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S. Ratnajeevan H. Hoole
To ignore and suffer Champika’s madness?
To ignore and suffer Champika’s madness?
By
Sri Lanka Guardian
•
December 09, 2012
•
Champika Ranawaka
Interview
opinion
S. Ratnajeevan H. Hoole
•
Ranawaka, Rio Ice Cream and Sinhalese Bread: Rajapaksa Contrasted with Andrew Jackson
| by S. Ratnajeevan H. Hoole
( December 9, 2012, Washington DC, Sri Lanka Guardian) Hon. Champika
Ranawaka, our Minister of Power and Energy, has authored an op-ed piece (The Nation, Nov. 25) that is quite mad.
Titled “Blatant attempt to justify ethnic cleansing in North,” it made me naturally
think, given his extremist politics,
that he wanted to rid the North of us Tamils – but no, he was alleging the
North being cleansed of Sinhalese.
In arguing that Jaffna
has been ethnically cleansed, he queries why Jaffna is still deprived of
Sinhalese bakery food although, he avers, a sales outlet for Jaffna’s famous Rio
ice-cream is in Colombo.
For an engineer running an organization raking in over Rs. 100 bn and
managing some 800 engineers, his logic is faulty. For life is a lot more than
bread and ice-cream. If he comes to Jaffna, he will see bread by Sinhalese at
the supermarkets. Indeed, the supermarkets, the army, the navy, the police,
luxury buses, the banks, the Moratuwa steel furniture and its hawkers, and the
government itself – almost everything is from the South. At his Electricity Board,
when the Tamil Deputy General Manager (North) retired, Ranawaka moved his
Sinhalese replacement’s station out of Jaffna to Anuradhapura although his work
is mainly in Jaffna.
We Tamils of the North are the only people in Sri Lanka without our own provincial
government. All our ministers are from the South except for one man who is
wanted for murder.
Living Anywhere
in Sri Lanka
Ranawaka makes much of the 2012
census listing “231,318 Tamils in [the] Colombo district and 106,318 in [the] Colombo
Municipal area alone.” He then argues that these figures “bear clear testimony
to the fact that there is no ethnic problem in the southern part of Sri Lanka.”
Obviously he has not heard of Tamils having to sign their statements in
Sinhalese at Colombo Police Stations, the navy harassing fishermen in Nachikuda
and tearing up their nets, and home-guards taking over Tamil lands in the East.
The most flawed is his argument where Ranawaka admits to traditional
homelands which Urumayists do not let us claim: “Tamils can live in any part of
Sri Lanka whilst the Sinhalese and Muslims are not allowed the basic right of
settling down in their respective historical villages and townships.” Tamils
and Muslims as peoples who have been subject to multiple persecutions,
rampaging mobs, and wild armed forces of the state, need state protection. But
the Sinhalese as the majority wielding all powers of state institutions need no
protection. One cannot speak of the Sinhalese and the minorities as if we are
equals.
Some Tamils do live in Colombo by choice because of its economic
attractions. Many Sinhalese do not live in Jaffna because it is an economic
wasteland, thanks to the army and LTTE, and the development policies of
successive governments since independence. Indeed, no one today stops Sinhalese
from living in Jaffna. Since the 2002 ceasefire the only ethnic cleansing there
has been of Tamils from our lands for Buddhist temples, security zones, and the
army and foreign companies to do business. In the Vanni abandoned lands
alienated before the 50 acre reform limit and on which destitute Tamils have
settled and lived for decades, are being reclaimed for southern and foreign
companies, throwing out without any judicial process those living there with
rightful claims. Even lands owned by Tamils with deeds have been sold by a
beloved government MP.
When I was on the UGC there was a fundamental rights case that was
conflict-ridden. The child of a prosecutor who had just moved to the apex court
was involved and the AG had declined to defend the UGC, leaving that to the
private bar. And when the Supreme Court ordered more medical admissions as
expected, we had to send some to Jaffna for lack of any other place.
The Sinhalese on the UGC readily recognized that Sinhalese students would
go there and within a year say they cannot live there and ask for a transfer to
universities with better degree recognition. This would create problems at the
already over-crowded southern medical faculties. So the UGC decided that if students
subsequently transferred to other universities, their degrees would be issued
by Jaffna using credit transfer. (The UGC was usurping Jaffna University’s
powers; that is the nature of colonial governance). But that has not stopped students
from lobbying. As I write, there are reports that the disturbances created by
the Army at Jaffna University are being used by Sinhalese students there to leave!
Provincial Elections Promised:
So Cancel Provincial Councils
Ranawaka further argues
against holding provincial council elections in the North on the grounds that “Without
re-establishing the ethnic composition and the demographic balance that
prevailed in 1971, to hold such an election will constitute a great injustice
towards the Sinhalese and Muslims.”
Provincial Council
elections having been promised for September, Ranawaka is making the case for
not having a Tamil chief minister: he has already argued that the 13th
amendment should be nullified (so that there will be no provincial council to
hold elections to) and now he is arguing that such elections, if held, would be
an injustice.
By his argument any
election in Sri Lanka without the return of the estimated 300,000 Tamils who
fled to Canada, 200,000 to the UK and lakhs to India and other parts of Europe
would be a great injustice. The UPFA which has broken all democratic norms –
most heinously by scaring judges from rendering independent judgments – can
stay on in power forever without elections.
Presidents
Andrew Jackson and Mahinda Rajapaksa
With the impeachment of our
Chief Justice and the need to enforce and obey the judiciary’s rulings being
denied in parliament, we are reaching the point where US President Andrew
Jackson’s acerbic allusion to the separation of powers between the judiciary
and the executive no longer seems funny. Jackson was a crude military man to
whom is wrongly but easily attributed the word OK by his detractors. It is said
he would minute papers put to him by his aides with OK, thinking that “All
Correct” is “Ole Kurrect.”
Early in nineteenth
century US, the lands of Native Americans were being eroded by land-hungry
Whites, just like Tamil lands today. Jackson used the army to throw out the
Indians and take over millions of acres. Like in Mullivaikal, Jackson’s time
was characterized by murder and pillage of powerless minorities.
The crisis came to a
head in Georgia when the legislature claimed jurisdiction over the Indian tribes
and their lands, and the Indians were forbidden from bringing suits against
Whites. Similarly if our President has his way, soon our Supreme Court would
routinely refuse leave to proceed on many fundamental rights cases. The
government has got so arrogant that, according to the Daily Mirror (Dec. 4),
it asked the Speaker to take action against UNP MP Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe for
legally challenging the parliamentary process to impeach the Chief Justice.
In landmark judgements
in 1831 and 1832, US Chief Justice John Marshall held that the relevant Georgia
laws were “repugnant to the constitution.” But with Jackson’s blessings
Georgians defied the Supreme Court decisions as in our parliament today.
This was when Jackson
issued his defiant comment in constitutional thuggery: “John Marshall has made
his decision; now let him enforce it.” Here Parliament ignores requests of the
Supreme Court which has no executive authority to enforce anything!
Living in twenty first
century Sri Lanka, we are cruder than Jackson’s nineteenth century America. A
murderous, pillaging government is making sophisticated use of the law in an
utterly unethical but lawful misuse of constitutional provisions. With both
presidents, despite their sanguinary records, their citizens are sanguinely
defensive of them.