by Tisaranee Gunasekara

“The black cells will dry up and die Or sing with joy and have their way.”
Jorge Luis Borges (Cancer Cells)

Last week Beijing went into shutdown mode. Children were housebound, factories and worksites closed and cars disallowed on roads. The reason for this three day state of emergency was not a terrorist threat but extreme air pollution. A foul smelling and tasting smog enveloped the city rendering the very act of breathing life-threatening. The Beijing Times very appropriately called it ‘Airpocalypse’. China was infamous for a growth model which completely ignored environmental concerns. The payback time has arrived.

According to a new scientific study, if climate change continues at the current pace the Gulf region will ‘suffer heat waves beyond human endurance’ after 2070. The temperature hikes in the region might even interfere with some Hajj rituals, warns Prof. Elfatih Eltahir of MIT: “One of the rituals of Hajj…involves worshipping at the site outside Mecca from sunrise to sunset. In these kinds of conditions it would be very hard to have outside rituals.”

At the 2010 Copenhagen Climate Summit, Chinese obstruction played a major role in preventing a global carbon mitigation treaty. China did not want any deal which would impede its rampaging economic growth. Today its fabled economy is in crisis and over 70% of its population exposed to pollution levels above national regulatory norms

Oil rich nations in the Gulf region, led by Saudi Arabia, have long opposed climate deals which would affect their petro-dollars. Activists are accusing Riyadh of sabotaging a Paris Climate deal which seeks to set a long term temperature goal of 1.5C. The Arab Group was the only bloc which opposed this limit and many environmentalists see Saudi bullying as the primary reason.

Global climate change and internal pollution have a disproportionately devastating impact on small countries like Sri Lanka. A larger country might be able abandon a highly polluted area as uninhabitable but for countries like ours, that option does not exist. And though we cannot play a major role in reducing global climate change, we still have the capacity to reduce national pollution levels. That, in fact, was one of the main promises of both President Maithripala Sirisena and Premier Ranil Wickremesinghe at the January Presidential election.

President Maithripala Sirisena is the Minister of Environment and no fault can be found with his many utterances on the subject. The problem is how the words are translated into action – or not. The best case in point is the issue of the pollution of the Kelani River, the source of drinking water for many people in the Western Province. In recent weeks, the authorities have taken legal action against several river-polluters. This is a commendable development. Unfortunately, action is being taken only against small scale polluters, mostly householders. Large scale polluters, such as the Coca Cola Company which released a pollutant into the river twice this year, continue to stay above the law.

The devastating effect of the Chinese growth model in China is a good enough reason to take a careful look at such Chinese inspired projects as the Colombo Port City. Environmental devastation was one of the arguments used against this project by the UNP, while in opposition. Mr. Wickremesinghe is on record promising to scrap it, once elected. Now the onetime critics are silent and there are indications the project will resume next year.

Why are the former critics of the Port City silent? Does it mean that they were wrong and the Rajapaksas were right about the desirability of the project?

Or are they silent because they have been bought, with campaign funds and other goodies? Was no action taken against Coca Cola because of American pressure? Has Mahinda Chinthanaya taken over Maithri Palanayak?

The practice of catching a few sprats while allowing sharks to go free is not limited to environmental matters but common to many areas, starting with corruption. This discriminatory treatment is tarnishing the government’s reputation, turning its declarations of good governance into a mockery and providing aid and solace to its opponents.

‘War Heroes’ and Justice

The Rajapaksa way of protecting ‘war heroes’ and punishing Tigers was extremely discriminatory. The main criterion in deciding who should be protected and who should be prosecuted was the stance on the Rajapaksas. Those Tigers who became Rajapaksa pets went free while those ‘war heroes’ who opposed the Rajapaksas were persecuted. A ‘war hero’ didn’t have to be a political opponent of the Rajapaksas to suffer this fate. A senior military intelligence official who got into a fight with Minister Mervyn Silva’s reprobate son was hounded, made to incriminate himself and dishonoured.

Many Tamil men and women were locked up without charges for years, while the chief financier and arms procurer of the LTTE and Vellupillai Pirapaharan’s handpicked successor became a privileged citizen. Mr. Kumaran Pathmanathan alias KP remains free because the AG’s Department is reportedly unable to find any evidence against him.

That was how the Rajapaksas protected ‘war heroes’ and prosecuted Tigers.

The military is a microcosm of the society it comes from. Lankan society has been experiencing a ceaseless wave of violent crime at least from 2006. The fact that murder and rape proliferate does not mean every Lankan is a murderer or a rapist. There have been several incidents of uniformed men committing crimes against ordinary citizens, including child rape, even outside of the North and the East. This doesn’t mean that all military men are criminals; it merely means that some are. And they should be brought to justice, irrespective of their war record or the ethnicity of their victim.

The demand by the Rajapaksa camp that no action should be taken against members of the armed forces for any crime committed during the war years is grotesque and dangerous. The uniform shouldn’t place its wearer above the law. It does in practice, especially in lands where the rule of law is weak. But it shouldn’t become policy or be enshrined as an inviolable maxim. That is the sort of impunity the Rajapaksa camp is demanding when they say that no one who took part in the victorious war effort should be prosecuted for any crime.

Except Sarath Fonseka (and others like him) who fell foul of the Rajapaksas.

Sri Lanka’s international woes stem not from the war against the LTTE per se, but from Rajapaksa politico-propaganda antics. The Rajapaksas renamed the war a humanitarian operation and decreed that zero-civilian casualties be accepted not as a desirable goal but as living reality. Even mentioning the possibility of any harm coming to civilian Tamils became equated with treachery. This policy prevented the admission of ‘collateral damage’ caused by human error, something no war, however clean, is free of. Had the Rajapaksas done what the Americans did after the air strike in Kunduz, Sri Lanka would be in a much better position today – investigate at least some of the charges, admit human errors where warranted, apologise and pay compensation.

Unlike in the case of Kunduz, the civilian victims after all were our own people.

Then there were crimes such as the killing of five students in Trincomalee in 2006. A case was filed in a Lankan court, but the regime interfered in the judicial proceedings while the military threatened witnesses and families of the victims. Egregious deeds such as these debased Lankan justice system and totally destroyed its credibility in the eyes of Lankan Tamils.

It’s when governments fail to act justly by their own people, those people turn to outside entities and forces for justice.

Now the Rajapaksas are trying to gain political mileage from the problem they themselves created. Any attempt to deliver justice to any Tamil will be depicted as a step against Sinhalese. Like Donald Trump in the US or Marine Le Pen in France, recreating a sense of victimhood in Sinhala-Buddhist masses was and continues to be a pivotal Rajapaksa tactic.

It can work, if living costs and unemployment do not decline, if living conditions of ordinary Lankans do not improve.

Extremists usually make gains when an economy is in crisis and ordinary people fear for their future. What was true of the Nazis in Germany can be true of the Rajapaksas and their BBS type allies in Sri Lanka.

A New Politico-Ethical Bind

Christopher Clapham identified “the lack of organic unity or shared values between state and society” as the “single most basic reason for the fragility of the third world state”iv. Fidelity to Sinhala-Buddhist supremacism (masquerading as patriotism) and idealisation of the military were the ‘shared values’ the Rajapaksas exploited to create and maintain an ‘organic unity’ between the Lankan state (under their near absolute control) and Sinhala society.

Good governance was supposed to fulfil the same function for the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe administration. The basic premises of good governance were to become the shared values between the new government and that segment of society which voted it in. Since good governance was depicted and seen as the dividing line between the Rajapaksa regime and the new Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government, its basic premises included eschewing the main aspects of Rajapaksa governance such as corruption, nepotism, repression, anti-democracy, anti-people economics and ethno-religious racism.

In 2013, a former journalist paid a call on President Rajapaksa in the dawn hours and reportedly found him standing on his head. Upon inquiry, the President replied, “We have done so many good things. The opposition cannot see any of them. So I stand on my head to see how I could see the country in that position.”

Perhaps President Rajapaksa failed to read the danger signs in late 2014 because his vision was topsy-turvy.

Is the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe administration becoming afflicted with topsy-turvy vision as well?

How else can the Central Bank bond scam seem kosher and the outrageous acts of nepotism from the president downwards seem just and necessary?

Cleaning the muck of Rajapaksa rule is no easy task. Adding to the muck can only make that task harder. The Augean Stables would never have been cleaned if Heracles kept on adding more cattle to the existing herd.

Credibility is the lifeblood of any administration. No party can hold onto power (or win power) without credibility. The Rajapaksas lost power because they lost credibility with their base. If there is too much of a gap between words and deeds, no amount of spin-doctoring or media control can prevent the erosion of credibility. And without credibility, elections cannot be won, even with unprecedented levels of power-abuse and unlimited amounts of money.

Courtesy:Sunday Island