A Nation Betrayed

Thirty years ago, in 1977, J. R. Jayewardene brought forth on this island a new nation. Sweeping aside the so-called 'seven year curse' that left citizens scavenging for food from dustbins, Jayewardene opened the nation's doors to foreign investment and liberal ideas. No one held it against him that he had been among those who had marched towards the Dalada Maligawa in 1957 in protest of the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayagam Pact, that sought to give Tamils reasonable use of their language in the north and east.

Jayewardene had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and had five-sixths of parliament in his pocket, making him the outright dictator of the land. Indeed, he said so himself.

Mahinda Rajapakse, in his early 30s having lost the Beliatte seat at the 1977 general election had no inkling that he would for the next 17 years be agitating from the opposition. He had plenty of time to lick his wounds and reflect on how he, when one day his turn came, would get things right. It was the ultimate learning experience. Unfortunately for Rajapakse, he is a slow learner.

When in 2005 he secured the SLFP's presidential nomination he, like Jayewardene in 1977, had the silver spoon. A new face promising fresh ideas, saying the right things, wearing the right clothes, Rajapakse would fight Ranil Wickremesinghe all the way to the finish line. But even before the starting gun went off, he faltered, having been caught red-handed, siphoning tsunami aid into a private bank account. Many men would have been overwhelmed by such an exposure and slunk off silently into the sunset to sulk over the shame of it all. But not Medamulane Mahinda: he was of thicker skin. Indeed he had a hide as thick as a rhinoceros.

With the whole country talking of nothing but the Helping Hambantota scam, our worthy presidential aspirant decided that if elections could not be won by hook, they must be won by crook. The Tamil electorate, he knew, was none too pleased with his pro-Sinhala-Buddhist outlook and was unlikely to vote for him. They had to be stopped from voting for the UNP. But how?

Enter Tiran Alles, who everyone now knows as a close buddy of former Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera. Alles was at the time also in the innermost circle of would-be President Rajapakse. According to a statement made by Alles, Prime Minister Rajapakse requested him to set up a meeting with a representative of the LTTE with a view to obtaining the Tigers' support at the forthcoming election. Alles maintains that he did make the necessary introductions through a business contact and that a staggering sum of money running into millions of dollars changed hands between Basil Rajapakse and Emil Kanthan, the emissary of Velupillai Pirapaharan, in his presence. There was of course more to the deal with the Rajapakses agreeing to the grant of a massive housing project to the Tigers in addition to disarming the Karuna group after victory was secured.

Pirapaharan, it seems, kept his part of the bargain, and at the eleventh hour, the Tigers announced a Tamil boycott of the polls. Not only in the north and east, but even in Colombo, the Tamil citizenry stayed away from election booths in droves: no Tamil, however distant from Kilinochchi, wants to get on the wrong side of 'Thambi.' The upshot was that Rajapakse won the election, albeit by the slimmest of whiskers. But he had given an IOU of staggering proportions to the LTTE, which he himself labels as a terrorist organisation. Now, he had to pay up.

The money that changed hands before the election was a mere down payment. It had come from the coffers of the presidential election budget, and was considered money well spent. Then, having taken over the country and the Ministry of Finance with it, Rajapakse had control of the national cheque book. And within weeks of his taking office on November 18, 2005, Emil Kanthan had caused his fianc‚e and her two brothers to register not one, but three construction companies in Vavuniya to pave the way for the post election deal which was agreed upon.

Believing the Tigers were in his pocket, Rajapakse then tried to broker a truce. That, however, thanks to the amateurish performances of Nimal Siripala de Silva and Rohitha Bogollagama in Geneva, was a spectacular flop. Sensing that Rajapakse was not interested in peace, the Tigers began once again to escalate the violence. One by one the attacks became more serious until the July 20, 2006 standoff at Mawilaru, where LTTE cadres blocked off an anicut, cutting off the water supply to several Sinhalese villages. Even as Sinhala anger mounted, Rajapakse, in whose mind money could buy anything, sought to bribe the Tigers by implementing the post election part of the deal.

On August 3, 2006, he brought to cabinet a memorandum under his own signature, seeking to pay over Rs 700 million of government money to Kanthan's companies for 'housing projects' as per the deal agreed upon with the Tigers prior to the election even as the Mawilaru controversy raged. So anxious was Rajapakse to get the money passed that almost every applicable procedure was fudged. No Cabinet Procurement Committee - mandatory for a contract of this magnitude - was appointed. No prequalification of the contractors was made.

Government rules prescribe that a construction contract of this size could be given only to a contractor who is awarded ICTAD's Grade M1 certification. Kanthan's companies, hastily incorporated just six months earlier, had no such qualification. They had been designed simply to fly by night - to siphon your tax rupees to the LTTE so they could buy planes with which to bomb you - and that is all they did.

With cabinet approval under his belt, Rajapakse ordered that the money be paid to Kanthan's nominees. Here was the man who claims to be a sincere patriot than the rest of us, even as the armed forces girded their loins for battle, surreptitiously paying out cash to the enemy. What would the British people have done had they found that Churchill, at the height of World War II, had been siphoning money from the British exchequer to a company owned by Eva Braun, Hitler's girlfriend?

Yet, that is precisely what Mahinda Rajapakse did even as Mawilaru raged with the Sinhala villagers he swore to protect were starved of their water. Incredible, it seems, but elsewhere in these pages you will find the evidence, including the fateful cabinet paper. It has been well said that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel: we leave it to you, dear reader, to decide who is the patriot and who the scoundrel.

If the payment was bona fide, why the secrecy? After all, if Rajapakse was being so magnanimous as to give the Tamil residents of Kilinochchi some free houses, he would hardly keep the transaction under wraps. The President is not one to hide his light under a bushel. The next day's cabinet briefing would have praised his action in glowing terms and the Daily News would have run banner headlines. Yet, the payout was shrouded in secrecy. Why? It seems the reason was that it had nothing to do with housing: it was the next installment of the blood money Rajapakse had promised Pirapaharan for giving him the election on a platter.

Many things Rajapakse has been doing in these past few months now begin to fall into place. With revelations of the multi million dollar payoff to the Tigers becoming public, there have been repeated calls for the appointment of a Parliamentary Select Committee. These have been strenuously opposed by the government. If there is nothing to hide, why oppose an investigation? Now we know why!

In the midst of all this, the Terrorism Investigations Division, in a patently political exercise, arrested Tiran Alles, coincidentally just days after it became clear that Mangala Samaraweera would not accept a fresh cabinet portfolio. Although Alles was taken in and questioned merely in order to harass, his statement to the TID was pure dynamite. Not only did he implicate Basil Rajapakse in the perfidious negotiations that took place between Temple Trees and the Tigers, but also the President's Secretary, Lalith Weeratunga and Treasury Secretary P. B. Jayasundera. The proof of the deal in now reflected in the Cabinet Paper.

Meanwhile, sensing that all hell is about to break loose, Rajapakse last week sought to reintroduce the law of criminal defamation, clearly in order to threaten the free media. That plan, thanks to Rauf Hakeem's presence of mind, floundered. There is now nothing except violence that stands in the way of the facts being brought before the public.

The truth is about to out, and the tale is a chilling one. In reading our account of these dealings of Sri Lanka's super patriotic President, our more erudite readers will no doubt recall the words of William Shakespeare in Hamlet- "I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, thy knotted and combined locks to part, and each particular hair to stand on end, like quills upon the fretful porpentine."

Unable to counter the facts, the government will tomorrow appeal to the public's credulity. "If we were paying off the LTTE," they will ask, "why is the LTTE trying to kill us? They attacked Gotabaya. They attacked Sarath Fonseka. If we had really paid them off, would they ever do that?"

Such questions, though rhetorical, in fact can be answered by history. Premadasa gave the LTTE arms in order to mollify them. They killed Premadasa. Rajiv Gandhi gave them money. They killed Rajiv Gandhi. Mahinda Rajapakse has paid them off big time: but that is not to say for a moment that he has bought himself, or the country, a moment's respite. If Pirapaharan was a man who could be bought for money, this war would have been over decades ago.

When Chandrika Kumaratunga merely tried through P-TOMS to involve the LTTE in the tsunami reconstruction process, the Buddhist nationalists - JHU, JVP and all, egged on by Rajapakse - were out on the streets to stop her. When Ranil Wickremesinghe sought to bring the Tigers into the democratic fold by involving them in an interim government for the north and east, the outcry from the nationalists was to bring his government down.

It would be interesting now, to see how these same forces will react to the revelation that Mahinda Rajapakse paid off the 'Tiger terrorists' not just before he became President, but even after, to the tune of millions of dollars. Only the coming weeks will tell where Sri Lanka's morality lies.

These latest revelations could not have come at a worse time for Rajapakse, who barely two years into his presidency, is beleaguered on all sides. The excesses of his brothers, the stench of corruption, blas‚ disregard for human rights, the culture of violence and a stagnant economy are coming to haunt the President. The Rajapakses have lost touch with the public. When Gotabaya's convoy whizzes through Colombo streets, the city's traffic is brought to a complete standstill. Even pedestrians are herded like cattle off the streets, into shops and roadside houses and, at gunpoint, ordered to face the other way. Gotabaya, it seems, enjoys inspecting the public's backsides.

Astonishingly, few will be shocked by today's revelations of presidential payoffs to the Tigers. So disgusted has the public become of the excesses of the Rajapakse Brothers, that they do not think anything to be beneath them. Question is, when will the politicians who are propping up their evil regime come to their senses? They too, must know that the longer they delay the day of reckoning, the lower their own chances will be of re-election. At the end of the day, the fate of the Rajapakses will be decided by parliament. And unless there is popular pressure on parliamentarians to do the right thing, all Sri Lanka can expect is more of the same.