Change we can’t believe in

By Lucien Rajakarunanayake
The Writer, Media adviser to the President Mahinda Rajapaksha

(January 23, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) We are just two days away from January 26, 2010, a very significant day in the Sri Lankan calendar; one of great hopes for its people who wish to see the full fruits of peace and freedom achieved after nearly three decades of terror, Yet, this is too close to January 20, 2010, the first anniversary of the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States of America. It is an anniversary that would not have done much to bring hope and assurance to the candidate in Tuesday’s Presidential Election, who is peddling Obama’s slogan of “Change We Can Believe” with hardly any concept of the full meaning of political change.

Overplayed slogan

Sarath Fonseka’s by now hackneyed and overplayed slogan of a “Vishvaasaneeya Venasa” - “Change we can believe” had its biggest blow from the State of Massachusetts in the USA, which chose the first anniversary of the Obama inauguration to defeat the Democratic candidate in the late Senator Edward Kennedy’s constituency and elect a Republican to fill the Kennedy vacancy.

As one perceptive correspondent for a leading news service described the record of Barack Obama at the end of his first year in office, it was not “Change, We Can”, but “Change, We Can’t”.

This is indeed a reminder of the danger that awaits those who borrow slogans from a different world and use them here, with the satisfaction of repetition, and no content attached.

If it has taken Barack Obama one year for the American people to see how hollow his promise of change has been, it has taken barely a month for the people of Sri Lanka to realize the hollowness of the change that Sarath Fonseka, and the motley, unchanging crowd of bankrupt politicians around him are offering the people of Sri Lanka.

In the language of politics, change is a movement forward. It is never a movement backwards. A movement for change cannot be one that is meant to revive the dying hopes of the politics and politicians of despair, even with the help of a discarded general’s uniform.

The true change that our people seek, without the word being bandied about with an abundance of vague and unreal promises, is not a move towards the politics of hatred, after all the horrors of terrorism that was built on hatred; but rather it should be the politics of renewal and revival, which are the true expectations of peace.

For those who were chanting the empty slogan of “Change” and trying to give credence to it with an abundance of rumour, invariably without even the flimsiest connection to truth, last week was one of great disenchantment. It was the long awaited time of exposure, when an edifice of lies came tumbling down, and the Fonseka Corps were left looking more like Humpty-Dumpty after the big fall.

Fonnie Gate

Early in the week there was the exposure of the attempt to bribe a member of the NFF with a massive heard of money to cross-over to the Fonseka camp that went awry, to put it mildly. For the first time in Sri Lankan politics there was a real political scam exposed. Given the size and scope of our politics this Fonnie Gate was as big as or even bigger than Watergate in the USA.

From before and through the week was the damning evidence, without the need for any signed documentation, of the definite understanding reached between the Fonseka Cabal and Sampanthan and the TNA. Although the demand to reveal the secret pact is still ringing aloud, one does not need such evidence to realize that the TNA’s reason for agreeing to support Fonseka was because, and only because, he and his band of strange allies had agreed to what Mahinda Rajapaksa had refused.

Sampanthan says he presented the same demands to both candidates, and that Rajapaksa refused to accept them. One does not need the genius of an Einstein or even a lesser rocket scientist to deduce that why the TNA cast its lot with Fonseka is because he had agreed to what his rival had refused. The TNA gives no other reason, compelling or not.

Dangerous twist

And, although, it is convenient for those fanning Fonseka’s winds of so-called change to claim that communalism is being resurrected by the Rajapaksa campaign, it is undeniable that by embracing the former proxies of the LTTE, who have yet to shed or change their own stripes, Fonseka has given a new and dangerous twist to the politics of Sri Lanka.

Issues that could have been left for quieter negotiation later have now been laid open, and the wounds of war, instead of being healed are threatened with being re-opened.

Dancing the tango with those who have yet to apologize to their own people, the Tamils of this country, for all the travails brought upon them by the vociferous and active support of the terrorism that held them in thrall for so long, cannot help in any process of reconciliation - which is the vital need of today.

It is easy for the forces and their agents that kept braying about genocide when the battle against the LTTE and its terror was on, to surface again, with new asinine shouts about the rise of communalism and racism, without a single mention of the fact that the TNA has not altered even an iota from the racist position it took when acting in concert with the LTTE.

And, whatever talk of change Fonseka may use, embellished with his battlefield experience, it does little to tell the world that his hugging of the TNA is nothing but the embrace of opportunism, and a far cry from any change that can be believed.

The Swan Lake today is a coalition of the impossible. On the one hand there is the very pro-capitalist UNP, not regretting anything of its former policies of solely private sector and market only-led growth; even in the face of the world’s biggest economic crisis, when socialist policies are being used to save the face of capitalism. On the other are so-called die hard leftists, waving a red flag of convenience, allegedly supporting a system where the State is the dominant force in economic development, supporting the same military man, he who has promised to fill prisons like Augusto Pinochet did in Argentina.

How this twain shall meet is a question that Fonseka cannot and would dare not try to answer. But as each day passes by and the swan song of the retired general gets louder, and more vulgar and crude, it is obvious that the contradictions in the Swan Lake are much bigger than any of the similarities.

I come back to January 20 - that disastrous anniversary for the Obama’s promise of Change that Fonseka is wearing thin today. It was left to Gotabhaya Rajapaksa at Swarnavahini’s Rathu Ira program, to demolish Fonseka with his own words, about the leadership given by Mahinda Rajapaksa in the battle to defeat terrorism. This is what Gotabhaya Rajapaksa quoted from what Sarath Fonseka, still in uniform, told the Indian Defence Review of the reasons for the success in the battle against the LTTE.

“It is the political leadership with the commitment of the military that led the battle to success. We have the best political leadership to destroy terrorism in this country. It was never there before to this extent.

War victories

The military achieved these war victories after President Mahinda Rajapaksa came into power. He, who believed that terrorism should and could be eliminated, gave priority do go ahead with our military strategies. And no Defence Secretary was there like the present Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa who had the same commitment and knowledge on how to crush the LTTE. Finally, they gave me the chance of going ahead with the military plan.”

There is much more of Fonseka own words, not the uncouth language of desperation and hatred of today, but the language of the officer he once was. To read it now is to hear him shamelesly chomp his own words. (Visit http://www.info.gov.lk/www.info.gov.lk of January 21, 2010 - “1st Fundamental of Victory against terror”) There’s much more there to read about the shameless duplicity of this man who claims to be the epitome of honesty, with a promise of change, which rings so hollow, as to forfeit any trust with which he launched his campaign. And, there is a good deal of corruption about him too, that can easily penetrate his current body armour made of a veneer of falsehood. Sri Lanka can well do without such types even masquerading as leaders to be. The time is fast approaching when such a sanctimonious humbug is driven beyond the wilderness of politics.