Ceylon Today Editorial

Well done Mr. Prime Minister

14 November 2016

Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe made an astounding speech in Parliament on Saturday (12) on the pathetic state of war widows in the Northern and Eastern provinces. Since the civil war ended in 2009, the plight of war widows, the majority of whom are sole breadwinners was highlighted with statistics and several civil society organizations also launched campaigns to find solutions to solve their untold grievances.

However, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe during his budget speech last Saturday, focused on the plight of war widows in the North and the East. A latest survey in the North and the East has revealed that more than eighty-thousand war widows lived in the two provinces without proper livelihood support and the pathetic part of it is that the majority of them remain sole breadwinners.

Since the war came to an end in 2009, the previous regime had focused on restructuring infrastructure in the North and the East. But there was hardly any move to address the humanitarian issues of civilians affected directly by the war. These innocent civilians particularly war widows, orphans disabled persons and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) are largely living in a state of neglect without proper livelihood assistance or a roof above their heads to lead a secure life. As far as the misery created by the three decades of civil war is concerned, humanitarian issues remain a common phenomenon not only in the North and the East but also in the entire country.

Last week's protest in Colombo by disabled soldiers, demanding a pension hike, has clearly indicated the unresolved post-war humanitarian issues which haunt the whole country. Even in other parts of the country thousands of women have become war widows with children in their thousands orphaned.

Therefore, paying due attention to these adverse effects of war beginning from the North and the East by Prime Minister Wickremesinghe, is appreciative and timely before these humanitarian issues turn into enormous social problems. Reports from the North and the East indicate that to support families war widows living below the poverty line, have even stooped to engaging in various anti-social activities.

It is important to note that Vietnam was faced with enormous humanitarian problems at the end of its long-lasting war in the country. However, the South East Asian country now remains exemplary in overcoming its social problems and blossomed as a healthy economy in recent years.

In the past one year, the present government handling post-war issues in the North in comparison to the Rajapaksa regime is praiseworthy. Several core issues such as releasing lands, resettling IDPs and building new houses for those who resettled in their original places have been handled without leaving room for delay and postponement. President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe have prioritized relief measures for victims of the war since the government was formed in January last year.

The Prime Minister in his speech in Parliament, last Saturday, has also pointed out the plans to be worked out by the government to assist not only war widows, but also ex-militant cadres.
Realizing the potential of Jaffna's natural resources such as its coastal areas and beaches the Prime Minister also announced that new investments would be encouraged to develop the tourist sector in the North.

The recent incidents in the North have clearly outlined the volatile situation which presently prevails in the province. So the Prime Minister's concerns over settling the humanitarian issues in the North and the East, will lead to winning the hearts and minds of the people in the two provinces, while erasing the scars of war.

Daily News Editorial

A break from the past

14 November 2016

Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe’s assertion that the national economic policy, built on the foundation of Budget 2017, crafted with the inputs from both major parties, would ensure a smooth development process unimpeded by a change of government, is to be welcomed. Speaking in parliament during the Second Reading of the budget the Premier said that even though the two parties are together now, there is bound to be a parting of ways in the future, but the economic policies put in place by the Unity Government will remain constant despite political changes.

Since Independence the general norm has been for a newly elected government to change or undo the work of its predecessor in keeping with its policies or ideologies and start all over again. Till 1977 governments changed every five years or after its first term in office and the incoming government did away with the development plans of the regime it replaced. Since the country was ruled by the UNP which practised capitalist policies and the SLFP (or SLFP led governments) which was inclined towards the left, the view points of these parties and their policies were diametrically opposed to each other. The result: the country had to restart again, with the change of governments, since development programmes already started by one party or those in the pipeline, were scrapped altogether. The polarisation was such that promises made to the voters by one party to do away with the work of the other also played its part.

Thankfully, after 1977 this trend was arrested to a great extent. Not only that, former President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, who was a dyed in the wool socialist, went so far as to proclaim that she who was a good socialist at one time would now be a good capitalist, when she took the reins of power in 1994. This even earned for her the wrath of Dullas Alahapperuma who famously said in parliament that aanaduwa vamata signal daala dakunata haravanava.

Be that as it may, the country can at least now be assured that there would not be any drastic policy change with the change of government since, as the PM stated, the budget which charted the country’s future development course was the outcome of the consensus of both the UNP and SLFP. There is good reason to believe that it is the SLFP that is represented in the Unity Government that will hold the reins of power if and when it parts ways with the UNP. To that extent, the country can be assured of continuity of the current development process without seeing things disrupted and discontinued, which will be the case if a hostile SLFP were to assume power some day.

To begin with, the economic policies of both major parties are today almost the same although ideologically the SLFP may still retain the vestiges of its past. The view points and standpoints of some of its members are an indication of this. But this may not pose a problem generally for the two parties to work together although it is the contention of the Joint Opposition that UNP policies won’t jell with that of the SLFP and hence the Unity Government was bound to fail.

Be that as it may, the Premier’s assurance is welcome in other ways too. It will put an end to the bitter, rancorous party politics this country has gone through all these years. Under the present circumstances, even after an envisaged political separation, one could expect both parties to work in unison on urgent national issues instead of the usual leg pulling party politics in this country has come to witness.

Above all, the political landscape in the country would undergo a welcome change with the friendly relations between the parties seeping down to the rank and file in the grassroots. Where there was enmity and hostility in the villages between supporters of rival parties, which sometimes end even in murder, one could expect to see a more calm and subdued atmosphere which would also go a long way in ending the violent political culture that has been the bane of Sri Lankan politics.

Take him on

The threat by the President of the Private Bus owners’ Association Gemunu Wijeratne to pull out all private buses from the roads if the government does not withdraw the enhanced fines imposed on highway offenders in the budget should be met squarely by the government. A fine is a deterrent against the repetition of an offence and the need to enhance the fine, while it could be argued is another way for the government collect much needed funds, is also an indication that the exiting fine had not acted as a deterrent. Fines imposed on ticketless travel in trains and buses were to no avail when it dawned on the authorities that the offenders were ready to pay the meagre fine imposed by risking ticketless travel. The fines, thereafter, were increased several fold. Private buses anyway deserve to be slapped with imposing fines for the cavalier manner in which they are plied on the roads.

The Island Editorial

‘Dump Trump’

14 November 2016

 

Everyone is keenly watching the post election tumult in the US, the biggest exporter of democracy in the world. Riots, which broke out following the recent shock win of President elect, Donald Trump, who proved his detractors, pollsters, media moguls, political analysts and animal oracles wrong, have raised serious questions about the wellbeing of US democracy.

No one expected Americans to kick over the traces in this manner without respecting a popular verdict. Something seems to have gone wrong. What we are witnessing in some US cities are the worst protests since the Occupy Wall Street agitations in 2011.

The US democracy is, no doubt, resilient enough to withstand shocks and the anti-Trump riots are likely to fizzle out after emotions run their course. The Clinton backers’ consternation is understandable. No sooner had the polling closed on Tuesday than they, going by polls predictions, thought their heroine’s election was all over bar the shouting though the Trump backers knew ‘it aint over until the fat lady sings’. However, the fact that many Americans have refused to come to terms with reality and accept their President elect does not augur well for US democracy, widely considered a role model. Their unruly behaviour has brought into question the success of the much-flaunted social integration and ethnic reconciliation processes in the US.

Clinton got it right when she declared, in her concession speech, the other day, ‘The nation is more deeply divided than we thought’. Trump said, in his victory speech, that the time had come for wounds of division to be bound. These wounds are apparently festering and something more need to be done than just binding. Trump has lost the popular vote and his success as ‘the President of all Americans’ will hinge on his ability to win over those who have openly rejected him and taken to the streets. Those who are pressuring Sri Lanka, which has emerged from a protracted bloody conflict, to learn from western democracies including the US lessons of reconciliation, should realise that their gods have feet of clay. Race relations in those lands are not so rosy as they are made out to be and we have to depend less on foreign models and adopt an autochthonous mechanism to achieve reconciliation, which is the be-all and end-all of national progress.

Some pollsters have claimed that educated white Americans backed Hillary Clinton and Trump won mostly with the help of the so-called rednecks and trailer trash. This conclusion is not independently verifiable though widely thought to be valid. However, the argument that Clinton was the favourite of the minorities seems to hold water if the elections results in the states with large numbers of minority voters are any indication. Florida, however, was an exception.

Voting patterns indicate that Trump won because the conservative white America struck back with might and main while the keenness of the minorities and the anti-Trump whites to elect Clinton President did not translate into votes as such. If the black Americans, Hispanics, Asians and other such groups who were attending the Clinton rallies in their thousands and shouting themselves hoarse had voted more enthusiastically, the final result would perhaps have been different.

The outcome of the Trump-Clinton battle for presidency is the opposite of what we witnessed in this country, last year, when the votes of ethno-religious minorities tilted the balance in favour of Maithripala Sirisena in the presidential race. The Joint Opposition (JO), without owning up to the blunders its leaders made while in power, alleges that the US was among the foreign powers responsible for bringing about last year’s regime change here with the help of minorities. If so, the question is whether the modus operandi of the Obama administration, which threw its weight behind Clinton, who depended on the minorities to win the presidency, came a cropper at home?

One may wonder whether America’s post-election woes are consequent to bad karma, as it were, resulting from its alleged involvement in engineering uprisings against some democratically elected leaders elsewhere and making economies scream to achieve that end.