Kolombata hunu, gamata kunu
22 April 2017
People who, troubled by the contamination of their wells owing to
effluent from a factory, asked for clean water, got bullets from the
previous government at Rathupaswala in 2013. The present administration
seems to think the panacea for people’s burning problems is water; it
unflinchingly has police use water cannon liberally to disperse
protesters demanding redress for their grievances as we saw on
Thursday. People who took to the streets against Colombo’s garbage
being dumped in Dompe came under water cannon and tear gas attacks.
A
special police unit set up by the Rajapaksa government to deal with
litter louts came to be dubbed kunu [garbage] police. That outfit,
credit where credit is due, functioned efficiently and nobody dared
dump garbage on the roadside under the previous dispensation. All signs
are that the yahapalana regime will have to establish a special
military unit or a kunu hamudawa to crush protests against rubbish
dumping and protect garbage trucks. The present-day leaders came to
power promising to adopt the Licchavi method of problem solving i. e.
meeting, deliberating and dispersing peacefully, but today they are
dependent on water cannon, truncheons, teargas and rubber bullets to
neutralise dissent. They amply demonstrated in Hambantota in January
this year that they did not hesitate even to get rock-throwing goon
squads to operate alongside the riot police. Let it be stressed that
the yahapalana government is not a collective of angels; it consists of
former members of the Rajapaksa Cabinet, who unflinchingly endorsed
the use of violence to overcome dissent and a bunch of UNPers with a
history of carrying out goon attacks on dissenters. They are only
laying bare their true faces at present.
The government is
lucky that our Rathu Sahodarayas have chosen to float like bees and
sting like butterflies in dealing with it for reasons best known to
them. They were instrumental in preparing the ground for the 2015
regime change and the formation of the present administration. Else,
they would have by now coined a slogan like kolombata hunu, gamata
kunu—‘whitewashing for Colombo and garbage for villages’ to instigate
the rural folk to rise against the government. One may recall the
catchy attention grabbing phrase, kolombata kiri, gamata kekiri—‘milk
for Colombo and melon for villages’; they very effectively used it
during their disastrous insurrection in the late 1980s to capitalise on
the seething resentment of the rural youth towards the glaring urban
bias in the allocation of state resources.
If the government
thinks it can neutralise public resentment with coercive methods, it
is mistaken. It is staring down the barrel of a gun. For, such measures
only aggravate protesters’ frustrated rage, which tends to find
expression in other forms of agitations and a massive protest vote. The
yahapalana government had better listen to protesters and try to
convince them of the difficult situation it is in and secure their
consent for temporary waste disposal measures it has had to adopt to
prevent a garbage crisis in the Colombo city; a prerequisite for
persuading the irate public to stop protests is for the government to
reveal how it intends to solve the garbage problem once and for all and
assure them that their areas won’t be turned into huge waste dumps like
Meethotamulla. There is a severe trust deficit, which the government
has to overcome as a matter of urgency if it does not want to be
relegated to the dustbin of politics.
There is no way the
UNP-led government can justify using force instead of negotiations to
overcome resistance to garbage dumping. For, the UNP has a history of
negotiating with the LTTE for years in spite of the latter’s crimes
against civilians such as massacres in a bid to find a solution to an
intractable problem. Protesters in areas such as Dompe, Wattala and
Karadiyana are not terrorists, are they?
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