Balancing democracy with stability
07 April 2017Sri Lanka's move towards full democracy, post 8 January, 2015 is astonishing.
The only country in the Asian region which may be ahead of it on this score may be Japan.
Ironically, in the immediate aftermath of World War II in 1945, it was war destroyed Japan, destroyed first by Colonel Dolittle of the US Air Force's (USAF's) illegal incendiary bombing of Tokyo, followed by the even greater inhumane destruction by the atom bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the USAF in August 1945, was yet, the richest country in Asia in 1948, the year Sri Lanka got its independence, with the island ending up in second place to Japan, then.
Sixty-nine years down the line to the present, economically, i.e. from a GDP perspective, Japan may be the second richest country in Asia after China and Sri Lanka, now way behind, but, in terms of 'democracy indicators', it may not be wrong to say that while Japan may be the first, Sri Lanka may now be in second place.
Sri Lanka's move towards greater democracy, post 8 January 2015, may even be the envy of the West, with perhaps only the rich Nordic/Scandinavian countries from that region, being ahead of it on this indicator, especially in the backdrop that this poor, developing island was scarred for 26 long years by brutal, Tamil terrorism, which only ended as recently as eight years ago, in 2009.
And, in a further step towards moving towards full democracy, Cabinet Spokesman and Health Minister Rajitha Senaratne told reporters on Wednesday that Cabinet has approved amendments to the Witness Protection Act, allowing witnesses to provide evidence from abroad in the form of audio-visual communication. (See this newspaper's yesterday's edition)
Nonetheless, even after all these laudable steps that the new Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) is taking to strengthen and firm up democracy after its systems were battered and bruised by 26 years of Tamil terrorism, made worse by the misuse and abuse of power by the previous Mahinda Rajapaksa regime which made terrorism even after its destruction in 2009, an excuse to unleash State terror on its people, by throwing-up pet Stalinist, Nazi and Maoist slogans such as imperialism, Western agents, saboteurs and traitors to serve their own vested interests. GoSL, however, must be mindful that democracy alone cannot feed its people, find jobs for the unemployed, in short, give a better life to its citizens.
Stability, both in its political and social form, hand in hand with democracy, is also needed to ensure a better life and higher living standards for the people of this country. Good examples of these are the South-East and East Asian tiger economies.
Some of those economies, at least previously operating under the umbrella of dictatorships where human rights were relegated to the dustbin, nevertheless ensured a better economic life for its people were obtained, after which only they embraced democracy.
Examples of these are South Korea and Taiwan, while the other tiger economies such as Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, even now, may have only pretensions of democracy, if they have such pretensions at all, while Hong Kong has ended up as being a colony of China, which, however, has no pretensions of democracy!
Even, the emerging Tiger economy Vietnam, like China, also has no pretensions to democracy, being governed under the Marxist-Communist doctrine of a one-party State, ipso facto from a political perspective, though in an economic sense, like China, it practises capitalism, thereby allowing it to give a better life and higher living standards to its people, democracy or no democracy.
Further, those tiger economies have not become victims of 'Arab Spring', like Tunisia and Libya, or 'more' tragically, like Syria and to a lesser extent Egypt.
That may be due to the 'theory of relativity', not in the physical sense as applied by Einstein, but in the socio-economic and political sense where those South-East and East Asian economies may not be as bad as the Arab Spring countries vis-à-vis negative indicators such as corruption, nepotism and the breakdown in the rule of law.
Japan, post World War II, was however a totally different kettle of fish. Its goods enjoyed free trade access to the world's largest economy, the USA, thereby helping it to grow and become an economic giant.
In the pursuit of greater freedom for its people, of establishing justice and the rule of law with retrospective effect and beyond, hand in hand in achieving and reaching forth to these noble ideals, GoSL must also be mindful of the need to firm up political, social and economic stability in the country.
The Tass correspondent of the then Soviet Union in Colombo, speaking to a local journalist in the 1960 said, what's the point in speaking about democracy when your people are hungry?
His words proved to be prophetic, when a few years later the country was engulfed in the April 1971 insurgency, which, in its aftermath, left 13,000 youth, belonging to the then 77% Sinhala majority community dead in the hands of the authorities within a matter of a few weeks after the launch of this abortive uprising.
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