskans who had been judged worthy of damages received nothing at all. The final ruling required them to pay only $500 million.

The point is that oil exploration is a very risky business that Sri Lanka cannot afford to get wrong. To understand this better, go to www.ifitwasmyhome.com.

This is why we need to pay attention.

The Government has identified three areas - practically encircling the island - in which it plans to allow drilling. One block in the North West has been leased to an Indian company, and they intend to start work on test wells in January. They are said to be expecting to spend about $100 million on the endeavour, so they will be going all out for results. If they are successful, that will draw many others in, and quickly too. The Mannar Basin could be full of oil rigs before we know it.

Discussion of how this process is going to be managed should have begun already.

Instead there is a deafening silence.

I know there is nothing unusual about that. The authorities in this country are used to hiding everything other than their highly imaginative predictions of wealth, fame and glory, to which we have to listen at regular intervals and very great length.

It is up to the local media to seek out the necessary information.

This is a task they are more than capable of tackling. So let them get on with it.

In a rather cruel twist of fate, it is the United States that is supposed to be helping Sri Lanka work out how to avoid an ecological disaster of the kind precipitated by BP. It awarded a grant of $500,000 to the Ministry of Finance and Planning some time back through the agency in charge of advancing its commercial interests in Low and Middle Income Countries. What the Government has done with the cash is a mystery. But given that these experts couldn't prevent what happened in the Gulf of Mexico, it probably doesn't matter.

We have been warned. Read more...

Waiting for spring to come

By Kath Noble

(May 05, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) A lot of promises have been made to the people of the Northern Province since the end of the conflict. The Government launched its Uthuru Wasanthaya programme with a great deal of fanfare, and billions of rupees have been spent.We assume that work is being done. New plans are announced on a regular basis. However, it remains to be seen whether all this money and activity will result in the kind of economic takeoff the region so desperately needs.

This was the subject of a very interesting debate led by well known researcher Muttukrishna Sarvananthan at the Indian Cultural Centre last week. The text of his presentation was serialised in this newspaper.

He emphasised a general concern about the Sri Lankan economy that I think bears repeating.

Economic growth shouldn’t be an end in itself. Whether Mahinda Rajapaksa achieves his target of 8% growth per annum up to the end of his second term is far less important than how he goes about the task. Continuing the trend set in the last five years would have dangerous repercussions, given its focus on expanding the public sector. While the Government has doubled per capita income from $1,000 to $2,000, it has also doubled public debt. A lot of money has been spent both in recruitment and on salary increases. Unless something can be done about productivity, this isn’t going to generate funds to pay back the loans Mahinda Rajapaksa has taken when they fall due.

It is stupid to get excited about statistics without looking into what they mean, in other words. We need to do a bit more thinking on these issues.

Politicians will never tell us the whole story, only what shows their party in the best light. What’s more, their focus is on the here and now. They have very little incentive to worry about sustainability. As a rule, just looking as though they are achieving something is enough to satisfy them.

In a way, this is the cause of many of the specific problems Muttukrishna Sarvananthan highlighted.

The Government actually wants people to be dependent on its munificence. If they regard it as their saviour - or at least the provider of the majority of the goods and services they need - then they may well vote for it.

Of course, there are a number of things the administration really has to do.

Infrastructure has to be rebuilt. The conflict brought massive destruction to pretty much all of the Northern Province, and for many places this came on top of years of neglect and decay. Roads need repairing, as do schools and hospitals. Water supply and irrigation facilities have to be improved and the power grid has to be expanded.

However, there is no reason for the permanently loss-making Sri Lanka Transport Board to run buses to Jaffna, when there are plenty of companies and individual entrepreneurs who could do as good a job. Similarly, the Air Force has experience in running flights, but it need not do so when there are private operators ready to step in. As for the Army setting up tea shops along the A9, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything so ridiculous. Newly resettled people could easily do this while they are waiting to go back to work in their fields, with a little assistance. Likewise, the state-owned Mercantile Bank of Sri Lanka should be focusing on giving loans to people who are trying to restart or expand their businesses after the conflict, not spending time and money building a hotel in Nallur.

One doesn’t need to be a committed private sector development enthusiast to understand that there is something amiss with these initiatives.

Indeed, we are not talking about economic growth in just any part of the country. This is a region that was held back due to the conflict. The causes of stagnation may overlap with those seen elsewhere, but they are not the same.

The focus has to be much more on unleashing the potential of the people themselves.

Bradman Weerakoon, who was one of the other speakers at the Indian Cultural Centre debate, made some decidedly condescending remarks about the industrious nature of Tamils in support of this argument. But stereotypes aside, he was right. People of whatever ethnicity - Sri Lankan or otherwise - will do a pretty good job of looking after their own future if they are given the chance.

This means involving them in the process.

One of the most important and urgent tasks in the Northern Province is the reconstruction of houses, given the numbers that were reduced to little more than rubble during the conflict. This is something that newly resettled people should be encouraged to do. They just need money and support in acquiring materials. Without turning the exercise into a bureaucratic nightmare, the Government should also play a role in ensuring that vulnerable groups like widows and orphans - of whom it would be silly not to expect large numbers - are coping.

Above all, people need to know what help they are going to get and when they should expect it.

This directs us to what I think is an even more relevant criticism of the Uthuru Wasanthaya programme. It is highly centralised, with decisions being made in Colombo or by its appointed representatives, none of whom are locals.

Information on what is planned is simply not available on the ground.

This must be particularly disturbing for those who remain IDPs. Having lived through a year of uncertainty in camps, during which period they were for some unknown reason told as little as possible about what was going to happen to them, many of them still have no idea. They have to just wait and hope. It is completely stupid, when the Government could easily decide on a timetable and the benefits they are to be given and publicise it.

More generally, lack of confidence in the policy framework is behind the delay we see on the part of many Tamils originally from the Northern Province but now resident elsewhere in the country or abroad in coming back to start work.

The illogical restrictions that Muttukrishna Sarvananthan noted in his presentation clearly don’t help either. Maintaining a High Security Zone where by all accounts it is not needed - in the middle of the city - seems particularly dumb, when all efforts are being made to demonstrate that the situation is getting back to normal. Likewise, there would appear to be no sensible reason for insisting on clearance from the Defence Ministry for commercial goods to be transported to Jaffna and for people without Sri Lankan passports to enter the peninsula.

Such things generate suspicion. After a long conflict, it is hardly surprising that people fear the intentions of the Government, but this natural tendency is exacerbated by its failure to include them in decision-making processes.

It is an environment in which the private sector is bound to hesitate.

With the administration showing little awareness of the tasks on which it should be concentrating its efforts and even less interest in facilitating the work of others, this is rather worrying. Funds can very easily be wasted or at least not spent in the most effective way.

Of course, this situation could be significantly improved - if undoubtedly not completely solved - with stronger leadership at the provincial level.

All the speakers at the Indian Cultural Centre debate were careful to stress that they were focusing only on the economy and not on politics. But of course these subjects cannot be separated. And they shouldn’t be. How decisions are made and by whom is of vital importance. Avoiding mention of the exclusion of MPs and other elected representatives from the Northern Province - even members of the ruling coalition - in the effort to generate an economic takeoff, as Muttukrishna Sarvananthan did, simply will not do.

Both the UPFA and the UNP took this route in the election, it is true. But they didn’t win in the areas we are talking about.

Politicians from the region should be given the opportunity to demonstrate that limited devolution of the kind that is already in the Constitution can actually work, if the Government wants to stop people dreaming of even greater autonomy.

Involving a range of actors from all the main parties in the Northern Province would help in avoiding the obsession displayed with the public sector. Not all of them would have something to gain.

Returning to the broader question about the direction of the Sri Lankan economy, Muttukrishna Sarvananthan was right to draw attention to the problems that surely lie ahead if Mahinda Rajapaksa persists with the course he set during his first term. The public sector is important, but it cannot be allowed to grow at such a tremendous rate without any consideration of the implications. We know that it is a problem. There are already so many people employed and yet not actually working, and the Government continues to announce plans for further expansion. Eventually, it is going to end in a crisis, especially when the burden of pensions hits.

This issue deserves much more attention than it is currently getting.

It is almost as vital to the future of the Northern Province as what is being done under the Uthuru Wasanthaya programme. The Government can only go on doing work for as long as there is money available, after all. Read more...

Let's not have any more wars

By Kath Noble

(April 28, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) There are, I suspect, a lot of people in Sri Lanka who would rather cut out their own tongue than talk to the TNA.

It boils down to quite rudimentary logic. The TNA supported terrorists. And they want Eelam, even if they claim to be ready to settle for less. We simply can't trust them.The party hasn't done a great deal to assuage these fears, it must be said. There has been no stocktaking of their role during the war in Parliament and with the international community. They said nothing when the LTTE killed their fellow politicians and started conscripting the youth of the North and East. They did nothing to persuade its leaders to turn away from violence. Worst of all, when Prabhakaran got trapped in Mullaitivu and it became clear that there would be no escape, they failed to call on him to release the hundreds of thousands of civilians being kept as a human shield. The TNA did a good job of exposing the suffering the Tamil people endured at the hands of the Government over the years, but it wasn't enough. They let their own side get away with too much.

But, these are issues for Tamils to take up. The rest of the country, I propose, had better just get over it.

Members of the TNA would have been under serious threat, if they had adopted a different position, we know very well. How many of us could say with anything like equal certainty that we would not have behaved in the same way?

The LTTE is gone, and that provides an opportunity for a fresh start in the relationship.

The party's success in the election demands a change in attitude, anyway. They retained two thirds of the seats they won under the LTTE and confirmed their status as the third largest group in Parliament. The TNA took three districts, which is rather more than the Opposition managed to achieve. They represent more people in the North and East than any other party does. Given the obstacles the Government placed in their way during the campaign, it was a major victory. They are a force to be reckoned with, now they have established their democratic credentials.

This means putting a stop to the use of the TNA as a bogeyman.

The Government and its hangers-on are experts at frightening the Sinhalese community into ever greater subservience by claiming that its opponents are in league with the TNA, amongst other demons. It was done with gusto during the tussle between Mahinda Rajapaksa and Sarath Fonseka, and the practice continued up to April 8th.

Having anything to do with the TNA is now a kind of taboo in the minds of a most unfortunate number of Sri Lankans.

And that is unhealthy.

Perhaps the TNA really is secretly hoping for Eelam, as the propagandists claim. I just don't think it matters.

Separatism is no more than an idea. We shouldn't start a 'war' on it, as some people have been arguing of late, to replace the 'war' on terrorism. Nor should it be criminalised.

It is bad enough that there is a clause outlawing its advocacy in the Constitution. That was inserted in the immediate aftermath of the Black July massacres in a vain effort to save the Government from having to face the inevitable consequences of its own actions.

I would like to see a rather more thoughtful approach to the subject.

Readers should know from what I have written in these pages over the years that I wouldn't like to see Sri Lanka divided. I don't consider it to be a good solution to the problems - real or perceived - of the Tamil people. Not even close. However, I don't think it is morally wrong for other people to want Eelam, so long as they don't use guns to make it happen. This doesn't mean that I accept the claims they make in support of their position, only that I believe in their right to try to persuade the State and its constituent parts to grant their wish.

Where is the harm in letting people debate?

I haven’t a clue. Suppressing opinions doesn't usually result in them going away, we should have learnt by now. I would have thought that open discussion, without the use of insults and slurs, would be far more productive for all concerned.

But, this will undoubtedly be dismissed as a Western idea, as has become fashionable.

It is true that most Asian countries adopt a very different position on separatism. India and China are only too clear about their opposition to any mention of it. But this isn't necessarily about what is good for their people. Their size is what gives their leaders the power they are in the process of acquiring on the world stage, and they wouldn't risk anything getting in the way of their rise to the top. It might not be just Tibet and Kashmir that tried to get away if they were given a little more encouragement.

This should give Sri Lankans even more confidence that the TNA's views on Eelam - now or later - are not a threat, if they hadn't concluded that already with the death of Prabhakaran in the muddy waters of Nanthi Kadal.

There is simply no need to worry about it.

What disturbs me even more than this persistent desire to crack down on an idea is the habit the Government and its fellow travellers have got into of claiming that two very different positions are in fact the same. We are told that people who support an improved Thirteenth Amendment really want federalism, and that federalists are determined to have Eelam, amongst other nonsense.

The country has got into a pretty mess when to say a good word about devolution of any sort is to risk being called a backer of terrorists.

It is, I suggest, just a means of dismissing people without having to deal with their arguments.

So let's cut the rhetoric.

The TNA's manifesto called for a federal state with powers over land, the police, socioeconomic development including health and education, natural resources and tax, and that is what about one third of the voters in the North and East supported on April 8th, despite the many incentives for them to do otherwise. It is significant. If the Government is genuinely interested in reconciliation, it has to engage with this platform.

And that means negotiating.

In doing so, it would be prudent for the Government to look afresh at the issues under consideration. Opinions arrived at during the war may not be valid any longer. There is no Prabhakaran trying to hoodwink them into a deal that he will not honour and instead use to his advantage. The fascist dictator is no more. It is no longer a matter of holding out against the LTTE and its terrorism.

We can't trust politicians, I know, but we should remember that they will be thrown out by the people if they don't follow the mood of their constituency. That is democracy, and that is what is going to make all the difference for Sri Lanka going forward.

It is time for a dialogue with the TNA. Read more...

Putting the Emergency Regulations on trial

By Kath Noble

(April 07, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) This month marks a year since the arrest of a man I am going to call Jeyaratnam. It isn't his real name, but that hardly matters. He is a small person. Nobody has organised a demonstration outside Fort Station for him. There is no petition.

All readers need to know is that he is accused of having been involved in a terrorist plot. According to the Police, he handed over money and weapons he had received from the LTTE to a third party, who was supposed to use them. As it happens, he didn't. Either it is all lies, or they changed their minds or were stopped before they could execute their plan.

I don't know. Maybe he is guilty.

The point is that Jeyaratnam is still waiting for a chance to prove otherwise.

It's not that he hasn't been to court. He goes every 14 days. I saw for myself a while back, as I accompanied a mutual friend to Hulftsdorp. He is brought to the holding cells first thing in the morning and hangs about there until a judge calls his case. It can be hours. But the action is over in minutes. My contact says Jeyaratnam sometimes doesn't make it into the room before the judge hands down another 14 days. He doesn't seem to mind. It makes a change from staring through the bars at Welikada prison, I suppose.

On each occasion, the Police say they need more time. And they get it.

This sounds quite reasonable. We are talking about terrorism, after all. Jeyaratnam is said to have conspired to kill. It isn't a speeding fine. If he is released, he may act. He could be a fanatic. Who knows how many people would die.

However, there has to be a limit. The State can't detain people indefinitely without presenting the evidence against them and giving a jury the opportunity to decide their fate. That is common sense as well as law in pretty much every country I know. Precautions have to be taken to protect the citizenry, but they can't involve violation of rights on a massive scale, especially outside wartime. It is about finding a balance.

Under the Emergency Regulations, the limit is a year. After that, detainees can file a Fundamental Rights case and they must be heard.

Jeyaratnam has instructed a lawyer to draw up a petition on his behalf. He is lucky. He has our mutual friend to help, to raise money, make calls and do whatever else she can think of to try to ensure that Jeyaratnam isn't forgotten. It is a comfort. He claims during his detention to have come across many people who have been on remand for up to a decade.

The legal system is full of holes through which it is only too easy to slip, often never to be recovered. They are reserved, of course, for the poorest and least well connected in society.

Things could be much worse for Jeyaratnam.

Our mutual friend got involved quite by accident. If I relate a little of the story, readers will understand.

This case involves a Tamil who was living and conducting his business in Colombo, but my contact, who I am going to call Anoma for the purpose of this article, stumbled into it from a very different direction. She had made a video about organic farming in a village somewhere in the Kurunegala district, which she had uploaded to the internet. Months later, she received an email from a foreign couple looking for the birth parents of a daughter they had adopted some 20 years ago from the same place.

After locating the birth mother, Anoma arranged for the foreign couple to visit. The daughter was eager to get to know her relatives and learn more about their home area.

During the stay, it emerged that they had also adopted a son from Sri Lanka around 25 years ago. He wasn't interested in tracing his roots, but the foreign couple thought it worthwhile making contact, seeing as they had come all the way.

The son had been taken from a convent in the Mullaitivu district. His birth parents had given him up because of opposition to their marriage from one of their families, on the basis of caste.

Anoma went to the house of the birth father, to be told by neighbours that he had been gone for a number of months. When she returned with the foreign couple, they found out that he was being held by the Police.

It was Jeyaratnam.

This came as rather a shock. The foreign couple hadn't known what to expect from their search, but they certainly hadn't anticipated getting caught up in terrorism. They were cautious. When the time came for them to return home, they asked Anoma to keep an eye on the case and let them know if there was anything they could do in support.

What she found out exposes another of the well known and yet so persistent flaws in the legal system.

The Police had located the third party and recovered the weapons and money Jeyaratnam is supposed to have passed on within 30 days of his arrest. They had even identified the cadre who they claim instructed him. They completed their interrogations and wrote up their report. After that, there was little chance of uncovering any more information. They had given up trying, in fact. Before 60 days had passed, they had finished the investigation.

They didn't need a year. Of course not, because the Emergency Regulations were designed with other circumstances in mind. The country is at peace now.

Readers will be curious to find out what has been going on in the intervening period. A combination of overwork and bureaucratic inertia probably explains the delay in sending the case for prosecution. It is impossible to be sure. Even if there were no more sinister reason, this would still be a cause for concern. The authorities don't consider what the time they spend in shuffling papers means for people who are not granted bail or who cannot afford to pay.

Jeyaratnam may serve what many people would consider an appropriate sentence for the crimes of which he is accused before he even gets to trial, whether he deserves it or not.

Meanwhile, this situation is exploited by the unscrupulous.

Our mutual friend tells me that money has changed hands several times. Jeyaratnam was taken into custody along with a whole lot of people associated with him, from family members to employees. He told her that they had bribed the Police to be released. He claims officers then offered not to oppose his bail in exchange for cash. Later, they offered to expedite his paperwork. When he could, he paid up. If what Jeyaratnam says is true, he has parted with over Rs. 300,000 already, and he is still behind bars.

Readers may not be inclined to believe a person accused of having been involved in a terrorist plot, especially when he will not speak about it on the record. That is fair enough.

But there is definitely some kind of cheating going on. The day I went to the court, the lawyer told my contact that a particular official had requested Rs. 200,000 to complete the next step in the process. She doesn't know whether to believe him. Maybe he wants it for himself. Somebody is certainly being dishonest. She doesn't know what to do. There is no guarantee that the work will be done if she manages to pull together the funds.

It is a sorry tale.

What is most disturbing is that there is probably very little of the unusual about it. Things like this happen all the time to people like Jeyaratnam. Nobody cares. A year of their lives can be lost, just like that. Read more...

Regarding Kath Nobel's comment on: "Another perfectly reasonable idea"

By Gam Vaesiya writes from Ontario, Canada

(March 25, Ontario, Sri Lnaka Guardian) Kath Noble is one of Sri Lanka's columnists who is always worth reading. She is well informed and writes with good judgment. I read her comment which appeared as feature article in The Island (17-March-2010) as well as in Transcurrents, ( read)on the proposal by SPUR, an Australian expatriate group. The "Transcurrents version" has the benefit of some reader comments as well.

SPUR has proposed that electoral

representation in the North needs to be reviewed. In Kath Noble's words " They want the Government to undertake an immediate census of the North and East, with a view to cutting the number of representatives from those districts in Parliament". Kath Nobel claims that "you'd have thought everybody in Sri Lanka would be extra careful about suggesting policies Tamils might consider discriminatory." KN explains further: "Rushing in to calculate how many people need to be represented and therefore how many seats the North and East are due in Parliament isn't going to be viewed with anything like understanding. It will be seen as taking advantage of a crisis to get one over on Tamils".

Where angles fear to tread?

In fact, Kath Nobel cites the University Admissions issue as an example of what not to do. The University standardization came into effect because the 1970 SLFP government in coalition with the LSSP recognized in-grained inequalities in the existing system which discriminated in favour of Colombo, Kandy and Jaffna, and took steps to correct them. The same government took steps to nationalize the (mainly Christian) private schools, and indeed earned for ever the hostility of the Anglicized products of these schools.
Some of the more enraged even attempted to carry out a coup d'etat.

Should one not put into place democratic processes because it would offend the
sensitivity of some powerful group? Didn't every democratic reform upset the Tamil or Christian or Sinhala-conservative ruling classes? Dare we have Universal Franchise?

Kath Noble should have gone back many years further in history. The first quarter century (1900-1920) was idyllic for the Tamil ruling class as they, in the person of the "pure-laine" Ponnambalam Arunachalam, represented even the Sinhalese in front of the British. Then came, the Donoughmore commission "suggesting policies Tamils might consider discriminatory", if we are to use Kath Nobel's words. The suggestion of SPUR is only a faint echo of Donoughmore, who proposed universal franchise, with one vote for each,, irrespective of wealth, even for women, and even ignoring caste! The whole of the North recoiled from all this and rejected the Donoughmore proposals. Ponnambalam
Ramanathan led two delegations to London hoping to get the caste system included in the constitution. Meanwhile, G. G. Ponnambalam (GGP), realizing that he could usurp the Ramanathans by playing the even more inflammatory race politics, began his campaigns of the 1930s, with attacks on the Mahavamsa, and on the Sinhalese "race" claimed to be a hybrid "off-shoot" of the Tamils. This lead to the 1939 Sinhala-Tamil race riots which were rapidly quelled by the British authorities. This is in strong contrast to the post-1956 riots where law and order always arrived far too late.

Pan-Sinhala Government.

The reaction to the insensitivity of Ponnambalam was the rise of S. W. R. D. Banadarnaike (SWRD) and the Sinhala Maha Saba. Ponnambalam knew very well that universal franchise meant the end of the hegemony of the Tamil ruling class over the Ceylonese people. Meanwhile, D. S. Senanayake (DSS) wanted to prove that a pan-Sinhala government could run fairly and without communalism. By clever manipulation of the committees of the state council, DSS established a pan-Sinhala government in the State council for a few years. Although the Sinhalese had accepted a quarter century of Tamil hegemony during Arunachalam's time, the Tamils strongly resented the few years of the pan-Sinhala state council under Senanayake. But this was enough for Senanayake to prove to the British constitutionalists that a non-discriminatory Sinhala government could
function. The British rejected Ponnambalam's 50-50 proposal, and GGP's claims of discrimination in education, colonization, health, employment etc., and essentially rehashed the constitutional package that Senanayake wanted, in the guise of the Soulbury commission. The first cabinet of Senanayake, with 14 ministers, had excellent representation of Tamils and a Muslim. The foreign ministry, the Galoya board which ran the colonization schemes, the armed forces, the universties, the civil service, the banking sector etc., all had Tamil representation roughly equal to twice or even three times the demographic percentage.

The battles against causeways

Kath Noble should go back to read the Hansard of those times. The Northern Peninsula was a disconnected set of villages amid lowlands, impassable due to lack of causeways and proper roads. And yet, every time the responsible minister proposed building such causeways, there were stout objections. "Sensitivities" of the type mentioned by Kath Noble in her judgment against SPUR were coming into play. However, here it was not ethnicity but caste that was relevant. There were objections to providing causeways to areas with low caste villages. There were even objections to converting Jaffna (a very populous urban council) into the status of a Municipal council. The Colombo Tamils who owned property in Jaffna did not want to pay higher taxes! However, all this was presented as examples of Sinhalese interference in Tamil matters. Dr. Jane Russell, the British Historian writes that Tamil politicians essentially regarded that any legislation touching the North should not concern the Sinhalese legislators.

Exclusive Tamil Homelands

S. J. V. Chelvanayagam did not accept the "Ceylonese" concept that D. S. Senanayake was trying to build up. His associated had published and popularized a vigorous, militant genre of historical writing claiming that the Tamils were the earliest and ever present inhabitants of Sri Lanka. These Tamil-nationalist historians, while condemning the Mahavamsa as false history, would in the same breath reformulate it, with the names of Kings cast in to Tamil form, vith Vijaya becoming Vijayan, and Kashyapa becoming Kasi-Appaan etc. The concept of the exclusive Tamil Homelands already existed in writings that appeared around 1940 onwards. In 1945 E. L. Thambimuttu had written the book "Dravida, a History of the Tamils from Prehistoric times to 1800". The 1949 Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kadchi manifesto of Maradana stated an exclusive land claim, and established the clarion call for a separate state. As found in the Tamil-language election material distributed by the ITAK in 1952 in Jaffna, the objective of the party was to use every means possible to rouse the "uchchaham and Uruppu" of the people to establish a separate Arasu of the Tamils. The talk of Federalism was restricted to Colombo audiences only.

S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike was no racist. He was a democrat and an opportunist who did not have the political adroitness or sagacity of D.S. Senanayake. When SWRD formed his government in 1956 with the "Sinhala-only" cry, Muslims and other minorities did join his cabinet. What if the Tamils had also offered to cooperate with him and even join the government? The Colombo Tamils knew Bandaraniake very well as they all belonged to the same social class. They knew that he was not a racist. Some, like the Thiruchelvams, living down the same road may even have helped to bridge such a move. Given such a big move, SWRD would have had to make equally big concessions- and he could have.

And yet, that was far too big a step. The ITAK had already decided in 1949 that the Tamils were economically and organizationally strong enough to take on the Sinhala majority. The idea that the "invaders" must be driven out of the exclusive homelands, just as the British were driven out had been firmly spelt. In this case the invaders were the Sinhalese and the Muslims living in the North and the East. Every political process was to be used as a means of polarizing the two communities. Senanayake, be it Don Stephan or Dudley, or even GGP were to be painted as enemies of the Tamils.

An inevitable state of Affairs?

Kath Noble should now see that there was a determined inevitability that had to play its Aristophanean end inexorably. Of course, this reading of history can be sharply questioned. But then, every reading of history is only a cross-section of a multi-dimensional manifold of facts. Each cross section is different and shows to advantage some facts, while covering others. While I readily grant that a completely different analysis can be presented with equal vigour, I have attempted here to argue that SPUR's demand for electoral reform is just a feeble echo of what started in 1931. proposing one vote per person. They too touched Tamil sensitivities, being prone to the same objections as those of Kath Noble, generating a vehemence and force that are still shaking and stripping this country apart.

Irrespective of Tamil sensitivities, Sri Lanka today, and Ceylon then, have grappled with the refusal of the Tamil leadership to accept the concept of one vote for one man. The 1930s saw the upsetting of Tamil sensitivities with the rejection of Ramanathan's plea for legislatively recognizing caste. The 1940s saw the upsetting of tamil sensitivities with the rejection of the 50-50 formula by the British. The 1980s saw the complete recognition, by J. R. jayawardene, of Tamil as an equal-status official language, and the Indian proposals for provincial councils, mainly under the duress of the sessionist threat of the LTTE. of course, the LTTE took every step to prevent the implementaion of Tamil language, by threatening and forcing out from the government workers competent in Tamil.

Sebastian Rasalingam, an outspoken anti-LTTE Tamil writer, has characterized the "exclusive Tamil-Homelands" concept as being identicle to the Apartheid concept of the white Afrikaaner regimes. Kath Nobles's plea for continued appeasement of sentiments which originate from such macabre roots cannot surely be justified. Read more...

War Crimes, Human Rights: A home Grown Solution

By Dayan Jayatilleka

(March 14, Singapore City, Sri Lanka Guardian) One simply has to thank Island columnist Kath Noble, and not for the first time, for injecting a note of sanity into an overheated discussion, if discussion it is, among us natives. Following an interview with the respected progressive intellectual Fr Francois Houtart, who presided over the Dublin exercise, she has written a thought provoking piece this week on the issue of war crimes and accountability. While I do not go as far as she does, nor even in quite the same direction, she has at least struck a dissenting note into what is otherwise a cacophonous chorus, and proceeded to make a constructive suggestion.

The Sri Lankan discourse on war crimes, violations of international humanitarian law and human rights in general, divide into two camps, both of which demonise the other. One holds that the entire matter is a campaign by imperialism and its agents; human rights is itself a suspicious Western usage if not a concept invented millennia ago by us Asians (perhaps even the Sinhala Buddhists) which we need no lectures on— and the only response we need give is to "just say no", which we can with a little help from our (Asian or Third World) friends.

The opposing school of thought is that Sri Lanka is a human rights hellhole and either became so during whichever the administration the critic is not in sympathy with at this moment, or has been so for most of its existence— and can be redeemed only with more than a little help from our (Western) friends.

What, however, are the facts? Given the nature of the Tigers and the repeated experience of successive Sri Lankan administrations, there was no negotiated solution possible or desirable at any stage of the final conflict. Any such attempt would have provided an exit for the Tigers. Given that the Tigers were an army or armed militia with a small navy and a fledgling air-force, the state had to fight a full-on war to its logical conclusion, with the aim of the military destruction of the enemy. While political multi-polarity is healthy, military bipolarity is not permissible within a state; certainly on a small island-state. Given that the Tigers had fielded more suicide bombers than any and all other terrorist groups put together, and that the stated Tiger strategy involved (what ‘Taraki’ called) ‘asymmetric deterrence’, i.e. deep, destructive terror strikes into the ‘Sinhala heartland’, it was necessary to uproot and eliminate the LTTE suicide cells and extensive clandestine network.

No war takes place in a vacuum. The assertion that with the Tigers encircled, it would have been possible to have a less bloody outcome, and therefore the endgame that actually took place needs be investigated as a war crime or violation of international humanitarian law, is sheer nonsense, for three reasons:

Firstly, the lesson of twentieth century history is that a ‘textbook fascist’ force as The Economist (London) admits the Tigers were, has to be utterly decimated.

Secondly, the Sri Lankan forces had to operate according to a tightening time table not of their own choosing, as regional and sub-regional politics as well as mounting international pressure, gave the State a narrowing window of opportunity. It was a neck-and-neck race between the historic chance of finishing off the Tigers and concerted international pressure interrupting the offensive as once before, or retarding its momentum. If not for these external factors acting as accelerants, the war could/would probably have taken another month to finish, with greater circumspection.

Thirdly, at no time were civilians wittingly targeted as a matter of policy, nor were civilians boxed in and deprived of an exit by the state, as was not the case in a war that took place around the same time and is being rightly investigated by a probe initiated by the self-same UN Human Rights Council which gave Sri Lanka a 29-12 majority vote. It is the Tiger terrorists who were keeping the civilians hostage while the Sri Lankan military was trying to help them escape.

This having been said, it is also necessary to draw attention to the fact that in no civilised democracy is the allegation of war crimes or human rights violations made by an ex-military officer or even a serving one, treated as treason and cause for prosecution! After the recent Gaza war, several serving members of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) told the press that a certain Rabbi had been giving them ‘spiritual instructions’ that it was ok to kill Palestinian civilians. Others testified that certain orders were given which were at best, ambiguous, in relation to civilians and could have led to incidents of killings. Years before, a group of helicopter pilots of the Israeli Air Force signed a public petition refusing to engage in ground attack operations in built up civilian areas. In none of these incidents were any of the servicemen prosecuted for revealing military secrets. When there was an outcry over the massacres at Sabra and Shatila in the aftermath of Israel’s Lebanon War of 1982, Israel held a much publicised inquiry in which General Ariel Sharon, war hero, was named as one of those responsible.

In the United States, servicemen have confessed about civilian killings even on prime time TV. Far from being locked up, they have been questioned, those allegedly responsible investigated, taken into custody and prosecuted (though the allegation is that sentences have been light and there is a virtual revolving back door). Some incidents involving civilian deaths, such as the infamous killings during Baghdad traffic jam by Blackwater ‘security contractors’ (i.e. mercenaries) have led to hearings before the US legislature.

Therefore, today’s Sri Lanka has a grotesque uniqueness in its response to Ret General Fonseka’s sporadic statements about war crimes. Those statements are as ironic as they are reprehensible —ironic because he was responsible for the toughest policies and practices during the war and would permit no softening – there is no reason to behave like a lynch mob and call for his burning at the stake. This official response only marks us out as having failed to be aware of and catch up with modern norms of conduct on matters of accountability, and damages our image in the eyes of the world. As I had warned earlier, it is not so much Gen Fonseka’s allegations but the deafeningly loud trumpeting of those allegations as a betrayal

of national military secrets, followed by prosecution on the same grounds, that has escalated the international push on the issue (this time at the level of the UN Sec Gen).

The issues of accountability will be dealt with by each society at its own pace, and in accordance with its own imperatives. The UK has still to conclude its second inquiry into the killing of unarmed civilians in broad daylight, on Bloody Sunday 1972! Many societies find organic ways of catharsis and conciliation.

In order to get the war crimes/human rights pressure off Sri Lanka, it is imperative to realise that such pressures are a symptom and by-product of something having gone wrong in our external relations and our ability to communicate with the world. There is a growing deficit of Sri Lanka’s ‘soft power’ and conspicuous failure in the realm of ‘the New Public Diplomacy’ (both phrases of Harvard’s Prof Joseph Nye).

Learning from our experience in Geneva, I propose a third position, which consists of five propositions and proposals as solution.

1. There must be a substantive difference between our wartime and post war policies, though two factors must remain, namely, no polarising rake-up of the past and no intrusion into national sovereignty.

2. It is not necessary however, to stonewall, as we did and had to, during the war. There has to be an authentic, manifest, unilateral liberalisation in our attitudes and policies on human rights.

3. Just saying ‘No’, and giving not merely the West but the UN the finger, is not a solution. Many of our friends and allies will not want to get into a squabble with the UN and its Secy Gen on our behalf. Those who fought alongside us diplomatically during the war may not do so during peacetime, especially if that peace drags on without reconciliation and normalcy. Furthermore, as Sudan realised, sometimes even one’s friends do not wish to get into a punch up with the West on one’s behalf if they have bigger fish to fry.

4. The only real antidote against external pressures on accountability and human rights is to have strong, credible national institutions and mechanisms. Sri Lanka does not have a national human rights body which fits this description, though arguably there was once an approximation. The country needs a strong, independent Commission on Human Rights, Equality and Elimination of Discrimination headed by a person with international credentials and of acknowledged international stature, or the appointment of such a personage as a powerful National Ombudsman on Human Rights.

5. Cooperate with the Asian region and the global South on matters of human rights. It is not enough to countervail Western pressure; it is necessary to adhere to evolving consensual norms in Asia and the global South. ASEAN already has a human rights charter, and the African Union has a mechanism which was one of the examples for the Universal Periodic Review adopted by the UN Human Rights Council. Build up South-South linkages and learn "best practices" from the democracies of the global South such as Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, South Africa, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Philippines etc.

Those ‘nationalists’ who propose a ‘national’ solution for everything, have failed to call for the strengthening of the national human rights institutions, and mechanisms; a strengthening that is possible only by the appointment of an independent body with ‘teeth’, consisting of distinguished nationals who have brought honour to their country of origin by performance and recognition in the global arena.

What stands between Sri Lanka and the full reintegration as a normal and successful member of the international system, is not only the prejudice of the West but the perniciousness of our own dominant ideology; our own mindset. John Stockwell, a dissenting former CIA employee, blew the whistle on America’s tacit support for apartheid South Africa in Angola, in a book he entitled ‘In Search of Enemies’. He was referring to the mindset in the White House. It is time to for Sri Lanka to stop the search for enemies and ‘turn the searchlight inwards’. I believe what ails us is already best defined in a comparative analysis (which makes no reference to Sri Lanka) by Professor Fred Halliday, renowned radical scholar of international relations at the LSE, writing in Open Democracy on ‘The Miscalculations of Small Nations’. He describes the phenomenon as ‘the puff of ideology... self-inflating’ and a ‘delusion’, arguing that:

‘...the responsibility devolves onto the self-inflating nationalist ideology ...with its heady mix of vanity, presumption and miscalculation...If the supreme responsibility of democratic leaders is indeed to protect their own peoples, then the briefest of comparative overview can show just how pernicious the impact of the kind of nationalist delusion...The chief agent of destruction is not to be found in "culture" (in the guise of religion or some other vague source of identity) but in the arrogance, recklessness and ignorance born of nationalist excess - which, to be sure, often uses religion and associated "cultural" offerings as part of its packaging...True, such miscalculations about the capabilities of one’s own forces and the reactions of others are not confined to small nations. Most major nations have many and larger blunders to their name...The difference is that except in the most extreme of cases - notably Nazi Germany - these large states have been able to recuperate their losses and in large measure continue to inhabit their illusions of grandeur. Smaller peoples pay a higher price... [Sakaashvili’s] entrapment in nationalist delusion was always going to backfire.’

Human Rights are not a Western invention or booby-trap, to be decried and shunned like the devil. Though there is a constant attempt to use human rights as an instrument to undermine national sovereignty, the answer is not to shun human rights or to pretend that these are intrinsically inscribed in our culture and therefore automatically observed, but to protect them ourselves and to maintain verifiably high standards of human rights observance nationally. While it is true that the West uses human rights in a duplicitous manner, the answer is not merely to content ourselves with exposing and denouncing that duplicity as we must (and I did, in my turn) but to observe and protect those rights in a manner that is other than duplicitous and hypocritical. The answer to duplicity and hypocrisy is not counter-duplicity but sincerity and truth. The great African liberation fighter Amilcar Cabral said that ‘tell no lies, claim no easy victories — the best propaganda is the truth’. He had a resonance which catalysed a revolution in the colonial country, Portugal, which was oppressing his own.

The vital lesson is to hold the moral high ground. During the war Sri Lanka held that ground, not because of some innate moral virtue deriving from intrinsic cultural superiority but because of the demonstrably fascist character of our enemy, the Tigers. Today that moral high ground must be recaptured and can be done so only by our own positive efforts, not by reference to the negative attributes of a defeated enemy, nor attributing the same qualities to whoever comes along to criticise us. Human rights are not the preserve of West or East, North or South; they are universal and derive from the universality of the human condition. Human beings are possessed of certain inalienable rights. What is most important is not that we are ‘Sri Lankan’ (a ‘karmic’ circumstance, surely) but that we are human, and even more basically, sentient beings.

[The writer was Sri Lanka’s Ambassador/Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Geneva during the Special Session of May 2009, and was a Vice President of the UN Human Rights Council]. Read more...

Let the people have what's theirs

By Kath Noble

(March 03, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) We don't often have much in the way of good news to report. These days, a vast amount of ink is wasted on what are no morethan petty issues - who will contest where, in alliance with which parties and under what symbol. These are supplemented by the all too common stories of accidents, murders and suicides, the occasional abduction and a whole lot of double dealing and crookedness. The best we can really expect is an announcement that a trade union has decided to postpone its strike or that the Army has found explosives before they could be used. Life can get pretty depressing.

That's why I was pleased to read of the efforts being made by the Ministry of Justice and Law Reforms to prepare a potentially transformative bill for introduction to Parliament after the election. I am talking here about the Right to Information Act.

There was a time when such legislation was considered the privilege of developed countries. People thought that governments couldn't be open and successful at the same time, so those states that had a lot of work to do to pull themselves up would have to maintain a culture of secrecy. It was seen as just another right to be curtailed for the greater good.

This is no longer the case. While only 22 countries had passed bills like the Right to Information Act in 1995, by 2005 that number had gone up to 70.

Even countries that are not democracies have accepted the idea of openness. China passed its version of the legislation the year before last. India, a nation that is home to 500 million of the world's one and a half billion poor people, and which might therefore be expected to have plenty to keep its bureaucrats busy already, took the plunge back in 2005. Sri Lanka was starting to look rather backward in the face of what is clearly a global trend.

Openness is good for the economy, it is now widely accepted. We need to involve people in the governance process in order to address corruption and the mismanagement of public affairs that costs developing countries so dearly.

It's not just about passing a law, of course. As in most things, implementation is the key to success.

Research shows just that, as was made obvious by a review of the Indian experience that was published a few weeks ago. It was overwhelmingly positive about the impact of the legislation, while concluding that much remained to be done.

The main problem is oddly simple. Only 15% of the population knows that there is any such thing as the Right to Information Act. That drops to 4% of the poor, according to some estimates.

After decades of regarding information on what they're up to as the property of the State, bureaucracies need to be pushed to change. Officials in India have tended to ignore requirements for proactive disclosure. In one state, over 80% of local government offices make people file requests for information that the law obliges them to publish as a matter of course. Some 75% fail to display information explaining how to file requests, while the vast majority of officials assigned to deal with the public are unhelpful or even hostile. Half of them don't have a copy of the legislation.

The media has played an important role in raising awareness, but this has brought only limited results in a country with such high rates of illiteracy. Curiously, journalists have rarely made use of the law themselves.

Sri Lanka could well do better. However, this would mean planning a campaign.

This may seem rather unlikely in the circumstances. The Government hasn't even initiated a public debate on the contents of the legislation. A report in another newspaper some weeks ago indicated that lawyers had been working on a draft until Parliament was dissolved. Why they had to abandon the task just because an election had been called remains a mystery, as does much else about the Right to Information Act. This is hardly in the spirit of the law.

There is a massive gap between rhetoric and action in Sri Lanka. Inspiring words such as those spoken by Mahinda Rajapaksa when he was first running for the presidency about a ruler being no more than a temporary trustee and not the owner of the future of his people's children have rather lost their appeal. We don't believe politicians any longer, and for good reason.

Ranil Wickremasinghe's administration prepared a Right to Information Act during its brief spell in power, but it was never made into law. It isn't clear what has changed. This is surely one of the many things that the public should be told if the Government is really serious about openness.

Meanwhile, it would be as well for the rest of us to start talking about it. Pressure always helps.

The Indian version of the legislation was discussed for months before it was passed. More than a hundred amendments were made in the process.

Criticisms of the original draft focused on the excuses it allowed the State to employ to deny requests for information, from blanket exemptions for anything considered a risk to national security or even just the national interest to equally unspecific and no less worrying justifications for concealing information on the basis that it might require excessive resources to find and hand over. The final bill made these rather narrower and more clearly defined.

The other key concern was the lack of an upper limit on the charges that could be imposed.

This too was solved, but the review of implementation demonstrated some of the hidden costs involved in filing requests for information. Although the standard fee is only Rs. 10, with even this being waived for the poor, the process is estimated to require many times this amount. More than 25% of people using the Right to Information Act have to make at least three visits to a government office. That requires transport and in many cases the loss of daily wages.

One of the most interesting elements that was introduced to the Right to Information Act during the public debate is a clause setting out the responsibility of officials. If they fail to complete the work during a fixed period, they are personally liable for a fine.

This is quite an innovation, and it is one of many. India has positioned itself as a leader in the world of openness.

The Ministry of Justice and Law Reforms could usefully take note of the other major difficulty that has been experienced in India. As well as knowing that there is a Right to Information Act, people need to have confidence that the oversight mechanism works. Unfortunately, surveys have found that the majority believe that it is a waste of time and energy to appeal decisions. They consider the authorities to whom they would have to turn too close to the bureaucrats who denied their requests for information in the first place. Even state information commissioners are often regarded as worryingly unsympathetic, many of them being retired public servants. The process is lengthy and delays are the norm.

The more we study the experiences of other countries, the better for Sri Lanka. Then when Parliament comes to review the legislation, people will be sufficiently informed to raise questions.

I sometimes fall into the trap of wondering if politicians will ever do anything useful, watching their exploits. It is at such times that I try to think back a year to when Prabhakaran was still lurking in a dark corner of the island, plotting death and destruction in his ill-fated quest for Eelam. The country has changed a lot since then, which is an excellent reminder of how things that once seemed impossible can be done with a little determination and focus. We really ought to be more hopeful.

As for good news, the Right to Information Act certainly qualifies. It just needs to be put into practice.

(The writer can be reached at kathnoble99@gmail.com) Read more...

Rocking the boat

By Kath Noble

(February 17, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The word 'stability' has been abused one
too many times for my liking. It is what most people in Sri Lanka craved for three decades. As the conflict raged around them, nothing was guaranteed. Their children could be taken at any moment, whether to fight and die on the battlefield or in a terrorist attack as they travelled to school on the bus. They wanted to live in peace. They still do, and the results of the presidential election indicate that their natural appetite for 'change' is yet to return. This is understandable. But it doesn't mean that the Government should be allowed to do whatever it pleases.

For a long time, proposals to abolish the Executive Presidency have been met with protests that the office is needed to ensure 'stability'. So the country puts up with its flaws. The Ship of State mustn't be pushed off course, it seems.

Now the same thing is happening with Parliament. The Government is telling us that it needs a two thirds majority to be effective. Just about every Minister who addressed a press conference last week said as much, from Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickremanayake on down. Without an overwhelming number of MPs, they claim, they won't be able to do what is needed to move forward.

This is a joke. Before we know it, they will be asking Sri Lankans to give up on democracy altogether and just do as they are told.

I think this country is as stable as it needs to be for the moment. The major challenge in the shape of the LTTE has been wiped out. And any threat posed by those who refuse to accept Prabhakaran's death as the end of the struggle for Eelam can be dealt with by intelligence services and the Police. As long as that remains the case, there is no significant danger to be faced.

What is required now is the consolidation of the gains made by the Security Forces. And that has to involve a range of political actors. A one party approach is bound to fail.

Indeed, it would be counterproductive.

We know what happens when the Government is handed too much power. It doesn't use it wisely. There are no philosopher kings in the UPFA, and anybody who thinks otherwise has to be mad. Mahinda Rajapaksa certainly isn't one, although I am glad that he beat Sarath Fonseka.

He has been demonstrating as much in the days since the presidential election. Instead of doing the smart thing and allowing Sarath Fonseka to bury himself in conspiracy theories that not even the most gullible members of the international community bought, to waste away into insignificance in a few weeks, Mahinda Rajapaksa decided to make a point. No doubt Sarath Fonseka did much to undermine the country and the independence of the military in his effort for personal glory. And in principle there is nothing wrong with punishing him for it. Perhaps he really was planning a coup d'état, although I rather suspect otherwise. Whatever the truth of the matter, arresting him only made the situation worse. It has brought Sarath Fonseka sympathy that he didn't enjoy.

Witness the invigorated protests that we have seen in the aftermath. And witness the statements being made, by friends of Sri Lanka as well as its regular critics.

Equally misguided are the efforts to transfer people working for the State who supported Sarath Fonseka in the presidential election. Of course trade unions are politicised. The SLFP is as much responsible for that as the UNP or JVP. Their members participate in campaigns. They probably breach rules or at least codes of conduct in the process, but it doesn't help to single out for punishment those who backed the losing side.

Perhaps the Government would like us to regard all these actions as necessary in maintaining 'stability'. But it is actually doing the reverse, making Sri Lanka more vulnerable.

The country needs to be governed responsibly, and the Opposition plays a key role in ensuring that this happens. Questions have to be raised and alternatives put forward and debated. Running the country can't be done properly without such checks and balances.

For months the UNP and JVP have been struggling. Their problems didn't start with the war victory, but it certainly didn't help. They weren't part of it. Worse, they did plenty to jeopardise the progress being made by the Security Forces right up to the moment it became clear that Prabhakaran was going to be killed. The public statements of their senior members were completely irresponsible. They also tried to defeat the budget and plunge the Government into crisis. Those are black marks against them, especially when they so quickly changed their minds about the wisdom of fighting the LTTE once the job was done.

I wouldn't blame anybody for criticising them on this issue. But it shouldn't be the only concern when people go out to choose their representatives.

There was a time not so long ago when the JVP could have presented a decidedly praiseworthy record of its achievements in Parliament. Its MPs actually prepared, studying legislation and its implementation in depth. They took their role seriously. And it paid off. They were able to move the country on problems that mattered. The UNP may have to look a little further into its history to rediscover its glory days, but it has certainly had its moments of triumph on behalf of the people who voted for it.

Even the TNA, operating as it was under the spell of Prabhakaran, used to do a good job of highlighting the plight of Tamils.

They must do so again. The more information and the greater the range of views being fed into the governance process, the better the outcome will be for Sri Lanka. And for that the Opposition needs to be stronger than it is today.

Moving forward, these parties need to be clear about what they stand for and why they deserve support. The vague promise of 'change' that they put forward at the presidential election didn't work. Neither will a campaign that harps on the fate of Sarath Fonseka, however disturbing his treatment may be. The Opposition needs to be more convincing.

Handing the UPFA a two thirds majority would be a disaster. Reconciliation should be the highest priority for the Government, and an essential part of that is building consensus.

I'm not convinced that this need have anything to do with the Constitution. We know that there are flaws, but implementing the provisions of the existing one as they stand would be a perfectly good start.

In any case, changes to such an important document aren't supposed to be made unilaterally by decree. Rather than one party declaring what it believes to be best for the country and pushing it on everybody else, amendments are best agreed upon with reference to all political groups. This is what was always intended. It is particularly necessary when they are being announced only after a new set of MPs is sworn in. People will have voted for their representatives before knowing what they are proposing. That gives them no mandate whatsoever.

If the Government ignores such considerations, it will have trouble delivering the 'stability' it is talking about so enthusiastically. Indeed, it may soon find that it is onboard the Titanic. Read more...

A pink revolution?

By Kath Noble

(January 27, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Whatever the result, yesterday’s election was a disappointment. The participation of Sarath Fonseka opened up the possibility of an energetic and forward looking campaign, leaving the old problems and controversies of the war behind and bringing two strong leaders into healthy competition with each other, reinvigorating a political scene that had been dominated by one side for too long. I didn’t much fancy the prospect of his replacement, but it was clear that Mahinda Rajapaksa needed to face a real challenge. The Opposition, united or not, simply wasn’t up to it.

This didn’t happen. The race was close alright, but we were treated to some of the least interesting and useful debates imaginable.

More concerning was the resurgence of violence. People were threatened, beaten and shot at. Grenades were thrown. Campaign offices were burned down and the property of key activists destroyed. A number of Sri Lankans are dead because of the vote, including some who did nothing more controversial than attend a rally. It’s a terrible price to pay for democracy.

I don’t buy the claims some groups are making about this being the worst poll in history. Anybody who says so must be rather forgetful. They can’t have looked at the evidence either, because the reports of NGOs like the Centre for Monitoring Election Violence indicate that there was nothing new, at least at the time of writing this piece. It’s the same story that has been played out on so many occasions. We might almost call it a habit.

However, this doesn't mean we can dismiss what happened. The last presidential election and the general election before it were clearly better. What's more, a good deal of the violence we saw then was perpetrated by or was a consequence of the presence of the LTTE, and the Northern and Eastern Provinces bore the brunt of it. The main issue was the boycott that Prabhakaran enforced in areas under his control to upset Ranil Wickremasinghe. The Government couldn’t be excused of its responsibility for the problems, but there was a context to be understood.

This isn't the case any longer, and it would have been reasonable to have expected an even more peaceful poll this time. The terrorists are gone, after all.

Instead, violence saw a comeback. Desperate to win, politicians and their supporters undermined the process in which they were participating. Voting is supposed to be an alternative to the use of force, not a complementary activity. This doesn’t mean that their antics had any impact on the outcome, but they served to further turn public opinion against the very system that is supposed to protect its citizens. Confidence in politics was already low.

It was as I was reflecting on this situation that I read of Milinda Moragoda’s latest initiative, calling for more women representatives. He wants 25% quotas at all levels of governance.

His statement as reported in the media was somewhat condescending. Noting that women in Sri Lanka were just as educated as men and that they were present in numbers at the top of many other sectors, it implied that they needed help to get into politics.

I suspect they don’t want any such thing. If participating in elections were regarded as an honourable undertaking, women would be doing it already.

However, the basic point of the message was correct. Women make up less than two percent of those elected to local government bodies, five percent of provincial councillors and no more than six percent of the people who sit in Parliament making the country’s laws. That’s pretty close to zero. Naturally, the same goes for ministerial appointments. For verification we need only look at photographs of official functions, which are overwhelmingly populated by ageing men with pot bellies, badly dyed hair and oversized moustaches. Look and try to enjoy the spectacle. I’m not sure whether I could name more than a handful of women in politics.

Milinda Moragoda’s comments suggested that this was a paradox, given that Sri Lanka produced the world’s first female prime minister and has since had a female president, which is rather more than the world's only superpower has managed over the years, but I don’t see it that way. Politics has become such a dirty game that women stay away.

A lot of men do too, I should add, before somebody gets upset at the implication.

There would need to be a full discussion of the way in which 25% quotas could be implemented if the proposal were to be taken seriously. Voting is already a complicated procedure in Sri Lanka, and there are other suggestions for reform under consideration. Progress on such issues is typically slow, and working out how best to achieve the intended objective wouldn’t be easy.

Nevertheless, it might just be the kind of revolutionary change in the political scene that is so sorely needed. I haven’t heard any better ideas, at least.

The standard response to polls violence is to bang on about legislation. The Seventeenth Amendment is a particular favourite, for the powers it gives the Election Commission to monitor what happens during a campaign and on the day of the vote and order corrective action by the State and its agencies. As an independent body established with the approval of the Constitutional Council, which itself is supposed to be a product of agreement between the major political parties represented in Parliament, it appears to be the ideal solution.

As part of the constitution, it must certainly be implemented in full. However, the events leading up to yesterday's election demonstrated that this would be nowhere near enough to ensure that people can choose a government without risking their lives.

The long suffering Dayananda Dissanayake is able to issue all the necessary instructions as things stand, and nobody can accuse him of being less dedicated than he was in 2005 and 2004. He may be desperate to retire, but he continues to work tirelessly to ensure the integrity of polls held in Sri Lanka. Whatever failings there were can't be blamed on neglect of duty on his part.

We need to find other explanations for violence. Only then can remedies be worked out.

I must say that what strikes me most at election time in Sri Lanka is how eager people are to forget these problems and go out to vote. Very little can stop them exercising their franchise. Turnout was high even during the war, and growing cynicism about politicians doesn’t seem to have had any impact on participation either.

This sends an important message. Whoever emerges victorious, Mahinda Rajapaksa and Sarath Fonseka both know that people dearly value the right to choose their representatives. They use it to reward those who deliver and punish those who can’t even offer hope.

That’s some compensation. Read more...

Finally, the manifestos!

By Kath Noble

(January 20, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) After a month or so of the kind of campaigning that would have been better conducted in a boxing ring, with padded gloves and a referee to point out the numerous punches landing so painfully below the belt, Mahinda Rajapaksa and Sarath Fonseka have released their manifestos. Serious reflection on the choice facing Sri Lanka is now possible.

Voters, of course, haven’t minded the delay. They don’t read them anyway.

This occurred to me as I was leafing through ‘A Brighter Future’. When have I ever read a manifesto? Not at home in the UK, that’s for sure, which is the only place I get to vote. Like most people, I know what the parties stand for and decide accordingly. Listening to speeches and reading about the exploits of the candidates and their hangers-on is entertaining, and I do it with considerable enthusiasm. Plodding through however many pages of a policy document is another matter. It’s boring and I can’t imagine it having any impact on my decision.

I’d probably behave in the same way if I could participate in the election in Sri Lanka. There’s no sense in pretending that I’d be carefully studying the promises made. I already know who I’d support.

For the record, it’s Mahinda Rajapaksa.

This isn’t because I think he’s a great guy. Far from it, he has always reminded me of Tony Blair, the Prime Minister who dragged my country into killing a whole lot of innocent people in Iraq on the basis that a taxi driver overheard a couple of Saddam Hussein’s military commanders boasting that their Weapons of Mass Destruction could destroy us in 45 minutes –– the most famous claim in the intelligence dossier that now looks dodgier than the sheriff of Dodge City. Like Tony Blair, Mahinda Rajapaksa has proved himself to be capable of doing the most awful things whilst grinning from ear to ear.

Nor is it for any of the reasons that his propagandists have been trying to foist on us in the last couple of weeks. It’s great that he won the war, but let’s club together to buy him a nice gift rather than have people express their gratitude at the ballot box. Choosing a leader is about the future.

I hope the future won’t include a war crimes tribunal, so I have some sympathy for the argument that Sarath Fonseka is playing into the hands of the Tiger diaspora with his determination to get back at his former boss. G0oing about saying that the Defence Secretary called for the murder of people who ended up dead and only later adding that field commanders ignored the order definitely isn’t cool. It also makes me wonder how smart he is, if he thinks he could escape censure despite having been the Army Commander at the time.

However, the suggestion that his deal with the Tamil National Alliance is akin to consenting to Eelam is ridiculous. Whatever you think about releasing LTTE cadres, reforming the Prevention of Terrorism Act and removing High Security Zones, you really have to be paranoid to equate them with fulfilling Prabhakaran’s dying wish.

It’s a bit hypocritical, of course. We all know that Sarath Fonseka was the one who insisted on tough security measures after the war ended, including detaining the Vanni IDPs.

I would vote for Mahinda Rajapaksa because I think he’s the most likely to implement the kind of development programme Sri Lanka needs, or something approaching it.

A lot has been said about the imaginative promises made by Sarath Fonseka, who intends to slash taxes on a range of items like petrol and gas and do away with various revenue streams from businesses - in the surely vain hope that they would then increase the wages of their employees - while drastically increasing the public sector wage bill, compensating people affected by the collapse of unregulated financial institutions and so on. The sums don’t add up, and his suggestion that clamping down on corruption and waste will cover it is far too vague to be taken seriously.

Even if he were serious, are these really priorities? I can think of a lot better things to do with Rs. 10,000 per month than give it to a civil servant, for example. Such people have secure jobs and pensions. The same goes for his other ideas. If a Sarath Fonseka administration is going to be about handing out cash, at least let it target slum dwellers in Colombo, people still without homes after the tsunami, villagers in remote areas of the deep South and Mullaitivu farmers.

Mahinda Rajapaksa knows that these people exist and acknowledges that they deserve the attention of the Government. Whatever you think of disasters like Mihin Lanka and the international airport for Hambantota, you have to admit that he has spent money on the needy as well.

He kept the economy going, even during the war.

Meanwhile, there can be no question that Sarath Fonseka will find it much harder to get anything done. He is relying on the support of the UNP and JVP, who will never agree on anything other than getting rid of their mutual enemy.

This wouldn’t have been an issue if he’d stuck to a campaign based on abolishing the Executive Presidency, of course. The kind of development programme he’d want to implement and how he was thinking of getting it done would be irrelevant if he were staying on in a purely ceremonial role. We could have postponed discussion of the economy until it came to choosing Members of Parliament. That would have been fine. I might even have felt like backing him.

Given the history of undertakings to do away with such powers once acquired, it would probably have been foolish to trust him in any case. Sarath Fonseka got into politics, let’s not forget, because he was annoyed at not having been given more responsibilities as the Chief of Defence Staff. Having made it quite clear in the last few weeks that he doesn’t want to confine himself to foundation laying ceremonies and charity work, having any hope that he would feel inclined to limit his position after the election is quite peculiar. What the JVP says about Parliament legislating without his consent would only succeed if they could get a two thirds majority, and only the most optimistic amongst us could imagine that the UNP would give up a president they could rely on to be on their side.

I don’t believe that dealing with the economy is the most important task. I’m singling it out purely because I think it’s the only thing the candidates would attempt to tackle.

Reconciliation is more urgent, but you’d have to be hugely naive to believe that either of them was planning to take it seriously. Both Mahinda Rajapaksa and Sarath Fonseka are hopeless.

Going by everything we’ve heard him say about the war, it’s ridiculous to suggest that Sarath Fonseka is the more enlightened, as his propagandists have been doing of late. Need we drag up that quote about Sri Lanka belonging to the Sinhalese? At least Mahinda Rajapaksa knows that this is not something he should say in public, whatever he thinks.

In this and a number of other ways, Sarath Fonseka is looking ever more like George Bush. The less said about him the better.

It’s almost as stupid as arguing that he is the most likely to put an end to the so-called white van culture. I simply don’t know how people who accused him of being behind the attacks on journalists can suggest that Sarath Fonseka will be the one to end such things.

This is hardly a ringing endorsement of Mahinda Rajapaksa’s vision and experience, but that’s the way it goes in an election. Voters simply have to decide who they prefer.

It also brings us back to the manifestos, finally.

Reading them, you might not even realise that there had been a group called the Tigers. You would certainly not imagine that there were any political questions to be answered as a result of the war, only practical difficulties in getting people back to their homes and restoring infrastructure.

Mahinda Rajapaksa does at least use the words Tamil and Muslim, neither of which are to be found even once in ‘Believable Change’, but nothing is said in either policy document about the Thirteenth Amendment or any other reforms. Sri Lanka has been united by force and it is going to have to stay that way by force too, they seem to be saying. It’s profoundly depressing.

This is just a reminder of how much work has to be done outside the campaign.

If the thousands of people we now see participating so eagerly in rallies, stuffing our email inboxes with photos of their man and putting up illegal posters and billboards, shouting at length on radio and television, running around the country organising meetings and beating up their opponents and burning their property would dedicate just a fraction of that time and energy to something a little more meaningful than simply getting Mahinda Rajapaksa or Sarath Fonseka elected, there might just be hope. Read more...

It’s politics, stupid

By Kath Noble

(January 13, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The two main contenders for the presidency blundered into a substantive issue in their campaigns last week, although they were rather more interested in trading smears than explaining what they were going to do about it. Corruption, they seemed to agree, is everywhere.

We didn’t need them to tell us. It’s something most people have seen for themselves.

I don’t mean to imply that this is a particularly corrupt nation. In fact, studies by international agencies tend to find that Sri Lanka is better off than its neighbours, albeit not a lot. Transparency International, which produces the most well known ranking called the Corruption Perception Index, places Sri Lanka at about the midpoint of developing countries.

Nevertheless, it’s a big problem. The World Bank estimates that $1 trillion is lost annually due to corruption. That’s a fair chunk of global income.

Developing countries lose about ten times the amount they receive in aid.

Sri Lankan economists have calculated that the national income would go up by something like two percent if corruption were brought under control. That implies less of an impact than ending the war, which was already said to have cost double the GDP before the Ceasefire Agreement was signed in 2002, but putting a stop to corruption is obviously going to be an important factor in the development of the economy in the years to come.

It would certainly be a populist move. There’s nothing more annoying than seeing other people enrich themselves at your expense.

While the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption has done a lot of useful work in curbing petty incidents, it has proven itself to be completely incapable of tackling anything in the political realm. I’m sure we should be glad that it has caught an office aide at the Magistrate’s Court in Attanagalla accepting Rs. 400 to issue a copy of a case record without the usual delays, as it proudly announces on its website, but it’s going to take a lot of such coups to make up for what politicians get up to.

The rulings on the privatisations of the Sri Lanka Insurance Corporation and Lanka Marine Services are just two examples. They were exposed by the hard work of a few dedicated people, who found the information they needed to convince the Supreme Court to reverse the deals.

The politicians involved, we should note, escaped without so much as a ticking off. Whether that’s because they were blameless is yet to be established.

It isn’t just a matter of political interference. Investigations by the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption are carried out by police officers. Seeing as the Police generally do a pretty bad job of catching people who murder, ithardly surprising that they have yet to wipe out bribery and corruption. That they are particularly incapable of tackling crimes that involve suspects with political connections is too well known to dwell on here.

The trouble with the debate that Sarath Fonseka and Mahinda Rajapaksa are having on this issue is that it is concerned only with character. It has been brought down to the level where voters are asked to decide which of them they believe is the most honest.

This was consciously started by the UNP and JVP, of course. When considering how to market their common candidate, who needed attributes other than having been part of the team that destroyed the LTTE if he was going to stand against Mahinda Rajapaksa, the obvious route was to use corruption. Sarath Fonseka isn’t one of us bad politicians, they could tell people.

That much is accurate, at least. He demonstrates it every time he opens his mouth, as his foot hurtles in at top speed. Whether this is relevant is another matter.

Mahinda Rajapaksa doesn’t give the impression of being an aboveboard kind of guy. He may well be corrupt, although I would have expected to read more details in the Sunday Leader if he were really milking the State for his own enrichment. However, there is absolutely no doubt that he ignores evidence against people he finds it convenient to have around. He has probably convinced himself that such pragmatism is needed to get things done.

This is how even good politicians think, I suspect.

Then there’s the abuse of public resources at election time. Numerous examples of this now entrenched practice have been clearly documented, including in the current race.

The feeling most of us have that there’s something deeply wrong with the way politics works in Sri Lanka is why the Government went all out last week to demonstrate the corruption of Sarath Fonseka. They were essentially saying he is no better than us bad politicians.

I wouldn’t be surprised. Sarath Fonseka hasn’t exactly demonstrated his moral values in other areas over the years. Why he is thought to be so frightfully concerned about stealing money that belongs to the people when he wasn’t at all bothered by the idea of taking their lives is quite beyond me. Perhaps it’s some kind of uber capitalism.

What’s different about him is that he is only now entering politics. He hasn’t had many opportunities to be corrupt, and there has been no pressure on him to ignore corruption in others. Sarath Fonseka hasn’t had to do deals with anyone. He had a job and he did it efficiently. Directions were set for him and he gave orders accordingly. It wasn’t easy, but there were few of the complications that politicians encounter all the time. He didn’t need to win elections or retain a majority in Parliament, for example. While there was scope for him to influence procurement as he moved up the ranks in the Army, his power has been of an entirely different kind on the whole.

Sarath Fonseka has ambitions, so this innocence can’t last. If he’s elected, he will be immediately thrust into the environment that has made crooks of so many people.

This is an important point, I think. While bad people are attracted to politics in the hope of extracting what they can get for themselves, this is not the general rule. They were often good when they started out, just took a wrong turn along the way.

The UNP and JVP are no better than the UPFA when it comes to this issue, and it is with one or other group that the winner will have to work if he is going to do anything other than redecorate the bedrooms at Temple Trees. Given the enthusiasm politicians in Sri Lanka display for changing parties, we’re probably talking about both.

Character will help, but I doubt it will be sufficient to effect a change in the political culture. Even a person like Mahatma Gandhi would need more than his own good example and strong will to get it done, and we can be quite sure that neither Sarath Fonseka nor Mahinda Rajapaksa is such a figure. A good plan would be a start, and voters should be clear that what has been put forward by the two main contenders for the presidency doesn’t qualify.

Some of the promises that have been made are useful, of course. Abolishing the Press Council Act, passing a Right to Information Law and implementing the Seventeenth Amendment would be at the top of my list, but there would be many other points.

In the end, we have to realise that this approach to the issue can only get us so far. Politicians will simply get in the way.

This means that if people genuinely want to see an end to corruption, they are going to have to do a lot more than put a cross in a box. When it comes to deciding who to support in the presidential election, it would be nice to think that there are other substantive issues to consider too. Read more...

A people-centred foreign policy

By Kath Noble

(January 06, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) While Mahinda Rajapaksa and Sarath Fonseka passed yet another week bickering over the apparently burning question of who deserves most credit for the war victory, a small fishing boat carried five Tamils to India. They claimed to be refugees. Sri Lanka could never be their home, they told a journalist reporting for The Hindu from Ramanathapuram, because they would always be treated differently.

Such incidents often go unnoticed here. We are so used to the idea that people want to leave, it doesn‘t register as news.

This time, however, when asked how they’d managed to get across the Palk Strait, the asylum seekers happened to say that it had been an easy journey because there were fewer patrols since the defeat of the LTTE. Now a security matter, they had to be taken seriously. The Navy issued a stern denial, reassuring the world that there had been no let up in monitoring of the seas around Sri Lanka.

No doubt we ought to be glad. Cutting off supply lines was crucial to the Government’s success in reuniting the island and ridding the world of Prabhakaran, and it obviously wouldn’t be a good thing to allow weapons to be smuggled in again. There are still plenty of people who might use them, given half a chance.

That isn’t the only issue, of course. There is also the drugs trade to consider. It’s already a big enough nuisance and anecdotal evidence suggests that the problem continues to grow.

Whether or not it was easy for the asylum seekers to get away is hardly the point. What makes people want to leave Sri Lanka is the rather more important question.

It would make an excellent focus for Rohitha Bogollagama, who announced on New Year’s Day that the country would be following a people-centred foreign policy in 2010. He will need to find a way of making that statement meaningful in any case, or we might be tempted to wonder if he intends it to be something like Tony Blair’s ethical foreign policy, which turned out to be no more than a splendid excuse to drop bombs on people. That would be decidedly 2009, the Minister should realise.

The Tamils who traversed the Palk Strait last week are five among a huge number. Many thousands of people have fled Sri Lanka over the years, and the phenomenon doesn’t appear to have stopped with the end of the war.

Of late, there has been extensive coverage of attempts by several groups to get as far as Australia, one of whom has been involved in a stand-off with the Indonesian authorities for the last three months, having been forced to dock in a port near Jakarta. Another boatload has been persuaded to give up a similar protest on the customs vessel that rescued them from their sinking ship in the middle of the Indian Ocean, with the majority of its passengers leaving Indonesia for third countries a week or so ago. The Australian government promised that their cases would be assessed quickly.

Then there has been the saga with the Sri Lankans on the Ocean Lady. The Canadian courts are still in the process of deciding their fate.

The Foreign Ministry is in the habit of dismissing all these people as economic migrants. They see the kind of money that can be made in the West and they will do anything to have a go at securing a comfortable future for themselves and their relatives, its representatives tend to say. If they can’t get visas to move legally, they pay smugglers.

It’s true, but it can’t be anywhere near the whole story. Compared with other countries in South Asia, there’s relatively little desperate poverty in Sri Lanka. There are free education and health services and a big public sector providing secure if not very comfortable jobs for both skilled and unskilled workers. An awful proportion of Colombo’s population lives in slums, but these are nothing compared with the deprived areas near major cities in India, for example. Economically, Sri Lankans are not that badly off. Of course there will be young people willing to take a chance at making their fortune, but they know that it isn’t always easy to do more than survive in Western countries, especially now that their economies are suffering the effects of the global financial crisis.

To that has to be added the very serious risks taken by those opting to be smuggled out of the country. An excellent piece of journalism that appeared in the Sunday Leader a few weeks ago about boats operating from Negombo highlighted this very well. It quoted an agent as saying, ‘We tell anyone who is thinking about going that they must be ready to die.’ Indeed, many people disappear on the way. Boats run into poor weather or coral reefs and sink. More often, their occupants succumb to disease, as they are crammed into a tiny hold without sanitation. Water and food can run out if there are delays.

Incidentally, this article noted that the Navy was perfectly aware of these operations and happily looked the other way. With smugglers earning some Rs. 30 million per trip, there is apparently plenty to spare for bribes. That sounds like another security problem that could do with solving, and promptly.

What is less well publicised is the length of time asylum seekers have to spend in detention if they are caught, as many are. Conditions are often quite bad, especially for those stopped before they reach the West.

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees, which is mandated to look after the nearly one million people whose cases are in the process of being reviewed worldwide, drew attention in one of its recent publications to the plight of a Sri Lankan family who had spent almost two years in a detention centre in Bangkok. They had no idea how much longer they would have to wait to find out if their refugee status had been approved. Meanwhile, husband and wife were separated and kept in overcrowded cells without even enough space to lie down. Other people in the same facility had been held there for seven years, waiting for the Thai government to decide whether or not they qualified as refugees, so that they could either be resettled or returned to their countries of origin.

The other standard response of the Foreign Ministry to this kind of story is to declare that anybody wanting to flee the country must be a terrorist. Again, this is sometimes the case, but it is clearly not always so.

In any case, there should be no need for people who were involved with the LTTE to run. Only the senior leaders are to be punished, according to the Government’s policy, and almost all of them are dead. The sole survivor from that level of the organisation, according to the University Teachers for Human Rights, is already in London. The junior cadres are to be rehabilitated, which means helped to return to civilian life. If they fear this enough to leave the country, there must be something wrong with the programme. It is supposed to be about providing them with new skills and knowledge, so that they can return to their homes and find useful work. The Government needs to make this clearer, if it believes that members of the LTTE are so determined not to participate.

Whether people other than economic migrants and terrorists are leaving or not, the world certainly believes that there are refugees amongst those undertaking the trips. The deal referred to earlier with Australia, for example, implicitly recognised that the group concerned had a genuine reason to fear persecution here.

This is what might just succeed in grabbing the attention of Rohitha Bogollagama. He needs to convince the leaders of other countries that Sri Lanka is capable of protecting all its citizens, else they will continue to bring up annoying questions about human rights. What’s more, the Minister will get the blame if there are many more upsets like the loss of the GSP Plus trade concessions from the European Union.

It cannot be a propaganda exercise. The Government has to create an environment within the country in which it would be laughable for anyone to suggest that Tamils are discriminated against. Relying on the vagaries of interpretation and explanation will not be enough. The war is over, after all, and expectations are quite rightly much higher now. Sri Lanka has to build up a new image of the dynamic, progressive and inclusive state that we all know it can be, and this has to be based on reality. People have to feel that it is true.

This first week of January would seem to be a good time to begin. The only problem is the elections, which look set to ensure that politics continues to be about nothing other than the trading of insults for some time to come.

(The writer can be reached at kathnoble99@gmail.com) Read more...