EDITORIAL

The Wages Of Appeasement

A few months from now, Chandrika Kumaratunga will celebrate her 10th year in office as President of Sri Lanka, a solemn reminder to the citizenry of the blot she has been on the social and economic landscape of this nation. Her government has been the most corrupt we have known in our post-independence history. Indeed, she herself is on record as calling her own ministers - including her infamous uncle, Anuruddha Ratwatte - corrupt. She herself has gloated about how they sought to conspire, together with her, to murder newspaper editors. Trails of blood, including that of slain minority leader Kumar Ponnambalam, have led to the very doorstep of the then People's Alliance government. She wrought chaos on the economy, claiming falsely to have a PhD in economics and a degree from Sorbonne. In six years she succeeded in halving the value of the rupee.

And that is not all. She has demonstrated time and again that she is an inveterate, brazen and barefaced liar, rarely stopping to tell the truth if a lie would serve her purpose. And thus it was that she lied through her teeth in writing to Speaker Joseph Michael Perera on August 21, 2002, swearing that she would "not dissolve the present parliament unless the party which presently commands the confidence of the House loses its majority and an alternative government cannot be formed from among the members of the present parliament."

 As she had done so often before, this Mother of All Liars lied yet again.

The people of Sri Lanka would do well to stop and think why it was that Kumaratunga dissolved parliament, calling her third general election in four years. It was not because the government had lost its majority. It was not because there was chaos or instability. It was for one reason and one reason only: the insatiable and pathological greed of the Bandaranaikes for unfettered power to rule this nation as their private fiefdom.

In her letter to the Speaker referred to above, Kumaratunga admitted that "the dissolution of parliament could have unexpected and unforeseeable effects on the peace process and jeopardise its beneficial results at a time when the thoughts of all political parties should be focused on the question of prime national importance, that of bringing the ethnic conflict in our country to a close in a peaceful manner." Don't we know only too well where her thoughts were focused as she elected, on February 7, to bring down the curtain on the UNF government, barely two years old, so as to have yet another go at wresting total power.

Kumaratunga has, through her various perverted mouthpieces, not least among them Lakshman Kadirgamar, sought to trot out her own bizarre rationale for this volte face. While offering no alternative of her own, she has claimed that the peace process overseen by the UNF was unsatisfactory. Well, since she arbitrarily took over the Defence Ministry on November 4 last year (more than three months ago), it has been in her power to put everything right. She could, for example, have dismantled the Manirasakulam camp and acted to stop the recruitment of children to the LTTE's ranks. Yet, there has been not a hum out of her, and she has done nothing to stem the LTTE's alleged abuses.

She has been trumpeting the cause of farmers blighted by high fertiliser prices, seeking to ride to power on their backs. At the same time, she herself admits that "A general election could cost almost a billion rupees, which our country can ill afford to spend." Would it not have been better, rather than weeping crocodile tears for the farmers, to have spent this billion rupees on assisting them?

She has claimed that an election will help restore stability to government, not mentioning that it was by her arbitrary and capricious actions of November 4 and February 7 that she destabilised and destroyed a government that was barely two years in office, and had the complete confidence of parliament. And as for stability, the general election will engender anything but that. It does not take Nostradamus to tell us that we are on the threshold of a spasm of unprecedented violence as the JVP-PA coalition seeks to win the coming election, to use Kumaratunga's own words, by hook or by crook. That there will be blood on the streets and bodies on street corners is now a foregone conclusion, given that the stakes are so high for Kumaratunga.

She has enjoyed a decade in office, and what a decade that has been for Sri Lanka! Like her father and mother before her, she has succeeded not only in turning the clock back, but in cutting the very ground from under the feet of Sri Lankan polity. Through his disastrous Sinhala-only policy, her father precipitated the ethnic conflict that yet plagues us, almost a half-century later. By turning to Marxism, her mother not only destroyed the flourishing economy of this country, but also illegally extended her term of office and had to be forcibly smoked out of Temple Trees when she lost elections. And now their blighted daughter has but one obsession: how to continue in power for another decade. That requires the constitution to be amended, and that is what this election is all about: her unbridled greed for power. She can't help it - after all, she is a Bandaranaike. How, otherwise, could her own brats inherit the family prerogative to rule Sri Lanka?

And now, her desperation knowing no bounds, Kumaratunga has joined hands with the baby-faced murderers not only of her own husband, but tens of thousands of innocents. She is souping and supping with the very people who slaughtered sadistically and in cold blood, thousands upon thousands of innocents, including children and grandmothers, and looted their homes. She has subscribed to the JVP's vision for a Marxist Sri Lanka, taking us back to the bloodthirsty philosophy of Lenin. For Kumaratunga is a woman who knows no principle - at least not one that transcends her own greed.

Well might Sri Lanka stop and think how it got itself into this mess, for it takes two to tango. Even as Kumaratunga played Adolf Hitler in this uniquely Sri Lankan melodrama, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe has played with uncanny perfection the part of Neville Chamberlain. At every turn he has sought to appease her, expecting that she would conduct herself with propriety, forgetting that she is, after all, a Bandaranaike. In the aftermath of the December 2001 election victory, it was he who opted not to proceed to impeach her, seeking instead to develop governance through 'cohabitation'. It was he who sought to sweep her sins under the carpet, rather than telling the Sri Lankan people the full horror story of her reign. We hope that at least now, Wickremesinghe has learned that you cannot cohabit with the devil.

Wickremesinghe's faith in the foreign governments that espoused this futile cohabitation was touching. Naively he swallowed the dead ropes fed him by the Indians and the Americans, who could not conceive it possible that a head of state could lie to them so fluently or so well. She took them for the ride of their lives, and they in turn underwrote the UNF's strategy of appeasement. Well, look where that got us. Kumaratunga knows full well that it is not Uncle Sam or Mother India that win elections in Sri Lanka: it is the Sri Lankan voters and the thugs who stuff the ballot boxes. Fat lot of good it is looking to Washington or New Delhi for help now.

If perchance the UNF should win the battle that is now upon it, let Wickremesinghe remember one thing: that he would at his peril start once more the process of supinely flirting with this she devil. Like cancers, Bandaranaikes must be surgically excised: applying talcum powder on them will not help. Wickremesinghe thinks it fashionable to take the view that he is not in the business of politics for power, that at the end of the day highfalutin values and gentlemanly conduct will win through. Alas, dear sir, that don't count for nothin' when it comes to the Bandaranaikes. It would do the Prime Minister well to remember that it is the country that has suffered, and is suffering, as a result of his misplaced, touching and childlike trust in Kumaratunga, the Indians and the Americans. Whatever constituency it is that they represent, it is not one that puts Sri Lanka first, as it is Wickremesinghe's duty to do.

And even as the country plunges once more into a bloody election campaign, with the certainty of at least two more to come within the next two years, of one thing we can be certain: that Sri Lanka is in for the ride of its life, and that prosperity, if it comes to this sunny isle at all, will be some time in coming.