The Rajpal Abeynayake Column

The Rajpal Abeynayake Column By Rajpal Abeynayake

Colombo and the brand new World Order
Stanley Jayaweera of Avadhi Lanka writes that the greatest spectre that faces Sri Lanka is not Marxism or even the LTTE, but of being branded by America as a ''failed state.'' Susantha Gunatilleke writing in the Sunday Island castigates the OPA for inviting foreign forces.

Elsewhere, there is a controversy raging about America's Tropical Forest Conservation Act and whether Sri Lanka should sign the Tropical Forest Agreement in exchange for writing off US loans. Selvam Canegaratnam makes mincemeat of an earlier view that Sri Lanka should accept the terms of this Agreement, and handover control of vast swathes of our forest reserves to the control of the Americans.

All of which shows that there is an increasing awareness about the new contours of the global discourse. Jayadeva Uyangoda, in an interview with Tamil Net says that the LTTE should remember that 'that they are dealing in the global state.''

His connotation is also the same, which is that national problems are no longer resolved within national boundaries. But whereas others are willing to name names, and say the United States is the culprit, Uyangoda plays safe, and he confines himself to the rather sanitised descriptions of 'global state'' etc., which would probably not get him in trouble in the "global state'' that operates in matters of academic funding research grants etc., Either way, there is a phenomenon that can be seen with or without the jargon.

(Global state - American hegemony, choose what you want, but essentially you will be talking about the same thing.) Cut to the bone what it means is that American hegemony is becoming more and more nude these days. Even if garbed in the clothing of ''global state'' this nudity is showing, to all, even to those who have to carry out their scholarly work within the boundaries of what their foreign funded research grants may allow.

But it also means that people are increasingly beginning to identify the new ways and means -- the new modus operandi -- through which this hegemony seeks to assert itself. For example (as referred to in this column last week) there was no glib reference to regime-change those days when America needed to get its way in the world. Most certainly, there was no case for regime change in countries such as Sri Lanka.

But the route to accomplish regime change now is different. Sri Lanka can be ripe for regime change, if it first becomes a failed state. "Poor countries are "failed states"; those that oppose America are "rogue states"; an attack by the west is a "humanitarian intervention". (One of the most enthusiastic bombers, Michael Ignatieff, is now "professor of human rights" at Harvard). '' That was said by John Pilger. 'Bombers' refers there to those who approved the invasion of Iraq. As an article in the US Foreign Affairs magazine explained recently, there is also a category called the "pivotal state.'' Pivotal states are those which are vital --- in American thinking -- for the 'stability'' and furtherance of American interests on the globe.

Even if Sri Lanka is not a ''failed state'' say in Liberian terms, Sri Lanka probably qualifies as a "pivotal state'', which is why to make it quite unscholarly and bereft of jargon, we need to watch our backs.

The problem with classifying Sri Lanka as a failed state is that there is a coterie of thinkers here such as Susantha Guntilleke, Stanley Jayaweera (not thinkers of the OPA variety) who constantly keep reminding people that ''failed states'' for instance are made to fail. The failure is orchestrated or engineered. One facet of this orchestration is that a nation is slowly denuded of its intellectuals and thinkers.

They are either marginalised, eliminated in the worse case, or they are co-opted. It is easier to co-opt intellectuals with research grants than it is to eliminate them.
Those who want to take Sri Lanka down the road of the failed state would prefer the OPA variety of thinkers. Even Jayadeva Uyangoda seemed embarrassed for example, when the OPA recently unveiled its 'national electoral reform plan' to a group of select invitees. It is a harebrained project, that seeks to engineer the electoral system in such a way that people vote for candidates within a small 'commune''. Their rights of franchise end there.

The vast number of candidates elected in this "grassroots'' fashion, then proceed to elect a second tier of government, and from this is elected another tier and so on and so forth, until the National Assembly is elected by a rarefied few in the last tier at the top. Being polite Jayadeva Uyangoda the political scientist said "some professionals are naturally so exasperated with today's prevailing system that they would even unwittingly enthrone an elite leadership,'' or words to that effect.

The point here is hardly one of dismissing the OPA. That's almost not worth the while. The real issue is that there is a slow intellectual atrophying - a bereft-ness of thinkers who are prepared to see things for what they are -- and then proceed to call a spade a spade. For instance, it is good to see global hegemony. But if one is to neglect mentioning American hegemony, and call it ''global state'' instead, then that's at least partially co-opted wisdom also.

As for engineered regime-change, one does not have to go far. In Indonesia, for instance, Abdurrahuman Waheed was installed by the Americans. And then, he proceeded to appoint Henry Kissinger as an Advisor! But when Waheed was not malleable, despite Kissinger, they proceed to install Megawathi Sukarnoputhri in power, signifying the fourth regime change in a matter of years.Indonesia of course is no Liberia.

Part of the fundamentalist culture that's now being seen in the American power elite today (Bush, Rumsfield and company) is that it is so fundamentalist that there is no room for niceties. Any Sri Lankan expert in the American foreign policy system will say that Sri Lanka cannot be 'regime-changed' the way Liberia or Indonesia is ''regime-changed.''

But the fundamentalist thinking today in the US Bush administrations doesn't know or care. This is why it is possible that any number of ambitious politicians can try to hitch their wagon to the US regime, in an attempt to engineer a regime change here in Sri Lanka and get themselves catapulted into the seats of power in Colombo. But whatever its weaknesses, Sri Lanka has a democracy that cannot be "regime -changed'' just like that. It is time that the real Sri Lankan experts within the American system told the fundamentalist administration in the US that there are still some countries with which you cannot do a Liberia or an Indonesia.

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