Posts filed under 'Federalidea'
by Bob Rae
[Former adviser to the Sri Lanka peace talks, 2002-2004]
A United Nations agency recently declared Sri Lanka one of the world’s most dangerous places for aid workers and journalists. It is also a terrifying place to be a soldier. Both the government and its opponents, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), count scores of fighters killed and hundreds wounded during recent fighting. Sri Lanka’s already horrific war is entering a quantitatively new phase.
[Bob Rae, MP]
The country’s once admired democratic institutions are buckling under the strain. It is worth recalling that the LTTE emerged in the late 1970s against a backdrop of mounting grievances in the north and east of the island country over declining access to language, employment and political rights. A radical leftist group, the People’s Liberation Front (JVP)-composed primarily of disgruntled Southerners-raised similar concerns, albeit from a different perspective.
The response of the Sri Lankan government to these grievances was as swift as it was severe. It has waged a virtually uninterrupted military campaign against the LTTE since the early 1980s. For its part, the LTTE, a merciless armed group, has engaged in brutal attacks against civilians as well as assassinations of their opponents, raising support and money in the Tamil diaspora, including the large community in Canada. A conservative estimate puts the number of deaths in the fighting at 75,000. The government also launched aggressive operations against the JVP and about 60,000 civilians died over a two-year period in the late 1980s before the JVP made its transition to politics.
Such wars are inevitably accompanied by authoritarianism and fear. Along with the growing role afforded the military and the introduction of emergency regulations, the government has cracked down on independent oversight bodies and press freedoms.
War-related militarization has far-reaching implications for democracy. Symptoms include skyrocketing military spending and related racketeering. Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, the President’s brother, says he’s determined to win the conflict militarily and matches his words with an impressive will to spend. Defence expenditures in 2007 were more than 50 per cent higher than in the previous year. They are expected to grow by another 20 per cent in 2008, to $1.48-billion. Defence now accounts for a fifth of all public spending.
While Western governments have been unanimous in labelling the LTTE as a terrorist organization-the Tigers commit suicide bombings and recruit child soldiers-they have also been critical of the Sri Lankan government. Consequently, Colombo turned to China and Pakistan for support. Even the President of Iran was in the country recently. These governments are far less likely to criticize Sri Lanka for a democratic deficit. They are offering billions of dollars of aid with no strings attached.
There is much that the warring parties can do to reverse this situation. A complete ceasefire and a return of the government and the LTTE to the negotiating table could reverse the escalation in casualties on both sides. Thousands of civilians have been killed or displaced since the resumption of war. Re-engaging independent monitors and getting them on the ground is critical to rebuilding confidence.
Sri Lanka’s standing as a model South Asian democracy is suffering under the weight of war. The warning signs are clear. The Worldwide Press Freedom Index, published by Reporters Without Borders, places Sri Lanka in 109th place, tied with Cambodia and right after U.S.-occupied Iraq. Likewise, Transparency International consistently reports corruption at the highest levels of executive and legislative government. The relentless conflict continues. Democracy itself hangs in the balance.
Above all, Sri Lankans need to be able to imagine a country where mutual respect, an abandonment of extremist ideologies and new forms of autonomy and shared governance are possible. It will require extraordinary courage and determination to get there. The alternative - more death, more repression, more corruption, deeper economic stagnation - must not be allowed.
Canada can hardly be indifferent to this conflict. Our own experience with federalism and conflict prevention, our deep attachment to pluralism and our ties to this troubled country should push us to far more active engagement. We need to get the diasporas to talk to each other and put an end to the funding pipeline. [courtesy: The Globe and Mail.com]
Bob Rae is the MP for Toronto Centre.
May 12th, 2008
Statement by National Peace Council:
On Saturday May 10 the people of the Eastern Province will cast their vote at crucial elections that will have a bearing on the future course of politics in the country, and especially with regard to the ongoing ethnic conflict. The election can be historic as it will represent for the first time the hopes and opinion of the people of the east through an electoral process that is confined to the Eastern Province alone. The National Peace Council expresses its concern that the period of the election campaign has been marked by undercurrents of intimidation although there has been low overt violence. If conducted unfairly, these elections can misrepresent the will of the people of the east, who are unique in being from all three major ethnic communities and in significant proportions.
The National Peace Council views the forthcoming elections as providing an opportunity to the government to demonstrate its commitment to the democratic process as part and parcel of its strategy to resolve the ethnic conflict in a just and democratic manner. So far the level of violence has been relatively low which is a positive feature that we hope will continue until election day on May 10 and in the post-election period. However, available evidence indicates that campaigning was carried out under a security environment not conducive to a free and fair election.
[A boy looks out of his classroom at the Kaliyakadu camp for internally displaced Tamil people in Batticaloa, east of Sri Lanka May 8, 2008. REUTERS/Anuruddha Lokuhapuarachchi-via Yahoo! News]
The relative fairness of an election cannot be determined solely by considering what occurs on election day, as there are a number of other factors which can affect the citizen’s and political parties’ ability to participate effective in the democratic process. One of the controversial features of the elections is that the TMVP, which is a former militant organization continues to retain its arms on the grounds of self defence. In addition, the TMVP is contesting in alliance with the government, which has put the system of checks and balances on electoral malpractice into jeopardy. The basic requirement for a free and fair election is that all the contesting parties are unarmed and not in a position to intimidate both their political rivals as well as voters who will be fearful to cross the path of the armed party. Election monitoring organizations even filed action in the courts calling for the disarming of the TMVP for the purposes of conducting free and fair elections but without success due to the absence of jurisdiction of the courts in this matter.
Reports from the opposition political parties contesting the eastern elections, and from election monitors and the media, have highlighted a significant level of intimidation that has obstructed the electoral campaigns of the opposition parties. There are allegations that the TMVP has been intimidating its political rivals and put them into such a state of fear that they dare not campaign in areas in which the TMVP has its armed presence. The very low level of campaigning by opposition parties in some parts of the east has been independently verified by election monitors and the media. These same sources have also reported that in some instances polling cards have not been delivered to voters and that the TMVP has been issuing identity cards on its own, which could be used to fraudulently cast votes.
The National Peace Council urges the government to ensure that the election officials and police are suitably empowered to deal with any and all attempts made to tamper with the electoral process on May 10. We believe that having elections in the east, accepting some flaws, is an important step towards empowering the people in the east to democratically determine their future. But we wish to register our concern that an electoral process marked by intimidation, unless rectified even in these last days, will undermine the democratic processes that are necessary to restore peace and ethnic harmony in the country and can lead to a further marginalizing and alienation of disempowered ethnic minorities.
Executive Director
On behalf of the Governing Council
National Peace Council of Sri Lanka
May 8th, 2008
By Kusal Perera
The east has now become a battleground for interpreting democracy. The President claims the PC elections in the east would be an ideal example for democracy in comparison to all other elections. Whatever that example is and whatever lesson one would learn from it, it could never be assessed and analysed by “numbers and percentages” in interpreting democracy. There again, whatever the interpretation, the East would have to either kneel down with its heavily tortured social life in front of an armed group, the government claims is very democratic and live under licensed suppression, or try out a different leadership that opposes armed politics altogether and still live through an extended armed conflict. That second choice would leave an experienced, brutal armed group as the opposition in the Eastern PC with open and official government backing as the TMVP and UPFA are one in the same nomination lists. The choice for the eastern polity therefore would reduce to what is comparatively less bad and not what is best for the East.
Entrenched within this reality in the practical life of the East, is the future developments in the south as well. Except for the Pillayan led TMVP, all others have gone from the political south (meaning those who predominantly live with the politics of the Sinhala south) to the East, to come back with a result that could be interpreted to the South as their mandate to play politics in the south. With Pillayan’s TMVP providing the oppressive hand for the Rajapaksa glove, the bottom line remains in how much power the East could give those contesting the elections, to wield their influence more in the south.
It is for this reason the government wants the south in particular and the world at large to accept the PC elections in the East as free and fair. And it is for the opposite reason the SLMC/UNP and others in the fray want to contradict the government and prove it is not a free and fair election.
Free and fair elections were declared as impossible in the East by the Opposition including the JVP, with the Pillayan group running around carrying weapons with tacit government support even before the LG elections in Batticaloa. But then with PAFFREL giving credence to that election, the Opposition could not avoid contesting the PC elections to the east. With the credibility of PAFFREL openly challenged after its two decade plus history, monitoring the East PC elections have become a totally new issue with two more new outfits, CAFFE and SL Polls Watch entering the scene with their own reports..
Not only PAFFREL, but the other two new entities monitoring election campaigns, CAFFE and SL Polls Watch are talking of what they are trained to check in monitoring elections. They are perhaps reaching out to have more complaints recorded in their reports that PAFFREL may be accused of ignoring. They are definitely out to see the numbers of election related assaults, threats to life, abductions, killings, unregistered vehicles on the roads, white vans, blocking of election rallies, use of State resources and State media, etc., etc. These numbers do give meaning to what a free and fair election could be. But is that everything in East PC elections ? There is a serious politico-military factor in the east that is not brought out in answering issues related to election violence. It is this factor that had grown and evolved with savage intensity that obstructs and denies a free and fair election in the East.
The Citizens’ Committee was killed off during the IPKF backed EPRLF regime as the North-East PC. The East in particular became politically militarised with the LTTE challenging the military might of the IPKF from October 10th 1987. The EPRLF as the PC authority could not exert much influence in those parts outside the East with the war on and they concentrated in establishing their militarised administration in the East with the IPKF helping out with policing, banking, transporting and other civil work as well. Thereafter the fall of the North – East PC, the packing off of the IPKF and the EPRLF deserting the East in 1990, led to a change of military power in the east. The power vacuum was immediately filled by the LTTE, once again surfacing as a formidable force in the East. With the courting between the Premadasa regime and the LTTE coming to an end by 1991, the war swallowed the bits and pieces of social life there were.
Thereafter, except for a brief period from end 1993 to mid 1995, when the East enjoyed a respite from war starting during the tenure of President Wijetunge, that allowed for LG elections in early 1994, the general elections in August 1994 and the Presidential elections in November the same year, the East had always been living with a bloody war till the CFA was signed in 2002 February. This CFA was not given the political advantage of making space for confidence building and managing conflict. It was humiliated and violated to leave us with a war more brutal than what was there previously. The justification for TMVP carrying arms is just that. They are still under threat from the LTTE despite government claims of clearing the east of the LTTE.
Here lies the paradox of the democracy in the east. To begin with, living with these brutal and bloody calamities the east had never been able to survive with a social fabric that could stand against militarising due to the bloody protracted nature of the war after the IPKF intervention. The role of the Citizens’ Committee that one witnessed previously was never in force.Thereafter the IPKF propped N-E PC folded up in 1990 , it was armed players who called the shots in the East and not the people. People, especially the Tamil people in Tamil villages could not have their social organisations unless the armed players in the area wanted them. The Tamil people were always at the receiving end, with opposing armed groups wanting to ensure the villages did not have infiltrations from their “enemy group” and the State security forces wanting to eliminate LTTE work among the Tamil people. This was at times thought possible through ethnic rivalry. Within all this militarization and provoked ethnic rivalry, even the State administration was brought under direct control of the State security forces.
There was thus no space for civil life even within the Tsunami rehabilitation work where most aid agencies had to comply with security requirements. In fact all temporary shelters where Tsunami affected people still live is under a double scrutiny, with State authorities hovering around to keep tab of LTTE infiltration and Pillayan after Karuna Amman also stalking the lives of the displaced. To these displaced were added another innocent lot from the so called “liberation of the East from Tiger claws”. There are now over 200,000 “refugees” diplomatically labelled as “internally displaced persons” who are at the mercy of the armed groups and government security authorities, that dictate terms in their every day life. Worst among them again are the Tamil people.
Do remember that with all these negative developments that have eroded any possibility of the people living and thinking independently for over a decade, where they first have to think how secure their lives would be if they acted independent of the armed TMVP and then the LTTE as silent trespassers now, the numbers of election violence give little meaning to freedom and democracy. With all logistics and infrastructure controlled by the State security forces and the Pillayan group having access to all that, numbers of election related violence have little impact on the lives of the already subdued and threatened lives in the East.
It is in such a tortured and torn society that election monitoring is done as if numbers matter. It is within this savagely numbed social life that Pillayan threatens opposition candidates and numbers are given unnecessary importance. People would never be a deciding factor in this game of armed conflict that is now wrapped up in this election of power wrenching.
Either way, Pillayan winning or losing, numbers of election related violence increasing or decreasing, elections being free and fair or heavily rigged, East will not have democracy under a PC that would any way have to maintain a heavy military presence to exist. It is this truth that is not being said in the South. For the South is made to believe armed suppression in the name of peace could democratise a society. The worst is, the Sinhala South prefers to believe it too. [dailymirror.lk]
May 7th, 2008
by Harim Peiris
The Eastern Provincial Council elections are around the corner and as Easterners and the rest of the nation await the outcome of the polls not much can be gained by speculating regarding its outcome. However the situation in the East raises issues that will remain long after the polls are over and pose challenges to the government at the centre and the winners of the provincial polls.
With regards the election, the regime’s UPFA/ TMVP alliance faces a formidable challenge from the UNP/SLMC combine. In a multi ethnic polity such as the East, with a majority of Tamil and Muslim people, the natural Sinhala constituency of the UPFA is in short supply. However, the UPFA can be counted on to easily win a significant majority of the Sinhala vote in the Ampara and Trincomalee Districts, which make up about 23% of the provincial electorate. Assuming a near 80% of the Sinhala vote goes to the UPFA, it immediately bags about 18% of the popular vote.
The SLMC will, contesting under the UNP banner dominate the Muslim vote. Both NUA and the Ashroff Congress have been steadily losing ground to the SLMC and the presence of the senior most SLMC leadership at the top of the UNP ballot should enable the SLMC to dominate the Muslim vote in much the same way as the UPFA will dominate the Sinhala vote. A 65% Muslim vote to the SLMC would immediately provide the UNP/SLMC combine then with little over 20% of the popular vote.
The above would mean that the election would be decided by the Tamil vote in the three districts and how this would go is anyone’s guess. The TMVP dominated the recent Batticalore District local polls, but that was in a pretty much one horse race, where the UNP did not contest. Mr.Ranil Wickremasinghe beat out President Rajapaksa in the Batticaloa District in the Presidential elections of November 2005, but that was sans a Tamil candidate and much water has flowed under the bridge since then. However Ranil’s win in Batticaloain 2005 was despite the LTTE boycott and the Karuna Group (the TMVP’s predecessor organization)’s endorsement of the Rajapaksa candidacy, showing that the Tamil voter of the Batticaloa District bucked both the LTTE’s boycott and the Karuna / TMVP’s endorsement of his opponent, to vote for Ranil. While the TMVP can still be expected to deliver a victory in Batticaloa, not least because it is still armed and has state patronage, while its opponents have neither, its appeal amongst the Tamils of the Trincomalee and Ampara Districts are a greater unknown and the divisions within the TMVP between old “Col”.Karuna loyalists and the now dominant Pillayan faction may also be to its disadvantage amongst the Tamil polity in the East.
Even a relatively free poll would hence pose a significant challenge to the regime with its success in the East, dependent upon the Tamil voter and whether the Tamils of the East would be electorally rewarding the “liberators of the East”.
However significant issues will remain in the Eastern Province long after the dust settles on this election. First among them would be to resolving the simmering ethnic tensions that exist amongst the populace and which have been exacerbated by the elections. Tensions exist not only between the Sinhala and Tamil people, especially in the Trincomalee District, but also between Muslims and Tamils in Batticaloa and even Ampara.
The Provincial Council system itself is under serious challenge, with much of the powers of the Province wrested back to the Centre, through political and bureaucratic manoeuvrings. The lack of revenue raising capability for a provincial administration means that in the all important area of finance it is totally dependent on the Government at the Centre and the ability to deliver to the populace accordingly constrained. Given that the Government touts the 13th amendment to the constitution and the provincial councils as the cornerstone or bedrock of its devolution goals and solution to the ethnic problem, the success of a provincial administration in whether the North or the East or both would be important in enhancing the credibility of this proposition.
The Eastern rising or the rehabilitation and reconstruction program under the direction of the Senior Presidential Advisor and the Ministry of Nation Building would have to both proceed at a pace and with an inclusive process that takes into account community sensitivities and does no harm to communal harmony while desisting from gerrymandering with the demographic patterns in the East.
The above electoral and socio political situation in the East poses significant challenges to the regime in the East and we can only wish the political leadership of various political hues the very best as they seek to navigate these challenges to create a truly better future for all the peoples of the East. [dailymirror.lk]
(The writer was an advisor to and spokesman for former President Kumaratunga from 2001 to 2005).
May 7th, 2008
by Dayan Jayatilleka
In his soaring ‘rap on race’– his initial response to the Jeremiah Wright controversy–a speech that should be studied by every reflective Sri Lankan (I watched it twice myself, having read the text once), Barack Obama drew his fundamental demarcation from his former pastor. He said that Rev Wright’s main error was in assuming that racism in America was endemic and in failing to recognise that US society was capable of change for the better; of evolution. This, said Barack, was the major difference between Rev Wright and Rev Martin Luther King the 40th anniversary of whose assassination had been commemorated throughout the US just months earlier.
Martin Luther King always dreamed that that America could change, improve-and indeed the very candidacy of Obama is proof that King was right and Wright was wrong.
This point is true of many of the critics of Sri Lanka, and of this administration. Their main weakness does not reside in their criticism so much as in their endemic pessimism and negativism; their refusal to recognise improvement and the capacity for positive change.
Nowhere is this truer than in their comments on the upcoming provincial elections in the East. Vital as the conduct and outcome of the Eastern Province election are, nothing should obscure the historic achievement of the election’s very holding. The elections constitute a rare example of a win-win outcome, or in this case, a “win-4″ outcome.
The very ability to hold an election campaign and then an election in a contested territory in the context of a mid-intensity armed conflict is itself a triumph. In many countries with such conditions, any election campaign is blighted by far greater violence than this one has been. In fact the Eastern election campaign so far, has been characterised by remarkably little lethal violence.
The charge that the TMVP is armed is the height of hypocrisy in that most of those who make the charge were conspicuously silent when the province was tightly under the control of the far more heavily armed Tigers. Many of these critics were perfectly pleased to leave the Tiger militia in control of the entire North East during the CFA and under the ISGA or the PTOMS! It is, as Zhou Enlai once said, as if an unscrupulous gang which set houses ablaze took violent exception to someone who carried a lit lamp!
Inasmuch as the province remains the main unit of devolution, it preserves the main gain of the Indo-Lanka Accord and is a victory for four decades of political campaigning for the centralised unitary state to be reformed along the lines that the most enlightened opinion had suggested around the time of Independence.
The provincial councils were not only a long time coming, they were the result of intense pressure: armed struggle by the Tamil guerrilla movement and intervention by India. Having been born, these institutions were swiftly paralysed in the North East by twin armed rejectionists: the hardcore separatist Tamil Tigers and the hard-line centralists, the JVP. The paralysis of the North East Provincial Council was also greatly aided by the adventurism of the EPRLF (specifically Vardharajaperumal) and miscalculations by India.
Thanks largely to the LTTE, the Tamil people of the North and East and the Tamils, Muslims and Sinhalese of the East were devoid of adequate representation and devolved power for two whole decades. Now elections are being held to one of the two Councils and barring a catastrophe, the East as a whole-as a single autonomous unit, not a collection of local government authorities- will have an elected administration within a fortnight.
The fact that at this time of writing (Sunday May 4) no one knows who the winner will be indicates the genuinely competitive character of the contest.
Furthermore, given the almost equal distribution of the three ethno-religious communities, the electoral competition dictates that the winner must bridge the gap between at least two of those three communities. This is itself no mean contribution to inter-ethnic conciliation in our society.
No Sri Lankan government was able or willing to hold elections to the Eastern Provincial council for twenty years. It might be argued in the strict sense that no Sri Lankan administration was ever able to, until now, until the Rajapakse administration-because the election of late 1988 was managed and policed in all respects by the Indian Peace Keeping Force, not the Sri Lankan state machinery.
As significant a breakthrough as the Eastern provincial election is, the achievement of the Sri Lankan state is even more impressive when this election is taken together with the Government’s important Northern initiative, namely the institution of a High powered Committee or Special Presidential Task Force for Northern development, reconstruction and rehabilitation.
The idea itself has its precedents, and interesting ones at that: in 1995 the CBK administration and the LTTE in their exchange of letters, proposed a Northern authority or task force for reconstruction, but each had a different conception and in any event the Tigers resumed hostilities unilaterally in April. More ambitiously President Kumaratunga gazetted under Emergency Regulations in November 1999, an Advisory Committee to counsel the Governor of the Northeast on a number of subject areas including law and order. Unfortunately and yet so typically of that presidency, these Emergency Regulations lapsed in 2001, without this body ever being concretely constituted.
President Rajapakse went one better. On April 30th he announced to the Cabinet a setting up of such a body, until such time as the North is liberated and elections to that province are held just as in the East. This high-level Advisory committee has all three major communities equally represented, and is chaired, as befits the ethnic composition of the North, by its Tamil member, Minister Douglas Devananda (who would have been the beneficiary if President Kumaratunga had constituted the Advisory committee in 1999-2001). Tough, smart, experienced and patient, Devananda should be able to improve the lot of the Tamil people of the North.
The timing of the establishment of the Task Force is not fortuitous. It is all of a piece with the Eastern provincial election. Bracketed together, with these measures President Rajapakse has overcome a blockage of two decades and done for the North and East in terms of devolution, of power-sharing with the Tamil allies of the Sri Lankan state, that which leaders with a far more enlightened rhetoric were unable or unwilling to do in practice. Such is the cunning of History, but it is not unknown: it took Richard Nixon to make the opening to China and Menahem Begin to sign the Camp David Accords with Anwar el Sadat.
The situation today is thus roughly similar to that of exactly two decades ago, when the North East Provincial Council was set up. (Then too, elections were not held in the North, only the East.) Late 1988 was what Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore’s former Permanent Representative to the UN in New York and outstanding foreign policy thinker, calls a “plastic moment”, a moment when the decisions we take can shape the future as at no other time.
We failed to emerge from the tunnel then, because of the obduracy of the LTTE, JVP and a needlessly protracted external presence. Today we have a government that correctly resists external presence and is explicitly committed to overcoming the LTTE. If we exit the tunnel this time, we are well placed to benefit from the explosive economic rise of Asia. The basic premise for this exit remains the military defeat of the LTTE. The Eastern election and the Northern Task Force provide the openings for the political, ideological and diplomatic isolation and defeat of the LTTE which must be either prelude or parallel for the military defeat of the enemy.
The lessons of Muhamalai 3-the outcome of which seems to be more of a draw than the previous battles of 2001 and 2006 - must be absorbed, and these are four-fold: the enemy must be out-thought in order to be out-fought; predictable linear advance must be eschewed in favour of the element of surprise stemming from creative tactics of manoeuvre and mobility; such a war of manoeuvre and mobility in unpropitious terrain can only result from Air-Land-Sea battle concepts, requiring close cooperation and integration between all arms of the military; improved intelligence is needed to closely estimate the enemy’s capabilities and possible responses.
There are reasons to be optimistic of the final outcome, and indeed be proud of being Sri Lankan. The latest survey of public opinion, the Peace Confidence Index of the Centre for Policy Alternatives reveals majority opinion the country to be resilient, resolute and reasonable. The Sinhalese are almost (slightly under) 2/3rds of the country’s population, inhabiting very approximately, the Southern 2/3rds of the island’s land area. The majority of this majority “show a decrease in support for peace talks from 25.7% to 16.6 % since November 2007, while support for the government’s defeat of the LTTE remains constant”. Most of the majority prefer peace talks after the war, while over 60% feel that the country is close to reaching a permanent settlement to the conflict. 62.5% of the Sinhalese perceive the security situation to have improved, 70% feel that the LTTE is militarily weak, and there is a 4% increase in Sinhala perceptions of the military strength of the government. Over 70% of the Sinhalese do not perceive the conflict in ethnic or ethnocentric terms-against the Other-but as a “war against terrorism”. Most Sinhalese approve of “development NGOs” but disapprove of so-called peace/conflict resolution NGOs. The greater percentage of the Sinhalese polled approve of the abrogation of the CFA. 61.3% of Sinhalese are willing to undergo economic hardship for the sake of the government’s war with the LTTE, and list the war and world prices, rather than “government mismanagement” as the main reasons for the increase in the cost of living. There are “fair majorities” among the Sinhalese for an Indian role, in the war, peace talks and development.
“The Sinhala community express (sic) a high level of satisfaction”, to use the phraseology of the CPA, with President Mahinda Rajapakse’s handling of a wide range of topics, demonstrating its balance, fairness and open-mindedness by being critical on the management of the cost of living. 73.5 % of the majority community are satisfied with his efforts to solve the conflict, 77.1 % approve of the President’s international relations, 68.8% approve of his management of the SLFP and 81% support his handling of social values. Most striking, and strikingly ignored by the foreign and local media, is the 91% approval rating among the Sinhalese for the President’s handling of the war (a statistic that should stick in the eye of local commentators fond of grotesque analogies with President Bush and Iraq!).
[The writer is Ambassador and Sri Lanka’s Permanent representative to the UN; This article represents the entirely personal views of the author.]
May 6th, 2008
Our journey among the plantation workers is to evict the clique of reactionary ‘all-time ministers’
Remarks by Mano Ganesan MP, at Bogowantalawa May Day Rally:
Today the plantation workers vote and elect their own representatives. Beginning from the bottom, there are hundreds of local and provincial councilors. There are ten parliamentarians of recent Indian descent. Except me, nine are ministers. Therefore the under development of the plantation community is cannot be because of any inadequate political representation. The prime fault is not in the political system but in those persons, who have been elected from the plantations over and over again, said Mano Ganesan MP at the DWC May Rally held at Bogowantalawa, Nuwara-Eliya district on May 1st 2008. Ganesan who is the president of Democratic Workers Congress, the plantation trade union wing of Western Peoples Front said further in his address to the large gathering of plantation workers,
Plantation workers have sacrificed everything at their disposal for this country. Hard work of plantation workers has kept this country going for the last 200 years. It is going to be the same for next many decades in the future. Look at the prices fetched by tea and rubber today. Plantation export is the single largest foreign exchange earner in real terms. I challenge any economist to disprove me. But pathetically this is the sect of people who have been meted with the most injustice treatment. One can understand this by comparing plantation community’s enormous contribution to this country with their appalling living conditions. Be it education, housing, health, everywhere plantation statistics are at the bottom. Recent studies have revealed that over 50,000 of under aged plantation boys and girls are working as domestics in the urban sector. Those who talk about child soldiers never bother about these child laborers. Estate schools and living line rooms are no better than cattle sheds. Illicit liquor is brewed, distributed and sold systematically in the estates which keep them down so that their life span is low.
But who is responsible for this horrendous state of affaires prevailing within the plantation worker community? You cannot put the blame on the government of the day. I cannot fault President Mahinda Rajapakse for this. You can neither point blankly hold all the past governments responsible. There was a time when Indian origin plantation workers were stateless. They were not permitted to vote and elect their own representatives. Our late president Abdul Aziz and CWC president Soumayamoorthy Thondaman were nominated to the parliament to look after the interests of the plantation workers. It happened during the Senanayake and Sirimavo regimes. But today times have changed.
The political history of Plantations did not begin with Mahinda Rajapakse government. Plantation politicians were virtually part of all successive governments since 1978. You can call the names of past governments from J.R.Jayawardena, R.Premadasa, D.B.Wijetunge, Chandrika Kumarathunga, Ranil Wickramasinhe and to current Mahinda Rajapakse. What’s more, these politicians held numerous ministries. I can name a few subjects from Rural and livestock development, Tourism, Textile, National housing development, Estate housing development and to the ministry of Estate infrastructure development. In addition today there are deputy ministries of education, health, postal, vocational training and justice held by plantation based politicians. Political power and opportunities were given to these politicians for the last 30 years since 1978 by successive governments. You cannot blame Sinhala majority politicians for all the ills of the plantation workers.
Of course there is a form of blamable majority communalism practiced against poor plantation worker community. The governments of India and Britain too share parts of the blame. But the major blame for the under development of the plantation community should go to the credit of Minister Arumugan Thondaman’s Ceylon Workers Congress and Minister P.Chandrasekaran’s Up-Country People front. Actually the Sinhala presidents and prime misters were somewhat generous towards the plantation community in the recent past. President Chandrika created a super ministry that is Estate infrastructure. Prime Minister Ranil offered the national housing ministry what was previously held by president Premadasa. Today President Rajapakse has given two cabinet and seven deputy ministries to these plantation based politicians. Therefore we cannot put blame the Sinhala political leadership and escape. The major culpability lies with plantation electors and the elected. These men have failed miserably in their respective duties to their poor electors. These self centered plantation politicians have become part of the problem ailing the plantation community. We are reconstructing our historical Democratic Workers Congress trade union in which great plantation leaders Abdul Aziz, Nair, Doraisamy Naidu, V.P. Ganesan and others performed. We have a duty to our electors in Colombo. Also we are determined to the help out our north eastern brethren in their struggle for political and human rights. Yet we have plenty of energy and bravery left in us. Today let us in the Western Peoples Front and Democratic Workers Congress pledge with courage to evict the ‘all-time ministers’ from the plantations and bring development and justice to this pathetic people.
United National Party National Organiser S.B. Dissanayake, WPF General Secretary Dr.N.Kumaragurupran MMC, DWC General Secretary and WPF national Organiser Praba Ganesan MPC and many others addressed the rally.
[Full Text of Media Release by office of Mano Ganesan MP]
May 3rd, 2008
Previous Posts