Seeing, is believing
Sunday 29th November 2015
'Seeing, is believing' is an old English adage that
argues that it is easier to believe in the factual nature of something once one
has seen it in the physical form whether as an image or as an activity.
Relevant to a legal action last week is also another adage: that 'justice must
not only be done, but must be seen to be done', which derived from a 1920s
British court ruling.
Both these sayings are relevant to us because of a
recent court ruling. Last week, a court convicted a former senior Police
officer in what might become a landmark case in this country's modern legal
history. A former Deputy Inspector General of Police and several others were
convicted for murder of the first degree over a killing of a businessman.
The court sentence remains to be challenged in
appeals. But it is historic in that very few members of either the police or
the security forces have been found guilty and given strong sentences in a
country with a long history of violent upheavals in which there have been
literally thousands of cases of deaths, disappearances, torture, and other
violations of laws where the finger of suspicion has been directed towards the
very guardians of law and order and, national security.
Sri Lankans were, at one time, proud of their
country's liberal democratic practices. That was long ago.
In recent decades, Sri Lankans have had to live in
a worsening environment of brutality and cynical violence in which the
perpetrators have been seen to be 'subversives', 'terrorists' and 'gangsters'
on the one side as well as members of the armed forces and police on the other.
By the 1990s, a succession of insurgencies and a counter 'dirty war' had
already brought the citizenry to what appeared to be a near-crisis situation in
terms of human rights and political repression.
It was the most recent decade, however, that
brought Sri Lankan society its worst nightmare in which the ordinary citizen
became trapped between insurgents and political murderers on the one hand and
the officers of the law on the other who could be more relied on to take the
side of the murderers rather than the side of the victims. Indeed, this
nightmare became a farce as well when the government of the day itself made
'special inquiries' and even so-called presidential commissions into a kind of
crude art of evasion of accountability and cover-up of murder and plunder.
The political changes of January and August this
year were expected to herald a change in the environment of law and order and
national security as well. The public had high expectations of the prosecution
of plunderers and political assailants. But as the months dragged on, while
investigations have been initiated by the hundreds, the actual number of
prosecutions are very few and even those seem to have involved more the minnows
rather than the sharks. The justice that the people have demanded through their
emphatic electoral vote, is yet to be imposed in any convincing form.
The people have been waiting to see justice being
meted out and the convictions in the Shyam murder case are the first. More such
justice must be seen to be done if the people are to believe that their
political choice in January and August this year have been the right ones.
Remembrance: military and militant
November in Sri Lanka has become the month of
remembrance of various 'heroes' and 'martyrs', in addition to the passing on of
our near and dear. In addition to 'All Souls' day, we also remember the 'war
dead' of the First and Second World Wars - thanks to our colonial heritage.
The most recent commemorations that have begun to
be observed in November are somewhat unconventional in that those being
remembered are mainly young people who fought un-recognised 'wars'. They are
the combatants in the insurgencies of both the North and South.
Barely had our first such 'insurgency' been
crushed, bloodily, in the South in 1971, than, in 1975, there began another
insurgency in the North. While the southern violent unrest abated for the next
two decades, the insurgency in the North did not abate.
The secessionist insurgency grew over the decades -
prompted, no doubt, by the clumsy force resorted to by successive national
political leaderships - into a full-fledged internal war that almost tore apart
the Sri Lankan State. At one point foreign military forces from our neighbour,
India, also joined in the efforts to militarily suppress what is, ultimately, a
burning and un-resolved political conflict among social groups within the
country.
Today, while governments - Sri Lankan and Indian -
remember those thousands of armed forces personnel who died in our internal
wars, it is left to the citizenry, young and old, and also some political
movements, to remember those thousands, if not tens of thousands, who were also
killed in battle or on the sidelines in these internal wars. These dead are
those who died fighting for social causes in which they believed or were led to
believe.
Whether these dead - as with the armed forces,
mostly youth - are called 'martyrs' or 'heroes' is only a matter of political
perception. What is most crucial, however, is that they are all people of this
country or of a friendly neighbouring country. They are people whose living and
dying are real and cannot be 'deleted' as they can be done in the virtual
reality of war gaming. Hence, the importance of Remembrance.
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