Ceylon Today Editorial

TNA MUST DROP ‘UNITED stand’

25th October 2015

In 1976, the Vaddukoddai Resolution called for separatism that nurtured terrorism that ran its course with the three decade war. That situation worsened when they called for the devolution of power as the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was brought into action.

However, the Tamil community maintained that the powers embodied in the 13th Amendment to the Constitution were not adequately devolved to the periphery. That claim is justifiable.

Now with the Tamil National Alliance Leader R. Sampanthan becoming the Opposition Leader, he stands to support the Government of Sri Lanka to resolve the ethnic issue. That is most welcomed by all the sections in the country, despite the handful of nonconformists. Unlike Sampanthan's predecessors, he has said that he will support the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe Government to find a lasting solution to the ethnic issue. And, according to him he will stand by the government to create a 'united and undivided' country. At the All Party Conference, Opposition Leader Sampanthan had said, there will be no demand for a Tamil Eelam, separation or a division of the country.

Sri Lanka, in accordance with the Constitution of the country, is one country with a unitary character and the word 'unitary' is embodied in the Constitution. More so, all the Members of Parliament have sworn on an oath of allegiance to uphold the unitary character of the country as mentioned in the Constitution.
If the Tamil National Alliance and Opposition Leader Sampanthan harps upon the word 'united' it could create an unwarranted obstacle to the smooth process of discussions that are expected to continue at the All Party Conference. His observations on a 'united' nation have the unnecessary potential of being identified as an entry point for a federalist State. This has the potential of having adverse repercussions on the All Party Conference, if whoever joins the conference notices these subtle differences in terms. What is required is not a number of small units or States, in their various levels of independency or power, 'uniting' under one cause followed by the Central Government, but the need of a unitary State under the Central Government.

Adequate powers can be devolved to the periphery by the government under the present unitary character of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. For that to happen, the Sinhalese leaders must trust Tamil political leaders. And, as the latter suggests, there will be no demand for a Tamil Eelam, separation or a division of the country. It is rather high time that the Sinhalese leaders moved away from the paranoid state of mind and moved on to trusting the Tamil communities who have expressed their needs of reconciling on the ethnic issue. Not just the Sinhalese leaders, but also those citizens who still don't trust the Tamil man living next door should look in that positive direction.

Furthermore, we cannot, but stress on the importance of the All Party Conference which has given the opportunity to almost all active political parties to express their views on establishing the domestic mechanism inquiring into the alleged war crimes. Although it may be a long drawn process, the presence and active participation of all the invited parties can lead to a successful outcome in the near future.

More so, the invitees and the participants should take to mind that this is not an average parliamentary debate. This is a vital stage in the process of resolving the ethnic issue which has infected our country for far too long. Therefore, discipline is of utmost importance. The opportunity has come and it would be wise to use it. Otherwise, there would be no use crying over spilt milk later.

Thus, the Tamil National Alliance must not insist on the term 'united' and the Government of Sri Lanka must agree to devolve power to the periphery without fear, placing trust in the Tamil community who are undoubtedly citizens of our own mother country.

Sociologist Theodor Adorno once wrote, "An emancipated society would not be a unitary State, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences."Our country has taken the first few baby steps of realizing the universality in the reconciliation of differences, be it ethnic or religious. Subtle differences in words and terms can have a major impact on the outcome of things and it would be an improvement if our leaders could realize that too.

 

Sunday Leader Editorial

APC: Not Only Talk But Solutions Too

25th October 2015

President Maithripala Sirisena has decided on a very democratic process to decide on a mechanism to implement the contentious UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) resolution.

The government would consider opinions of all political parties in this regard, he told representatives of 21 political parties in parliament as well as some representatives of those parties not in parliament.

This method would not only provide opportunities for airing all diverse political views but also provide an opportunity of providing solutions rather than offering criticisms. The resolution will adhere to provisions of the Sri Lanka Constitution while preserving the human rights of Sri Lankans, he had added.

The opportunity of airing all shades of opinion at a forum specially devoted to formulate a judicial mechanism would take the wind off the sails of some critics who are attempting the make out that the UNHRC resolution is treason in the making and they are being denied their patriotic duty of exposing the resolution.

The furore caused in august assemblies alleging attempts to deny their rights to speak on the subject or being discriminated is a devious way to attract attention.

Parliament would have been the best forum for such discussions but unfortunately some appear to consider it a kind of bull ring on certain occasions which deny the opportunity for calm and rational debate.

This All Party Conference (APC) apparently intended to follow the same lines as All Party Conferences held before, but we do hope it will not end up in smoke or simply disappear as some APCs did. The Tissa Vitharana APC swotted for about two years and presented a report to then President Mahinda Rajapaksa. The contents of the report had not been heard of since then. How much of public funds, which could have been used for public benefit, the cost of intense attention devoted by the media, are not known. Only Vitharana and Mahinda Rajapaksa know of the fruits of this wasted labour.

Participants of this APC should realise that their soaring rhetoric will not result in the UNHRC resolution being thrown out. If that was possible, it should have happened when the former President Mahinda Rajapaksa ruled the roost. The proposed judicial investigation did not go away but kept coming back to the annual sessions of the UNHRC and getting worse every year. Threats of martyrdom with an imagined electric chair worked miracles in domestic politics but had no impact on the resolution which did not go away.

This is an ugly and deformed baby left behind by the Rajapaksa regime which Sirisena and Wickremesinghe have to carry. Thus the baby cannot be thrown out but something has to be done to make it look better.

Critics don’t want foreign elements involved in a judicial process but would go along with a domestic investigation. The government claims it is a domestic process. It is between these two posts that a compromise has to be worked out.

Can opposition critics come out with a solution or are they inclined to find one.

The impression conveyed by some of the strident critics of the UNHCR resolution is that they don’t give a damn for the resolution but want to use it as a tool for the political resurrection of Mahinda Rajapaksa!

We doubt very much if some of the critics who are more adept at flinging mud be able to fine tune the resolution. Perhaps only Prof. G. L. Peiris is capable among the critics to produce some valuable suggestions, but he appears to have forsaken such endeavours and is more inclined to play pandu (politics).

President Sirisena is also inviting representatives of political parties not represented in parliament which could result in enriching discussions of the APC. The clergy of all religions, who are close to the thinking of the people, and more particularly opinion of academics, should be welcomed.

But how long would all this take? APCs have gone for years and produced nothing. They fall into the category of modern day talk shops: NATO – No Action Talk Only.

Let’s hope Maithripala Sirisena can do better.

 

The Nation Editorial

Fresh Milk

25th October 2015

Fonterra, the owners of the now well-known brand ‘Anchor’, has boldly announced that it is venturing into the fresh milk market. The company didn’t have the best of times after the DCD controversy a couple of years ago. It can be said that the initial reaction did more harm than good to Fonterra. Time will tell if this move will see Fonterra completely dropping powdered milk products, but it still signals a fresh start and one that’s arguably a step in the right direction.

What is important is that that there was a problem and Fonterra has made an effort to win back the confidence of the consumer with a product which, by its very nature, has more trust-value.

The move comes with expected ‘goodness’ rhetoric. It’s ‘fresh’. It’s ‘local’. It will ‘strengthen the local dairy industry’. On the face of it all this could be true. But it is almost as though people are not interested in profit or that New Zealand has enough cows and pasture to give milk to the entire world if that country wanted to. It is as though Fonterra didn’t have any issues with powdered milk.

That said, we welcome this move. With caution, we must add, and that has more to do with the general arrogance and bullish ways of corporate entities than with Fonterra’s track record. Indeed that kind of caution, coupled with vigilance from a public empowered with relevant information, would be of great value to Fonterra as it seeks to reinvent itself in Sri Lanka, especially in these days of ‘good governance’.

That caution, moreover, obtains from a history of both the public and private sectors claiming to ‘up the local’ and then in the very name of the local, disempowering it. Revisiting the history of the Milk Board can show what happened to the dairy farmers of this country and how the local milk industry was destroyed. We are sure that Fonterra would welcome meaningful engagement with the consumers and other watchdogs on corporate activity in light of all this.

Fonterra was slow to respond to the critics. However, it now seems that the company has done a re-think and a deep re-think at that, and come up with a solution that is more open to scrutiny by the public. The public, or rather the informed, organized and articulate sections of the public, is the ultimate anchor of the consumer. Fonterra seems to have realized this and it is a good thing. It is good thing for the entire industry because healthy competition could result in competitive pricing and more importantly better quality.

What the general public should know is that even large corporates with a global presence can be made to change course. In other words, it is not the case that capital has its say regardless but it always has to contend with contestation and adapt. This could be called ‘the negotiation of terms of oppression or extraction’ by cynics and there may be some truth to the assertion. However, the availability of the ‘contestation’ button indicates clearly that it can be pressed, but only by a vigilant, informed, organized and brave community of ‘recipients’.

As for the corporate sector perhaps there’s a lesson to be learnt here.  For too long the naughty boys and girls in the corporate world have had it easy.  Friends in high places and an ad-dependent media have turned them into veritable touch-me-nots.  However, sooner or later the rhetoric of good governance will make people say ‘Not just in the public sector, but the private sector too, not forgetting of course the I/NGO community!’

The country is now demanding change.  The responsible corporate that have at times erred will mend their ways.  Those who are not will be held accountable.

Fonterra is making an effort and we applaud this subject of course to the caveats mentioned above.  Others must follow suit.

 

Sunday Times Editorial

Justice can be done in SL

25th October 2015

 

The tabling of two reports from domestic inquiries — the Presidential Commission of Inquiry Into Complaints of Abductions and Disappearances (commonly referred to as the Paranagama Commission) and the Presidential Commission of Inquiry to Investigate and Inquire into Alleged Serious Violations of Human Rights (Udalagama Commission) on the by-products of the protracted 30-plus year northern insurgency — raised a hornets’ nest this week. It was almost a prelude to things to come in the political terrain as the new Government grapples with the question of how best to handle the UN Human Rights Council resolution to investigate purported war crimes in Sri Lanka.

The Justice Maxwell Paranagama Reports and the Justice Nissanka Udalagama Reports were eventually tabled in Parliament though some of them were submitted to the Government months ago. The debate that followed gave a glimpse of — as predicted — the manner in which the emaciated Opposition that exists today (given the National Government concept now in operation) got a handle to attack the Government on the sensitive allegation of selling out the country’s Armed Forces to appease the so-called International Community.

The Government is only too aware of the dangerous consequences from a possible fall-out among the Armed Forces on this issue. Disgruntled soldiery is the worst possible thing in a democracy. The Government moved swiftly to say that the men and women in uniform will be protected at all costs. Such statements could attract the allegation that what is afoot is a sham war crimes trial. It might have been better, under the difficult circumstances the Government is in, had it reassured the Armed Forces that no injustice would be done to them.

The Paranagama Commission, in particular, has held that a judge-led independent investigation is required to go into allegations of war crimes. Exculpating the Army as a whole from wrongdoing, the report states that there is prima-facie evidence in individual cases that warrant further inquiry, and that a military tribunal cannot be expected to find fault.

The fact that the United Nations Human Rights High Commissioner’s report asked for the disbanding of the Paranagama Commission betrays once again the blanket prejudice and distrust these international agencies have of the Sri Lankan judicial system. It was the same with the LLRC (Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission) whose members were accused by this ‘International Community’ of being Government stooges only to welcome the LLRC findings thereafter. The Paranagama Commission in fact, it is being said, has gone even further than not only the LLRC but the UNHRC, and is calling for foreign adjudication, a sensitive issue concerning the independence and sovereignty of the nation-state, and involving the credibility of the country’s long standing, much devalued judicial system.

The Government is trying to test the waters, justifying the entré of foreign technical advisers, lawyers and judges while insisting that it is a domestic mechanism in place and that whoever foreign comes must do so with the Government’s concurrence. In Parliament, a minister quoted the example of The Gambia where the credibility of a similar tribunal was based on foreign participation, and justifying such a move in Sri Lanka. How far has this country fallen to be so compared.

Former President Mahinda Rajapaksa has also jumped into the fray saying his Government got international legal experts to advise – not to sit as judges, a move the incumbent Government is contemplating. The once vociferous Bar Association is unusually quiet on whether to allow foreign prosecutors to practise in our courts, and the Supreme Court will certainly be tested on retrospective legislation and other constitutional contradictions in time to come.

The upshot of it all is that both the Udalagama and Paranagama Commissions have proved beyond any reasonable doubt that local investigative mechanisms do work. It is unfair to judge the country’s entire judicial system by the few politically motivated ‘bad eggs’ who were strategically placed within the judiciary. These two Commissions, and the earlier LLRC, are classic examples that there are the ‘great and the good’ who still can deliver justice in this country provided they are scouted for, and the political will exists. There will then be no need for foreign prosecutors or judges.

The previous Administration miscalculated the turn of events of the post-2009 era which precipitated the UN war crimes demand. Now the limpet Opposition is, as expected, raising the nationalism bogey and will win back some of the support it has lost in the country to the detriment of the new Government.

However nice the slogan that justice must be done to the victims of war sounds, the danger of opening old wounds in an endless ‘fishing expedition’ or a ‘voyage of discovery’ for perpetrators of war crimes in the ‘fog of war’, going back to the dark past rather than the sunshine future is a matter worth pondering, not just for this Government but those who were instrumental in bringing such pressure on it.

Govts may change, not the rogues

While the Government scrambles to get its act together on how to sell a virtual international war crimes tribunal to the people, many of whom voted it into office, it is a fact that the UNHRC resolution was softened as a result of a ‘friendly Government’ (friendly to the sponsors of the resolution) being in office.

Still, there are a host of other critical issues the Government will need to pay urgent attention to, not least the economy. One of the issues, no less important than others, is that of the expenses of an elected representative of the people during an election campaign. The European Union election monitors have rekindled debate on this matter with their recent report on the twin elections in Sri Lanka this year, but it is an issue that has already attracted the attention of political parties and the Elections Commissioner. The problem, however, is that the talk notwithstanding, will anything be done to change the status quo?

The relevance of this issue is because corrupt businessmen and their companies, people in the narcotic and illegal alcohol trade and those engaged in nefarious commercial activities with undeclared funds, bankroll politicians during campaigns and then want their pound of flesh by getting favours in return. Political parties that cannot afford to pay the telephone bill of the party office when in Opposition are able to hire buses for May Day rallies when in Government. Those who get short-changed are the ordinary people who vote a new Government in but find the same rascals are ruling the roost – and the Ministers, mere puppets on strings.

The EU observers, as usual holier-than-thou, speak of laws in Europe that curtail such slush funding, but in the UK peerages are given to campaign donors; in the US amnesties are given; and Europe’s Spain is rocked by scandal with the ruling Popular Party nabbed for accepting campaign donations from companies that won lucrative public works contracts. In Sri Lanka, Governments may change but often not the rogues. The Prime Minister’s attention has been drawn to this or so it seems by his criticism of the Finance Ministry on this score, but can he alone make the change?

 

Sunday Observer Editorial

Back to ethno-politics?

25th October 2015

Barely has the country heaved itself out of a morass of hysterical ethno-politics of one kind, than the subsequent efforts to take national politics on to a plane of inter-ethnic dialogue and inter-class alliances are marred by a competition-driven return to ethnic innuendo.

For some time, those defeated political elements that once thrived on the 'Tiger' bogeyman kept harping on that theme until a second electoral defeat at parliamentary level demonstrated public boredom with it.

But competition engenders ingenuity even at the most base level. Has the JVP succumbed to this?

After months of careful political advocacy against ethnic politics of all kinds, and an encouragement of rational public debate on issues of governance, economic policy and other matters of social relevance, the JVP's leadership seems to have decided to try an easier way of electoral completion: back to narrow ethno-nationalism.

Suddenly, according to the JVP's latest pronouncement in Parliament, Jaffna is infested with Indian spies!

The ridiculous ethno-nationalist logic of this JVP 'line' is there for all to see. Why should 'Indian' spies focus on Jaffna alone? Are all 'Indian' spies Tamil? Is Jaffna the sole target for Indian espionage?

In the first place, modern citizens are well aware that espionage is practised by all States, including Sri Lanka. And, just as much as Sri Lankan intelligence must cover the neighbourhood region as well as other, more distant, locations of strategic and security concern to us, the intelligence agencies of other countries will similarly cover Sri Lanka in accordance with their concerns regarding Sri Lanka.

The pointing of suspicion towards one ethnically-dominant area of the country is, sadly, a return to crude ethno-politics which the nation's combined citizenry has only recently sought to overcome.

The JVP has just seen a lesson learnt by a set of politicians who exploited narrow ethnic politics bordering on racism. Does that lesson need to be learnt again by the JVP? What has happened to that once-heroic movement's secular, modernist outlook?

---

Military hardware in perspective

 

In their immediate reaction to the sheer ferocity of the Tamil secessionist insurgency - that ferocity itself a reaction to the brutality of anti-Tamil riots - Sri Lanka's political authorities and their Defence bureaucracy rushed to obtain the heaviest weaponry, no doubt in the belief that the bigger the jackboot, the quicker the suppression. Thus, in the 1980s and early 1990s, a political elite that saw politics as ethno-politics and, ethno-politics as territorial dominance, chose to pamper solely the Army with 'main battle tanks' and 'heavy artillery'.

This was done despite defence experts arguing that the undulating, irrigation-dense, terrain, the heavy monsoon rain climate, the small scale of the actual theatre of war and, the guerrilla nature of the insurgency, all weighed against such very heavy equipment. Within months, the Army was losing these weapons as guerrilla offensives that temporarily overran Army bases saw the capture and removal of MBTs and 155 mm heavy guns by the Tigers. The Tigers, themselves, hardly used this ordnance except as propaganda.

The initially less-pampered Air Force and Navy were equipped with weaponry best suited for the war effort - turbo-props (Puccara) and light jets suitable for ground attack purposes and, fast in-shore and coastal patrol vessels suitable for gun-running interdiction and off-shore dominance.

Ultimately, the ground war was won thanks to the sensible procurement of medium and mobile artillery in the form of the multi-barrel rocket launchers (MRBLs), the deployment of troops into highly mobile smaller formations and, the extensive use of drones for ground surveillance as well as interdiction.

While in-expensive fast-attack-craft, like the Dvoras, were crucial for the sea war, the air war against the LTTE was notable more for the smart use of drones and extremely efficient air logistical support rather than for the extensive deployment of expensive and glamorous supersonic fighter jets.

Thus, the future of Sri Lanka's armed forces must be built on a realistic assessment of threats to national security rather than simply the accumulation of glamorous high tech and high impact weaponry. Sri Lanka needs to understand who, in its geo-political environment, are its 'enemies'. We need to see beyond the parameters of competitive nationalism and nation-state defence matrices. As our recent series of insurgencies indicate, 'defence' is no longer inter-state warfare but a complex of socio-economic compulsions, cultural compulsions driving terrorism and, plain piracy. As the war against the Daesh (ISIL) already shows, high-tech airpower cannot be an answer.

Sunday Island Editorial