Collapse Of Wartime Alliance Promises Political Change

Mahinda Rajapaksa

By Tisaranee Gunasekara

“…‘tis with Sharpers as ‘tis with Pikes, they prey upon their own kind and ‘tis a pleasant Scene enough, when Thieves fall out among themselves, to see the cutting of one Diamond with another”
Aesop (The Fables
– A Wolf And A Fox)

Will the next presidential election become a total war between the Commander-in-Chief and the Army Commander who led Sri Lanka to a stunning victory against the LTTE? Will the Rajapaksa brothers and General Sarath Fonseka become enmeshed in an internecine political conflict which will undermine the credibility and weaken the potency of both parties?

Had the Rajapaksas’ appetite for power and glory been less voracious the Mahinda Rajapaksa – Gotabaya Rajapaksa – Fonseka triumvirate that led the Lankan war effort would not have fractured. But dynastic rule requires power to be concentrated in the hands of the ruling family. Outsiders are empowered from time to time to ‘do a job,’ but that is merely conjunctural; they are disempowered once the allotted tasks are done. This innate unwillingness to share power with non-family members is augmented by a congenital mistrust of ‘outsiders’ (further compounded by a historical tendency on the part of rulers to look askance at successful Generals). The Rajapaksas needed Fonseka to win the war, just as they needed Mangala Samaraweera and the JVP to win the presidency. Once the war was won the alliance crumbled, despite the remarkable politico-ideological congruence between the Rajapaksas and Fonseka.

When the ally of yesterday turns into the bête noir of today, ‘ruinous wrath’ becomes the general psychological condition and revenge the central motivating factor. In the Iliad, King Agamemnon  violates the rights of Achilles the warrior so that “…you may learn well how much greater I am than you, and another man may shrink back from likening himself to me and contending against me.” A raging Achilles asks the gods to teach Agamemnon a lesson by helping the Trojans to drive the Greeks “back to their ships with slaughter.”

The Rajapaksas’ relationship with Samaraweera and the JVP went through such a cycle; it is no accident that Samaraweera and the JVP are spearheading the efforts to bring Fonseka into the political arena. Given the fatal weakness of the Wickremesinghe leadership and the consequent inability of the UNP to challenge the Rajapaksa juggernaut, a mutually-devastating internecine battle between the Rajapaksas and Fonseka may provide the sole glimmer of hope for Sri Lanka’s beleaguered democracy.
Shattering the ‘patriotic’ monolith

The Rajapaksas’ aim is to win the presidential election with a huge margin, obtain a two-thirds majority in the parliamentary election and introduce a new constitution tailor-made for the perpetuation of dynastic rule. As the country has experienced in the last four years, the Rajapaksas are violently intolerant of dissent and demand unquestioning obedience as their right. They are also Sinhala supremacists unwilling to share power with the minorities. During their tenure corruption and waste have reached astronomical heights and a tendency to replace the rule of law with the law of the rulers has become embedded.

Until he was removed from his position of primacy, Fonseka shared the Sinhala supremacist vision and the anti-democratic ethos of the Rajapaksas. As a member of the ruling cabal he was directly or indirectly responsible for policies and deeds that violated the basic rights and freedoms of Lankan citizens, from the suppression of the media to the incarceration of displaced Tamils in Northern internment camps. He is on record calling Sri Lanka a Sinhala country and expressing his intolerance of dissenting opinions.

Post-war, he pioneered a plan to expand the armed forces and turn the north into a vast open prison, under the constant surveillance and control of army camps that would permeate the province. Had the war-time triumvirate not ruptured, the ongoing ‘humanitarian offensive’ against democratic and human rights in Sri Lanka would have become far more deadly. Fortunately, the unwillingness of the Rajapaksas to share power with any ‘outsider’ caused the shattering of the monolith, thereby weakening their asphyxiating grip on the democratic system.

When the war ended, the President announced that thereafter the only division in Sri Lanka would be between patriots and anti-patriots. This formula would have enabled the regime to politically and physically annihilate its enemies by sticking the anti-patriot label on them. Fortunately, the post-war break-up of the war-time triumvirate is causing confusion and consternation in the ‘patriotic’ camp. If the government is by definition patriotic because it waged and won the war against the LTTE, how is Fonseka to be classified if he becomes the President’s chief challenger in the presidential election? Will he remain a patriot because he played a leading role in the war against the LTTE? Or will he become a traitor because he is opposing the Rajapaksas? How will Fonseka justify his alliance with those whom he castigated as anti-patriots not so long ago?

Real patriots and pseudo-patriots

The case of Sri Lankan-born American billionaire Raj Rajaratnam demonstrates the absurdity of a patriot vs. anti-patriotic division premised on the needs and the convenience of the regime. Rajaratnam was hailed as a patriot when he promised to donate US $1 million to Minister Milinda Moragoda’s project to rehabilitate ex-LTTE cadres (with the full knowledge of the President – as The Hindu reported). The same Rajaratnam became a Tiger-loving traitor overnight when he was arrested by American authorities for insider trading. Similarly, Fonseka, who was a super-patriotic hero when he was working in tandem with the Rajapaksas, may well become an arch-traitor if he joins the opposition.

That the regime is extremely jittery about a Fonseka candidacy is undeniable. A Fonseka candidacy will not cause a politico-electoral realignment of sufficient magnitude to defeat the Rajapaksas, but it will compel the Rajapaksas to fight for every single vote. With Fonseka as the common opposition candidate the presidential election will turn into a bruising battle rather than the cakewalk it would be if Ranil Wickremesinghe is the candidate. Even if the President manages to limp home in the first round, an acrimonious campaign and a wafer-thin margin make for a pyrrhic victory.

Not only will the endless barrage of charges and counter-charges expose the skeletons in everyone’s closets; the depths to which both parties are likely to sink will bring down to an ordinary, human level the superheroes of yesteryear (by revealing their all-too-human weaknesses, from greed and envy to opportunism and hypocrisy). The acrimonious break-up of the war-winning triumvirate is perhaps the fastest way to end the mass intoxication caused by the euphoria of victory over the LTTE and re-inject into the national political bloodstream some sense of balance and sobriety.
Fonseka is neither a pluralist nor a democrat. Armed with the powers of  the president and strengthened by a willing government he will become as despotic as the Rajapaksas, if not more so. Nor is a Fonseka candidacy a certainty. Wickremesinghe is unlikely to be happy with such a prospect and may try to thwart it. Still, a Fonseka candidacy that does not result in a Fonseka victory may be the only realistic impediment to the success of the Sinhala-First, Rajapaksa-First project. If the Rajapaksas get their two-thirds majority a despotic constitution will follow, intended to keep the family at the pinnacle of power for many decades. A bruising at the presidential election would dim the Rajapaksa aura, impeding their plans to give the lion’s share of nominations to their favourites and limiting the UPFA to a marginal victory in the parliamentary election instead of the anticipated two-thirds majority. With patriots confused and heroes dethroned, Sri Lankan democracy may gain some desperately-needed breathing space.

The return of the mob

In civilised societies the insane are not hounded and beaten up just for throwing stones. When 26-year-old B. Sivakumar, a psychiatric patient, threw stones at passing vehicles in Bambalapitiya, he was pursued by a mob of supposedly sane citizens and beaten up by policemen in civilian clothes, even as he begged his attackers for mercy. Finally, in a vain effort to escape, he waded into the sea and drowned. Having caused a man’s death and watched him die, the mob went their separate ways and resumed their momentarily-interrupted lives. The police, characteristically, claimed that Sivakumar drowned – until video footage of the gory scene emerged.

The Sivakumar incident is an omen of dangerous psychological undercurrents present in our society. Both participants and spectators of that savage spectacle displayed a degree of moral depravity that is hard to reconcile with our much-vaunted claims about Sri Lanka being a ‘Dhammadeepa.’ There was nothing pre-meditated about the incident either, unlike other notorious incidents from the recent past. The people who played active or passive roles in it were mostly strangers; they probably had nothing in common except a willingness to debase their own humanity and indulge in mindless cruelty. The randomness and spontaneity of the incident, its non-political nature and the strange cooperation between the police and the public that enabled it mean that such outbreaks of savagery can happen anywhere in Sri Lanka.

Post-war Sri Lanka is on a downward slide morally and ethically. It is manifest in our collective lack of interest about civilian casualties that could not but have happened in the last, ferocious stage of the war. It is indicated by our collective silence about the northern internment camps. It is present in our willingness to countenance deaths in police custody as long as the victims are ‘criminals’ or ‘terrorists.’ It is evident when monks attack Christian places of worship over the accidental death of two participants in a faith healing ceremony, while maintaining a stony silence about the brutal slaying of a man by a herd of civilians and policemen. We are becoming a society permeated with fear, mistrust and hate, a society willing to tolerate the intolerable.

Wars brutalise societies. The risk of such brutalisation is greater when wars are seen as just or holy (an example is when a popular tele-drama claims that soldiers who fought the Tigers accumulated sufficient merit to attain Nibbana because the enemy they slew was the enemy of the nation and the faith). Papal and monarchical infallibility may have gone out of fashion, but national infallibility is very much au courant. This erroneous belief is the basis for the more extreme versions of patriotism, which tolerate no criticism of one’s own nation and regard such criticism as treachery (the LTTE’s brand of Tamil nationalism belongs in this category as much as Sinhala supremacism).

Post-war, the government continues to conjure up enemies in order to justify the retention of the state of emergency and the consequent undermining of democratic rights and freedoms. In this context anyone opposing the government is a terrorist, be they media personnel or opposition politicians, workers or displaced Tamils. (The absurdity of this categorisation is demonstrated by the fact that Mahinda Rajapaksa spearheaded a series of anti-government campaigns against the UNP government in the midst of the Second Eelam War.) When the public is warned about omnipresent conspiracies and told to be vigilant for ubiquitous enemies, a climate of visceral suspicion, fear and hate is created – an ideal breeding ground for mob violence and for mindsets which see even in a madman throwing stones an enemy deserving death.