Ceylon Today Editorial

Future of SAARC?

05 October 2016

Sri Lanka's decision to bandwagon with India in boycotting South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) last week has infuriated many individuals, parties and organizations both locally and internationally.

It is obvious that the decision to support India in the SAARC boycott didn't come as a surprise, but as a deliberate move to show good faith to the country. That much was obvious. India is one ally Sri Lanka Government does not intend to lose ever. Losing India as an ally would have severe implications on our country, culture-wise as well as economically.

SAARC was established in 1985 to promote the welfare of people in South Asia, to accelerate economic growth, social progress and cultural development in the region, to promote self-reliance in the region among other objectives. One of the SAARC objectives is to contribute to mutual trust, understanding and appreciation of one another's problems, which is funny because, as of yet, this has not been achieved by the group.

The two power houses in SAARC – India and Pakistan have failed at this objective mainly due to the Kashmir issue. And this year's summit maybe the tipping point of the entire thing.

Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe has announced recently that the future of the SAARC looks bleak. According to him, SAARC's future will be disastrous if a solution accepted by all member States is not provided.

The Prime Minister said Sri Lanka will have to look for other alternatives if it fails to provide a solution. And of course, this has been a long time coming. India and Pakistan have no intention of resolving the Kashmir issue any time soon. The members of the SAARC should have seen this when a proposal to prevent border terrorism was rejected at the SAARC Summit in 1985 – the very first summit itself.

India's decision to pull out of the SAARC Summit in Islamabad this November, with Afghanistan, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh deciding to follow suit, effectively draws the curtain on what was increasingly becoming a farce.

Islamabad dropped any plans to send a representative to India to formally extend an invitation to the summit, as is the custom. Indian Home Minister Rajnath Singh was given a mixed welcome by his Pakistani hosts during the Home Ministers' meeting in Islamabad in August, prompting Indian Finance Minister Arun Jaitley to cancel his visit for the subsequent SAARC Finance Ministers' meeting.

Sri Lanka has found itself at a crossroads. We could either follow India, who has always been our Big Brother figure to support whatever Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi says and does in order to maintain our rapport. Sri Lanka can also abandon India and support Pakistan, in a wildcard move. The third move is to remain neutral.

But Sri Lanka will not remain neutral and it would be more sooner than later we are forced to pick a side. The SAARC boycotting was the first move towards it. Either way, SAARC is done or dusted – a 1980s hippy dream which was kaput even at its birth.

PM Wickremesinghe and President Maithripala Sirisena have some serious decisions to make. Like PM Wickremesinghe said maybe it is time we looked into alternatives. Diplomacy works, and we are sure they know it. Isolating Pakistan, as India wants us to do, would be disastrous like we have learned in the past.

Hopefully that mistake is not committed all over again.

Daily News Editorial

President sets the record straight

05 October 2016

President Maithripala Sirisena, it appears, has had enough. For one year, he said, he has remained silent. It was now time to open up. Keeping mum all this time on the allegations made by former President Mahinda Rajapaksa that the present government was not doing anything new but merely continuing with the projects initiated by the former government, President Sirisena on Monday set the record straight.

Addressing the gathering after opening the Sugaladevigama model village in Dimbulagala built under a concept of Housing Minister Sajith Premadasa President Sirisena said it is the responsibility of a new government to allocate funds for the unfinished work left behind by former governments and to continue with the projects. In the same breadth the President said he did not demolish commemorative plaques of projects initiated by former leaders and replace them with his name and open them.

He then went on to refer to the Nelum Pokuna cultural theatre saga. The theatre, he said, was the brainchild of former President Chandrika Kumaratunga and was being built by the Chinese Government, on a request by CBK. When Mahinda Rajapaksa was elected in 2005 he (President Sirisena) too was an invitee to the grand opening of Nelumpokuna. What he saw he never bargained for. The plaque mentioning President Kumaratunga's connection with the project had been bulldozed and a new plaque erected with the name of Rajapaksa.

The President also went on say that the government has taken action to allocate funds for balanced development in every province. “The agenda of the government is to develop the entire country instead of following the agendas of other leaders to develop only their areas”. The reference is of course to the penchant of Mahinda Rajapaksa to develop and upgrade only his Hambantota fiefdom, to the exclusion other locales in the country.

No one will fault the former President for paying special attention to Hambantota, the seat of Rajapaksa power. But did the so called development projects bring about the desired results? The whole country knows what has become of the fate of the Mattala Rajapaksa International airport or the Hambantota port. Billions of public funds were poured into the projects with no tangible results. Mattala, which saw no aviation traffic, is to be merged with the national carrier and there is no word of what is going to be the fate of the port which has hardly seen any maritime traffic.

Not only that, shrines to commemorate the departed members of the Rajapaksa family came up in Hambantota, all paid for by the tax payer. So, when Rajapaksa says there is nothing to catch the eye of the public under this government he is being less than honest.

Public funds cannot be spent like is done by a drunken sailor. Projects should take in the cost benefit factor. The present government too can go on a splurge like the Rajapaksas, undertaking unsolicited projects offered by dubious operators. Governments instead should act responsibly, since it is public money that is at stake. It cannot rush headlong in undertaking anything without a proper evaluation.

The present government, which is barely one year old, cannot show results all at once .It also has to take cognizance of the parlous state of the economy left behind by the Rajapaksa regime, with debt repayment taking up a good proportion of the funds that could otherwise have been utilized for development and offer relief to the public. The Government also is placed in a dilemma, in that, if it defaults on its debts, it will be caught up in a vicious cycle of being forced to borrow again to repay the new loans it may take for development. It is easy for the Joint Opposition to shout from the rooftops that there is no development, since it has left the government holding its own baby.

Be that as it may, as President Sirisena rightly points out, governments cannot scrap undertakings of their predecessors. It is not as simple as that. There are the project developers and the funding agencies who have to be considered. The Colombo Port City project is a case in point .There is also the local financing component and the government is not in a position to disregard such obligations. Does Rajapaksa expect the government to abandon ongoing projects merely because they were commenced under his watch?

Many governments, in the past, were as not shy of borrowing from their predecessors. For instance the Janasaviya Programme of President Premadasa was adapted by the Chandrika government, albeit renaming it as Samurdhi. The baby cannot by thrown with the bath water.

In the past, more often than not, the entrenched practice was for new governments that are elected to office to scrap development projects started by their predecessors, purely based on political rivalry, without considering the merits or demerits of such programmes. If this is allowed to continue, the country will be at a standstill, development wise, with every incoming government trying to undo what the previous government did. Hence Mahinda Rajapaksa's allegation that the present government is merely continuing with what he commenced is misplaced and made to derive political capital.

The Island Editorial

Of that ‘new Constitution’

05 October 2016

 

Celebrated physicist Prof. Stephen Hawking, a few years ago, rectified a mistake he had made in the early 1970s, when he claimed information was lost in a black hole. He now argues that information can survive a journey through a black hole. That may be so, but information either gets distorted or even lost in enlightened Europe!

The Swiss Federal Department of Justice and Police says, in an official statement on migration issue, that Sri Lanka has adopted a new Constitution to achieve ethnic reconciliation and strengthen the rule of law. This cannot be ignored as a minor lapse in that the accuracy of information about Sri Lanka is of paramount importance for Switzerland, which has granted citizenship to a large number of Sri Lankans, mostly economic refugees, claiming to be the victims of war. There is reason to believe that racketeers, thriving on human smuggling etc, use misinformation to mislead the Swiss authorities so that they can advance their agendas.

As for the affluent countries which were once burdened with so many Sri Lankans seeking asylum the most important question that went unasked was why they did not flee to countries like India if their lives were really in danger. It does not make sense for anyone who feels threatened to spend time and resources to travel all the way to the developed world without fleeing to the nearest country. Australia has been wise to deny economic refugees entry and other countries had better follow suit if they want to keep racketeers and terrorists, disguised as asylum seekers, at bay.

Sri Lanka’s armed conflict, which is thankfully a thing of the past, not because of those currently in power but in spite of them, became the proverbial beggar’s sore for economic refugees and human smugglers operating in the West. Now, these elements are all out to paint a gloomy picture of the situation in Sri Lanka to avoid deportation and to continue their sordid operations.

While the Swiss government is under the impression that Sri Lanka has already adopted a new Constitution, the so-called yahapalana government is blowing hot and cold on the abolition of the executive presidency, the be-all and end-all of the process of making a new Constitution. Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe, who usually echoes the views of his boss, President Maithripala Sirisena, has been quoted by this newspaper as saying that the plans to scrap the presidency needs a rethink vis-a-vis Northern Chief Minister C. V. Wigneswaran’s utterances.

About a fortnight ago, the Danish Immigration website recognised Tamil Eelam as one of the countries from which foreigners could apply for visas. We thought the immigration officers of Denmark were quite au fait with the world map. This glaring error was subsequently rectified, but it as well as the aforesaid lapse on the part of the Swiss government demonstrates how uninformed the Europeans, tasked with handling immigration and asylum issues, are.

Meanwhile, in 2009, the then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, addressing the UN Security Council, declared that rape had been used as a weapon in Sri Lanka’s war, which had ended a few months back. Either the foreign affairs bigwigs of the developed countries are uninformed about developing nations like Sri Lanka or distorting information to suit their agendas as was seen in the exaggerated civilians casualty figures in the Vanni war and the falsification of intelligence dossiers to justify the US-led invasion of Iraq.

It behoves the affluent countries, especially those grappling with the problem of economic refugees masquerading as victims of war, persecution etc., to ensure that information on the basis of which they make vital policy decision is accurate.