Mahinda Rajapakse and Sarath Fonseka : Heroes or Charlatans?

'The war was won, at a cost that is still incalculable. Clearly the Rajapakses believed that the victory entitled them to limitless power (limitless in terms of time and extent), with popular backing. President Rajapakse was hailed as the High King, an assertion which implied both omnipotence and dynastic succession.'
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By Tisaranee Gunasekara

“The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Did he not even have a cook with him?” - Brecht (Questions from a worker who reads – The Svendborg Poems)

(November 28, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) It was a colourful spectacle, gigantic by Sri Lankan standards, mating state resources with new technology for enhanced effect. Complete with songs, dances, speeches and a short film, the November 15th SLFP Convention was a carefully choreographed event which left nothing to chance; even the moments of seeming spontaneity were well coordinated acts of drama. This gaudy extravaganza (which is believed to have cost the tax payer Rs. 9 million) had but one purpose – the creation of a new political myth, of Mahinda Rajapakse as the Leader-Hero-Saviour of the nation.

Item after item hammered home this central message. President Rajapakse did it all; President Rajapakse will do it all. It was no one but he who won the war; he is the only one who can develop the country; he is Sri Lanka and thus fidelity to him is the only true patriotism. The flowery words and the adulating comments enunciated a political idea based on the leadership principle – the leader infallible and omniscient, the leader as hero and seer, manager and saviour. This new political credo redefines Sri Lanka as a country of one nation, one people, one leader; patriotism is loyalty to the one leader who embodies the spirit of the one nation and expresses the will of the one people. It implicitly transfers the sovereignty of the nation and the people on to the leader, ‘the king who does not feel like a king’ as the introductory oration for the star item of the event, the speech by Mahinda Rajapakse, put it.

An important sub-theme of the event was the right of the Rajapakses to the leadership/ownership of the SLFP, with SWRD Bandaranaike and DA Rajapakse recast as Fidel and Raul, as the creator and the natural successor of the party. A line of descent was thus drawn from DA the father to Mahinda the son, and the principle of dynastic succession for the Rajapakses established. Thus the ‘leadership principle’ is conjoined with a belied in dynastic succession, to create the necessary fundament for the Rajapakse project of absolutist Familial Rule.

High Stakes

The Rajapakse project is based on a quid pro quo – majority Sinhala backing for a dynastic rule in return for winning the war and restoring Sinhala dominance over Sri Lanka. Consequently the future of not just the Rajapakse administration but also the broader Rajapakse project rested on the outcome of the war. The willingness and the ability to take on the Tigers was what made Rajapakse administration acceptable/bearable for a good part of the Southern electorate, including those who were distressed by many of its other attributes, from rampant corruption to violent intolerance. What made the Rajapakse administration sui generis was its readiness to wage a Sinhala supremacist war against Tiger fascism, at an enormous cost to civilian Tamils and to Sri Lanka’s future.

The war was won, at a cost that is still incalculable. Clearly the Rajapakses believed that the victory entitled them to limitless power (limitless in terms of time and extent), with popular backing. President Rajapakse was hailed as the High King, an assertion which implied both omnipotence and dynastic succession. The ‘King Mahinda’ refrain was begun by the state media and government politicians; the Southern masses, intoxicated by the victory over the LTTE, concurred with this elevation enthusiastically. At an official ceremony to honour war heroes, Rajapakse listened with complacency, to a song hailing him as the High King and a divine gift to the nation. The true nature and purpose of the Rajapakse project emerged in all its megalomanic nakedness in that moment of supreme triumph.

The Rajapakses seemed to have believed that defeating the LTTE would be tantamount to a blank cheque, which will give them the right to do (or not do) what they will to the country, with the full backing of the Southern masses. They seemed to have thought that by winning the war they fulfilled their side of the bargain with the electorate; that the rest would be plain sailing and the populace would allow them to do as they pleased. With such a mindset, hubris reigned supreme and excess became the norm.

But as weeks turned into months and the peace dividend so confidently expected by the Southern masses did not materialise, a sense of mild discontent began to emerge. There was as yet no political challenge, but the possibility that the public would permit economic discontent to guide their electoral decisions in the not so distant future could no longer be discounted. The regime tried to counter this ‘patriotic fatigue’ resulting from economic overdetermination in different ways. One was to maintain that the Tiger threat (including suicide bombers) still remained, as assertion totally at variance not only with reality but also with the regime’s own triumphalist claims soon after the war. The other was to have early Presidential election, before the rice and curry issues totally superseded any other concern in the South.

With a Presidential election expected in early 2010, the need to remind the public about Rajapakse’s central role in winning the war assumed a new intensity. Rajapakse needed to be casted, repeatedly, as the Hero who saved the nation from the Tiger menace and the nation needed to be reminded, repeatedly, that it owed a duty to him and to his family. Given the centrality of ‘winning the war’ claim to the very existence of the Rajapakse project, a contender in that area was totally unaffordable. As the re-enactment of the war at the SLFP convention indicated, there were the people, there were the Armed Forces and there was Mahinda Rajapakse; and that was the trinity which defeated the Tiger menace. In this official interpretation there is no room for any other individual to claim even the slightest credit for winning the war.

This was the context in which the collapse of the war time triumvirate of Mahinda and Gotabhaya Rajapakse and Sarath Fonseka happened. When Fonseka, irritated by the posturing of the Rajapakse brothers, staked his own claim to the role of pre-eminent hero of the Eelam War, the Family was alarmed. After all Fonseka was doing more than trumpeting his own heroism; he was challenging the very basis of the Rajapakse project, the raison d’etre for their continued existence in power. If Fonseka, and not Rajapakse, is the pre-eminent hero of the war and thus the real saviour of the nation, why keep Rajapakse in power? With a Presidential election in the offing, Fonseka’s increasingly strident dissent would have seemed extremely threatening to the Rajapakses.

This was perhaps the rational kernel of the Rajapakses’ Fonseka phobia. Ironically this overwhelming fear about Fonseka’s future choices turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Since the Rajapaskes could not afford to tolerate even a potential competitor in that arena which is their sole claim to power, they looked askance at Fonseka with nary a reason and moved to clip his wings with precipitate haste. Fonseka, an impulsive man with an enormous ego, a man as intolerant of dissent and disobedience as the Rajapakses themselves, seemed to have felt insulted. Both parties therefore played into the hands of Mangala Samaraweera and the JVP, waiting in the wings, for a chance to revenge themselves on the Rajapakse brothers, who used them to win the Presidential polls and then discarded them, once they had outlived their uses.

With Fonseka as the common oppositional candidate, the Presidential election will turn into a duel between the President and the Army Commander who defeated Vellupillai Pirapaharan. Both candidates have only one real qualification – winning the war. Consequently the Presidential election campaign is likely to be turned into a series of verbal skirmishes, as the candidates try to undermine each other’s right to claim a lion share of the credit for defeating the LTTE. And with each charge and counter-charge, they will reveal that rhetoric apart, their main concern is neither country nor people, but their own advancement, at whatever cost.

Infantile Battles

This week Fonseka filed legal action, asking for extra protection and for the deed to a piece of land granted to him by the government for winning the war. The Army Spokesman accused Fonseka of keeping extra men and vehicles over and above his allotted quota. The Military Police tried to remove some of these extra vehicles in the middle of the night but left after Fonseka objected. Ven. Uduwe Dhammaloka accused Fonseka of being part of a conspiracy to bring an international military force to Sri Lanka. Fonseka has also being accused to permitting his son-in-law to make money through weapons contracts, even though all military purchases were centralised by the Rajapakse administration under Lanka Logistics and Technologies Ltd (Set up in 2006 this state owned company had several ex-officio share holders – Defence Secretary and Finance Secretary with 100 shares each; the CDS, the Commanders of the three Forces and the IGP with 1 share each. Consequently if any corruption in weapons purchases happened, all share holders and the government itself are culpable, rather than one individual). Going by these indicators, the country may be in for the unedifying spectacle of the three men who led the victorious war against the LTTE squabbling like children over land, men and vehicles, and trading infantile charges.

The Fourth Eelam War was fought under cover of secrecy; using legal and extra-legal methods the government prevented stories about corruption in the armed forces and human rights violations by the armed forces from coming to light. As the Defence Secretary baldly informed some dissenting media personnel, “You are criticizing the military and its Commanders. You are attacking (Lieutenant General) Sarath Fonseka who has committed his life for the past 18 years to waging a war. He had a narrow escape (following a suicide bomb attack). When we have committed our entire lives, you are attacking us. This is no laughing matter. Tell me one thing you have done for this country compared to Lt Gen. Fonseka. He is loved by the soldiers. They can cause harm…... Don’t you understand what I am trying to say? If you don’t agree and continue with what you are doing, what has to happen to you will happen. There I no necessity to have defence columns to discuss military matters. Laws will be introduced to restrict reporting on the conduct of the military or on Commanders of the Armed Forces. The military will campaign for such laws. We can see whether the voice of the military is stronger than the campaign of the journalists…. I am definitely not threatening your lives. I am not. It will happen from where it happens. Our services are appreciated by 99 per cent of the people. They love the Army Commander (Lt. Gen. Fonseka) and the Army. Those who love us do what is required. We cannot help that” (The Sunday Times -1.6.2009).

Fonseka, the super patriot of yesteryear, is on his way to become the arch traitor, simply because he has joined the opponents of the Rajapakses. He in turn will accuse his former political leaders of the same crime, because they no longer support and indulge him. As the two sides engage in these verbal shenanigans, the electorate in general and the ‘war heroes’ on whose backs the Rajapakses and Fonseka attained their glory may realise that it was not about country and the nation but about political ambitions and personal egos. If those revelations help open the eyes of the people about the true nature of their leaders and their heroes, the democratic system will emerge the winner.

-Sri Lanka Guardian