Finally, the manifestos!

By Kath Noble

(January 20, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) After a month or so of the kind of campaigning that would have been better conducted in a boxing ring, with padded gloves and a referee to point out the numerous punches landing so painfully below the belt, Mahinda Rajapaksa and Sarath Fonseka have released their manifestos. Serious reflection on the choice facing Sri Lanka is now possible.

Voters, of course, haven’t minded the delay. They don’t read them anyway.

This occurred to me as I was leafing through ‘A Brighter Future’. When have I ever read a manifesto? Not at home in the UK, that’s for sure, which is the only place I get to vote. Like most people, I know what the parties stand for and decide accordingly. Listening to speeches and reading about the exploits of the candidates and their hangers-on is entertaining, and I do it with considerable enthusiasm. Plodding through however many pages of a policy document is another matter. It’s boring and I can’t imagine it having any impact on my decision.

I’d probably behave in the same way if I could participate in the election in Sri Lanka. There’s no sense in pretending that I’d be carefully studying the promises made. I already know who I’d support.

For the record, it’s Mahinda Rajapaksa.

This isn’t because I think he’s a great guy. Far from it, he has always reminded me of Tony Blair, the Prime Minister who dragged my country into killing a whole lot of innocent people in Iraq on the basis that a taxi driver overheard a couple of Saddam Hussein’s military commanders boasting that their Weapons of Mass Destruction could destroy us in 45 minutes –– the most famous claim in the intelligence dossier that now looks dodgier than the sheriff of Dodge City. Like Tony Blair, Mahinda Rajapaksa has proved himself to be capable of doing the most awful things whilst grinning from ear to ear.

Nor is it for any of the reasons that his propagandists have been trying to foist on us in the last couple of weeks. It’s great that he won the war, but let’s club together to buy him a nice gift rather than have people express their gratitude at the ballot box. Choosing a leader is about the future.

I hope the future won’t include a war crimes tribunal, so I have some sympathy for the argument that Sarath Fonseka is playing into the hands of the Tiger diaspora with his determination to get back at his former boss. G0oing about saying that the Defence Secretary called for the murder of people who ended up dead and only later adding that field commanders ignored the order definitely isn’t cool. It also makes me wonder how smart he is, if he thinks he could escape censure despite having been the Army Commander at the time.

However, the suggestion that his deal with the Tamil National Alliance is akin to consenting to Eelam is ridiculous. Whatever you think about releasing LTTE cadres, reforming the Prevention of Terrorism Act and removing High Security Zones, you really have to be paranoid to equate them with fulfilling Prabhakaran’s dying wish.

It’s a bit hypocritical, of course. We all know that Sarath Fonseka was the one who insisted on tough security measures after the war ended, including detaining the Vanni IDPs.

I would vote for Mahinda Rajapaksa because I think he’s the most likely to implement the kind of development programme Sri Lanka needs, or something approaching it.

A lot has been said about the imaginative promises made by Sarath Fonseka, who intends to slash taxes on a range of items like petrol and gas and do away with various revenue streams from businesses - in the surely vain hope that they would then increase the wages of their employees - while drastically increasing the public sector wage bill, compensating people affected by the collapse of unregulated financial institutions and so on. The sums don’t add up, and his suggestion that clamping down on corruption and waste will cover it is far too vague to be taken seriously.

Even if he were serious, are these really priorities? I can think of a lot better things to do with Rs. 10,000 per month than give it to a civil servant, for example. Such people have secure jobs and pensions. The same goes for his other ideas. If a Sarath Fonseka administration is going to be about handing out cash, at least let it target slum dwellers in Colombo, people still without homes after the tsunami, villagers in remote areas of the deep South and Mullaitivu farmers.

Mahinda Rajapaksa knows that these people exist and acknowledges that they deserve the attention of the Government. Whatever you think of disasters like Mihin Lanka and the international airport for Hambantota, you have to admit that he has spent money on the needy as well.

He kept the economy going, even during the war.

Meanwhile, there can be no question that Sarath Fonseka will find it much harder to get anything done. He is relying on the support of the UNP and JVP, who will never agree on anything other than getting rid of their mutual enemy.

This wouldn’t have been an issue if he’d stuck to a campaign based on abolishing the Executive Presidency, of course. The kind of development programme he’d want to implement and how he was thinking of getting it done would be irrelevant if he were staying on in a purely ceremonial role. We could have postponed discussion of the economy until it came to choosing Members of Parliament. That would have been fine. I might even have felt like backing him.

Given the history of undertakings to do away with such powers once acquired, it would probably have been foolish to trust him in any case. Sarath Fonseka got into politics, let’s not forget, because he was annoyed at not having been given more responsibilities as the Chief of Defence Staff. Having made it quite clear in the last few weeks that he doesn’t want to confine himself to foundation laying ceremonies and charity work, having any hope that he would feel inclined to limit his position after the election is quite peculiar. What the JVP says about Parliament legislating without his consent would only succeed if they could get a two thirds majority, and only the most optimistic amongst us could imagine that the UNP would give up a president they could rely on to be on their side.

I don’t believe that dealing with the economy is the most important task. I’m singling it out purely because I think it’s the only thing the candidates would attempt to tackle.

Reconciliation is more urgent, but you’d have to be hugely naive to believe that either of them was planning to take it seriously. Both Mahinda Rajapaksa and Sarath Fonseka are hopeless.

Going by everything we’ve heard him say about the war, it’s ridiculous to suggest that Sarath Fonseka is the more enlightened, as his propagandists have been doing of late. Need we drag up that quote about Sri Lanka belonging to the Sinhalese? At least Mahinda Rajapaksa knows that this is not something he should say in public, whatever he thinks.

In this and a number of other ways, Sarath Fonseka is looking ever more like George Bush. The less said about him the better.

It’s almost as stupid as arguing that he is the most likely to put an end to the so-called white van culture. I simply don’t know how people who accused him of being behind the attacks on journalists can suggest that Sarath Fonseka will be the one to end such things.

This is hardly a ringing endorsement of Mahinda Rajapaksa’s vision and experience, but that’s the way it goes in an election. Voters simply have to decide who they prefer.

It also brings us back to the manifestos, finally.

Reading them, you might not even realise that there had been a group called the Tigers. You would certainly not imagine that there were any political questions to be answered as a result of the war, only practical difficulties in getting people back to their homes and restoring infrastructure.

Mahinda Rajapaksa does at least use the words Tamil and Muslim, neither of which are to be found even once in ‘Believable Change’, but nothing is said in either policy document about the Thirteenth Amendment or any other reforms. Sri Lanka has been united by force and it is going to have to stay that way by force too, they seem to be saying. It’s profoundly depressing.

This is just a reminder of how much work has to be done outside the campaign.

If the thousands of people we now see participating so eagerly in rallies, stuffing our email inboxes with photos of their man and putting up illegal posters and billboards, shouting at length on radio and television, running around the country organising meetings and beating up their opponents and burning their property would dedicate just a fraction of that time and energy to something a little more meaningful than simply getting Mahinda Rajapaksa or Sarath Fonseka elected, there might just be hope.