On May 25, Hayashi Yoshimasa, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Japan, paid a courtesy call on Ranil Wickremesinghe, President of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, who was visiting Japan to attend the Nikkei Forum May 28 on the “Future of Asia.” Credit: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Japan

By Neville de Silva
LONDON, Jun 2 2023 (IPS)

On May 24, Sri Lanka President Ranil Wickremesinghe arrived on a three-day official visit to Japan, his second visit to the country, having attended the State funeral of former prime minister Shinzo Abe last September.

This would also be President Wickremesinghe’s second summit with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, the first having been on the side lines of the Shinzo Abe funeral, signalling the importance of Japan in Sri Lanka’s foreign policy rethinking and a move away from over reliance on China.

President Wickremesinghe’s visit has more significance than economic persuasion– trying to encourage Japanese investors to return to Sri Lanka after a couple or more bad experiences in recent years.

Under the Gotabaya Rajapaksa presidency, Colombo reneged on major projects agreed to, including a major Light Rail Transit (LRT) in Colombo for which the basic work had already begun.

Colombo dropped it without any prior notice to Japan and also went back on a tripartite agreement with Japan and India (and Sri Lanka) on the development of the Colombo port’s east terminal.

At his meeting with Prime Minister Kishida, Wickremesinghe expressed regret over his country’s past relations with Japan and said Colombo was ready to restart the dropped projects.

Wickremesinghe’s visit however is more than to revive economic cooperation at a time when Sri Lanka is passing through hard times having declared itself bankrupt in April last year. It had to turn to the IMF for a rescue package that would help pull the country out of the economic morass into which it had fallen- or been pushed into it– by mediocre governance and incompetent advisers.

His new relationship with Japan covers a broader canvas that surpasses bilateral relations though to a struggling Sri Lankan people burdened right now by high taxes, increasing tariffs on utilities and unbearably steep prices on domestic commodities, day to day existence presents the immediate priority.

Meanwhile small industries and businesses are shutting up unable to bear operating costs such as huge electricity rates-and higher water rates to come- throwing people out of jobs.

At the same time, professionals such as doctors, engineers, surveyors and IT and technically qualified personnel are quitting the country having found employment abroad or in search of fresh opportunities both in the developed and developing world.

Japan has been particularly helpful in advocating Sri Lanka’s case at the Paris Club on debt restructuring as called for in the IMF programme and has not joined hands with the west in castigating Sri Lanka at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva as the US, UK, Canada and some European nations have done. Japan’s approach has been more sober and benign

Furthermore, Colombo, embroiled as it is in delicate diplomacy at a time when Indian Ocean politics is becoming more complicated and confrontational, sees Japan along with India and the west as a countervailing force to China’s expanding naval activity and presence in the region.

But there are two other reasons that drive President Wickremesinghe’s interest in establishing closer relations with Tokyo. One is national. The other personal though some might not see it that way.

The national motive is to create more distance in Sri Lanka’s relations with China which had become too close for comfort under the Rajapaksas (both presidents Mahinda and Gotabaya) for a country that could find itself caught in a gathering geopolitical storm given its geostrategic location and China’s continuing interest in widening its footprints and influence in Sri Lanka.

Xi Jinping and his ruling clan would rather see the Rajapaksas back in the seats of power than Wickremesinghe who they consider pro-western in his thinking, especially pro-Washington.

Moreover, one may conclude that Wickremesinghe sees Japan as a more reliable friend and one without super power ambitions.

The other is the strong bond Japanese leaders have developed for and with Sri Lanka dating back to the 1951 San Francisco Conference when some 48 countries met to draft a post-war peace treaty for defeated Japan.

One wonders whether many modern-day observers realise the important role that Ceylon, as it was called then, played at that conference, largely due to the performance of Ceylon’s then Finance Minister Junius Richard Jayewardene, popularly known as “JR”.

Jayewardene, who earned the sobriquet “Yankee Dicky” at home for his pro-US proclivities and in 1978 was Sri Lanka’s first executive president, was Ranil Wickremesinghe’s uncle.

In an article former Sri Lanka Ambassador Bandu de Silva wrote some 8 years ago, he recalls the critical role Ceylon played at the time and an earlier meeting of the Commonwealth Foreign Ministers in Colombo that for the first time proposed that Japan be declared an independent nation.

Ambassador de Silva states that Wikipedia’s account of the conference states Minister Jayewardene’s speech was received with resounding applause. Later, the New York Times wrote that “The voice of free Asia, eloquent, melancholy and still strong with the tilt of an Oxford accent, dominated the Japanese peace treaty conference today.”

What is it that Minister Jayewardene said when the very future of Japan was being debated and discussed that has endured Japan’s leaders and its people to a tiny Indian Ocean-island that itself suffered from Japanese air raids on Colombo in April 1942 and the British naval base in north eastern Trincomalee and had gained independence only three years earlier in 1948?

While some other nations called for curbs on Japan and demanded compensation for war-time damage Ceylon not only urged an independent Japan free to build its future and renounced its right to reparations from Japan.

“Hatred does not cease by hatred but by love”, Jayewardene told the conference quoting the words of The Buddha. Interestingly Sri Lanka and Japan are both Buddhist countries though following two different schools.

Records show that when Japan offered to construct a new building for the Ceylon Embassy in Tokyo the Colombo government politely turned it down.

Perhaps the foundation of the friendship between the two nations is best set out by the Japanese ambassador at the 50th Anniversary Commemoration of diplomatic relations held in Colombo in 2002.

Recalling JR Jayewardene’s speech at the San Francisco Conference, Ambassador Seiichiro Otsuka said: “In the grim aftermath of the war, as Japan began to rise from the ashes and rebuild its nation, it was the government and people of Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, who extended their genuine hand of friendship to the Japanese people.”

“Japan and the Japanese people have been indeed grateful to Sri Lanka for the friendship and magnanimity extended to us at the time of our difficulties by the government and people of Sri Lanka. It is in this spirit that Japan has stood firmly and steadfastly side by side with Sri Lanka as a true friend and a constructive partner for Sri Lanka’s development. Indeed, 50 years of our cooperative bilateral relations has been guided, on our part, by this spirit which Mr Jayewardene spoke of at San Francisco on September 8,1951….friendship and trust.”

However, Minister Jayewardene’s strong and clear support for Japan’s independence might have had a setback for Ceylon elsewhere.

With the East-West Cold War beginning to get warmer, the Soviet Union proposed amendments to the Japan peace treaty that would have restricted Japan’s freedom of action.

Ceylon’s representative took upon himself to counter Soviet Union objections. At one point Jayewardene turned sarcastic saying the amendments with which the Soviet Union sought to “insure to the people of Japan the fundamental freedoms of expression, of press and publication, of religious worship, of political opinion and of public meeting – freedoms, which the people of the Soviet Union themselves would dearly love to possess and enjoy.”

Some might well argue that Moscow took its revenge on Ceylon for Jayewardene’s public rebuke by blocking Ceylon’s admission as a member to the United Nations for some years, arguing that Ceylon was not an independent country as it had a defence treaty with the UK.

How Ceylon gained admission to the UN in 1956 is the result of a quid pro quo with Moscow. But that is another story.

Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who held senior roles in Hong Kong at The Standard and worked in London for Gemini News Service. He has been a correspondent for the foreign media including the New York Times and Le Monde. More recently he was Sri Lanka’s Deputy High Commissioner in London.

Source: Asian Affairs, London

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Food insecurity in Sri Lanka has increased dramatically due to two consecutive seasons of poor harvests, foreign exchange shortages, and reduced household purchasing power. Amidst Sri Lanka’s worst economic crisis since independence, the UN revised its joint Humanitarian Needs and Priorities (HNP) Plan, appealing for more life-saving assistance to aid 3.4 million people. November 2022 Credit: UNICEF/Chameera Laknath

By Neville de Silva
LONDON, Feb 3 2023 (IPS)

On February 4, Sri Lanka commemorates 75 years of Independence. But it will not be the extravaganza of the past years, the minaturised imitations of the grand displays on Moscow’s Red Square or China’s Tiananmen Square.

Still, a critical question has been reverberating in the community ever since the government announced a scaled down celebration to commemorate 75 years since Britain relinquished power in 1948.

After defaulting on the country’s debt servicing last April for the first time in its post-independence history and being forced to resort to massive printing of money to meet state expenditure, does Sri Lanka need to celebrate independence day this year however downsized it would be?

Particularly so, when President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s government itself claims Sri Lanka is struggling economically and it would take years to recover from its current chaos created by leaders who inexorably pushed it to the tip of the abyss with stupid economic policies, wasteful expenditure and wide- scale corruption and fraud.

While imposing unbearable new taxes and other restrictions on the daily lives of the people, driving them further into penury with school children going without meals, fainting in their classrooms and in need of medical treatment which itself is becoming scarce, the country’s leaders don’t seem short of resources for celebrations.

Even the country’s diplomatic missions will be holding their annual independence day celebrations as the invitation I received indicated, feasting their countrymen as best as they could.

Yet over the last couple of months the government has been selling the story that it has no funds to pay for the Local Government elections due in March. A strange enough claim after President Ranil Wickremesinghe, in one of his other roles as finance minister, presenting the budget for 2023 last November allocated funds for the election and parliament, which oversees public expenditure, approved it.

Now, the very persons who allocated money just three months ago claim to lack funds for a constitutionally required election. Punning on the old Harry Belafonte calypso, there is a hole in the budget, said some wag on social media.

It is this contradiction in government conduct that an already enraged people find inexcusable. Having got rid of one elected president– Gotabaya Rajapaksa– who surreptitiously fled the country last July when mounting peoples’ protests demanded the Rajapaksa clan quit the government, they find themselves confronted with what Sri Lankans have come to see as a Rajapaksa clone– and now derisively call him Ranil Rajapaksa– thrust into the presidency to keep the family’s political fires alight.

The Roman poet Juvenal dismissively called the delusionary performances staged by the Roman emperors of the time to distract their discontented citizenry, “panem et circensus”- bread and circuses.

Bread, like some other essentials, might be scarce or priced beyond the reach of many of its 22 million people. A few months back, the UN agency UNICEF reported that 5.7 million Sri Lankans including 2.3 million children, are in need of humanitarian assistance and the numbers are likely to rise in the coming days.

But the country’s leaders are not beyond performing their own circus acts. A few days back President Wickremesinghe appointed two more cabinet ministers bringing the total to 22.

Within hours Sri Lankans with their innate sense of humour were on social media branding the new cabinet “Ali Baba and the 22” with the doors to the cabinet still open for more acolytes chosen not for integrity and competence but loyalty.

Before the two new ministers fattened the cabinet, splicing off the portfolios of two existing ministers, President Wickremesinghe a couple of months ago appointed 37 state ministers leaving room for three more.

Sri Lanka’s bloated ministerial ranks would surely be one of the largest in today’s parliamentary democracies. Not only is it large in numbers but the perks offered to ministers and state ministers is stunningly staggering–salaries, free housing, several expensive vehicles with fuel, free utilities such as electricity, water, telephones up to a point, several personal staff with paid salaries, armed personal security with escort vehicles, a special allowance for each day they attend parliament, state pension after five years and other facilities not generally known.

While the government is prepared to splash state funds on bolstering party cadres and lickspittle who have creamed off state assets, in the last couple of months it has been using every ruse in the books-and some which are not in them- trying to deprive the people of their constitutional right to the franchise, by blocking the Local Government elections due shortly.

This election, last held in 2018, is for 340 municipal councils, urban councils and village bodies is scheduled for March 9—the date set by the independent Election Commission last month.

But as the day for the election, as constitutionally required, neared, the attempts to stymie it began with grandees of President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s United National Party (UNP) and the Rajapaksa clan-run Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) that is propping up Wickremesinghe with its parliamentary majority, asserting that economic recovery must precede elections.

Ministers and even state officials were trotting out excuses that there was no money to fund elections, expecting the populace to have forgotten the budgetary allocation passed by parliament a few months back.

As this was being written, internationally-known legal academic and former foreign minister Prof GL Peiris was telling the media the government had made seven attempts to try and stop the election including an affidavit to the Supreme Court filed by the secretary to the finance ministry claiming the state of the economy precluded holding elections right now.

The latest ruse was a law called the Election Expenses Bill to control spending for elections hurriedly passed by parliament. If, as Justice Minister Wijeyadasa Rajapaksa said, this proposal has been hanging fire for years, why the rush now, the opposition and anxious voters asked.

Like the opposition, the public too smelled a rotten rat. It was seen as another attempt to derail the elections by calling for the provisions of the bill be incorporated which would call for more time.

Despite all the public bravura, both the Rajapaksa-controlled SLPP and Wickremesinghe-led UNP which was swept into oblivion at the 2020 general elections, fear that given the mood of the country which rose in mass protests for some seven months last year leading to the resignation of President Rajapaksa and three of his brothers from the cabinet, they would suffer ignominious defeat.

Especially so the UNP which lost every single seat including that of party leader Wickremesinghe who managed to creep back into parliament one year later through a clause in the electoral law.

Not only would a poor electoral performance by the SLPP and UNP which have now joined hands make governance difficult and troublesome, it would also strengthen public opposition both to the Rajapaksas and President Wickremesinghe who many argue-and rightly so-as a leader rejected by the country two years ago and lacking a popular mandate to rule the country.

So what one sees now is a symbiotic relationship between the executive headed by Wickremesinghe and the legislature controlled by the Rajapaksas, running the country and using outdated laws- some dating back to British times- to beat back public dissent, employing the security forces to trample on the constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of the people- free speech and expression, of association and assembly and peaceful protest.

It also raises issues about the independence of the Attorney-General and some of the independent institutions set up under the constitution which are believed to have come under pressure during the Wickremesinghe presidency.

With two arms of the state- the executive and legislature under the control of the Wickremesinghe-Rajapaksa- led cabal and backed by the security forces as recent event have shown, Sri Lanka’s increasingly beleaguered populace can only rely for justice on the third arm of the state- an independent judiciary.

Over the years the judiciary has, now and then, been under pressure from dictatorial leaders who have not been averse to tamper with justice and the judicial process, sometimes denying impartial, independent judges their rightful place as chief justice or appointing friends or those amenable to the judiciary.

But two recent judgements by the Supreme Court have resurrected public faith that the judiciary could be relied on to safeguard the constitution and the peoples’ constitutional and human rights against state abuse of the law and the battering and brutality by the security forces.

A few months back the government tried to push through a “Bureau of Rehabilitation Bill” ostensibly to help treat and rehabilitate drug addicts and other drug users. Under cover of that it hoped to incarcerate political dissidents, activists and others which state security would identify those they do not like as ‘trouble makers’.

So, it included among those to be included under the law “ex-combatants, members of violent groups, violent extremist person and any other person or group of persons”.

The Supreme Court saw through this as an attempt to round up any person the authorities considered a political nuisance and hold them without recourse to the law. The court struck down the clause.

Holding that the Bill as a whole violated the constitution, it said it could be acceptable if certain clauses were amended. One of the clauses it found repugnant was the one cited above which the court wanted deleted, leaving rehabilitation open only to drug dependent persons and those identified by law as in need of rehabilitation.

In mid-January the Supreme Court delivered a landmark verdict which held former president Maithripala Sirisena, secretary of the defence ministry, police chief and top- ranking intelligence officers, of dereliction of duty and “failure to act” when valid and clear intelligence was passed on by foreign sources of an impending terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists on churches on Easter Sunday in 2019.

Some 270 persons including foreigners were killed and several hundred wounded in these attacks on churches and Colombo hotels.

Since these were civil cases, President Sirisena was fined 100 million rupees and the others lesser amounts. Sirisena as a former president was no longer entitled to immunity, a lesson for other former and future presidents that they too are liable to civil and criminal action such as corruption and human rights violations once they cease to hold office.

These judicial judgments bring some hope to the people that the citadels of power are vulnerable and could be breached by a strong and upright judiciary, the only institution now left to protect and uphold the country’s democratic traditions and norms.

If the judiciary is badgered, the last resort is too bloody to contemplate.

Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who held senior roles in Hong Kong at The Standard and worked in London for Gemini News Service. He has been a correspondent for the foreign media including the New York Times and Le Monde. More recently he was Sri Lanka’s Deputy High Commissioner in London.

Source: Asian Affairs, London

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The ongoing financial crisis in Sri Lanka has also triggered a sharp drop in the value of the country’s currency.

By Neville de Silva
LONDON, Jul 6 2022 (IPS)

When Ceylon- now Sri Lanka- gained independence from Britain in 1948 after almost 450 years of colonial rule under three western powers, it was one Asia’s most stable and prosperous democracies.

Today, after years of misrule, rampant corruption by the ruling class and a politicised administration, the country is bankrupt, its economy on the verge of collapse, and society in disarray while a discredited president still clings to power and manipulating the political system, determined to serve the rest of his term.

While the original 18th century Beggar’s Opera was a satire on the injustice in London society of the day and Prime Minister Robert Walpole’s corrupt government, Sri Lanka has not turned to opera but to begging and possibly borrowing if any international lending institution is willing to lend to a country that has recently defaulted on debt repayment for the first time in its post-independence history.

That speaks volumes for the fiscal and monetary policies of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s government, and its unthinking and ill- considered actions in the last two and a half years, that has “collapsed” the country’s economy— as the prime minister told parliament the other day.

Under the 10-year rule of elder brother Mahinda Rajapaksa (2005-2015), the government borrowed heavily from China for massive infrastructure projects. That included a huge international airport at Mattala in nearby Rajapaksa territory in the deep south. Some of them continue to be white elephants.

A joke at the time and resonating now and then was that even herds of roaming wild elephants in the area spurn the airport because of the colour bar!

Since Gotabaya Rajapaksa came to power in November 2019 and a year later brother Mahinda led their Sri Lanka People’s Party (SLPP) to a parliamentary victory, the Rajapaksas, now at the helm of power, strengthened their already close relationship with Beijing at the expense of ties with the West and international lending institutions and alienating UN bodies such as the UN Human Rights Council.

But in the last few months it has been a begging-bowl ‘opera’ as Sri Lanka scoured the world for loans after its foreign reserves started dipping drastically and leading international rating agencies took to downgrading the country’s sovereign rating.

Eventually the Rajapaksa government reneged on its debt repayments, humiliating Sri Lanka which had never defaulted in its 74-year history.

Trapped by a plunging economy Sri Lanka turned to Bangladesh to save it from emerging bankruptcy. Nothing could be more ironic. In its early years Bangladesh was perceived as a recipient of financial support, not a lender.

At that time Sri Lanka’s economy seemed stable enough despite its near 30 years of war against Tamil Tiger separatists.

In early, June Bangladesh agreed in principle to another currency swap of US$ 200 million. This is in addition to last year’s currency swap of $200 million whose repayment date of three months was extended to one year at Sri Lanka’s request last August.

Today, the country’s 22 million people are almost without petrol, cooking gas, kerosene, food, medicines, powdered milk, and other essentials as the government has no foreign currency to import them.

A common scenario in many parts of Sri Lanka are queues of people-men, women and even children- spending many hours and even days to buy the essentials that are scarce and a food shortage is predicted in the coming months.

As I sat down to write this, news reports said the 12th man died seated in his vehicle at a queue for fuel. A few days later the Sunday Times Political Editor upped the death toll to 16.

Meanwhile physical clashes are becoming common at filling station where thugs have muscled in. The other day a soldier was caught on video assaulting a policeman.

Such is the tension building up in society that the Sunday Times Political Editor reported of concerns among local intelligence services about national security.

While the long-drawn out covid pandemic did cripple the tourism industry, a major foreign currency earner, much of the blame rests on President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s short-sighted policies as well as those of some of his ministers and close advisers whose arrogance and ignorance brushed aside warnings sounded a year or two ahead by reputed economists, former Central Bank professionals, academics and trade chambers.

Rajapaksa having denied any culpability for these errors of judgement ultimately conceded his responsibility but only when mass protests erupted in Colombo and elsewhere in the country with even the peasantry-a vital support base of the Rajapaksas- took to the streets castigating him and his government for creating shortages of essential fertilizers for agriculture.

After almost two months, thousands of anti-government protestors who set up camp on the seaside promenade opposite the presidential secretariat in the heart of Colombo, are still there raising their clarion call which has now spread across the country- “Gota Go Home”-demanding that the president return to whence he came.

While Sri Lanka struggles to survive and the Rajapaksas gradually reappear into public view, there has been a perceptible change in the government’s world view. Though Chinese leaders have often declared that Beijing is Colombo’s “all weather friend” it has been slow to come to Sri Lanka’s aid at a time of real crisis.

An appeal to China by the Rajapaksa government to restructure its loans as one of its biggest lenders had not produced the expected reaction from Beijing. Nor had there been a positive response at the time for another credit line of US$ 1.5 billion when Colombo’s foreign reserves were fast drying out.

Even President Xi Jinping’s birthday greeting to President Rajapaksa last month made no mention of any concrete assistance except references to the long-standing Sri Lanka-China relations.

Observers claimed that China was coaxing-if not actually pressuring- Sri Lanka to distance itself from India, its competitor for political positioning and an expanding stake in the strategically- located island.

While the immediate target was India, Beijing was also pointing its finger at Sri Lanka’s growing ties with the US and international institutions such as the IMF.

The fact that since January India has provided assistance to Sri Lanka with currency swaps, credit lines, loan deferments and humanitarian assistance to meet the mounting crisis and supported Colombo’s call for IMF aid, appeared unwelcome news to China which has been trying to persuade Sri Lanka to enter into a trade agreement with it.

In late June, a high-powered Indian delegation led by Foreign Secretary Vinay Kwatra made a quick few- hour visit to Colombo to meet President Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and discuss further strengthening of Indo-Lanka ties and bilateral investment partnerships including infrastructure and renewal energy.

New Delhi pointed out that this unprecedented recent economic, financial and humanitarian assistance including medicines and food valued at over US$ 3.5 b was guided by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Neighbourhood First” policy.

Had it not been for the Indian central government and the Tamil Nadu state government responding fast with generous assistance Sri Lanka would have been struggling to find scarce food, fuel and medicines.

Meanwhile a nine-member team of senior IMF officials spent 10 days in Sri Lanka in late June to assess whether it could come up with a reform package to restore macroeconomic stability and debt sustainability.

Since Colombo approached the IMF for a bailout programme early this year the international lending institution has been monitoring the country’s economic and political situation, neither of which presented much confidence.

It is not only sustainable economic reforms that the IMF is after. It seeks substantial efforts to improve governance and a stable corruption-free government that the IMF and other lending institutions such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank and donor nations could have confidence in.

The current government of bits and pieces could hardly provide evidence that it is fighting corruption when one of its stalwarts who was convicted the other day on extortion and sentenced to two years rigorous imprisonment but suspended for five years was reappointed to the cabinet by President Rajapaksa and made chief government whip in addition.

It is the need for clean government that causes concerns with President Rajapaksa reneging on promises he made to introduce constitutional amendments that will substantially prune the plethora of powers he grabbed on coming to power.

This is hardly likely as the world will see when the new 21st constitutional amendment is gazetted in a few days.

Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who held senior roles in Hong Kong at The Standard and worked in London for Gemini News Service. He has been a correspondent for the foreign media including the New York Times and Le Monde. More recently he was Sri Lanka’s Deputy High Commissioner in London

Source: Asian Affairs, London

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The protestors’ main rallying slogan is ‘GotaGoHome’

By Neville de Silva
LONDON, May 4 2022 (IPS)

When I ended last month’s column hoping that April would not prove to be hapless Sri Lanka’s ‘cruellest month’ (in the words TS Eliot), I hardly anticipated the current turn of events.

In April, the country was to celebrate several ethno-religious festivals. The biggest among them was the Sinhala and Tamil New Year, celebrated by Sri Lanka’s majority community and its main minority. It was also the Muslim month of Ramadan and Easter, commemorated by the Christians.

For over one-and-a-half years Sri Lanka had been grappling with a fast-failing economy. The dwindling of foreign reserves and the consequent shortages of food, medicines, fuel, gas and kerosene for cooking were more recently compounded by power cuts, at times as long as 12hoursper day, bringing manufacturing industries to a standstill and forcing businesses to close down early.

With the country struggling to avert bankruptcy and an unprecedented rise in inflation and spiralling commodity prices, many working-class families, daily wage earners and farmers were facing penury and starvation.

Against this dire background Sri Lanka’s 22 million people were anxiously preparing for the April festivities, wondering whether there would be anything to celebrate.

Then it happened.

On March 31 the residents of Mirihana, a middle- class town on the outskirts of Colombo, held a candle-light protest to highlight the daily power cuts that disrupted their family activities. The protest, initially by women, attracted passers-by and huge crowds from neighbourhood towns and residential areas as President Gotabaya Rajapaksa lived in Mirihana in his private residence.

Swelling crowds shouting slogans later clashed with police firing tear gas and water cannons to break up the demonstration, but many of the protestors held their ground till the next day.

The Mirihana protest has sparked the island-wide conflagration that now has the once all-powerful Rajapaksa family-run government teetering on the wall like Humpty Dumpty awaiting a splintering fall. It will remain an important landmark in this uprising, which some have called, rather erroneously, Sri Lanka’s ‘Arab Spring’.

Mirihana began the assault against the Rajapaksa fiefdom that once seemed impregnable. Gotabaya Rajapaksa is president. Brother Mahinda, who served two terms as president, is currently prime minister. Another brother, Basil, a dual citizen with US citizenship and a home in Los Angeles, was until last month finance minister, and the eldest brother Chamal holds the post ofirrigation minister and state minister of security. Mahinda’s eldest son Namal, whom his father sees as heir apparent, was sports and youth affairs minister, among other portfolios.

It appears that the prime minister suspects he is going to be sacrificed on the altar of expediency

Together, the family reportedly controlled 72 per cent of government resources, free to use as they deemed fit, even to farm off to their acolytes and business friends in the way of government contracts and import monopolies, even during the Covid pandemic.

Today, however, that fortress of power and privilege appears as exposed as France’s Maginot Line, set to crumble against a German Blitzkrieg.

All the Rajapaksas, except Prime Minister Mahinda, lost their positions last month when President Gotabaya suddenly dissolved the cabinet in a desperate attempt to quell the mounting outrage against him. It seemed a weak moral sidestep, for the protesters’ cry was not only against the president but against the entire Rajapaksa family, which they claimed had dipped their hands into the country’s assets for personal gain.

Mirihana lit the fuse for the enormous protest that flared up at Colombo’s beach-front Galle Face Green, right opposite the Presidential Secretariat from where political power radiated. It was this that breached the Rajapaksa citadel.

Economists urged the government seek IMF assistance

At the time of writing, this protest – which shows signs of unifying the country’s multiracial, multi-religious society and has drawn crowds of all ages and a wide cross-section of the Sri Lankan community, including the professional classes – has entered its 17thcontinuous day, with hundreds of protesters camped there day and night despite the heat and rain.

Yet it is no Arab Spring. It is an orderly, non-violent protest, mainly of youth of all shades, with an inventive genius to keep themselves and their cause alive.

Never in Sri Lanka’s 74 years of post-independence history has the country seen anything like this, even though anti-government protests are nothing new to the country, which has seen Leftist political parties and associated trade unions functioning even under British colonial rule.

The main rallying slogan is ‘GotaGoHome’, telling Gotabaya to return to his home – also in Los Angeles –though he relinquished his US citizenship to be eligible to contest the presidential election in November 2019.

Built round that slogan are a myriad other satirical comments in song, verse, caricatures, cartoons and videos, the creative work of the protesters deriding the Rajapaksas, some demanding they return the country’s supposedly stolen assets and otherwise accumulated wealth in tax havens.

Although the protesters are now demanding that the whole Rajapaksa family pack their bags and quit, the main target quite rightly is President Gotabaya. It was his military arrogance – having played a role in the defeat of the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam(LTTE) in 2009, under the leadership of his president brother Mahinda – and his ignorance of politics and governance, and over-reliance on incompetent advisers that started the economic rot.

With a group of retired and serving military men appointed to key civilian positions and a coterie of so-called intellectuals and businessmen as advisers, he plunged head-first into economic policy decisions.

Within a few days of assuming office, he had slashed VAT from 15 per cent to 8per cent and abolished some other taxes that cost the state a whopping 28 per cent in revenue. It led the Central Bank to print money feverishly to meet budgetary commitments, causing inflation.

Also disastrous was the overnight decision to ban chemical fertilisers that drove farmers to burn effigies of ministers and demonstrate on the streets, demanding restitution of their fertiliser needs or face food insecurity in the months ahead, forcing a once adamant president to retract.

While economists had foreseen the impending danger in depleting foreign reserves and international debt repayments this year, and hence urged the government seek IMF assistance, the president clung steadfastly to the advice of the Central Bank Governor and the Treasury Secretary, among others, who dismissed the idea for more than one year even ignoring cabinet support for IMF help.

In a belated gesture, President Gotabaya sacked the two officials immediately after replacing his cabinet with younger, untested MPs. He sent his new finance minister to Washington to plead with the IMF for immediate relief.

The president is hoping for political concessions he has agreed to – including returning to parliament and the prime minister powers that he usurped on coming to office through the 20thconstitutional amendment. He has now agreed to form an interim All Party government.

But one sees a growing rift in the once close-knit family. Names proposed by Prime Minister Mahinda for the new cabinet were ignored by his brother, causing the prime minister to boycott the swearing-in of the new ministers.

If the president opts for an interim government, it means he has decided to stay put but call for the prime minister’s resignation. It would appear that the prime minister suspects he is going to be sacrificed on the altar of expediency.

In an interview the other day, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa insisted that he will not resign and any reconstituted government must be under his leadership. In the meantime, he has been trying to whip up support against his ouster by canvassing MPs to muster the required 113 votes.

How the protesting public will react to all these political manipulations will depend on what is on offer. Right now, they are determined to continue until President Gotabaya surrenders, which seems unlikely.

Source: Asian Affairs, London

Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who held senior roles in Hong Kong at The Standard and worked in London for Gemini News Service. He has been a correspondent for foreign media including the New York Times and Le Monde. More recently he was Sri Lanka’s Deputy High Commissioner in London.

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There were widespread reports over the weekend of hundreds of demonstrators demanding the resignation of the family-run Rajapaksa government. Credit: Sunday Times, Sri Lanka

By Neville de Silva
LONDON, Apr 4 2022 (IPS)

With the economy in freefall and basics such as food and fuel in dangerously short supply, there is mounting public anger against a failing and desperate government in Sri Lanka.

‘O tempora, O mores,’ said the Roman orator Cicero in a plaintive cry, denouncing the political and social norms of Rome in 70 BC.

Unlike the Romans, the people of Sri Lanka have not left it to politicians or orators to berate what they perceive as their rudderless rulers. They have taken on the task themselves, going into the streets to decry their government in words more telling and malignant than any Cicero might have employed.

They watch as their once ‘Resplendent Isle’ hurtles downhill while confused rulers try desperately to halt its economic and social collapse.

Never in the history of modern Sri Lanka have its citizens queued up for hours to purchase one or two cylinders of cooking gas or a few litres of petrol or kerosene, while a wide range of other shortages continue to plague the country.

If in Ukraine civilians are dying because of the indiscriminate and inconsiderate shelling and bombing by Russian forces, in Sri Lanka they are dying on their feet, some having waited for pre-dawn hours for gas or kerosene to cook what little food they could muster to feed hungry families.

As I write this in late March, reports are pouring in of four people from different parts of the country dying within 48 hours. That is not surprising at a time when the Covid pandemic still persists.

But these four died while waiting in gas or petrol queues, three of then possibly of exhaustion after standing for many hours, and the fourth of stab wounds during an altercation at a filling station.

Today, history is being made. But it is not in the manner the country’s rulers –the powerful Rajapaksa family from Sri Lanka’s south, whose political antecedents go back to the 1930s–ever expected.

Today, the wheel of political fortune has inexorably turned.

It was over a decade ago that two of the Rajapaksa brothers, Mahinda and Gotabaya, were hailed as national heroes for their roles in defeating the dreaded Tamil Tiger separatists in May 2009, after a war that lasted nearly three decades.

Mahinda was then Sri Lanka’s president and Gotabaya his defence secretary.

In April 2019, a couple of days after jihadist terrorists suicide-bombed three churches and three luxury hotels on Easter Sunday, killing some 270 locals and foreigners and wounding another 500, Gotabaya Rajapaksa announced his presidential ambitions.

Politically untested, the former military officer promised enhanced national security, peace, political stability, economic recovery and preservation of Sri Lanka’s 2500-year Buddhist heritage.

In November that year he won the presidential election with 6.9 million votes and in August 2020 Mahinda Rajapaksa led the Sri Lanka People’s Party (SLPP) to victory at the parliamentary election with a near two-thirds majority.

But today, the wheel of political fortune has inexorably turned. Last month in a Gallup-style opinion poll conducted by a local think tank, Veritḗ Research found that only 10 per cent of those queried said they approved of the current government.

Rudderless Rulers

Such is public antipathy that long queues of people spending hours to buy a packet or two of powdered milk booed the president as he passed by.

Some days later busloads of women, led by a former MP whose politician father was shot dead by a rival, who was convicted of murder, sentenced to death but then pardoned by President Gotabaya last year and given a state job, demonstrated outside the president’s private residence.

Teachers, health workers and other trade union-led employees have gone on strike at various times. Farmers have taken to the streets, protesting against the overnight ban last May of chemical fertiliser that saw some rice fields and other agricultural land abandoned and export-earning tea and rubber plantations affected.

Over the past months effigies of the Agriculture Minister have been burnt and posters of the Rajapaksas (four of the brothers are cabinet ministers and so is Mahinda’s eldest son) have been torn or otherwise defaced in blatant displays of public anger and lack of faith in a government that has failed to provide uninterrupted supplies of basics such as electricity, gas, petrol and kerosene, and essential foods and medicines.

It has been said that even the dead have no peace. Some crematoriums have stopped functioning unless they can be certain of continuous electricity.

Outages lasting several hours have often brought factories to a halt. Thermal power stations and other power providers cannot operate continuously for lack of fuel and coal.

Fast depleting foreign reserves have forced the government to slash imports of food, fuel, diesel and gas, compelling many restaurants, bakeries and wayside eateries, as well as other enterprises, to close or restrict their business.

Meanwhile, prices of food and domestic essentials and transport costs have skyrocketed, driving many families, particularly daily wage earners, into penury and starvation.

With foreign reserves at the end of February down to a perilous US$ 2.3 billion and some $7 billion in sovereign debt and loan repayments due this year – including a $1 billion repayment in July – the Rajapaksas turned from their traditional friend and ally China, which that has extended financial help over the years, to neighbouring nations.

A currency swap was arranged with Bangladesh, and last month Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa flew to New Delhi for meetings with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, urging help to rescue Colombo from its foreign exchange crisis.

Never in the history of modern Sri Lanka have its citizens queued for hours to buy fuel

New Delhi extended a $1 billion credit facility to enable the purchase of food, medicines and other essentials. This brought Indian assistance this year to $1.4 billion, which included a $400 million currency swap, besides another half a billion-dollar line of credit for essential fuel imports, and the deferring of a $500 million loan and.

Meanwhile China is considering another $2.5 billion in fresh assistance, China’s ambassador to Sri Lanka stated while turning down the deferment of a loan.

Even as Sri Lanka turns to Asia’s two leading powers, both vying for larger footprints in Sri Lanka, with its strategic location in the Indian Ocean, Colombo has finally turned to the IMF for belated assistance due to internal dissension in the ruling coalition.

President Rajapaksa recently sacked two ministers from minor coalition partners for criticising government policy and attacking Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa, who has dual Sri Lankan-US citizenship, for bending backwards to satisfy American interests.

Some other state ministers have resigned or been removed as internal squabbles begin to take a toll on stability in the 11-party coalition.

With the economy in tatters and mounting public wrath against President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, with calls of ‘Gota Go Home’, he summoned an all-party conference late last month in the hope of showing a friendly face and seeking solutions to the country’s economic catastrophe.

While some minority Tamil parties which had long sought a meeting with the president and some other parties attended, two of the leading opposition parties, which recently launched anti-government demonstrations, boycotted the conference.

It started on a sour note, with many-time prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe putting the Governor of the Central Bank Nivard Cabraal in his place for unwanted political remarks, for which President Rajapaksa apologised to Mr Wickremesinghe.

To the average Sri Lankan who has witnessed such conferences over the years, including ones to bring racial peace to a divided country, they are an exercise in political waffling and time-wasting.

With Sri Lanka’s biggest national celebration, the Sinhala and Tamil New Year, in mid-April, the working and middle-class families now struggling to survive wonder whether there will be anything to celebrate. Even if families can get together for the traditional meals, will they be able to cook them for lack of gas and kerosene?

Will this April be the cruellest month?

Source: Asian Affairs, London

Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who held senior roles in Hong Kong at The Standard and worked in London for Gemini News Service. He has been a correspondent for foreign media, including the New York Times and Le Monde. More recently, he was Sri Lanka’s deputy high commissioner in London

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Sri Lankan Buddhist monks at the UN General Assembly session commemorating Vesak. Credit: Sri Lanka’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations

By Neville de Silva
LONDON, Feb 3 2022 (IPS)

Driven by unprecedented hardship to pass round the begging bowl, Sri Lanka has become the centre of a tussle between Asia’s two superpowers.

There was a time in Asia’s predominantly Buddhist countries when saffron-robed monks walked from house to house in the mornings, standing outside in silence as lay people served up freshly cooked food into their ‘alms bowls’. The food was then taken to the temples, where it was shared among the monks.

That religious tradition has now largely given to other ways of serving alms to monks.

Today, governments and their aggrandising acolytes have converted this respected and virtuous tradition into one of begging richer nations to rescue them from economic deprivation, brought on largely by failed promises and disjointed and ill-conceived foreign and national policies.

This ‘begging bowl’ mentality in search of ‘alms’ is more likely to succeed if a nation is strategically-located in an area of big power contestation. Sri Lanka is just that, situated in the Indian Ocean and only a few nautical miles from the vital international sea lanes carrying goods from West to East and vice versa.

The country’s economy has been caught in a real bind. Buffeted by the Covid pandemic on the one hand and, on the other, ego-inflating economic and fiscal policies introduced by the new president Gotabaya Rajapaksa shortly before the country was pounded by the pandemic, Sri Lanka now has to beg or borrow to keep its head above water.

By December, Sri Lanka’s parlous foreign reserves situation had dropped to a perilous $1.2 billion – enough for three weeks of imports. The foreign debt obligation of $500 million that needed to be met last month was only the beginning. Another $1 billion is due in July. The total pay-off in 2022 will amount to some $7 billion.

Meanwhile the pandemic has virtually killed tourism, one of the country’s main foreign exchange earners, driving the hospitality industry into free-fall. If this was not bad enough, the Central Bank’s attempts to put a tight squeeze on incoming foreign currency led the country’s migrant labour remittances to drop drastically as overseas workers turned to the black market to earn real value for their money sent to families at home.

But nothing has had such widespread political repercussions as the government’s ill-advised policy of banning overnight chemical fertilisers last May, ahead of the country’s main agricultural season between October and April.

Its over-ambitious agenda of trying to turn Sri Lanka into the world’s first totally ‘green agriculture’ was laudable enough, but was botched when the sudden ban on chemical fertilisers and other agrochemicals – used by farmers for the last 50 years or so – left rice farming and other cultivations in disarray and farmers inevitably confused.

The government’s agenda of trying to turn Sri Lanka into the world’s first totally ‘green agriculture’ was botched.

While agricultural scientists and other experts warned of an impending food scarcity due to failed harvests and sparsely cultivated fields, the government ignored the warnings, sacking heads of the Agriculture Ministry and removing its qualified agricultural experts for spreading doom and gloom.

Against this backdrop of confused governance, probable food shortages due to poor harvests and slashing of imports and even essential medicines for lack of foreign currency, growing public unrest has seen even farmers take to the streets.

Consequently, a once-buoyant government confident of public popularity, especially among the Sinhala-Buddhist voters and the rural community, began to look beyond its faithful ally and ‘all weather’ friend China for ‘alms’ to pull it out of the morass.

China has already planted a large footprint in Sri Lanka, with massive infrastructure projects such as sea and airports in strategic areas, which allowed a monitoring of international sea lanes to make neighbouring India worry.

A major Chinese presence in Sri Lanka could endanger India’s security at a time when China continues to militarily pressurise India in the Himalayas.

From the early 1950s Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, and China had established close ties. Despite threats of sanctions by the US, Colombo sold natural rubber to China – then involved in the Korean War –in exchange for rice, marking the beginning of the long standing ‘Rubber-Rice Pact’.

As long as China’s immediate concern was the Pacific theatre, where the US and its allies remained dominant, and China faced territorial disputes in the South China sea and elsewhere, India was not overly concerned with China-Sri Lanka bilateral ties.

But as soon as China began to expand into the Indian Ocean, challenging what India considered its sphere of influence, New Delhi’s concerns multiplied considerably, as did its disquiet over China’s growing influence over Colombo.

The 70th anniversary of that Sino-Ceylon agreement, which cemented bilateral relations at a time when the People’s Republic of China was not even a member of the UN, was commemorated last month when China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited Colombo in early January during an influence-building visit to Africa, the Maldives and Sri Lanka.

This is the third high level visit by a Chinese official in little over a year, beginning with former foreign minister and Politburo member Yang Jiechi in October 2020, and followed last April by Chinese Defence Minister Gen. Wei Fenghe, a visible signal to India and US-led ‘Quad’ countries the importance that China attaches to its relations with Sri Lanka.

But Sri Lanka’s struggle against dwindling reserves, the need for foreign investment and expansion of trade relations at a time of economic hardship has shown the Rajapaksa regime that reliance on China alone will not suffice.

A more balanced foreign policy and an equidistant relationship between Asia’s two superpowers cannot remain at the level of diplomatic rhetoric. It is an imperative, given Sri Lanka’s geographical location in close proximity to India and the historical, cultural and ethnic ties with it huge neighbour.

Sri Lanka’s ambassador to Beijing, Dr Palitha Kohona, said recently that Colombo should not depend on China forever – a valid piece of advice Colombo should seriously consider.

India also cannot ignore that, security-wise, Sri Lanka lies in India’s underbelly, whose vulnerability was exposed during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. So a major Chinese presence in Sri Lanka could endanger India’s own security at a time when China continues to militarily pressurise India in the Himalayas.

Last December Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa’s hurried visit to New Delhi, even as his maiden budget was still being debated in parliament, was indicative of Sri Lanka’s anxiety to seek India’s economic and financial assistance, without depending solely on Beijing.

That visit led to the two countries agreeing on ‘four pillars’ of cooperation in the short term, including emergency support of a $1 billion line of credit for importing food and medicines and a currency swap to bolster Colombo’s dwindling foreign reserves.

Other assistance included investment in an oil tank farm for oil storage in northeastern Trincomalee, close to the vital natural harbour that served the British well during the Second World War.

An Indian company, the Adani Group, has already won a stake in the Colombo port, where it will engage in developing the western terminal while the Chinese build the eastern wing.

Meanwhile, Colombo is having talks with China for a new loan besides the $500 million loan and a $1.5 billion currency swap.

While the two major Indian Ocean powers tussle for supremacy in this vital maritime region, Sri Lanka is beginning to understand that it sometimes pays to dip one’s oars in troubled waters.

Source: Asian Affairs, a current affairs magazine.

Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who held senior roles in Hong Kong at The Standard and worked in London for Gemini News Service. He has been a correspondent for foreign media including the New York Times and Le Monde. More recently he was Sri Lanka’s deputy high commissioner in London

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President Gotabaya Rajapaksa (on screen) of Sri Lanka addresses the general debate of the General Assembly’s seventy-fifth session. Credit: UN Photo/Loey Felipe

By Neville de Silva
LONDON, Oct 5 2021 (IPS)

Addressing the UN General Assembly last month President Gotabaya Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka raised several concerns, two that had to do with health. One concerned the health of the human race; the other the health of Planet Earth on which man struggles increasingly to survive.

It is understandable for the President to draw the world’s attention to the current pandemic that plagues the people of Sri Lanka as it does the populations of most other nations that constitute the UN family that have struggled in the last two years to overcome COVID-19 which has brought some nations almost to their knees.

As we know some countries have dealt with the spreading virus more effectively and efficiently than others because they relied on the correct professional advice and had the right people in the places instead of dilettantes with inflated egos.

The immediacy of the pandemic with its daily effects on health care and peoples’ livelihoods is seen as urgent political and health issues unlike the dangers surrounding our planet which, to many, appear light miles away while still others treat it with large doses of scepticism.

Quite rightly President Rajapaksa pointed to the dangers ahead for the survival of the planet – as underscored in the recent report of the Inter-government Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — due to human activity and said that Sri Lanka, among other measures, aims to increase its forest cover significantly in the future.

What really matters is whether those on the ground — like some of our politicians and their acolytes who seem to think that saving the planet is somebody else’s responsibility but denuding the forests and damaging our eco-systems for private gain is theirs — pay heed to the president’s alarm signals that should appropriately have been sounded at least a decade ago.

But what evoked a quick response was not the call for international action to save the people from the pandemic or the planet from climate change as President Rajapaksa told the UN but what he told the UN chief Antonio Guterres at their New York meeting.

While reiterating Sri Lanka’s stance that internal issues should be resolved through domestic mechanisms what aroused interest was the president’s sudden and unexpected readiness to invite the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora scattered across the Global North and in smaller numbers elsewhere, for discussions presumably on reconciliation, accountability and other outstanding matters.

One would have thought that there would be a gush of enthusiasm from some sections of the Tamil diaspora which had previously shown an interest in being involved in a dialogue with the Sri Lanka Government over a range of issues that concern the Tamil community.

But the few reactions that have been reported from a few Tamil organisations appear lukewarm. Yes, the Non-Resident Tamils of Sri Lanka (NRTSL), a UK-based group, welcomed the President’s announcement saying that “engagement with the diaspora is particularly important at the time when multiple challenges face Sri Lanka”.

However, there was a caveat. The NRTSL is supportive of “open, transparent and sincere engagement of the government of Sri Lanka,” the organisation’s president V. Sivalingam was quoted as saying.

The better-known Global Tamil Forum (GTF) called it a “progressive move” and welcomed it. But its spokesman Suren Surenderan questioned what he called President Rajapaksa’s “sudden change of mind”.

Surendiran said that in June President Rajapaksa was due to meet the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) but that meeting was put off without a new date been fixed.

“When requests are made by democratically elected representatives of Tamil people in Sri Lanka to meet with the President, they are “deferred with flimsy excuses”, {and} now from New York he has declared that he wants to engage with us, Tamil diaspora,” Surendiran said rather dismissively in a statement.

Though the Sri Lanka Tamil diaspora consists of many organisations and groups spread across several continents there has been a studied silence from most of them, a sign that many of them are sceptical about how genuine the gesture is.

In March this year, after the UN Human Rights Council passed a highly critical resolution on Sri Lanka, the Rajapaksa government proscribed several Tamil diaspora organisations and more than 300 individuals labelling them terrorist or terrorist linked. These included Tamil advocacy organisations such as the British Tamil Forum, Global Tamil Forum, Canadian Tamil Congress, Australian Tamil Congress and the World Tamil Coordinating Committee.

Precisely seven years earlier in March, the Mahinda Rajapaksa government banned 424 persons and 16 diaspora organisations.

The problem for the present administration is that if it is intent on inviting Tamil organisations to participate in talks it would have to lift the existing bans on individuals and groups without which they are unlikely to talk with the government.

As transpired before peace talks at various times between the government and the LTTE, the Tamil groups are most likely to insist on participation as legitimate organisations untainted by bans. That is sure to be one of the key conditions, if not the most important pre-condition.

It is also evident that the Tamil diaspora is not a homogenous entity. It consists of moderate organisations that are ready to resolve the pressing issues within a unitary Sri Lanka, to those at the other end of the spectrum still loyal to the LTTE ideology and demanding a separate state.

If the Government cherry-picks the participants-particularly the ones that are more likely to collaborate with the administration, it would be seen as an attempt to drive a huge wedge in the Tamil diaspora.

That could well lead to the excluded groups strengthening their existing links with political forces in their countries of domicile including politicians in government as one sees in the UK and Canada, for instance, and Tamil councillors in other elected bodies to increase pressure on Sri Lanka externally.

That is why some Tamil commentators already brand this as a “diversionary move” to lessen the international moves against Colombo.

What would be the reactions of powerful sections of the Buddhist monks and the ultranationalist Sinhala Buddhists who strongly supported a Gotabaya presidency?.

And across the Palk Strait there are the 80 million or so Tamils in Tamil Nadu and an Indian Government watching developments with a genuine interest and concern.

Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who was Assistant Editor of the Hong Kong Standard and worked for Gemini News Service in London. Later he was Deputy Chief-of-Mission in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London.

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In March 2021, the UN Human Rights Council was given a mandate to collect and preserve information and evidence of crimes related to Sri Lanka's 27-year long civil war that ended in 2009. Meanwhile, Western nations taking a cue from the Human Rights Council’s highly critical resolution on Sri Lanka appear to be tightening the noose. Credit: UN Photo / Violaine Martin. 43rd session of the Human Rights Council.

By Neville de Silva
LONDON, Jul 5 2021 (IPS)

For well over a century Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, has been known to the world as the ‘Pearl of the Indian Ocean’ for its multifaceted attractions. That is until blurb writers ruined it all with hyperbolic epithets that obscured the country’s magnetic charms, which attracted visitors from around the globe.

But one particular epithet has lived up to its name. Called ‘a country like no other’, Sri Lanka is increasingly beginning to prove this true – though not for the reasons that originally prompted it.

Over the years, groups of professional politicians and those drawn to the sphere, not to serve the public but by thoughts of self-aggrandisement and avarice, have dragged this once prosperous country, with its many natural resources and strong democratic institutions, towards its nadir.

From being Asia’s first democracy, with universal franchise granted in 1931– even before independence from Britain in 1948– political commentators and increasingly the public now fear that the country is teetering on the brink of militarism, with retired and serving senior officers in key positions in the civil administration, and others appointed to virtually oversee Sri Lanka’s 25 administrative districts.

While there is both international and local disquiet over the deterioration of democratic values, of more immediate concern is the country’s dire economic state. The situation is so critical that less than two weeks ago, the respected Sunday Times wrote that President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s government is ‘steps away from bankruptcy’.

At the same time, well-known economists were pressing alarm bells, warning about the possible breakdown of the banking system ‘causing a collapse of the economy’. The direct cause of the current crisis was the sudden hike in fuel prices in late June, which is bound to have a ripple effect on other commodities and services.

Bakers are already threatening to raise their prices, which could well have happened by the time this article appears.

A thermometer gun is used to take a boy’s temperature in Sri Lanka. Credit: UNICEF/Chameera Laknath

With the prices of staples such as rice and vegetables unbearably high, the average consumer, already burdened by the steepening cost of living, is being pushed to the wall by a government that came to power some 20 months or so ago promising to reduce poverty and improve living standards.

Rising living costs are compounded by a still uncontrollable Covid pandemic. This has compelled the government to impose lockdowns and curb travel – restrictions which are haphazardly lifted and re-imposed, despite the best medical advice – as daily wage earners run out of cash to buy food for their families and meet other domestic needs.

Political commentators and increasingly the public fear that the country is on the brink of militarism

Last month, the Sri Lanka Medical Association urged President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to continue lockdown restrictions without interruption–”considering that over 2,000 Covid 19 cases and over 50 deaths are being reported daily” and also the detection of the highly dangerous Indian variant’.

At the time of writing, health authorities reported another 52 fatalities and put the daily count of positive cases at 2,098. But such statistics seems to matter little to politicians and their military and medical cohorts, tasked with combating the spreading pandemic but ignoring the accumulating data and the advice of specialist medical professionals.

Meanwhile, the vaccination of the population, according to a pre-determined programme, has been disrupted by politicians who have drawn up their own priority lists and even threatened doctors and health workers who refused to accept their dictates, raising law enforcement issues and public criticism.

Those with power and influence find backdoor means to gain access to vaccinations, at the expense of an increasingly frustrated and angry public, who stand in long queues for hours awaiting their turn.

While the overall Covid containment programme is reportedly in a mess, along with an economy going steadily downhill, another pearl turned up in the Indian Ocean close to Colombo port. The X-Press Pearl, a Singapore-registered container ship, was carrying noxious cargo, including a leaking nitric acid container. With Qatar and India refusing to admit the vessel for repairs, it turned up in Colombo

That poisonous pearl spewed nitric acid into the ocean and then self-immolated, burning for days before part of it went down on June 2. As a result of the incident, more than 150 marine animals, including 100 turtles, 15 dolphins, three whales and scores of birds and fish beached in various parts of the country, not to mention the kilometres of beach covered with plastic pollutants, leading a UN representative in Colombo to describe the episode as a ‘significant damage to the planet’.

Meanwhile, the original pearl of the Indian Ocean is struggling to keep its head above water. The Sunday Times’ economics columnist Dr Nimal Sanderatne, an agricultural economist, former central banker and academic, painted a bleak picture in his weekly column in late June: ‘The external finances of the country are in a perilous state. External reserves have fallen, the trade deficit is widening, the balance of payments deficit is increasing and there are foreign debt repayments of about US$4 billion during the rest of the year.’

His views about the parlous state of the economy were echoed by several other economists, including the spokesman of Sri Lanka’s main opposition party SJB, Dr Harsha de Silva, and Dr Anila Dias Bandaranaike, a former assistant governor of the Central Bank.

In a desperate bid to boost reserves, Sri Lanka went for a currency swap of US$200 million with Bangladesh, once a struggling new nation in South Asia. Prudent economic policies and management, and national interest, brought Bangladesh to its current flourishing status.

When the currency swap was announced, one Sri Lankan wag remarked that it would have made more sense if Sri Lanka had swapped its advisors for those from Bangladesh, and the swap should be permanent to protect the country’s self-respect

Only a country that has lost its political sense and perceptiveness, or has abandoned all concern for its struggling people, could seek government sanction to import nearly 300 vehicles costing Rs 3.7 billion for its 225 parliamentarians and unnamed others, in the midst of a severe foreign currency crisis, when begging and borrowing seem the only options.

What is even worse, Sri Lanka’s premier state bank was ordered to open letters of credit one month or so before cabinet approval had been sought. Whoever ordered this remains unknown to the public at the time of writing.

Critics of the government say it is fast losing its one-time popularity as ill-considered and sudden policy decisions are heaped on existing economic and health problems, such as the snap decision to ban chemical fertiliser and pesticides, so essential right now for agriculture and export crops such as tea.

Scant wonder the government is being assailed by even close associates of the Rajapaksa family. One such is the head of the Catholic Church, Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith, who, in a strongly critical statement recently said that ‘even nature seemed to be turning against the rulers’.

Meanwhile, western nations taking a cue from the UN Human Rights Council’s highly critical resolution on Sri Lanka last March appear to be tightening the noose.

At the end of June, the European Parliament moved a resolution, with almost 90 per cent voting for it, urging the EU authorities to consider suspending the Generalised System of Preference (GSP Plus) trade concessions to Sri Lanka, which would be a serious blow to exports.

Later the Core Group of Western nations that sponsored the UNHRC resolution issued a statement condemning Sri Lanka’s human rights situation and new changes to the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

Bleak times lie ahead.

Source: Asian Affairs Magazine

Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who held senior roles in Hong Kong at The Standard and worked in London for Gemini News Service. He has been a correspondent for foreign media including the New York Times and Le Monde. More recently he was Sri Lanka’s deputy high commissioner in London

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The implications of Colombo’s foreign policy shift under Sri Lanka President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, from a time-honoured adherence to non-alignment to a clear affiliation with Beijing. Former minister Dr Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe said Colombo Port City (above) might turn out to be a ‘colony’ of China.

By Neville de Silva
LONDON, Jun 4 2021 (IPS)

June 4, 2021 marks 30 years since the killings of an undisclosed number of Chinese protestors at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. For many years, the Chinese government and its ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), with characteristic understatement, called it the ‘June Fourth incident’.

It was the hardliners in the CCP who forced the ouster of its general secretary Hu Yaobang, a party moderate who had encouraged democratic reform, and eventually ordered the military crackdown on the protestors at Tiananmen – perhaps the blackest day in the history of post-revolutionary China.

Sri Lankans should recall the central role of the Chinese Communist Party in turning Tiananmen Square into a horrendous killing field that provoked an unprecedented outpouring of public grief and condemnation from neighbouring Hong Kong, in light of the apparent reverence that Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa appears to pay to the CCP’s style of governance.

And he has done so more than once, even telling China’s Defence Minister Wei Fenghe, during his visit to Colombo in April, that he hoped to ‘learn from the governance experience’ of the CCP in poverty alleviation and rural revitalisation.

While the CCP’s role in poverty alleviation might be conceded, the same cannot be said of corruption elimination. It was growing corruption among those in the Chinese government and Communist Party that triggered the massive student protest, which demanded an end to the burgeoning graft and lack of accountability by officialdom, and collectively called for democratic reform in China’s politically regimented society.

Critics say Sri Lanka’s foreign policy of neutrality and its ‘India First’ declaration are mere geopolitical window dressing.

While President Rajapaksa, who has been invited to China, might pick up a thing or two about the success of the CCP in alleviating poverty, there is little he could learn about ridding society of other malaise prevalent in China – a pity, as such knowledge might help to eliminate Sri Lanka’s own political viruses that are causing serious concern, not only in Sri Lankan society but also in the region.

From the early years of Sri Lanka’s independence from British rule, Ceylon (as it was then known) had followed a policy of peaceful co-existence, articulated earlier by India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru as the five principles of ‘Panchaseela’, deriving from Buddhist Thought.

It was this Nehruvian Panchaseela that eventually formed the bedrock of the foreign policy of most newly independent states in Asia, Africa and Latin America, under the banner of non-alignment.

Under Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike, the world’s first woman prime minister, Ceylon was among founding members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) when 25 countries met in Belgrade at NAM’s first summit in 1961

It was a foreign policy that most Ceylon/Sri Lanka governments were wedded to, except perhaps the pro-western United National Party (UNP) government under President Junius Richard Jayewardene, who cynically told me there were only two non-aligned countries in the world: the USA and the USSR.  

This was in 1979 and, ironically, he was then the Chairman of NAM having taken over the chairmanship from Sirimavo Bandaranaike who lost the 1977 general election having hosted the NAM summit in Colombo in 1976.

President Jayewardene was very much pro-American. Still, he went to Communist Cuba, an arch enemy of the US to pass on the baton to President Fidel Castro who was hosting the next NAM summit in Havana in 1979.

Then, with the advent of another Rajapaksa, Gotabaya, as president, Sri Lankan foreign policy was redefined. He said at his inauguration in November 2019 that it was now one of ‘neutrality’, dropping any reference to the long-standing policy of non-alignment.

Though never clearly defined, to Rajapaksa junior this meant staying aloof from Big Power conflicts. By that time, the Indian Ocean had perceptibly turned into a conflict zone as China’s push into this vital maritime international sea route led to counter responses from other major powers, namely the US, Japan, Australia and India.

Moreover, New Delhi saw the growing Chinese naval and economic presence in the region under China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Maritime Silk Route as an intrusion into its sphere of influence, raising strategic security concerns.

So, there was a congruence of interest among other major powers and users of the Indian Ocean in challenging what was perceived as Beijing’s expansionism, that is, asserting its own presence in the region and the freedom of navigation for all.

Shortly after Narendra Modi became India’s prime minister in 2014, he made a dramatic shift in India’s own foreign policy, turning from a ‘Look East’ policy to an ‘Act East’ one. This implied a more conscious and determined involvement in South East Asia, particularly ASEAN.

If Modi enunciated a ‘Neighbourhood First’ doctrine, Gotabaya Rajapaksa claimed his to be ‘India First’, perhaps in an attempt to balance the elder Rajapaksa, Mahinda’s, pro-China predilections as president. It was during Mahinda’s nine years at the helm, from 2005, that bilateral relations were at their strongest, perhaps not without cause.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa, with brother Gotabaya as his defence secretary, was at war with the ruthless separatist Liberation Tigers of Eelam (LTTE), popularly known as the Tamil Tigers.

The only country at the time ready to help the Rajapaksas defeat the separatists, with substantial finance and arms aid, was China, which it did in May 2009.

Mahinda returned the favour by contracting China for some major infrastructure projects, including the new Hambantota port in the deep south some 15 nautical miles or so from vital international sea lanes. This port, which is now on a 99-year lease to China because Sri Lanka could not meet its loan repayments, has turned out to be a serious strategic concern to India and other major trading nations.

Last month another major Chinese project Colombo Port City (CPC), some 270 hectares of land reclaimed from the sea close to the capital’s principal port, came alive after the Supreme Court approved the Bill to set up the managing commission after the Court called for several changes to clauses that were inconsistent with the constitution.

The CPC, in which the Chinese development holds 43 per cent of the land (also for 99 years) is intended to be a huge investment and business centre for foreign investors. This made the US ambassador in Colombo, among others, reach for the panic button for fear that the CPC could be a source of money laundering and other ‘dirty’ money.

A former minister in the previous government and a member of the ruling party, Dr Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe, even warned that the Port City might well turn out to be a ‘colony’ of China, given the exclusion of Sri Lankan entrepreneurs from investing there, even if they had foreign currency to do so.

Critics of the Rajapaksa government’s policies – including the militarisation of the civil administration and the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic that is still surging in the country – say that Sri Lanka’s foreign policy of neutrality and its ‘India First’ declaration are nothing more than geopolitical window dressing.

They claim it is unsupported by fact and is meant to cover the government’s strong pro-China commitments. They also point to a media release by the Chinese Embassy in Colombo, following Defence Minister Wei Fenghe’s April visit, in which President Rajapaksa is quoted as telling the visiting minister that Sri Lanka ‘has prioritised developing relations with China and firmly supports China’s positions on issues concerning its core issues’.

If, by jettisoning non-alignment and embracing ‘neutrality’, Sri Lanka means it is following an equidistant foreign policy, it has not shown so by its actions. China obviously knows best. In its statement on the defence minister’s visit, the Chinese embassy says: ‘China appreciates Sri Lanka’s independent and non-aligned foreign policy.’

Scant wonder many are puzzled by the nomenclature.

Source: Asian Affairs

Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who held senior roles in Hong Kong at The Standard and worked in London for Gemini News Service. He has been a correspondent for foreign media including the New York Times and Le Monde. More recently he was Sri Lanka’s deputy high commissioner in London

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All that goes up must come down was considered a truism from the days of yore. The apple that descended on the Newtonian dome-probably a fable anyway- had obviously got Sir Isaac thinking. So was born what is called the law of gravity.

Those untutored in physics were often told by elders not to walk under coconut trees in case a nut falls on their pate. But there are nuts that ignore such advice and one day pays the price for discarding their school texts which would have told them that objects do fall whatever the height, even from the fifth floor.

Remember what happened to a loquacious minister of the former regime who in search of his misplaced room key in a hotel somewhere in Australia went tumbling down from the balcony on to the bushes below. His son almost fell 35,000 ft in the company of a plane load of passengers and crew when he mistakenly tried to open the exit door instead of the toilet door. So it was said at the time.

These are dangerous times. The higher you go the harder you fall. These days when politics has become a money-spinning vocation and amassing wealth at the expense of the public is a time-tested occupation with even the corrupt prone to preach against corruption, one needs to be careful.
Whether it be the good, the bad or the ugly they somehow defy gravity and keep going up and up, at least their bank balances and other assets do.

One cannot cheat the laws of nature forever. At times people do get entangled in a web of deceit. Is that what happened to Ravi Karunanayake, former finance minister and until late last week foreign minister who has fallen from grace? On Thursday I was still trying to decide on a subject for today’s column when news of resignation hit cyber space.

Earlier in the life of this government Tilak Marapana honourably resigned his portfolio after a speech in parliament in which he inappropriately made references to one of his former clients under investigation at the time.Now Ravi Karunanayake has, like Marapana, gone from the front benches to the rear to sit among what some call the parliamentary hoi polloi, the back benchers.

Yet within months the former Thomian Tilak Marapana had risen like Lazarus and was back in the cabinet, albeit in some ambiguous role playing, as it were, for the minor counties. That, however, was till Friday when he was suddenly elevated to acting foreign minister.

Since the former foreign minister has quoted scripture in his resignation speech we might do the same, in our fashion. Will we see the Second Coming of the old Royalist Karunanayake or has he been thrown to the wolves by some of his former schoolmates (as Karunanayake has tangentially hinted) who have learnt not to depart but to protect themselves (and the party?) from further political fallout now that the Treasury bond scandal is beginning to unravel and possibly edging closer to ‘home’ or so it seems.

Rarely, if ever, does a country have three cabinet spokespersons. But then we are the wonder of Asia and set trendy ways to achieve political obscurity if not oblivion. Anyway the most vociferous of them who often has a habit of straying beyond the contours of the week’s cabinet discussions and interposes his own comments, stood steadfastly by his fallen (or falling at the time) colleague just as Mark Antony did speaking to Brutus and Cassius about the assassinated Caesar.

The modern text has Antony referring to corruption though the original has no reference to the corrupt. Yet in the circumstances the modern seems more appropriate. Says Antony: “Oh, mighty Caesar! Do you lie so low? Have all your conquests, glories, triumphs, achievements, come to so little? Farewell. Gentlemen, I don’t know what you intend to do, who else you intend to kill, who else you consider corrupt”.

If I might add a couple of lines of my own to bring Shakespeare up to date on Sri Lanka’s convoluted, contentious and often corrupt politics it would read:

“It was only the other day you were chosen as Asia’s best and our envoys celebrated in London town. Today you lie rejected and dejected. See how the mighty have fallen. Will others join you on the floor, bespoiling those lavish rugs with their blood for party and country?”
In a passionate plea Ravi Karunanayake’s daughter Onella appealed for understanding and justice for her beleaguered father who suddenly became the centrepiece of this drama. An anxious public waiting for the promised crackdown on corruption and abuse by the previous regime have seen no accountability, nothing more than a chimerical creation.

So when a serving minister fell foul of the inquiry by accident or design, a hungry public denied the theatrics they expected from corruption trials at last found something to savour, never mind who was being hung out to dry. The drama was made more exciting because here was a government minister being ‘crucified’-as Karunanayake called it- when all the time the public had been waiting to see the former ruling clan and its senior white-collar officials in the dock.

This sudden and dramatic turn of events where the recent accuser has become today’s accused was theatre of a high order and served as a moral pep pill for a disenchanted public. Scant wonder then that this turned out to be drama not for the gallery but for the pits and Onella Karunanayake was prompted to make that plea on behalf of her father. When she asked why only my father, a distraught daughter was articulating a question that many were asking in their own way.

Brutus was there plowing his lonely furrow. But where were Cassius and Casca the real plotters of the conspiracy to assassinate of Caesar. Would they ever be found and with enough evidence to bring them to trial for this Commission is not a court of law but a fact finding mission only.
Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe seemed proud of his colleague’s resignation. It was proof of the principles of good governance advocated by the unity government. Those advocates of clean and accountable government had told the citizenry that nobody was above the law and the people believed it then. But do they believe it now?. They know only too well that one swallow does not a summer make.

The troubles for the Yahapalanaya government which claimed it will exorcise this country of all kinds of malfeasance and malignity are hardly over. The saga of the Treasury bond affair continues to fester. One does not have to be a prophet to say that President Sirisena is enjoying the squirming that is going on inside the UNP which has behaved with hauteur and haughtiness as the SLFP struggled to maintain order within its ranks.

There might well be more on the UNP plate. It was reported last week that sections of the UNP are planning to bring a “no confidence” motion against the Justice Minister Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe. He has publicly declared he is opposed the ‘sale’ of Hambantota port to the Chinese and said he will not rest until he regains its ownership on behalf of the people.

If I might get back to Julius Caesar, ambition should be made of sterner stuff. Is he speaking as Minister of Justice or as Minister of Buddha Sasana or in some pseudo-patriotic garb he has donned in recent days? He will not rest, he says, until he sends the Chinese packing. Maybe the Chinese could suggest a traditional cure for Rajapakshe’s political insomnia. Perhaps he could draw inspiration from the conduct of that ‘hit man’ of the Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) Galaboda Aththe Gnanasara or revive the services of Avant Garde and chase the Chinese all the way back to Beijing.
If those in the UNP planning to move a confidence motion against the Justice Minister are serious then justice might well be done and the party better served.

In the meantime President Sirisena should temporarily recall the Kandyan sword, the kasthane, he gifted to the museum and keep it handy. If the UNP does to Justice Minister Rajapakshe what it has done to Ravi Karunanayake President Sirisena could hand over the sword to the Justice Minister to fall on it.

Now that Rajapakshe is trying to carve for himself a role as a patriot, or it is being carved for him, he might well relish the fall. As far as the public is concerned justice would have been done.

By the way isn’t Minister Faizser Musthapha desperately looking for ways to get rid of rubbish?

This story was originally published by The Sunday Times, Sri Lanka

It is indeed a giant step for mankind. Both the print and electronic media in many countries carried the startling and happy news last week about a major breakthrough in scientific research that would have huge ramifications. A joint team of scientists from the US and South Korea has discovered how to eliminate deadly heart disease running in families by editing a piece of faulty DNA.

Foreign Minister Ravi Karunanayake at the centre of a financial scandal.

This discovery would doubtless provoke endless discussions with talking heads debating the morality of tampering with genes and whether man’s genetic engineering interferes with the natural order.

All this scientific mumbo-jumbo is way above the heads of ordinary folk like us. Whether this would lead to an imbalance in the nature’s scheme of things, important as it would be, is not our main concern right now.

What is regrettable is that these scientific discoveries did not come much earlier. It is claimed this breakthrough has the potential to prevent some 10,000 diseases that are passed down from one generation to the next.

Normal folk would earnestly hope that one of the diseases that could be cured is the politics of denigration, division, disruption and corruption that is the bane of many countries and has brought a lunatic fringe on to centre-stage.

If so a high priority in the application of such research must surely be to drastically alter the value system of politicians worldwide so that their faulty DNA could be replaced by one that instills justice and a sense of morality that appears sadly lacking these days.

We would then be governed by those with an ethical code which has no place for cheats, liars, abusers of power, back stabbers, front stabbers, the corrupt, the narcisstic and crafty whose desire for self-aggrandizement supersedes all else.

The new DNA or whatever the scientific terminology for it, should be such as to compel law makers and other politicians to eschew these vulgar and deleterious habits.

Let them awaken each morning with thoughts of adherence to Buddhism’s five precepts including musawadha and the Christian ten commandments which says “Thou shall not lie”. No doubt other religions practiced in Sri Lanka have their own precepts to remind politicians of clean, upright living.

Such scientific advancements that could eliminate the noxious DNA and inject a new morality would have been immensely valuable not only to the Trump presidency but Sri Lanka’s own leaders who preach political cleanliness but sadly need more than a single dry clean.

Naturally the Trump presidency has in its first six months attracted worldwide attention because of the pivotal role of the United States in world affairs and the power and influence wielded by the US president.

If the Trump presidency and the chaos and caterwauling in the White House seemed like a part of Shakespeare’s comic universe, Sri Lanka’s politics has appeared like the tragic happenings in Julius Caesar with our current foreign minister saying “et tu Brute” as the pin-pricks as he calls them, of his colleagues and friends begin to hurt.

Take the Trump administration. Major figures, some of them inducted into the White House by the new incumbent himself or appointed by him to key positions outside the West Wing have hardly had time to unpack their bags and test their comfortable seats before being shown the door. The last one to exit – at the time of this writing that is – was Anthony Scaramucci, the new Director of Communications who survived for 10 days.

As the Bard said “they have their exits and their entrances”.

That unfortunately has been the trouble with Trump politics. In his own crazy, bigoted, brash and incompetent way Trump has not hesitated to get rid of officials who were friends for what he perceived as gross incompetence or unacceptable disloyalty. Our politicians try desperately to provide cover and succour to the corrupt and crooked.

Late last week events took a turn for the worse for Trump as Robert Mueller, the Special Counsel investigating possible Russian interference in the US presidential election empanelled a grand jury that would subpoena witnesses and documents.

This could bring the investigators to look towards Trump and his associates’ possible financial connections and relationships with Russia. Trump had earlier warned that any such probe by Mueller into his finances would be to cross a “red line” in the investigations.

While all this koloppan over Russian collusion and Trump’s finances embroiled the White House, in Sri Lanka all the kulappu in political circles was over a Colombo Penthouse occupied by then finance minister and now foreign minister Ravi Karunanayake and who paid the substantial monthly rent of some Rs 1.4 million for it before the apartment was purchased by the Karunanayake family for some Rs 165 million.

Well not exactly the family because the master of the house- well not exactly house either but never mind – did not know anything about the lease and perhaps the purchase too and who has paid for such luxury and how.

Well that is what Ravi Karunanayake said. Now if you believe what he said and why not after all he was doing so under oath, one might well wonder how the country trusted him with the nation’s finances when he showed such nonchalance about the financial dealings that led to the lease and later purchase of the very apartment he is living in.

Apparently it was only when the name of Arjun Aloysius came up in parliament in mid-2016 that the finance minister sought to inquire from his dear spouse what all this was about or words to that effect, as he told the Commission of Inquiry.

This is only a sub plot – but a very important sub plot – in the wider drama of the treasury bond scandal that is increasingly choking the Yahapalanaya “Unity Government” since mid-2015.
Despite the strenuous efforts of a major constituent of the Yahapalanaya government to throttle the scandal at birth all attempts to put the genii back in the bottle has only proved more disastrous to those who have long wished to bury it.

One would have thought that having lived in his new abode for nearly one and a half years he would at least asked his wife in casual conversation whose apartment he was living in, how she came to negotiate it, how she was paying for it and how much.

Oh no. Mr. Karunanayake is not the inquisitive type. He does not go digging into domestic affairs and ask awkward questions from his wife. He minds his own business, as it were which was looking after the country’s finance at the time. It is probably because of his lack of interest in domestic affairs including that of his own household that prompted President Sirisena to entrust him with the portfolio of foreign affairs.

Unlike Mr. Karunanayake’s disinterestedness in domestic matters – he probably does not know where his wife keeps the family silver – the Attorney General’s Department counsel have been probing into his travel habits especially his visits to Singapore. Such probity is not deserving of the man who was chosen as Asia’s best finance minister. Some might be inclined to say this does not speak much for London’s “The Banker” magazine that paid him this honour.

It was perhaps natural for the “Best Finance Minister of Asia 2017” to travel about in Asia – as elsewhere – at least for those in this vast continent who do not know him to come to recognise Asia’s best.

So if he went to Singapore 13 times between certain dates what does it matter. After all such a man of stature should be seen even if he is not heard or heard of elsewhere. It was revealed that Karunanayake and Aloysius were once on the same flight. If it was on Sri Lankan Airlines it was probably to keep the national carrier afloat seeing that some of his schoolmates running it needed a helping hand just as Karunanayake needs now from his FRCS types.

So what if he had known Aloysius long before this fiasco which is beginning to look like the morass Trump has stepped into, though it might not be of the same proportions.

Surely Aloysius did not have to go up to RK/Ravi K/ or simply K and say to him “The name is Bond, Aloysius Bond”. After all they knew each other and probably spent Christmas in Singapore if not together at least at the same time.

And what is all this about a not-so-crispy letter that had no date, reference number or the name of the recipient? What does the learned counsel expect, a letter resembling a limp papadam?
What worries me is Karunanayake’s forgetfulness. He forgot to date that letter and to give it a reference which state communications normally carry. Why he did not address it to the Governor of the Central Bank who apparently requested it. He simply wrote “To whom it may concern”.

Now that is sheer forgetfulness. He seems prone to amnesia which is not a good sign now that he is dealing with international matter. Seriously he should consult a doctor before he forgets. But then our chaps are so often on strike that he might have to consult a stethoscope-wearer in Singapore on one of his numerous visits to the city state or during a transit. Why, he might even run into Trump. It would do their tormented souls a lot of good to compare notes on their respective woes. Trump calls his a “witch hunt”. Wonder whether Karunanayake thinks the same of his troubles. Maybe he knows who the witches are. Or has he forgotten that too?

In Sri Lanka our leadership that appoints cronies and old school chums into positions of importance and power will defend them to the last despite their public display of arrogance, of dubious practices, abuse of power and waste of public resources.

This story was originally published by The Sunday Times, Sri Lanka

The world might not think much of the inventive genius of Sri Lankans. But where else would you find politicians that can inflate their egos (besides other things) into unbelievable proportions with nothing more than hot air which can generate enough power to meet a temporary energy crisis caused by striking workers.

Certainly there are other countries in which politicians and officials have been caught with their hands in the till or demanding that the till be filled before a job is done. Many have had to pay the price for it just as their ‘clients’ have had to pay for services rendered. The problem however is that with each passing day as it were, bribery and corruption in this country spreads wider and deeper to the point that it has turned endemic like dengue or the still unresolved garbage crisis which the government recently promised will be solved soon.

But how soon is soon. As an ancient philosopher once said truth is this to me and that to thee. To the people of Meethotamulla and elsewhere piled up garbage brought death and destruction more than three months ago. To them and others facing similar plights in other areas “soon” would be in a relatively short time like a few months or so until a more settled solution is found.

But to promising politicians who pile hopes on top of the rubbish “soon” could mean when they find the time to get round to it, busy as they are trying to break up some strikes by a club-carrying “public” or trying to cover up dubious bond deals by hook or by crook (mainly crook). Fantasies are cynically concocted by leaders who only look to appease the people when the time comes to seek their vote, as would surely happen when the continuously-delayed local government elections are eventually held and politicians go round offering more counterfeit promises as bait.

No amount of preaching by the likes of Deputy Minister Harsha de Silva the other day at what is touted as the Sri Lanka Economic Summit 2017 is going to cure this malaise unless politicians like Dr de Silva examine their own conscience wherever that might be located.

Harsha de Silva lambasted not merely the private sector but the public too for pointing their fingers at others for failing to deal with bribery and corruption. Dr de Silva would do better to turn the spotlight inward at the political class of which he is unfortunately now a member. It was just the other day that I read in our sister morning daily of a prominent school near Borella which has solved its garbage problem while our elected and non-elected geniuses are still promising solutions to what has turned out to be a toxic national issue.

True, the school’s solution might be just one small step for the rubbish problem but it is a giant step for the school and one that our failing politicians should give a thought to if their thinking processes are in some form of working order. It appears that this school has worked out a novel scheme to get rid of its waste. The school staff has prepared a roster of students who are then assigned to collect the rubbish in the classroom when their turn comes. What do they do with it? Why take the rubbish home at the end of the day, listening to the nasty comments of bus crews and others who loathe to travel in the same vehicle with passengers and rubbish or passengers with rubbish.

One never knows of course where the carriers of this rubbish end up. But we do know of a school in a more affluent part of Colombo which dumps some of its rubbish on the community. They end up holding political office or important public positions usually messing up both. However novel and clever this latest rubbish clearing exercise appears to be, it represents a long followed cultural tradition that has been finely honed and crafted over the years by politicians and officialdom alike.

That is the practice of passing the buck like the school referred to has now done. It has passed on the problem to the students. A classic example of buck passing was witnessed after the Meethotamulla tragedy when no one seemed to take responsibility wholly or partly for what happened and each seemed to blame somebody else-from the previous government to the present lot.

When it comes to passing the buck it seems that not even the President is safe. Maybe we have misunderstood the functions of the Ministry of Disaster Management. Since it is to manage disaster it has little to do until a disaster happens and the world and half the garbage dump comes crashing down.

But Deputy Minister de Silva was not only talking of passing the buck but also the backsheesh though in most cases it is backsheesh plus like the GSP+ that is supposed to bring us continental largesse to turbo-boost out economy.

In language and tone that seemed unusually overcharged Harsha de Silva was to accuse the private sector of succumbing to the practice of oiling the palms of officials to get their jobs done. That might please his new boss and party chief who has just celebrated 40 years of parliamentary life but it surely tells only part of the story. The Harvard-educated de Silva is beginning to sound like Trump, lashing out with feckless arguments.

The deputy minister surely knows that it takes two to tango. Bribery, graft, santhosam or whatever you call it is not one-sided. Bribery involves both giver and taker. Sometimes it is given and taken and sometimes it is asked for/demanded and given. Castigating the private sector for giving bribes to get jobs done de Silva urged businesspeople and others to stop corrupting themselves.

Good advice if they themselves as politicians and others as high-ranking officials looked closely at the mirror each morning and said a prayer as a reminder to desist from bribery and corruption. What de Silva failed to do – judging by reports of his speech – is to ask himself where all this really started. Let him go back into the history of his own party and say truthfully whether in the early years of our independence there was public agitation against bribery and corruption. No, because there was little to speak of unlike today when it is rampant.

All this started with politicians taking bribes often through their wives as their private secretaries or family or friends given jobs under them. Have not some politicians been referred to as Mr 10% and later by an increased percentage as inflation began to eat into their assets. Why is it that today one has to pass the backsheesh to minor officials to get something done? It is because those lower down the pecking order have seen and heard that those at the top of the order not only engaged in high-scale graft and corruption but that this government has heaped more and more perks and privileges on the political class and the law makers.

If those at the top of the political ladder and wielders of power can fatten themselves at the expense of the public making money out of state tenders and projects, why should those at the bottom be left out of this equation?

That surely is the logic that drives those to whom money is given to get a job done. If the high and mighty can fleece the nation why cannot we who need it much more take a few rupees more is their argument. This is not to condone bribery and corruption. It is merely asking those in power to look reality in the face. When the crackdown on bribery-taking comes it falls on some policemen taking five hundred rupees or some gramasevaka niladhari pocketing thousand rupees.

But despite all the bribery and corruption that the present rulers spoke vehemently against at election time and threatened to cull the bribe takers and throw them in some hell hole remains empty rhetoric. They are unfulfilled promises like so many other pledges and unlikely to be fulfilled because the political class protects itself and only those from lower down who have managed to creep into it are likely to be sacrificed.

They cannot act against political opponents without exposing your own who are as tainted morally as your enemies. At the same conference Dr. Indrajith Coomaraswamy, the Central Bank Governor asked why Sri Lankan entrepreneurs are not investing in their own country while foreigners are doing so.

For all his economic erudition if Dr. Coomaraswamy fails to see why, then he is not likely to see at all. It is because they had so much faith in the promises and pledges of this yahapalanaya government.

But 2 ½ years have shown that this faith has rapidly dissipated. There is no consistency in policies, there is ambivalence and the need to burn incense at the feet of politicians and their henchmen. The claim it will eradicate nepotism and cronyism and replace it with a meritocracy is already hollow. What has happened at SriLankan Airlines and other institutions is proof that cronyism is very much alive. Transparency and accountability are as dead as a dodo.

Instead hate crimes and hate speech are on the increase with the saffronisation of politics and the loud mouthed Justice Minister who is also Minister of Buddha sasana unable to manage either with conviction.

In short Dr. Coomaraswamy, Sri Lankans seem to have a better grasp of the climate than foreigners. Even Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard seems fuller than this yahapalanaya government of fulfilled promises.

This story was originally published by The Sunday Times, Sri Lanka

It was a week of tragedy and farce. Here in the UK death came suddenly and unexpectedly one night last week. The country went into mourning as the single biggest suicide bomb attack in the UK brought home a reality. Home grown terrorism is as alive here as transnational terrorism which has taken root in continental Europe.

For Sri Lankans who have lived through nearly three decades of terrorism, blood-letting and gory violence and mayhem, it seemed like déjà vu many times over. In my years of journalism in Sri Lanka I have visited many scenes of terrorist attacks and killings from the massacre of worshippers and monks at the Sri Maha Bodhi in Anuradhapura to the indiscriminate shooting of Buddhist monks and samaneras at Aranthalawa, the shooting, hacking and dismemberment of farmers and their families in north central/ eastern province villages, to the bombing of the CTO, the Pettah bus depot and the explosions inside a passenger a train close to the Dehiwala station and other scenes of unbelievable gore.

Newly appointed Foreign Minister Ravi Karunanayake

The type of terrorism perpetrated by youth born and bred in the UK or others who sought refuge here is rather new but not to Sri Lankans who have lived through years of daily fear not knowing when they and their families left home in the morning whether they would ever return home safe.

While most Sri Lankans will condole with the families of those killed and wounded in Manchester, their groaning and moaning today have little to do with that dastardly incident. It has all to do with the acute stomach cramps they unexpectedly underwent last week. What with our medicine men, some with black cloth tied across their mouths occupying space on the pavements instead of in the hospitals where they should have rightly been and so were unavailable to treat the needy, it was a torrid time for many people.

We now know what caused the indescribable pain. It was the consequence of a nation-wide outburst of side-splitting laughter. It spread faster than the dengue fever that a yahapalanaya administration, more interested in sorting out their duty-free vehicle permits, is still trying to eradicate.

It spread like a rash when news broke of the cabinet reshuffle which had gripped the country with great expectation for weeks. Would they rid the country of those who have been in the public eye for various shenanigans that are too well known to require reiteration here.

Having grappled day and night on how to shuffle the pack the great minds of the palanites came up with such a classic solution that even the irresistible Don Trump might wish to emulate. On hearing of the final solution Sri Lankans burst into paroxysms of laughter at what almost immediately earned the sobriquet the “Great Hoax”.

When some years ago an advertising copy writer, perhaps jokingly, called Sri Lanka the “Wonder of Asia” he little realised what prescient powers he possessed. If the copy writer still follows the haps and mishaps in what he called a wondrous land he too would add to this comic interlude that has at least brought momentary laughter to a people suffering under the multiple indignities and corruption they are forced to live under.

What better illustration of this farce than the appointment of the new foreign minister. Everybody and their kussi ammas knew that our great president who was last heard of exploring the wonders of Australia wanted to get rid of Ravi Karunanayake from the finance ministry under pressure or by choice.

He might be the wonder man of the Asia-Pacific region for “The Banker” magazine which had probably run out of nominees, but to President Sirisena and his motley crew a long time slogan had been “Ravi must go”. It is also known that Sirisena had sounded several ministers including one or two I know, for the job.

But they turned it down just as Prime Minister Wickremesinghe’s reported approach to at least four persons including I am told former high commissioner to Malaysia Rosie Senanayake for the post of High Commissioner in London were turned down just as those who Sirisena sounded for the finance ministry turned down the offer.

This reshuffle seems like the man they wanted out of the job was not being removed but provided with pre-Christmas goodies. Where in the world would you find a foreign minister given functions that have little or nothing to do with foreign affairs such as running lotteries.

It surely requires a tour de force of the imagination that institutions such as lotteries boards, mahapola scholarship funds and ancillary aspects of the plantations industries are connected with foreign affairs unless it is somebody’s dark humour to demean the foreign ministry.

If media reports that Ravi Karunanayake demanded – or is being presented with additional duties because of his exemplary performance as finance minister, whatever others might say I think it is eminently relevant that he be allocated such money-losing institutions like SriLankan Airlines which investors run away from at the first mention of the name of the national career.

It has also been reported that the new foreign minister – wonder of the Asia-Pacific – now handling (or perhaps manhandling as it could well turn out to be) a new ministry would also find the Securities Exchange under his belt which of course is a highly appropriate thing to have.

But why the Socratic thinkers who worked out such magic formula to appease the deities or whoever demanded that the pack be shuffled to remove some of the cards and card sharpers, did not gift Foreign Minister Karunanayake with overseeing the Treasury Bonds really is a cause for great worry. In fact he should have had the Central Bank attached to the foreign minister portfolio.

Those who are laughing their sides out at the Foreign Minister overseeing the lotteries boards have missed the point entirely. The fact is that he can now make use of the country’s diplomatic missions scattered around the world to sell the lottery tickets as one Sri Lankan jokingly (I hope) said the other day.

We know of course that little productive work is done in several of these missions. Capable and experienced officers are languishing in them because they have no work or no important work is assigned.

In his travels round the world Karunanayake would have realised this. It might be said for the now reassigned Mangala Samaraweera he knew what was happening in some of our missions but his hands seemed to have been tied.

Now Karunanayake can make use of officials sent to our missions to stand on the streets of their respective capitals and hawk lottery tickets. I mean they can earn their keep by doing something more lucrative than, for instance, being deployed to cut the grass in residency lawns.

It is reported that Foreign Minister-elect had asked for an immediate report on the composition of our missions even before he set foot in his Republic Square office.

Apparently it is Prime Minister Wickremesinghe who has asked for the report. Surely in his frequent travels abroad Wickremesinghe who is fast earning the reputation of the most travelled PM in the shortest time, must know some of those who are heading our embassies, high commissioners and consulates.

Karunanayake will soon find some of them cosying up to him making requests for extensions of service for them or their junior officers who they have taken to their bosom. These things have happened in the past and will happen in the future as relationships with the minister are built or strengthened.

One wonders of course why our leaders want to know about our ambassadors and high commissioners. After all they are the very people who appointed them making some strange choices that should never have happened.

All they need to do is look at the cvs of our great diplomats that should be available with the high posts committee in parliament. How some of them got through that committee is another of the wonders of Asia. One always wondered what educational and professional qualifications some of them had.

One supposes that like so many of our elected (and non-elected) representatives they may not have gone beyond the GCE ‘O’ Level – that is if they got that far.

It appears that the report is also to look into other diplomatic and non-diplomatic staff in our missions. That would really require a thorough study not a cover up to appointments made and extensions of service given to undeserving persons sometimes two or three extensions in the same posting as has happened several times.

This deprives others deserving of overseas postings being sent out, a practice the minister should stop before it turns into a bigger joke. Among other issues perhaps the PM is trying to identify dual citizens and non-Sri Lankan citizens holding office or in various positions in our missions. That should reveal some very interesting facts and should not buried for the sake of protecting people.

It was said many months ago that Singapore would help restructure our foreign ministry. As far as I know Singapore does not recruit foreign nationals as confidential secretaries to their heads of missions because it is a sensitive position. I know this well from my personal interactions with high ranking Singaporean diplomats.

How could foreign nationals be permitted to handle confidential correspondence between a head of mission and the foreign ministry or between missions unless of course nothing confidential ever passes from the mission to the ministry?

There will surely be requests and appeals to the new foreign minister from lackeys, unqualified and unsuitable friends and relatives to be posted to our foreign missions. One hopes that he will not fall prey to this demeaning the quality of some of our missions still further.

This government is well known for appointing commissions and committees to inquire into various issues and calling for reports at the drop of a hat. Some of the reports of these appointed bodies seem to end up in the attic of forgotten things without the public ever seeing them.

If the report of our foreign missions now called for is to serve any purpose and the public is to be made aware of it, this report should not end up the same way. There are sizeable Sri Lankan communities in most countries where we have missions. It is not enough that these communities to be asked to help Sri Lanka and appeals are made for them to return to what was once their home if they are ignored when it comes to making use of their knowledge and experience in writing the report. After all they are people who interact with the missions on official business.

If they are denied such opportunities then Sri Lankans will have to resort to their right to information which this government made into law. So the report must be available for public scrutiny.

This story was originally published by The Sunday Times, Sri Lanka

Overawed by the May Day public display of support for their political opponents and even for their partners in government and perhaps exhausted by their own efforts to convince the people that promises made two years ago have not been forgotten, our ruling elite seem to have forgotten one important event.

The government will seek high standards in media through the establishment of an independent media commission says Deputy Minister Parliamentary Reforms and Mass Media Karunarathna Paranawithana

Usually presidents, prime ministers and ministers in charge of media would issue statements on World Press Freedom Day extolling their own virtues in safeguarding media freedom, how they have battled to preserve it or revive it after years of suppression and have stopped the physical and mental harassment of journalists.

But this year even those platitudinous words from political pulpits were absent. At the time of writing this column on Thursday night (London time) I checked the official websites of the president and prime minister who tend to move onto centre stage whenever there is a major national or international event that calls for a paragraph or two celebrating or commemorating it. After all, this government has often celebrated with words the great media victories it has won for us, extirpating the vicious maltreatment that went before.

Alas! I found none. There are, of course, the naïve and the ignorant which would discourage the media from delving too deep into their websites in case we discover their idiosyncrasies and lack of clarity. Despite such attempts at bureaucratic and diplomatic obfuscation we searched even the website of the Minister of Parliamentary Reforms and Mass Media, who, as the minister in charge should have recognised the importance of the world event and issued a statement on behalf of the country if the president and prime minister were too exhausted after participating in Labour Day activities though our May Day has little to do with workers, unlike when there was a strong left movement. Today workers serve one purpose — filling the sites of the rallies to which they are often transported at the expense of political parties.

Curiously enough even that usually loquacious secretary to the ministry seems to have taken a vow of silence which some might say is not a bad thing after all given some earlier encounters. Finally I managed to uncover a statement made by the Deputy Minister of Mass Media Karunarathna Paranawithana. However this record of government achievements in safeguarding journalists and their rights was not made in Sri Lanka but in the Indonesian capital Jakarta where a conference was held in connection with Press Freedom Day.

Some might even say that the government is trying to distance itself from its earlier commitment to media freedom by talking of its achievements in safeguarding that freedom by ‘selling’ these tales abroad instead of at home. Admittedly, it is more difficult to do so at home where the perennial platitudes are accepted with as much alacrity as the garbage that has been accumulating over the years at Meethotamulla.

“The government will seek high standards in media in Sri Lanka through the establishment of an independent media commission said Parliamentary Reforms and Mass Media Deputy Minister Karu Paranawithana addressing world press freedom day conference in Jakarta on May 3.
The Government is also committed to the cause of journalist safety and all efforts will be taken to end impunity, Mr. Paranawithana said addressing the panel on Journalists Safety and Tackling Impunity.

We are slowly but gradually moving towards ensuring full media freedom in Sri Lanka, he added,” reported the ministry website.

For the edification of those participants who are not fully acquainted with government media policy and related issues it would surely have been beneficial all round if the deputy minister had spelled out what this independent media commission is all about.

How does this commission work and how is the government going to seek to raise high standards in the media. Is this independent commission going to be truly independent or is it going to turn out to be another stalking horse that will stamp its hooves on criticism and dissent?

That is the crucial question here. Not what the government claims the commission is but what it will be in practice — another body to oversee the media under a more innocuous title.

“The government was successful in implementing RTI laws in Sri Lanka and the same inclusive procedures will be adopted in bringing in laws on media regulation,” the Deputy Minister reportedly said. Admittedly, the RTI law was a progressive measure and one should be thankful for seeing it through. But this rosy picture is already beginning to fade as it is being challenged.

Last Sunday, this newspaper carried two items — a news report by Namini Wijedasa and a column by the papers Legal Affairs commentator that exposed the surreptitious means by which the government has managed to smuggle into the Counter Terrorism Act (CTA) offences such as the one relating to “confidential information” by simply tampering with words in the earlier draft, intended it would seem to convince the European Union to approve GSP Plus status for Sri Lanka.

But, as Namini Wijedasa points out, this undermines the much-touted Right to Information Act. Wijedasa wrote: Confidential information has a broad definition under the CTA policy framework. It includes: “Any information not in the public domain, the dissemination of which is likely to have an adverse effect on national or public security.”

“Questions now arise on the position of the CTA against the Right to Information Act, also enacted by this Government, which denotes that public security is not a ground to restrict information. The RTI Act only permits information to be withheld on the grounds of “national security, defence of the State or territorial integrity”. This means that the proposed CTA now contradicts the RTI Act. It would also prevail over the RTI Act because the draft CTA states that once enacted it will have priority over past laws, she wrote.”

Legal Affairs columnist Kishali Pinto Jayawardene provides a more detailed analysis of how the government has tried to sneak in dangerous definitions of offences under the Counter Terrorism Act which it pretended to drop because of earlier objections.

Space does not permit me to quote at length Ms. Pinto Jayawardene’s column but it must be read in full to understand how the government is trying to hoodwink the country and the European Union by showing a more benign face when in fact it is subtracting from the progressive legislation it has already enacted.

This contagion of deception, lies and hostility to journalistic freedom and independence is now spreading beyond Sri Lanka’s shores where even diplomatic missions seem to believe that they should deny journalists access to information and contact, thus trampling on the right of the media to seek information under the RTI law.

Last month, the Institute of Commonwealth Studies held a two-day conference in London, co-sponsored by the Asian Affairs Magazine, on the theme “The Commonwealth and Challenges to Media Freedom”. A paper by Kishali Pinto Jayawardene was presented on the increasing concern in Sri Lanka, particularly regarding the faltering progress in enacting a Right to Information law and the impact of a recently proposed counter-terror law on freedom of expression.

As a founder-member of the Commonwealth one would expect Sri Lanka to be represented at diplomatic level, not only because it is a subject of concern to the Sri Lankan government which has expressed on numerous occasions its commitment to media freedom and the safety of journalists, but because of the presentation on Sri Lanka which was an embarrassing expose’.

This conference attracted many experts from diverse fields but all interested in media freedom. Much could have been learnt on the importance of the media’s role even in promoting trade, which today is a priority area for the government. For those who are unaware of the Commonwealth’s Latimer House Principles it would have been an opportunity to add to their storehouse of knowledge, which seems to have plenty of vacant space these days.

But then there must be a will to participate and a desire to learn how to deal with the media and how to use it as an important adjunct to the democratic process, not shun it because of ill-advice or ignorance, as the conference so patently conveyed.

This story was originally published by The Sunday Times, Sri Lanka

So it is May’s day. Prime Minister Theresa May who pledged that she will run her course as Prime Minister and dismissed the idea of an early election did a rather sudden u-turn. Those who remember the Margaret Thatcher era would recall her October 1980 conference speech when she told those waiting “with bated breath” for a Thatcher u-turn “You turn if you want to. The Lady’s not for turning”. She was punning on the title of the Christopher Fry play “The Lady’s Not for Burning”.

Politics in Britain as well as in Sri Lanka, until quite recently called the “Miracle of Asia” by tourist blurb writers with little imagination and no respect for facts, have come a long way since Thatcher’s words rocked the conference hall with laughter and applause that October day.

When Mahinda Rajapaksa called a presidential election two years ahead of time it was said that two persons influenced the decision. One was his favourite astrologer and the other brother Basil who made a quick exit from the country after the Mahinda lost the election pleading mea culpa or words to that effect.

Britain’s Prime Minister, Theresa May last week announced an election three years before the scheduled date. REUTERS/Leon Neal/Pool

Theresa May’s announcement last week of an election three years before the scheduled date had nothing to do with stellar movements but the political constellation at home, and possibly in the European continent, the orbit from which she is trying to detach Britain.

The Fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011 passed during the time of a Conservative-Lib Dem coalition led by Prime Minister David Cameron, states that from the 2015 parliamentary elections would be held every five years. However an early election could be triggered only if the government is defeated in a “no confidence” vote or if 2/3rds of MPs vote for an early election.

Theresa May who became Prime Minister following David Cameron’s resignation after losing last year’s referendum on whether to stay or leave the European Union, was determined to stay the whole term during which her government would negotiate the best terms on which to quit the EU.

Her problem however was that a small group of Tory backbenchers who are opposed to the UK pulling out of the EU could prove troublesome during the negotiations and be damaging and even dangerous when she had only a slender majority in parliament.

There was the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) calling for another referendum on Scotland’s future, sniping at the Tory’s from the flanks in Westminster. Just last month the Scottish Parliament voted in favour of a second independence referendum that would have only added to May’s woes as she struggled to convince Europe over the terms of UK’s exit from the Union.

And there was the Labour Party, the main enemy, facing the May government in the Commons but in a state of disarray with a lackluster leader still mouthing socialist shibboleths and trying to win the voters with more promises that would be hard to keep.

Theresa May saw the looming political landscape and decided the time was nigh to call an election before things began to fall apart. The latest polls showed that the Conservatives were 15-20 points ahead of Labour and who could blame her if she struck first like any political party would, making use of the prevailing political circumstances to its advantage.

Most probably she would win with her call for a stronger and united nation. But would she get the kind of majority that would strengthen her hand at home and give her greater leverage in the negotiations with the EU. While that is what she is counting on, the fact is that people here are getting more and more disgusted with politics and politicians just as voters in Sri Lanka are tired of the mounds of broken promises by politicians which are climbing as high as the mountains of garbage accumulated in Meethotamulla.

If May’s broken promise on regular elections might be excused as political expediency, there is a trail of other promises in the manifesto that seem to be falling by the wayside and leaving a trail of discarded pledges as the Tory Party does what is has always done – the shift of power to the wealthy and the already powerful.

While there are several manifesto pledges that now seem to have been binned, the most recent and perhaps the most serious as far as Chancellor Phillip Hammond’s political future is concerned is the dropping of a key budget proposal concerning national insurance contributions.

One is reminded of several proposals by UNP Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake in the 2016 and 2017 budgets that ran into trouble after President Sirisena and the SLFP had second thoughts about their impact on the country.

To speak of the Conservative Party of the UK and the UNP of Sri Lanka in the same breath is not unusual. They are comrades-in-arms (well not exactly comrades) in the International Democrat Union (IDU), that grouping of centre-right parties inclined to favour the rich and the powerful who are their biggest donors.

So dumping manifesto or election pledges may seem natural to the UNP whic promised the country a whole raft of political goodies at the presidential and parliamentary polls in 2015 only to betray the people before long.

The country was assured of good governance. Even if the UNP did not coin the word ‘yahapalanaya’ it certainly joined in celebrating the new form of government that was going to clean the country of corruption, nepotism, cronyism and a multitude of other sins practised by the ruling family and its associates before the yahapanites occupied the seats of power.

Why, this government was going to be cleaner than white sweeping away the abuse and misuse of power, refrain from wasting public funds, keeping the cabinet to manageable numbers and a host of other pledges that would indeed have made Sri Lanka the Wonder of Asia.

The wonder is that a desperate people, longing for change after years of abuse by the ruling clan swallowed the promises that were never intended to be fulfilled and voted for politicians who were no strangers to breaking promises.

Hardly had the new president assumed office when UNP leader Wickremesinghe’s nominee as Governor of the Central Bank was embroiled in a bond scandal which still reverberates as the report of a commission of inquiry looking into the circumstances which led to what is purported to be an unprecedented scam is anxiously awaited.

Those who were scandalized – or so it was said – by nepotism seemed unmoved when the UNP finance minister planted his brother-in-law in high office in the Insurance Corporation until one day the corporation had two CEOs.

Those who complained about the country’s fiscal deficit and promised to tighten the purse strings – at the expense of a struggling citizenry – had no qualms at all about liberally spending public money on luxury cars for MPs and some public servants and upping their allowances while burdening the people with increased VAT.

VAT, if one might say so, a tragedy the last two years has been despite a somewhat freer democratic atmosphere for dissent and criticism. After the administration of the national carrier under the previous government ran into stormy weather this government appointed a committee headed by Attorney J.C.Weliamuna to inquire into SriLankan Airlines. The Weliamuna committee’s report pinpointed maladministration, abuse of privileges, misuse of funds, and several other acts where even diplomatic vehicles were misused and unpaid for cargo space utilised to dispatch packages to the presidential secretariat.

But the current chairman of SriLankan Airlines, appointed by the UNP palanites, and some other members of the board decided to ignore allegations of sexual misconduct and other abuses made in the Weliamuna report. The promises made to bring to justice the killers of Lasantha Wickrematunge and Wasim Thajudeen and those responsible for the abduction and assault of several journalists is dragging on with political lip service paid occasionally to the victims apparently to show some concern to a public angry over the attempts to stall the investigations.

The public was told that billions of dollars of public assets were robbed and efforts were under way to bring them back to the country. Instead what we are witnessing is the FCID being told not to stick its nose into procurements made after 2015.

Why? Is it because more dirty linen will be uncovered and the yahapalanaya’s Mr. Cleans will themselves have to be sent to the cleaners?

If Theresa May broke a promise about not calling early elections, it is no great shakes. At least there are sufficient checks and balances in the British system to keep its politicians along the straight and narrow though there are instances of a few overstepping the declared limits.

But eventually they have to pay the price unlike in Sri Lanka where the public pays the price for electing representatives who hardly have a formal education and others who have taken refuge in politics fled at the first sign of a public exam.

Politics means different things to different people. To most who take to politics in Sri Lanka it is a well-paid job that rakes in more than the entitlements. Why strain yourself trying to pass exams when MPs get duty free vehicle permits which can be sold and ever-increasing perks for making promises at the behest of party leaders which one knows will be broken.

It is our politicians that make Sri Lanka the Miracle of Asia.

This story was originally published by The Sunday Times, Sri Lanka