In response to a call by the Opposition and civil society to lift the state of emergency and to repeal the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) in consequence of the end of the war, the Leader of the House Nimal Siripala de Silva informed Parliament last Tuesday, 26th May 2009, that the Government has no intention of doing so at present. The stated reasons are that the threat of terrorism continues, remaining LTTE cadres in hiding need to be weeded out, and investigations regarding those already in detention are incomplete.

This is a predictable and even unsurprising response from the government, because as students of states of emergency will know, the present government is acting in broadly comparable terms with both …

continue reading

My critique of the Ministry of Human Right’s report on its preparations on a future National Human Rights Action Plan (NHRAP) has drawn the kind of contumacious response from one ‘Trigger Happy’ (hereinafter ‘Trigger’), which in Sheridan’s England may have resulted in a dual at Putney. That may not be perhaps the wisest thing to do with someone calling himself trigger happy, and indeed, is no insurance against his retention of the recently advertised ‘White Van Pest Control’ service, but some aspects of his overeager and substantively superficial intervention require rebuttal.

Exactly a year ago today, a week before the Royal-Thomian, the journalist J.S. Tissainayagam went into the TID to enquire after his friends who had been taken in for questioning the previous day, and promptly walked into a monstrous nightmare that continues to date. After months of agonising uncertainty and delay, roughshod abuse of process by the TID and a deplorable judicial refusal to enforce procedural rights fundamental in a democracy by the Supreme Court, he was finally charged last year under that ghastly blot on our legal landscape, the PTA. Tissa thereby won the suspect distinction of becoming the first journalist to be prosecuted for PTA offences arising directly out of the practice of his profession.

In proof that …

continue reading

As the much hard-sold elections to the Eastern Provincial Council came to an unseemly and acrimonious conclusion last week, it was already becoming abundantly clear that its political and constitutional ramifications may well turn out to be anything other than what the government’s triumphalist claims would have us believe.

Perhaps the most disturbing political upshot of these elections was the sharp and violent polarisation of ethnic and religious communities in this most pluralistic of provinces. Electoral politics was conducted unashamedly as a form of antagonistic communal competition and outbidding, paralleling without much overstatement that nonpareil of political disintegration, the general elections of 1956. In the years before the watershed of 1956, the gross ineptitude of Sir John Kotelawala’s UNP with regard …

continue reading

The constitutional reform debate in Sri Lanka is in a particularly enervated state as we approach the Sinhala and Tamil New Year, with a government in power that displays that bizarre concoction of procrustean infantilism that so characterised the Jayewardene and Premadasa attitudes to constitutional government and democracy: its thinking juvenile, its methods menacing. This has, in turn, lent a degree of respectability to secessionism it would not otherwise enjoy in world opinion. In fact, the supremacist ethno-nationalism which is at the ideological core of this government, and the simple-minded and unreflective obstinacy with which its dictates are pursued, raises a question that is at the heart of the liberal theory on self-determination and secession, but which Sri Lankan liberals, …

continue reading

As the major military onslaught against the LTTE gathers pace to the accompaniment of increasingly jingoistic rhetoric of ruling party politicians, bureaucrats and military top brass, Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka finds itself at a critical crossroads. What may or may not happen in the battlefield this year is still a matter of conjecture, in spite of the bellicose rhetoric of both parties. Faced with the military resolve of the State and the seeming apathy of the international community in respect of any form of intervention, what is also clear, however, is that Tamil nationalism appears to be running out of ideas at the political level. The paucity of political ideas and their articulation in constitutional and legal claims to …

continue reading

The year 2007 in Sri Lanka began with little hope for a revival of the peace process, and therefore also for constitutional reform, and it ends with similar prospects on either of these issues in 2008. The military conflict has intensified between the government and the LTTE, with either side now seemingly committed to, for the want of a better phrase, a fight unto the death.

For the government, this means an exclusively military policy aimed at the total defeat of the LTTE, including the elimination of its leadership. There is little sign that this policy also involves a political settlement addressing the core political causes of the conflict, entailing fundamental reforms to the constitutional order so as to remove the …

continue reading

When John Stuart Mill wrote his seminal essay of the same title as this column, he set out, elegantly and persuasively, the foundation for much of the political liberalism of the next two centuries all over the world. He was, however, the member of a society and citizen of a country that gave the world the Magna Carta and parliamentary government, and continues to extol, celebrate, and practice the ideal of human liberty as its central and inalienable value. Last week, the UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, decided to tackle his recent trough in the polls by making a major speech at the University of Westminster on the subject of liberty. In it, he promised a new Bill of Rights …

continue reading

Much has been said and written about the UNP’s supposed abandonment of federalism during the past week. Much of it completely misses the point. Whatever are the politics and motivations behind the UNP’s statement, in terms of the substantive contours of a possible constitutional settlement it delineates, there is nothing to suggest that the party has abandoned the federal idea as a method of power-sharing in a negotiated peace.

The statement sets out the objectives of conflict resolution and constitutional reform as addressing the grievances of the Tamils, meeting the concerns of the Muslims of the North East, and assuaging the fears among some sections of the Sinhalese that devolution would lead to separation. The fundamental principles of such a negotiated …

continue reading

This columnist has been associated for the past several years with that much-maligned minority that can be broadly labelled ‘liberal federalists’ on the question of peace and constitutional reform in Sri Lanka. Allowing for individual nuances of emphasis and premise, Sri Lankan liberal federalists are those who have advocated (a) a negotiated resolution to the ethnic conflict (b) along the lines of a federal-type constitutional settlement that accommodates the secessionist ethno-territorial Tamil minority in the North and East (c) within a united Sri Lanka through regional autonomy and power-sharing at the centre. The key assumptions of this worldview are that a politically liberal conception of a unified Sri Lankan citizenship is both possible and desirable, that this notion of citizenship …

continue reading

Unveiling his political vision for a ‘new Sri Lankan order’ this week, Mangala Samaraweera challenged Sri Lankans to envision a better future. Dare, he said, to dream which, as a rallying cry in these miasmic times, has an even more piquant ring to it in the Sinhalese ‘Sihinaye Abhiyogaya’.

The SLFP-Mahajana Wing’s discussion document is remarkable, both for its length, breadth and depth, and the fact that it has been produced by a Sri Lankan political party. Ideological conviction, articulacy, ideas, and policy debate – in short the pith and substance of democratic political leadership – are not things usually associated with the Sri Lankan political culture, and certainly not with its political parties. Yet this is …

continue reading

On 27th June 2007, Tony Blair leaves office after a little over a decade as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He leaves office a reviled figure, largely due to the widespread unpopularity of his decision to support the United States in the invasion of Iraq, and its continuing disastrous consequences. Nothing could be further from the aura of almost angelic invincibility that he exuded in May 1997 when he swept into office on a historic landslide and the worst post-war electoral reversal for the Tory party. It is ironic that Iraq should be Blair’s nemesis, given that it was in fact an extension of an interventionist foreign policy, a willingness to use armed force against gross human rights …

continue reading

News from Sri Lanka had been disquieting for the last several months with the escalation of conflict, the collapse of the rule of law and the protection of fundamental human rights. It was also becoming clear that the government was rapidly taking leave of its senses and losing sight of any moral compass that it may have possessed.

That, however, did not prevent widespread double-takes and sheer incredulity that greeted the Neanderthal antics reported today, of the expulsion of Tamil people of North-eastern origin from Colombo, enforced, SS-style, by the police. It is possible to cite chapter and verse the violation of international human rights and humanitarian law as well as Sri Lanka’s own constitutional rights that this kind of executive …

continue reading

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
– George Orwell

As an example of monumental irrelevance for the cause of peace in Sri Lanka and as a testament to the awesome political bankruptcy of this government, it is hard to beat the May Day 2007 document released by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), purporting to be its constitutional reform proposals. It has, to paraphrase Ferdinand Mount, all the intellectual oomph of a tranquillised vole. Reading through the document, disbelief gives way to perplexity, and eventually, to hilarity. Perhaps never in the history of the Sri Lankan conflict has such a measly offering of constitutional primitivism been made …

continue reading

Uvindu Kurukulasuriya’s inaugural piece in Groundviews is an aptly Niemölleresque exhortation to greater civic responsibility in the defence of political freedom, civil liberties and the Rule of Law. It comes at a time when Sri Lanka is once again returning to a ‘Bheeshana Yugaya’, the previous experiences of which should have toughened the resolve of Sri Lankans to never allow a repeat. It appears, however, that rather than resistance, that experience has inured Sri Lankans to serial abuse much like a tragic case of battered wife syndrome.

I would like to offer some further parallels in addition to the historical ones that Uvindu mentions in his article. In September 1930, Hitler was called to testify at a trial of three …

continue reading

The statement of the LTTE marking the unhappy 5th Anniversary of the CFA is a remarkable document. Admittedly, one has to get used to the slightly disconcerting effect of talon, tush and claw of the snarling Cholan tiger that leaps at you through a ring of bullets and rood of bayonets from the top of every page. But as necessarily a partisan account, it is rather a well-stated case.

It seeks to give a comprehensive account of events of the past six years or so; engages international humanitarian law in its critique of the conduct of the government and the international community; reiterates central principles of process such as parity of status, balance of power, and international guarantees (and also, by …

continue reading

Ranil Wickremasinghe made, I think, what he thinks is a speech of statesman-like prophesy, not to mention dignified grace in the face of political cuckoldry, when Parliament reconvened this week following the reshuffle farce. In this he warned of dark times ahead, where “We will witness in the coming weeks an increase in the violation of human rights, deterioration of good governance, spread of corruption, undermining of democracy, and the rising cost of living.”

For all our sakes, and for the sake of democracy in Sri Lanka, we hope that Mr. Wickremasinghe sees his role as more than a mere Cassandra – with the Apollonian gift of prophesy but without the power to persuade – in the face of the insufferably …

continue reading

The Morning Leader (31st January 2007) carries a report of the first press conference given yesterday by the Hon. G. L. Peiris M. P., the new Minister of Export Promotion and International Trade, since he crossed over to the government. In this he is reported to have, to put it tartly, rubbished the significance and import of the Oslo Declaration of December 2002, which he was instrumental in producing. The Declaration appeared to articulate the framework of a politically negotiated constitutional settlement around an asymmetrically federated, united Sri Lanka. Stressing that constitutional concepts such as federalism are ‘mere words’ which have ‘no clear definition and are indistinct at best’, he states that effectively what he and other actors in …

continue reading

Rajavarothayam Sampanthan M.P. (TNA/ITAK, Trincomalee District) gave Sri Lankans a wistful and even poignant glimpse of the ghost of parliamentary democracy a fortnight ago, when he delivered an incisive exposition of the arguments for the merger of the Northern and Eastern Provinces in the debate on the de-merger in Parliament. The speech was a three-fold argument that contains a masterful restatement of the historical dimensions of the merger. It also critiqued the reasoning of the Supreme Court’s decision, the gravamen of which was a mooted procedural flaw in the original merger, as well as the domestic and international political considerations applicable to the issue. The latter included the undertakings of the State under an international agreement, the Indo-Lanka Accord of …

continue reading

At the empennage of ghastly and gruesome 2006, the Majority Report of the Experts Panel was dismissed in these pages as inadequate, predictable and hesitant. In the light of what has gone on since then – the Minority Report, the JVP’s withdrawal from the APRC, the escalation of conflict and human misery – amidst the loathsome baying of the jackals of supremacism (crescendo, fortissimo), however, it would appear that that was too harsh a judgement to pass. Indeed on that same occasion, the Majority Report was construed, in its best light, as a broad statement of principle around which the saner political forces of the South could coalesce. As appears from the excerpts published in the Morning Leader today, Tissa …

continue reading