Daily News Editorial

Protecting wildlife during a pandemic

While the attrition among our human population from the global COVID-19 pandemic remains relatively low compared with many other countries, we now hear that our wildlife population is coming under an ever-increasing threat from us, humans. Earlier last week, a most rare creature anywhere in the world, the black leopard that is a precious feature of our island’s wildlife, was found illegally trapped and then, tragically, died after being rescued.

And, another leopard was found caught in a snare last Friday near Yatiyantota. Both big cats, magnificent creations of Mother Nature and stars of this country’s wild fauna, were victims of callous human greed, and the rarer specimen unfortunately did not survive the suffering of its cruel entrapment.

This unscrupulous greed and wanton exploitation of our natural environment – fauna and flora – is ultimately part of the larger dynamics of Humanity’s poorly managed relationship with Nature. Our overall failure to better protect our Earthly habitat is a major contributory factor to the degradation of that habitat.

The recent centuries of environmental over-exploitation and devastation have been accompanied by a corollary toxicity emerging from our natural environs in the form of plagues, deformities of plant life including food crops and, dangerous biological mutations like Coronaviruses.

Patting ourselves on the back for our relative success in pandemic containment is of no use if we fail in the protection of our larger, already fragile, natural environment. Continued disregard for Nature will only worsen the conditions of our island habitat.

Even before COVID-19 struck, our isle has been besieged both within and without, by environmental degradation and worsening climate change. Sri Lanka’s human population density (among the highest in the world) has resulted in topographical damage that makes landslides and floods an annual, traumatic routine. Overcrowded hillsides are quick to collapse while the natural drainage systems cannot handle the shock of sudden, massive rainfall far in excess of the normal annual precipitation, resulting in the flooding of waterways and inundation of residential areas. Just over a week ago, several lives were lost in such floods.

The rapid and improperly planned and managed human settlement expansion has also resulted in the savaging of our forest cover, reducing it from more than 50 per cent of the island’s land mass a century ago to just 13 per cent today (and dwindling further by the day). Humans may have had success in housing and real estate ‘development’ but, in doing so in an inadequately planned manner, we are rapidly ‘de-housing’ or physically displacing our island’s wildlife from their home habitats. This is the cause of the Human-Elephant conflict and many other such conflicts between man and animal.

As we have repeated many times in these columns, our encroachment of wildlife habitats has caused the increasing invasion of human settlements, plantations, farms and other places by wild creatures – from insects and reptiles to vermin rodents, carnivores and the largest of mammals (elephants).

This island’s wild animals, however, will likely view the whole process in reverse. With their naturally evolved, evenly balanced, proportions of the natural populations, it is the wild animals that are resisting the encroachment of their natural living spaces by the island’s bloated human population.

The Sri Lankan Leopard is the country’s biggest carnivore and with less than a thousand of these magnificent cats in existence in the wild, it has been internationally classified by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as an ‘Endangered’ species. The Black Leopard, which was found ensnared in the Laxapana area on May 27, is far rarer and was thought to be extinct for decades before a few sightings in the high hill country by scientists using motion-sensitive night vision video systems earlier this year.

Equally rare are similar species are found in Taiwan, known as the ‘Formosan Clouded Leopard’ and in Kenya, where it is known as the ‘African Black Leopard’. There are less than ten Black Leopards so far sighted in our hill country, and this animal is classified as a ‘Critically Endangered’ species.

The COVID-19 outbreak and consequent lockdown cannot hinder the careful surveillance of our wildlife as well as valuable indigenous plant life to protect them from illegal commercial exploitation. The respect given to wildlife by our village culture must be upheld while all encouragement and incentives should be extended to volunteer watchdog civic groups who work closely with the Wildlife Conservation Department in the protection of our wild fauna and flora.

The Department itself needs full backing by the law enforcement authorities and also political endorsement by the Government if it is to fulfill its role. Finally, however, it is up to the citizens to fulfill their patriotic duty by treasuring these gifts of Nature that help beautify our island home. Most importantly, it is our flora and fauna that ultimately completes the wholeness of our island natural environment and makes it habitable for us.

The Island Editorial

Pumping up Petromax

It takes a thief to catch a thief. Sri Lankans seem to go by this saying. When they helped engineer the 2015 regime change by voting against the then UPFA government, the people thought all thieves in the previous administration would be brought to justice and their ill-gotten wealth confiscated. After all, that was the main campaign slogan of the yahapalana camp. Disillusioned, they voted for the SLPP, five years later, in the hope that the rogues in the yahapalana administration would be arrested and prosecuted for their crimes, only to be disappointed, again. Rogues of all hues continue to go places.

What is currently unfolding on the political front reminds us of a satirical Sinhala song about a drama. A group of village youth and some adults enact the Dutugemunu-Elara story with the help of a Petromax lamp for want of an electric lighting system. Just as the duel between the two kings begins, air pressure drops in the lamp, plunging the stage into darkness. A few minutes pass, and an inquisitive villager in the audience goes behind the stage. What he sees has him in stitches; ‘Dutugemunu’ and ‘Elara’, in full regalia, are taking turns to pump up the lamp so that the show can go on!

What we witnessed before last year’s presidential election and the subsequent change of government was a political war of epic proportions between the UNP-led UNF government and the SLFP dissidents. The SLPP promised to jump-start the legal process which had stalled, anent the bond scams, and see to it that the scammers would pay for their crime without further delay. It promised to bring former Central Bank Governor Arjuna Mahendran here to stand trial for his role in the bond rackets. But when it captured power and the court ordered the culprits to be arrested, they were allowed to go into hiding, and the CID acted like a headless chicken thereafter. It was obvious that the police were steering clear of the bond racketeers due to political interference. The suspects would not have been able to avoid arrest without government help. Machiavelli has famously said, a promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present.

The SLPP made a solemn pledge to make essential commodities available at affordable prices while it was in the opposition. Its leaders vowed to crush the Millers’ Mafia responsible for hoarding paddy and keeping the prices of rice extortionately high. People voted for them in the hope that the SLPP leaders, who take pride in having neutralised the LTTE’s military muscle, would tame the big-time millers in next to no time, only to realise they had been taken for a ride. Last week, the government allowed the Millers’ Mafia to increase the prices of rice. The head of the Consumer Affairs Authority, which had conducted raids and made the millers agree to sell rice at lower prices, was left with egg on his face.

The last government was involved in a mega racket, where substandard milch cows were imported from Australia and sold to local dairy farmers. Some of those cows were sick and farmers who bought them testified before a presidential commission that probed corrupt deals under the yahapalana administration. They revealed how they had been duped. The SLPP, in its opposition days, condemned their rivals for lining their pockets at the expense of the local dairy farmers, but it has reportedly decided to resume the controversial scheme and import cows from Australia! Now, it is clear that the corrupt elements responsible for the controversial cow deal will never be brought to justice. The present-day leaders seem to have taken the masses for asses.

There is nothing stupider than to expect politicians to go all out to put one another behind bars. They are aware that such action is tantamount to mutually assured destruction. We see the warring political bigwigs of both the government and the Opposition taking turns to pump up the Petromax lamp, so to speak. Their show will recommence when the apex court sorts out the general election issue.

Daily Mirror Editorial

Death of Thondaman and the passing of an era

On the evening of May 26, news trickled in that Arumugam Thondaman, the leader of the Ceylon Workers Congress had passed away. The name Thondman is synonymous with the sufferings, plight and subsequent semi-redemption of the most exploited community in this country –the Tea Estate Workers and their struggle to gain basics.

Lured from the drought-stricken blazing hot pIains of South India, these workers were strangers to the chilly climatic conditions in the hill country. Yet on arrival, they were frog-marched from the point of landing to the hill country. By day they hacked and cleared the way to what was going to be the future tea estates.

There was no shelter awaiting the incoming workers. They were forced to sleep in the open during the first days of their arrival. The late Rev. Paul Caspersz who researched the background of the community, states the sudden exposure to the cold climatic conditions and malaria, killed off hundreds of these miserable workers. For these workers there was no respite or escape from their places of work, where they were kept in slave-like conditions. Two or more families often forced to live in a single dwelling of 10 x 12 sans toilets or water facilities. They could not escape the estates, as the peasantry looked on them as enemies. The Kandyan peasants whose lands were robbed by the British, and hemmed into land-holdings described by the Kandyan Peasantry Commission as being the size of a postage stamp, looked on the Indian workers as persons who occupied their lands. They looked on the estate workers as their enemies.

By 1931, there were around 700,000 Tamil plantation workers, who had formed their own trade union. In the same year these workers were also granted the franchise. Following Indian leader, Nehru’s advice to the Indian workers to form their own political party, the Ceylon Indian Congress was born, which morphed into the CWC to contest the first general election.

Saumiyamoorthy Thondaman was its first president. At the election, the CWC won all seats it contested. The then prime minister claimed the Kandyan peasantry were discriminated because their interests were not represented in parliament, as a result of the overwhelming numbers of Indian Tamils in those areas. He brought in the Ceylon Citizenship Act, which effectively disfranchised the Upcountry Tamils. India claimed the estate workers were Sri Lankan citizens and not India’s responsibility. A majority of estate workers became ‘stateless ‘lost representation in parliament and became unimportant in local electoral politics. All mainstream political parties soon forgot this section of the population.

It was left to Saumiyamoorthy Thondaman (Arumugam’s grandfather) and the CWC to single-handedly take up the cause of the estate Tamils – their pitiful housing, the slave-labour work conditions, education of plantation children etc. At that time, while the whole country enjoyed free health services, estate management was forced to make payment if workers had entered government hospitals! In addition to this work-place related discrimination, opportunistic politicians portrayed the estate Tamil community as a fifth column of India. Those backing their cause were looked upon as traitors. Even other trade unions ignored their plight.

However, despite a lack of parliamentary representation and support from fellow trade unionists, using his position as head of the single largest TU in the estates, slowly but surely Thondaman successfully began negotiating better conditions for his constituency. Not surprisingly, Thondaman became by default, the undisputed leader of the Estate Tamil community. The manner in which he won the citizenship rights back for his community was epic. With no government attempting to solve the issue of statelessness, Thondaman called on all Estate Tamils to down tools on a particular day and pray for the restoration of their citizenship rights.

On a single day, all plantation workers, led by Thondaman downed tools and prayed. The country’s economy came to a standstill. President Jayawardene signed legislation granting citizenship rights to the estate community.

However, since the death of Saumiyamoorthy Thondaman in 1999, and the appointment of his grandson to lead the CWC, the estate community has made no significant gain either economically or socially. Even their demand for a daily wage to be raised to a paltry Rs. 1,000/- per day has not become a reality yet. Resultantly, rival TUs have sprung up in the estate sector. The appointment of yet another relative, not closely involved in the struggles of the community may lead to more fissures and leadership struggles. We may therefore be witnessing not only the end of a TU dynasty, but a weakening of the estate trade union movement.