Rotten egg is now in his pocket

"Rajpal’s argument is “now we are in paradise.” My argument is that all human rights violations that started in 1978 still continue. These violations did not start with Kumaranathunge or Ranil Wickramasinghe, it started with Dicky, who took upon himself the protection of his position while destroying the whole nation."
_______________

(a reply to Rajpal Abeynayake)

By Basil Fernando

(August 20, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Rajpal Abeynayake, true to his style, has been able to write another long harangue without even referring to the main argument I raised against him. The argument is that so long as the 1978 constitution exists, nothing can get better in Sri Lanka. The source of all violations of human rights is the country’s paramount law, which Rajpal Abeynayake, sometime back when he was sober, said. He said that the option we have in Sri Lanka in presidential elections is to select our dictator. The rotten egg that I referred is Sri Lanka’s constitution and the title, “Rotten eggs never get better” meant that so long as this constitution exists, nothing will get better.

Rajpal’s argument is “now we are in paradise.” My argument is that all human rights violations that started in 1978 still continue. These violations did not start with Kumaranathunge or Ranil Wickramasinghe, it started with Dicky, who took upon himself the protection of his position while destroying the whole nation. That destruction still continues with the present executive president. If there is going to be some other executive president without the change of this constitution on all its fundamental aspects, that new president will also continue Dicky’s destruction.

Why does Rajpal have to create an impression that things are improving in the country? For whatever reason has he even forgotten what happened to the 17th Amendment? Just to remind him for when he is sober, the parliament of Sri Lanka, with rare uninamity, passed the 17th Amendment in order to undo even in some little way the destruction caused by the 1978 constitution which handed over absolute power to the executive president to the detriment all the national institutions in Sri Lanka.

Is Rajpal saying that our national institutions have now become better? Just today, even the president himself had to acknowledge the utter collapse of the policing system in Sri Lanka, and even the opposition, which has contributed a lot to the destruction of this policing system, had to raise some questions in parliament about the present situation as reflected by extrajudicial killings of criminals and many hundreds of similar incidents to the assault of Nipuna Ramanayake and the murders of two boys at Angulana.

What has gotten better? Some journalists receive perks when others are killed. One journalist’s leg is broken so that he cannot walk to demonstrations and his fingers are smashed so that he cannot write. Is that the way things have gotten better? Only someone who has gotten so blind to the continuous destruction of the whole nation that can take so much trouble to convince others that things are not as bad as they appear, and to look at the brighter side of things.

Rajpal’s perspective is a narrow, party-political perspective. The perspectives that I have seen expressed by Pinto Jayawardena in her regular columns in the Sunday Times, in many articles she has published including a recent book on the decline of the rule of law in Sri Lanka, have been written from a perspective of a lawyer who is well informed on the international law on human rights. Her reflections on constitutional matters, as well as human right issues, are based on a solid foundation of law and human rights norms and standards. If anyone finds that this is not the case, they could show where her law is wrong and where the principles of human rights that she is relying on are wrong. I do not expect Rajpal to do this, and to my knowledge no one else has attempted to do that so far. Rajpal claims he has a readership. So does Kishali Pinto Jayawardena, and many others. What is to be said of anybody who can scribe the same sentence many times within the same article but that they are unable to answer to the simple issue, which is, to repeat deliberately, that the destruction of the nation by failure to undo the 1978 constitution continues also under President Rajapaksha’s regime and till that remains the case, nothing will get better.

To be a humbug is to pretend that one is writing a reply when one is in fact avoiding the very question that has been raised to him.

As for the issue of disappearances, there are three people who have continuously and extensively written on this: MCM Iqbal - who was a civil servant and a secretary to some of the Commissions of Inquiry into Forced Disappearances - Kishali Pinto Jayawardene, and myself. My book on forty families of the disappeared, under the title “An Exceptional Collapse on the Rule of Law – told through stories by families of the disappeared in Sri Lanka,” was published in 2004 (202 pages). A website which I took the initiative to create is entitled Cyberspace Graveyard for the Disappeared www.disappearences.org , and records over 16,000 cases of the disappeared; there is also a monument at Seeduwa exhibiting about five hundred photos of the disappeared. These are some of the work to which Pinto Jaywardene has also contributed.

Now I think I will in fact read what Rajpal writes because I am sure, as his reply shows, his other writings will be a continuing source of amusement.

Related Links:

Rotten eggheads never get better

Rotten eggs never get better (A reply to Rajpal Abeynayake)

Rice-fed rascality?

-Sri Lanka Guardian