{"id":83955,"date":"2024-04-28T01:11:27","date_gmt":"2024-04-28T05:11:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=83955"},"modified":"2024-04-28T04:51:04","modified_gmt":"2024-04-28T08:51:04","slug":"the-unholy-row-between-cardinal-malcolm-ranjith-and-ex-president-gotabaya-rajapaksa-regarding-the-easter-sunday-attacks-by-home-grown-jihadists-on-21-april-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=83955","title":{"rendered":"The \u201cUnholy \u201cRow Between Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith and Ex-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa Regarding the Easter Sunday Attacks by Home Grown Jihadists on 21 April 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

By<\/p>\n

Kishali Pinto-Jayawardene<\/strong><\/p>\n

An (un)holy row has erupted between Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, head of Sri Lanka\u2019s Catholic Church and former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa regarding \u2018who said what\u2019 in the aftermath of the Easter Sunday attacks on April 21st 2019 by \u2018home grown\u2019 jihadists.<\/p>\n


\nSymbolic punishment is insufficient<\/strong><\/p>\n

Examining several aspects of this dispute is relevant against the wider backdrop of Sri Lanka\u2019s painful struggles with political accountability. <\/p>\n

Marking the fifth anniversary of the attacks last week, the Church repeated its call for the perpetrators to be punished. That has not yet transpired apart from the Supreme Court holding former President Maithripala Sirisena together with his defence and intelligence officers responsible for failing to protect the security of the country.<\/p>\n

But that decision is largely symbolic in value, hardly deserving of the degree of punishment that must follow if the scales of justice are to be balanced fairly. These attacks started a train of events that not only brought unbearable anguish for the victims but also, in true Greek tragic form, resulted in the decimation of Sri Lanka as a nation.<\/p>\n

These are not uncommon happenings. On the contrary, they have been played out time and time again in \u2018politically unstable\u2019 nations of the global South as well as in developed democracies as some may like to style the global North. <\/p>\n

Yet to return to the fate of this unfortunate land, it was a fear cloud of the Easter killings coupled with the dangerously seductive promise of a \u2018Sinhala Buddhist monarch\u2019 that led to Gotabaya Rajapaksa sweeping into power a few months later in November 2019.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n


\nKarmic retribution of enabling evil<\/strong><\/p>\n

This election of a foolish, ignorant and arrogant President by cheering Sri Lankans was the karmic trigger point for consigning themselves and generations yet unborn to a catastrophic fate. <\/p>\n

The final consequence of that saga ended with Rajapaksa ignominiously fleeing for his life through the backdoor of his official residence in 2022 as the angry public broke down the gates in the wake of the Government declaring bankruptcy.<\/p>\n

To this same point, if we are to look at examples of extreme political foolishness, we do not unfortunately seem to see the end of this.<\/p>\n

A few days ago, President Ranil Wickremesinghe smilingly boasted while declaring open the ITC Ratnadipa, that he is cutting the ribbon to Sri Lanka\u2019s latest super luxury hotel at the same protest site where the public had once sent a President home.
\nHe then called for another peoples\u2019 protest (\u2018the aragalaya\u2019) not to happen again. <\/p>\n

To be blunt, this patently insensitive statement, even as the disgraced former President sat in his audience, aptly speaks to the Wickremesinghe Presidency\u2019s highly worrying state of democratically dissociative disorder. <\/p>\n

First, nothing could be further apart than luxury hotels in Colombo and a democratic peoples\u2019 struggle that summarily ejected a leader who had destroyed himself, his family and the country for good measure.<\/p>\n

Is this country only for the rich? <\/strong><\/p>\n

That juxtaposition of one with the other is obscene to say the least. Is the President not aware of the massive gulf that yawns between Sri Lanka\u2019s uber-rich who fawn around him and the majority of the populace in the wake of the country\u2019s punishing bankruptcy?<\/p>\n

Thousands of families have been decimated by poverty and malnutrition amidst the collapse of once optimally functional public health and education systems.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the Government has been so inept in providing them relief that it cannot even ensure that stocks of rice distributed to the poor in yet another ridiculous state event recently, are fit to eat. <\/p>\n

Does the President expect people to rejoice in new luxury hotels even while their children do not have enough to eat? <\/p>\n

Does he not bother to listen to popular venom that accuses his Office of fashioning a Sri Lanka where only the rich can live while the others desperately scrabble for scraps?<\/p>\n

Secondly, without the protests of 2022, a disastrous Presidency could not have been ended. And to add a tad unkindly, President Wickremesinghe would not have had a snowflake\u2019s chance in hell of sitting in the Presidential chair either. But leaving that aside, let us return to the political shenanigans that are being played out over the Easter Sunday blasts in 2019.<\/p>\n

\u2018Political\u2019 men of the cloth<\/strong><\/p>\n

The good Cardinal has confessed that he had been \u2018misled\u2019 into extending support for former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa as Rajapaksa had promised \u2018justice\u2019 for the victims.<\/p>\n

This claim raises a number of important points apart from belying vehement denials previously that he had supported the Rajapaksas. Primarily, this confession by and of itself does not sit well with the persona of a man of the cloth, to put the matter mildly.<\/p>\n

The Cardinal himself does not quite appear to recognise that open \u2018politicking\u2019 of a religious leader does not augur well for his flock. Last week, the evil consequences of communalistic tensions that Buddhist monks have stoked at the bequest of their political masters were discussed in these column spaces. That has been the bane of post-independence Sri Lanka.<\/p>\n

That indictment applies equally for all men of the cloth. Moreover, the Cardinal\u2019s explanation that he \u2018supported\u2019 Rajapaksa\u2019s election campaign on the premise that he \u2018believed\u2019 him to be sincere, needs to be taken with more than a pinch of salt. Long before the Presidential election campaign went into full swing in 2019, received wisdom in Sri Lanka and overseas was firmly against that glib assurance.<\/p>\n

Sinister findings and obvious conclusions<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was commonly accepted that there was far more to the dastardly attacks than a few smiling boys who casually walked into churches and hotels with explosives in their backpacks, blowing up worshippers and revellers.<\/p>\n

Without labouring the point, the sequence of astounding intelligence lapses inferentially suggesting complicity by sections of the security apparatus with the Easter Sunday attackers, were obvious to the most na\u00efve.<\/p>\n

Whatever snippets of investigations available, including the report of the parliamentary select committee made public by October 2019, underscored that sinister finding.<\/p>\n

So for the head of the Catholic Church to claim blissful ignorance of all those warnings and to profess to child-like innocence in saying that he \u2018supported\u2019 Rajapaksa and had been \u2018misled,\u2019 is to insult our intelligence no less.<\/p>\n

On his part, the former President has also come out with all guns blaring, to deny that he had spoken to the Cardinal after his election or that he could not ensure \u2018justice\u2019 according to the recommendations of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry as that would mean the arrest of people and banning of organisations \u2018allied\u2019 with him. Whatever is the \u2018truth\u2019 thereto, certain facts are undisputed.<\/p>\n


\n\u2018Suffer the little children to come unto me\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

After all the water has flowed under these very several parliamentary committees and Commissions of Inquiry to probe the Easter Sunday barbarities, the end result has been \u2018zero\u2019 except for some prosecutions desultorily winding their way through the state system. <\/p>\n

As another election approaches, the main opposition parties vying for power have promised further Commissions of Inquiry. The Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB) has gone a step further by committing to an Office of a Special Prosecutor and a dedicated court.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile the families of more than two hundred and fifty victims and hundreds more critically wounded \u2018still seek justice.\u2019 Many victims were children celebrating Resurrection Sunday, one of the most revered events in the Christian calendar. <\/p>\n

All of them have become cold statistics of the terrible collateral damage caused by decades of ethnic, civil (and religious) conflict in the North, East and South.<\/p>\n

That is our shame.<\/p>\n

Courtesy:Sunday Times<\/em><\/p>\n

Tweet<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Kishali Pinto-Jayawardene An (un)holy row has erupted between Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, head of Sri Lanka\u2019s Catholic Church and former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa regarding \u2018who said what\u2019 in the aftermath of the Easter Sunday attacks on April 21st 2019 by \u2018home grown\u2019 jihadists. Symbolic punishment is insufficient Examining several aspects of this dispute is relevant …<\/p>\n

Continue reading ‘The \u201cUnholy \u201cRow Between Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith and Ex-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa Regarding the Easter Sunday Attacks by Home Grown Jihadists on 21 April 2019’ »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83955"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=83955"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83956,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83955\/revisions\/83956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=83955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=83955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}