EDITORIAL

He Said, She Said

The slanging match has started. The air is thick with accusations, counter accusations, charges, allegations, finger pointing, rumours and innuendo. Posters deface our walls, newly-surfaced roads are being dug up for pandols to be erected, and polythene is everywhere. Sri Lanka is in the midst of an election campaign, and the general mess lacks but one ingredient: corpses. Those, no doubt, will be supplied in the fullness of time. It is only a question of time before the bloodletting starts, with no prizes for guessing who will fire the first shot.

Even as the slanging match gets under way, the gross hypocrisy of the parties rises to the surface, like scum on foetid water. The President has alleged that the waiver of the loans granted to Yashoda Industries tycoon, Yasasiri Kasturiarachchi is illegal and fraudulent, and threatened People's Bank that she plans to take action against them. She has failed to disclose, no such waivers based on an independent inquiry report was in fact made.

No mention has she also made of the fact that she oversaw precisely the same kind of waiver of monies complained of owed to state banks by the Dasa Group who, however, have been traditional friends of the Bandaranaikes. The message is that any sin is forgiven, condoned and even encouraged if only it benefits the right cause.

Kumaratunga is also going on and on about the vehicles and security available to former non-cabinet and deputy ministers. With the dissolution of parliament, of course, such ministers cease to exist and so have no right to such privileges. Nevertheless, in every campaign Kumaratunga has fought since 1994, deputies have held on to their vehicles post-dissolution, with the blessings of the Executive. She has called for the return of the bullet proof vehicle used by John Amaratunga but has provided her brother Anura with a bullet proof BMW from the presidential fleet. In whichever book it was that Kumaratunga picked up the rudiments of French cuisine, they evidently had different sauces for the goose and the gander.

Much has been made also of the allocation of land belonging to the Land Reform Commission (LRC) on the borders of the eastern side of Sinharaja, and the equally valuable Kanneliya-Dediyagala-Nakiyadeniya forests near Galle, for private sector development. Despite the JVP-PA alliance's attempts to paint this as a government plot to privatise forests, in fact the government has come out in a rather good light. For one thing, the LRC had acted in complete contravention of a decision taken by the cabinet's Economic Policy Committee chaired by the Prime Minister, which had ordered that all the LRC's forestland holdings in the wet zone be handed over to the Forest Department.

Not only that, but immediately the land alienation at Morningside on Eastern Sinharaja came to the attention of the prime minister (in fact within hours of the clearing activity commencing and well before the media became aware of this), Wickremesinghe gave orders that it should be stopped forthwith. He then followed it up by requesting Environment Minister Rukman Senanayake to bring a cabinet paper to formalise the hand over of the LRC's forests to the Forest Department, making future alienation impossible. What is more, Lands Minister Rajitha Senaratne turned out to be completely unaware of the whole sordid transaction, though quite rightly, he accepted responsibility as Minister.

While the mudslinging continues apace, the electorate may well look askance at which side is more likely to deliver solutions to the problems that face the country. While handouts by way of pay rises and subsidies are all very well, they can come only if there is economic growth to keep pace with demand. With Kumaratunga as President-cum-Finance minister, the country actually went into recession-negative growth- for the first time in its history. Despite that, in just one year, the UNF managed to get economic growth up to almost 5%, still well below that of India and China, our giant neighbouring competitors.

Then there is the issue of peace. The LTTE has long claimed to be (rightly or wrongly) the sole representative of the Tamil people in the resolution of the ethnic conflict. This has been widely recognised by all Tamil groups bar the EPDP, whose constituency is in any case now vanishing small. For its part, the PA holds that it wants to negotiate a devolution package with the Tamils while not recognising the Tigers as their sole representatives. The JVP denies both these possibilities and to boot, wants to turf the Norwegians out, despite the whole world having recognised the Norwegians as facilitators sine qua non of the peace process. Should the JVP-PA alliance win through to governance come April 2 we have then, the makings of one of those fine pickles designed to throw the country into chaos and possibly into war. Thousands of youngsters stand once more to be slaughtered like chickens in the killing fields of the north, just to appease the blood lust and thirst for power of the sabre-rattlers hiding under their beds in the south.

And even as she readies the nation for war, one might well ask where Kumaratunga's own loyalties lie. Her children are safely secreted in the United Kingdom, far from harm's way, even as she flirts with their father's killers. Quite apart from girding his loins for battle, her son Vimukthi, eminently of conscription age, has been engaged in promoting hotel projects, under the improved economic climate ushered in by Ranil Wickremesinghe from the President's House no less. Even as his mother has been raving at Lands Minister Senaratne, young Vimukthi has taken it upon himself to approach the Minister and request the allocation of land for a hotel project he is promoting in the south. So much for Kumaratunga's war effort. While the crass hypocrisy of the Bandaranaikes may well sicken the public, it is a burden this country has to bear.

And Kumaratunga's new-found pals in the JVP are barely better. The JVP, under its founder Rohana Wijeweera, took an extremely pro-Tamil line, so much so that in the 1982 presidential election, Wijeweera actually espoused the cause of a separate sovereign state for the Tamils. By 2001, the JVP was still anxious not to toe a war-like line for fear of alienating the 150,000 troops in the north, ever anxious to come home, exhausted after two decades of war. Now those troops are largely home. However, the Reds discovered in the election of 2001 that the newly-formed ultra-nationalist Sihala Urumaya ate significantly into its vote bank.

The JVP's answer to this, post-2001, was to adopt an even more strident nationalist line in the hope of recapturing the electors who had drifted to another faith. They thereby alienated not just the Tamils and the Muslims, they then made the mistake of taking it one step too far. By identifying publicly with the Ven. Elle Gunawansa, a well-known ultra-nationalist and anti-Christian, the JVP leadership painted an indelible picture in the retinas of the Christian community that it was, if not responsible, at least sympathetic to attacks on Christians. Indeed, JVP activists have been implicated in attacks on some 42 churches in the past two months, making it clear that should they and the PA win on April 2, persecution will follow.

Having thus alienated itself from all the minorities, the ground has been cut from under the JVP yet again, and this time by the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU), the latest manifestation of the Sihala Urumaya. By fielding essentially a clerical list of candidates, the JHU hopes yet again to swipe the nationalist rug from under the JVP's feet, effectively leaving the Reds without a constituency. The JVP may yet come to rue the day it abandoned genuine leftist politics (if indeed it ever did espouse them) and begin its drift towards Nazism and intolerance.