Mahinda is prolonging the agony

Photo: President Mahinda Rajapakse (right) and his brother Gotabaya Rajapakse (Defence Secretary)

By: R Jayadevan

(October, 28, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) It will be two years since Mahinda Rajapakse was elected as President of Sri Lanka-this is one third of his six years term as President. Unfortunately predicament of Sri Lanka is still proceeding like a bottomless pit with no light visible even at the far end.

For the past two years, the President did not waste his time in turning Sri Lanka into his family run fortress. He is the leader of the state! Constitutionally he is the Commander in Chief of the armed forces!! He has appointed himself as the Finance Minister!!! What more? Many more senior positions are held by his brothers, family members and close friends.

Being the commander in Chief of the armed forces, he is extending the unrewarding and the dangerous war agenda like his predecessors. The only reward he is able to reap is unending deaths, destruction and the ravages of the war that has been felt on the civil society. As the Finance Minister, he is progressively leading the country into economic decay. He will reveal his budget details in on the November 7th. With the severely constrained economic circumstances, how he will be responding to the average mans difficulties and uplift the economy considering the need to allocate more resources to extend the war agenda aftermath of LTTE’s Anuradhapura attack will be closely watched. And he has further by meddling with the judiciary, brought disrepute to the legal syatem. Is Sri Lanka progressing towards full scale anarchy?

The nation is crying in agony, but the President is not willing or unable to understand the pain. The indifference shown by the President is no different to the French Marie Antoinette telling the hungry people to eat cake when they were unable to buy even a loaf of bread and also comparable to King Nero of Italy playing with his fiddle stick when Rome was burning.

His leadership is progressively taking Sri Lanka from decay to degeneration and the day to day basic survival of the average citizen is becoming pathetically scary.

Photo: The second most powerful man in Sri Lanka Basil Rajapakse, the brother of the President. He took office as appointed Member of Parliament recently.

Rule of law is the country is encountering severe battering. There are widespread human rights violations, rampant corruption and inaptitude of the government to deal with the many decade old burgeoning Tamil problem. The President is a victim of his self making visionless agenda and is another leader who will go in the books as not willing to find ways to bring the Tamils into the political mainstream. This single most issue of not accommodating the Tamils into the socio-polito-economic mainstream is rotting the country politically, socially, economically and militarily.

President Rajapakse has symptomatically consolidated his powerbase by giving scant regard to good governance, accountability and transparency in his management of the affairs of the country. The past two years have seen manipulative politics being heavily practised under his leadership with the only objective to preserve his hold in power without taking the route to engage the people in a positive manner to deal with issues seriously and to progress the country towards better future.

Intoxicated with power, the President is resting on the rocking boat without realising it can get into serious trouble anytime over wide varieties of reasons. His credibility of holding on to power is only centred on his apparent and only agenda of fighting to defeat the LTTE. His government is overwhelmed by some victories achieved against the LTTE recently and is unable to take a visionary path to find a political end to the conflict.

As the Commander in Chief of the armed forces, he remains horribly exposed over the display of dead LTTE cadres in the scavenge carriers of the local authority aftermath of the LTTE attack at the Anuradhapura Airforce base. The denial of such display by the government official and attributing the blame on the media as they were manufactured stories is very nauseating and confirms the inability of the government to deal with factual matters honestly, sincerely and in a responsible manner.

However, the government has initiated investigations on this degrading conduct and time will say whether this too will be another façade and is an instant response to an international outcry.

President’s attitude is causing serious concerns even for the Tamil political leaders who support the government. Mahinda went out of the way to tamper with the judiciary to nullify the north and merger reached under the Indo-Sri Lanka agreement in 1987. His recent comment that he is only representing the Sinhala constituency proves his inability to present him as a statesman to represent all the people even though he has been elected with the Southern Sinhala votes, whilst remains accused of being a party to the LTTE effort to deprive the Tamil people in the North from voting in the Presidential election. The victor in this election manipulation is the LTTE and it was able to play its triumph card rightly two years ago to extend its unmitigating war agenda which has helped the President to extend his majority Sinhala agenda.

The President may claim the government was able to change the status quo in the eastern Sri Lanka. This could not have been achieved without the single most factor of Karuna breaking away from the LTTE and creating the favourable conditions for the government to stretch its authority in the area. Though people of east are enjoying relative peace, the government is under watchful eyes how it is going to progress to establish democracy and fair play in the East without overtly or covertly engaging in programmes to extend its established Sinhalisation policy in the area.

The interest the political pundits had in the All Party Representative Committee (APRC) is rapidly loosing grounds and it is progressing like a melting pot engaged to whittle down any reasonable resolution Tamils could accept. APRC is proving to be another white elephant post independent Sri Lanka has seen since 1948. It is used as a mechanism to extend the government’s game of procrastination to counter any pressures that it is not seriously making effort to find a political resolution to the conflict.

The President by extending his Sinhala agenda is helping the LTTE, which does not want a resolution to conflict. He like his predecessors is giving indefinite and absolute authority to the LTTE to run its affairs in the north and even extend to the east in due time. The Tamil people too are unable to reject the LTTE outright because the post independence governments of Sri Lanka including the present one have ominously failed to address the plaguing Tamil crisis in a responsible manner.

Having committed himself to the war agenda, the President is finding it hard to take a u-turn in the direction to find peaceful resolution to the conflict. Any peaceful resolution has to be democratic and transparent politics and it will not suit the LTTE as its very existence will be threatened under such circumstances.

Both Mahinda and Pirabakaran are heads of mechanisms that make them survive on extremism and violence.