The Price Of Treason

THE times in which we live are strange indeed. In these pages a week ago today, we unfolded a tale that, judging from some of the letters we received in response, made our readers' blood boil. Supported by extensive documentary evidence, we showed that President Percival Mahinda Rajapakse, whose predisposition to shoot-from-the-hip has earned him the sobriquet Medamulan‚ Percy, had gifted hundreds of millions of your tax rupees to the LTTE.

The Tigers had no need to adopt a false ruse or resort to subterfuge in order to get their hands on this colossal fortune. They had put in office a President who would do their dirty work for them. Rajapakse lied to cabinet and obtained its consent in effect to embezzle Rs 700 million in public funds and channel this to three 'front companies' set up by Emil Kanthan, an LTTE operative under the name of his common law wife and her two brothers. So concerned was Rajapakse that the truth would out that ministers were not allowed so much as to read the paper, let alone have a copy.

As he has done in so many similar cases - e.g., the scandalous Mihin Air deal and the reintroduction of the criminal defamation law just a fortnight ago - Rajapakse caused a version of the paper to be read out. So damning were the contents that no one was vouchsafed a copy, not even his most trusted non-family ally, Jeyaraj Fernandopulle.

The President's bid to reintroduce criminal defamation, according to his own explanation to cabinet, was personal. Exposures of his maladministration have been coming thick and fast, and these are surely embarrassing. How better to stop them than to wield the stick of state power by threatening editors and political opponents with arrest and incarceration? Thanks to the outspokenness and courage of Rauf Hakeem, who made it clear that he would resign from cabinet should it be decided to proceed with the legislation, that bid failed. And within hours of that failure, Rajapakse made it abundantly clear as to why it was he had wanted to take cover behind such a law in the first place: he issued letters of demand against the Opposition Leader and the Lankadeepa for Rs. 2 billion apiece.

That the Rajapakses think in multiple billions nowadays will come as a surprise to no one. The Helping Hambantota days of mere tens of millions are long gone. The President is irked that Opposition Leader Ranil Wickremesinghe had allegedly questioned his sanity. In a speech at Kegalle, according to the Lankadeepa, Wickremesinghe had not only questioned Percy's rationality but also alleged that he had paid bribes amounting to hundreds of millions of rupees to the Tigers in order to prevent the Tamil citizenry of the north and east voting for the UNP in the last presidential election.

Interestingly, as Wickremesinghe himself is pointing out with increasing frequency, Rajapakse is suing him only in relation to the first part of his speech, not the second. The Opposition Leader, however, may well argue that his thesis is proved by the fact that no sane man who is also Minister of Defence and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces could conceivably channel hundreds of millions of rupees to enemies of the state. After all, there is a word for that: treason. Indeed, when the time comes to account for his actions, Rajapakse may well discover that insanity could be just about the only credible defence he could offer. He would do well to keep that option open.

It is some months now since Tiran Alles claimed that he has in his possession evidence that Basil Rajapakse made a near billion-rupee payoff to win LTTE support for his brother at the presidential election of November 2005. None of the Rajapakses have to this day denied that allegation. Now, we have produced evidence that the President himself lied to cabinet in order to pay over Rs 700 million to three front companies operated by the LTTE. No denial has been offered. Why? Because it is true.

What is most damning in all this is not the silence of the lambs - members of the cabinet - but the silence of the nationalist parties. There has not been so much as a whimper of protest from the Sihala Urumaya or the JVP with regard to their views on the President being caught red-handed, siphoning money to the LTTE to buy arms with which to kill yet more Sri Lankan soldiers. They are dumbstruck. Medamulan‚ Percy, the champion of their cause, has been shown up as a hypocritical fraud. "While others abide our question," they seem to be telling Percy, "thou art free."

Rather than take the fight to the Rajapakses last week, they opted to plaster the walls of Colombo with posters asking British High Commissioner Dominic Chilcott whether in the wake of the Glasgow bombings, his government would be negotiating with al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden. If not, how could Britain possibly expect the Sri Lankan government to negotiate an end to Tiger terrorism with Velupillai Pirapaharan?

This bit of empty rhetoric must not be allowed to pass unanswered. If there is a logic to al Qaeda's actions, however perverted that logic might be, it is that they see the West as being inimical to Islamic values. The raison d'etre of al Qaeda has nothing to do with Iraq: the organisation was up and running long before the US-led invasion of Iraq. What Bin Laden finds objectionable is the Western system of values that runs counter to the medieval brand of Islam he espouses. That is not to say that al Qaeda does not have its supporters in the thousands of people the United States manages to aggravate through its arrogance, from people badly treated by US visa officers through to victims of US torture and bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The LTTE are every bit as bloodthirsty and murderous as al Qaeda, and we condemn outright and without reservation their terrorism. But to see the LTTE purely as a terrorist organisation would be to miss the point.

Tamil militancy had its genesis in the late 1970s when it became clear that moderate Tamil political parties were having no success in negotiating a bill of rights for Tamils from the Sinhala-dominated governments Sri Lanka had since independence. Tamil militancy was - and continues to be - a result of the unwillingness of the Sinhala majority to grant even basic rights to Tamils. It is a response to the tearing up of the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayagam Pact, the 'Sri' number-plates, a Sinhala-only national anthem, Buddhism as the religion of the state, Sinhala as the official language and countless other insults.

For 30 years after independence, the Tamils tried exclusively through democratic means to persuade the Sinhalese to develop the then Ceylon as a democracy with a secular identity and polity. They were resisted at every step by Sinhala-Buddhists who wanted the country to have a purely Sinhala-Buddhist identity. So inured have the Sinhalese become to this that they cannot now recognise how hateful it is to Tamils who, after all, see themselves every bit as 'Sri Lankan' as the other communities.

Indeed, even the term 'Sri Lankan' is an affront to many Tamils. Just as Sri Lanka has always been known by that name to the Sinhalese, the island's name in Tamil has been Illankai (Eelam) and, for the preceding two centuries, in English, Ceylon. This is not at all unusual. After all, India is Dambadiva in Sinhala, Hindustan in Hindi and 'India' in English.

In 1972 however, the Sirimavo Bandaranaike Government actually passed legislation to force everyone - and especially Tamils - to refer to Sri Lanka by the Sinhalese name regardless of the language-context in which it was used. It was as laughable as Germany passing a law to require its name to be Deutschland even when used in English.

Not surprisingly, Sri Lanka's Tamils did not laugh. This was just as hateful to them as it would be to Sinhalese to refer to their country by the Tamil name, Illankai or Eelam. It is the failure of post-Independence Sinhalese to accept Tamils as equals, and to be sensitive to the fact that Tamils think of themselves as being every bit as 'Sri Lankan' as the Sinhalese, that led to Tamil militancy. Tamils took to arms only after 30 years of democratic struggle failed. To equate this militancy - and the terrorism that flowed from the continued frustration of Tamil aspirations as a result of Sinhala bigotry - to al Qaeda's terrorism only shows that the poster-pasters are once again missing the plot.

To reduce this to its simplest terms, our readers should ponder a moment on why it is that policemen and soldiers, when they stop you at a checkpoint, ask you for your identity card. Do they ever actually check your identity, as for example a bank would, by scrutinising your card, reading your name, checking to see if your photo matches your face and, if doubt persists, asking for a secondary identification such as a driver's license? No, they do not. They merely glance, not at the photo side of the card but the text side, and it takes them only a second to decide whether or not you are a safe bet. By what magic do they do this? Sinhalese barely ever notice, but every Tamil does. The reason? Because the ID cards of most Tamils have their name written on the reverse also in Tamil script. The only thing those well-meaning policemen are looking for in your identity card is to see whether it has your name written in both Sinhala and Tamil (i.e., whether the holder is a Tamil) or just in Sinhala alone.

The official argument is that having the name in Tamil on the reverse enables Tamil policemen and officials to read the script on the cards of Sri Lankan Tamils. Well then, how do Tamil policemen read the cards of Sinhalese? The obvious solution, that everyone's national identity card should be in both languages has evaded officialdom, and the card serves only as a symbol of race, like the yellow arm bands Jews in Nazi Germany were required to wear.

Having got that aside off our chests, let us then return briefly to the antics of Medamulan‚ Percy. Ever since claims were first made that he had paid off the LTTE to subvert the last presidential election, the opposition has been asking for a select committee of parliament to be appointed to investigate these allegations. The government, caught with its pants down, has understandably resisted the select committee's appointment and sought instead to stifle further exposures by reintroducing the criminal defamation law. At the end of the day, it is Speaker W. J. M. Lokubandara that needs to decide on the select committee issue, and he has cast his lot with Rajapakse by saying that he will appoint a committee only if evidence of payouts to the LTTE are provided. Well, Mr Speaker, last Sunday we did precisely that. We provided evidence, including the damning cabinet paper signed by none less than the President himself, and showed that the money was paid to the family of Emil Kanthan, a man who even the TID claims is a key LTTE operative. What further proof do you need?

It is a sad state of affairs indeed when the President, Minister of Defence and Commander in Chief of the armed forces of a country is discovered paying bribes to the enemy in the middle of a war - out of state funds, to boot - and the whole nation chooses to sweep the damning evidence under the carpet. There is a word for what Medamulan‚ Percy did, and that word is Treason: of that let there be no doubt.