Ceylon Today Editorial

WALKING WITH THE ENEMY

07 May 2017

On 7 November last year we witnessed a turn for the worse in the Opposition's brand of politics. At their behest, disabled soldiers who threatened gate crashing into the Presidential Secretariat, demanding a pension, compelled the Police as the situation threatened to escalate, to resort to the use of water cannon and tear gas to disperse them.

Interspersed between the disabled soldiers, obviously stalwarts of the movers and shakers in the Opposition were dissident Buddhist monks and pro-Opposition social political lackeys posing off as social activists. When ever did soldiers need monks and lackeys to draw their chestnuts out of the fire? When did they lose their manhood?

Some of them, having received their pension demand on President Sirisena's orders, were seen at Opposition May Day rallies, a sad commentary on the total lack of morality in Opposition ranks whose leaders seem disposed to stoop to the lowest level, turning the nation's disabled servicemen against the government of the country. That's the same as fostering a treasonable mutiny. Let us not fool ourselves into thinking that the men who orchestrated that de facto mutiny have also been busy brainwashing personnel who are still in uniform.

Immediately after that shameful incident, we wrote saying that politics just took a nasty turn. We said the Opposition would get its foreign funding and finance a slew of trade union and other forms of aggressive political action to destabilize and topple the government.

Tragically, we have been proved right.

The government needs to keep extremely close tabs of what's happening in the services because this will not be the first time that disgruntled politicians with inflated egos, now badly bruised, have sought to use the forces to topple a government. Let's not be stupid or naïve and throw up our hands in feigned horror at even such a suggestion. Let's face reality and take adequate precautions to preempt lawlessness exploding all over the nation before it's too late. Let's not forget that the majority of suspects wanted for a dozen murders of journalists and politicians, of aid workers and students, wanted for disappearances, are all servicemen including a very senior Police official and senior Army and Navy personnel. Let's not forget that the Welikada jail massacre was carried out by Army men. Most of these disgruntled elements with more than one axe to grind against the government are roaming free and at the beck and call of their former masters now driven insane at their loss of power. Let's not forget even for a second that the men who lead the Opposition forces are the men under whose watch the worst pillage and murders and abductions and disappearances were carried out.

Before and since November last year there's been a score of times when the GMOA, IUSF, trade unions and the floor of the House have been used to diabolically derail the government's entire mechanism in a bid by the Opposition to grab power. Its leaders have said so openly. The trail of destabilization left by them all over the nation bears testimony to the fact that the Opposition does not intend facing another election, no matter how profusely they clamour for LG elections. We said that the clamour about Hambantota being given to the Chinese was just a dry run staged to later justify what they knew was coming: handing over Trincomalee to India! In this too we have been proved absolutely right.

Within SLFP ranks in the government are fifth columnists, moles of the Opposition. While they hold top Cabinet portfolios and sat with the President on the May Day platform in Getambe, many knew that their voters were at Galle Face.

The enemy without and the enemy within...they are the same, both biding their time to pull the government down.

The government must know that there cannot be any rain without thunder. It needs the integrity to so rule...or be kicked out of office! And that will only unleash an unprecedented reign of terror that will dwarf the evil we experienced for ten years of the previous regime.

Sri Lanka could then be on the brink of a major and unprecedented crackdown on the forces of evil which threaten democracy.

President Sirisena and PM Wickremesinghe find themselves in the crossfire between permitting the freedom of expression and on the other hand doing something about the abusive expression of that freedom which traduces every democratic principle embodied in the exercise of democratic freedoms.

An immutable truth in life is that one remains indecisive in the face of evil at one's own peril.

The President will be well advised to bear in mind the truism that "when two are not agreed, they cannot walk together."

To try to govern by handing portfolios to your enemy's sycophants can prove very destructive.