Three Months Of Entertainment

Beginning today Sri Lankans count down three eventful months ahead of them culminating in the third week of May.

A month from now we Sri Lankans will know what the dreaded Ides of March has in store for the country with the two main parties hell bent on winning the forthcoming general election.

Exactly two months from today, on April 22nd to be exact, a brand new parliament will be having its inaugural session in the house by the Diyawanna.

Then in three months time at about the same time in May we will be marking the first anniversary of what has been described as the most momentous event in Sri Lanka’s post independence history – the military defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam who wreaked havoc in the country for three full decades.

In the political realm the past year has been nothing short of a blockbuster with back-to-back elections — the President and his UPFA bent on extracting every ounce of political capital from the military’s success over the Tigers.

Provincial polls, a presidential poll and now a general election have all been called ahead of time to capitalize on the political capital accrued from the defeat of the LTTE.

This is all the more intriguing because little attention has been paid to the source of this capital. It needs to be pointed out that the one thing that President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s Mahinda Chinthana of 2005 did not promise was a military victory against the LTTE. In fact what it did state was that Mahinda Rajapaksa would go the extra mile to talk to the Tigers and bring about a durable solution and indeed Rajapaksa proceeded to do just that by talking to the Tigers in Geneva not much later after assuming office.

Eelam War IV was entirely a creation of the Tigers — precipitated by the infamous Mavilaru fiasco, which three years later resulted in the Tigers’ Nanthikandal waterloo. Though Rajapaksa apologists may think and say otherwise, it was at the urging of the then recuperating Army Commander Sarath Fonseka that Operation Watershed was launched on July 26, 2006. A day earlier the country marked the 23rd anniversary of Black July, the day that is identified as when the war proper began. It was also in early July 2006 that Fonseka had resumed work having returned from Singapore following an almost successful assassination attempt on his life two months earlier in April by the LTTE. For Fonseka who had a score to settle with the Tigers, Mavilaru was a blessing in disguise to take on the Tigers and having convinced his boss on the way to go, there was no looking back. Fonseka was so determined to get back at Velupillai Pirapaharan that he famously kept on saying that he will finish the war and will not leave it to his successor. The rest is history.
It is to the credit of the Rajapaksa spin doctors that the entire electorate swallowed hook, line and sinker the “fact” that the “main promise in Mahinda Chinthana” was “delivered” when there was no such ‘promise’ in the first place. It was as a part of this capitalization process that the war hype was raised to a crescendo so that all other issues of the day could be conveniently glossed over by the electorate ensuring safe passage for the government.

This ‘engineering’ of facts to suit the political agenda of the regime is now the established norm and goes on albeit in a different form to suit each occasion. In this regard an issue that has currency is the much-publicized seizure of Rs. 70 million mostly in foreign currency that was discovered in the vault of Ashoka Tillakaratne, mother of defeated presidential candidate, Sarath Fonseka’s son in law. If Tillakaratne had no connection to Fonseka the money would still be safe in the vault.

To his credit Fonseka was probably the only presidential candidate to have complied with the law and declared his assets on handing over his nomination papers for the presidential election. This has provided the authorities a foundation to base their investigations on and help them to expedite their work.

A glaring omission here and part of the media engineering is the fact that the other main presidential candidate failed to submit his assets declaration before the poll and is yet to do so even after the poll as obligated by law. His supporters when pressed on TV talk shows in the run up to the election about this lapse were to comment that no sooner he was re-elected the president would declare his assets. This is yet to happen.

It is also of interest that the Rs. 70 million that was found in the Tillakaratne vault is just a fraction of the vast budget that was expended by various organisations on the President’s election campaign. The Tharunyata Hetak organisation is one such organisation which for some reason has not drawn the attention of the authorities.

Observers are stunned by the vast resources of this organisation, which to boot is yet in its formative years. Its media campaign budget on behalf of the president was estimated to have run in to hundreds of millions of rupees. This organisation which is headed by the 23 year old President’s son, Namal, owes an explanation to the nation at least in the name of transparency and good governance as to the sources of its funding now that the opposition candidate is being hounded to come clean with his funding. After all what is sauce for the goose must necessarily be sauce for the gander as well.

To get back to the main theme, in three months time when the country marks one year of peace, closet Tamil Tiger supporters are as likely to celebrate the event as their Sinhala brethren. After all they have much to celebrate for Mahinda Rajapaksa has done what Velupillai Pirapaharan could not do — put his bete noire, Sarath Fonseka in jail. In this nation of ironies this surely would be the mother of all ironies when the nation commemorates its first year of peace in 30 years. It would be interesting to see what the President comes up with to explain the incarceration of the only four star General in the country’s history.

It would also be an opportune time to look back at the past year and see what steps have been taken to build on the fragile peace that has been achieved at great cost. Ideally where the war ended the peace process should have kicked in but no such thing materialised. Instead what the administration, in what is now becoming an all too familiar pattern, has been doing is to divert all its resources and energies on neutralizing perceived threats to its own survival.

As a consequence the independent media is still being hounded, the military is being purged of so-called Fonseka loyalists who essentially made up the army’s ‘A’ team in its war against the Tigers, and now post presidential election, the trend has spread to all organs of government. For the government it has been a constant case of ‘investigating’ plots, threats, conspiracies and assassination attempts and governance has ground to a halt. With parliament dissolved and elections set for April it will be the Ides of March that will set the tone in the political landscape as the country drifts aimlessly, preoccupied with choosing who will rule the roost on April 9.