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| Angry
CBK walks out of meeting Indeed, it was a difficult task; to replace someone like Kadirgamar who was a colossus in the contemporary political scene; but the issue took a different dimension because the filling of this vacancy was also a test of strength between former President of the Republic, Chandrika Kumaratunga and the incumbent President Mahinda Rajapakse. Rajapakse
is the head of the country, while Kumaratunga remains the head of
the party, and likens herself to the role played by Sonia Gandhi
in India, whose Prime Minister is not the head of the ruling party. With
time running out, and Kumaratunga flying out of the country on her
customary visits for the Christmas season, it was decision time.
The onus was on Kumaratunga as head of the SLFP to summon the meeting.
To set the stage for it, she called her close allies for a preliminary
meeting. All but Jayaratne turned up. And Kumaratunga without much ado, started rambling about her current status as a forgotten political leader. She told the assembled men that they have all forgotten her as well, and accused Rajapakse of throwing mud at her at every turn. Indeed at one point, she broke down lamenting at what had befallen her. The former President quickly regained her composure. It is a difficult task to return to civvies street after a life as the all-powerful President of the Republic. Presidents J.R. Jayewardene and D.B. Wijetunge slipped back without much problems, but Kumaratunga is finding it increasingly difficult to cope. She then told the senior party wallahs that the office-bearers of the party must be summoned to discuss only the forthcoming local government elections. The decision on filling the vacancy in Parliament was to be left in abeyance. It was a known fact that Kumaratunga herself was eyeing the seat. The question of where the central committee was to meet then became an issue. Kumaratunga suggested the party office at Darley Road, Maradana, but Maitripala Sirisena said she never came there when she was the President, due partly to security concerns, so he suggested the meeting take place at the now vacated President's House. She would have felt at home with the suggestion, and readily agreed. The SLFP central committee has 25 office-bearers and 52 ordinary members. The meeting was scheduled for December 12, and all of them were to be summoned because Rajapakse has a clear majority over Kumaratunga in the committee. But lo and behold, suddenly some office-bearers began receiving last-minute telegrams cancelling the Dec. 12 meeting. One of them was Mangala Samaraweera, the erstwhile confidant of Kumaratunga. There was confusion all round. Samaraweera had gone to Temple Trees to meet Rajapakse when he had a call asking him why he was not at President's House for the CC meeting. He dashed from Kollupitiya to Colombo Fort in record time. At President's House, Kumaratunga was presiding as head of the party, Rajapakse the President of the Republic listening. The former continued in good form, on a verbal attack on the latter. Like Samaraweera, many others were trooping in late for the meeting following the confusion caused by those mysterious telegrams. So much so, that when one of them sat at the back and asked a colleague what was the item on the agenda that was under discussion, his colleague had told him with a mischievous grin that it was Item No. 3. Item No. 3 on the agenda was ' Mahinda Rajapakse Janadipathita upahara kireema ' or to felicitate the new President. It was anything but that. Kumaratunga was on a monolgue and Rajapakse patiently listening to her. She went to the extent of saying "I can't even get sugar or tea after I left the Presidency ". She went on to say how her father was killed, and then her husband, and now she said "even the State media are maligning me". Then, she seemed to pinch a nerve in the new President. Kumaratunga said that the man behind all this was Basil Rajapakse, the President's brother and factum factotum. At which point the elder Rajapakse intervened and stopped Kumaratunga. He said that it was unfair to accuse Basil Rajapakse of all these doings because he was back in the United States attending to some matters of his daughter. CC members were whispering to each other that none of the matters raised by the former President were on the agenda, and it was necessary to stick to the agenda and the business at hand. The whispering 'campaign' reached the head table, and proceedings resumed, with the issue of the filling of Kadirgamar's vacancy in Parliament taken up. Again
Kumaratunga was the first to speak. She asked why the party was
wanting to appoint someone who had fled the country. She was referring
to Dalles Alahapperuma, the former deputy minister of Samurdhi Affairs
and MP from the Matara district, whom Rajapakse had wanted appointed. Rajapakse, however, responded by saying that Alahapperuma helped him win the Presidential election, and had done a lot of work for him. Then, Rajapakse struck a conciliatory note by telling Kumaratunga that if she disliked Alahapperuma, that the party can appoint Ronnie de Mel. Many CC members noticed the smirk on Rajapakse's face as he made the suggestion. The former MEP-SLFP-UNP-SLFP-UNP member, de Mel had pledged his support to Rajapakse at the Presidential campaign when UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe refused to confirm any posts for those who work for him. Now de Mel is an advisor to Rajapakse. At
this point, two of Kumaratunga's remaining loyalists turned their
guns on her. It was a cruel blow to her. Both Reggie Ranatunga and
Kingsley Wickramaratne made the point that Rajapakse should be allowed
to appoint the man of his choice because he is now the incumbent
President and he should be able to pick his team to get a job done
in the country. For others, her departure was a blessing because they could then proceed to take a unanimous decision. It was Kingsley Wickramaratne himself who proposed the name of Dalles Alahapperuma for the vacant seat. There were no dissenters. It was agreed that the UPFA secretary Susil Premajayantha write to the Commissioner of Elections nominating Alahapperuma to Parliament. But the drama did not end with that. Kumaratunga was due to leave that same night to Canberra, this time for sure, on a private visit. She was to be the guest of her one-time Secretary Kusumsiri Balapatabendi. Kumaratunga had someone telephone SriLankan Airlines and ask them to keep the flight waiting. In the bad old days of not so long ago when she was the President, SriLankan would say that the departure flight was delayed "due to technical reasons". This time they could not be bothered with those niceties. They told their passengers, bluntly, that the flight was being delayed because they were awaiting the arrival of one of their passenger's - former President Chandrika Kumaratunga. Furious passengers started complaining, to no avail. The aircraft would still not budge without Kumaratunga. This time, the reason for Kumaratunga dragging her feet in getting to the airport was a direct outcome of the CC meeting. Blissfully unaware that the rest of her party had decided on Alahapperuma in her absence, Kumaratunga sat down to draft a letter to SLFP secretary Maithripala Sirisena saying "because no decision was taken at the central committee meeting, I wish to nominate V. Anandasangaree to Parliament". Now, everyone knows that Anandasangaree is the de-jure president of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), and a vociferous opponent of the LTTE. In a sense, his appointment to fill Kadirgamar's seat might well have been the most appropriate decision for the party to take. It was Kadirgamar to whom Kumaratunga had turned to when Intelligence reports began mounting about LTTE threats to Anandasangaree's life. The ex-LSSPer had not wanted security, but Kadirgamar had persuaded him to accept state security. That apart, Anandasangaree's political line on national unity was consonant with that of Kadirgamar, and such an appointment would have smoothened the rough-edges the Rajapakse regime has on its nationalistic stance. Anandasanagaree would also have been a good advocate for them. But all that was academic. For one thing, had Kumaratunga proposed his name earlier, it may have received some positive response from the party. Surely, he would have been a better option than Ronnie de Mel. The more relevant point was that by the time Maithripala Sirisena had received this letter from Kumaratunga, Premajayantha's letter to the Elections Commissioner appointing Alahapperuma had already reached the Commissioner. Now,
Alahapperuma is scheduled to take his oaths on Tuesday. Norwegian
envoy Hans Bratskaar met Rajapakse almost on cue with these LTTE
attacks, and knowing very well that the great hope of Sri Lanka
- India - has declined Colombo's unilateral offer to play a bigger
role in the peace process. He was speaking with a sense of authority. Bratskaar
had told Rajapakse that he had met LTTE political wing leader S.P.
Thamilselvan and that the LTTE was willing to discuss the flaws
in the 2002 ceasefire agreement. The catch, however, was that these
discussions would have to take place in Oslo, Norway's capital. Government's
peace secretariat was instructed to write to the LTTE peace secretariat.
They were asked to embody Bratskaar's message about amending the
truce agreement, and to say that the new government was willing
provided these discussions took place in an Asian country. The question
for the government is whether all these demands and counter-demands
they put forward eventually get implemented given the caving in
that followed the twin attacks in Jaffna a fortnight ago. Special envoy Eric Solheim was also present. He is now the Minister of Overseas Development of that country, and it seems that he will continue to be very much part of Sri Lanka's peace process. The late Kadirgamar didn't like him, not personally, but because of his pro-Tiger stance, but there was not much he could do about it. One wonders if the likes of Rajapakse and Samaraweera will fare any better as the LTTE seems to have wrested the initiative at the moment with a government whose players are thoroughly unacquainted with the intricacies of the crisis, and the one-time head of the local body that was meant to handle the process on what seems still a wild goose chase canvassing votes for his own candidature for the UN top job. So, if Kumaratunga - and the LTTE/Norwegian combine was bad news for Rajapakse, it was almost cruel for his own side - the JVP - to come and give him a kick at the rear. In Parliament, Nandana Gunathillake, JVP MP slammed Rajapakse directly for appointing a big cabinet of ministers. Rajapakse had tried to camouflage this exercise by pruning down the cabinet but appointing state ministers. The JVP was not impressed because the state ministers were to get virtually the same benefits and perks as their cousins in cabinet. Gunathillake then leathered off an instance where he claimed one amathi (he did not specify if it was a cabinet or state minister) had imported a vehicle for Rs. 14 million, and that this was a criminal waste of public funds. The matter was raised at Wednesday's cabinet meeting. Rajapakse was furious, with both Gunathillake and with the amathi who had imported this vehicle. Around 7.30 that evening, the President telephoned Nandana Gunathillake and asked him who this amathi was. He was told that it was Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Wijedasa Rajapakse. Instead of a Rajapakse to Rajapakse call, he then telephoned the secretary to the Finance Minister P.B. Jayasundera and asked him if this was so. Jayasundera said that it was not so, and that there was no such request. He was told by the President that even if such a request were to come, not to pass it. Immediately thereafter, the President invited the JVP for a meeting. He felt that things must be nipped in the bud, and that the JVP whose tacit approval was obtained post-facto the Norwegian re-invite, need to be handled. He was looking for some southern consensus on how best to deal with the LTTE, the Norwegians and the peace process. The JVP hierarchy turned up for the meeting. Somawansa Amarasinghe, Tilvin Silva, Wimal Weerawansa and Anura Dissanayake comprised the delegation. The President assured them that the Norwegians would now only play the role of the facilitator, and not as ceasefire monitors, which might come as news to the Norwegians. He
told the JVP team that the LTTE was stepping up its military campaign,
and Somawansa Amarasinghe wanted the President to take effective
measures to stem the violence by taking tougher steps. He urged
the President to hold local government elections in the north and
the east, something the Tamil parties of the TNA had not wanted
done. They began confiscating photographs of LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, something that could be questioned because the LTTE is not a banned organisation in Sri Lanka. The army then walked into newspaper offices making the same demands, but it appeared that they were being given the go-ahead to step out of their barracks and ensure that no offensive operations can be launched against them from these civilian populated areas of Jaffna. It was towards the end of the week that Rajapakse was preparing to re-group his position as the new President. He invited the United National Party (UNP) for a discussion. He made it out that it was his continuing campaign to build a southern consensus in dealing with the LTTE. Others saw it as a deft move to neutralize the JVP-JHU combine that was beginning to pelt a few stones at his new administration. The
JVP especially would not have liked this invitation to the UNP,
but could not accept it in muttering resignation. The UNP's troubled
leader, Ranil Wickremesinghe, accepted the offer saying he had always
stood - even before the elections - for a UNP-SLFP stand on the
peace process. Accompanying Wickre-mesinghe were his deputy Karu Jayasuriya, one-time peace process negotiator G.L. Peiris and Wickremesinghe loyalist and ex-speaker Joseph Michael Perera. The UNP is also in two fighting camps, the eternal victim of every defeated party. One camp wants its leader Wickremesinghe, whom they consider was just unlucky not to have become the President, to continue, while others want him replaced by Jayasuriya. The compromise seems to be 'party reforms'. This
week the two camps met to iron out their problems, the Wickremesinghe
faction comprising John Amaratunga, Tissa Attan-ayake and Hemakumara
Nanayakkara, while the Jayasuriya faction comprising Rajitha Senarathne,
Gamini Lokuge and Ranjit Maddumabandara. There seems to be some pressure on Wickremesinghe to quicken the pace of these 'reforms' which include his stepping down from some of the posts he holds on to - Leader of the Opposition, Leader of the UNP, leader of the UNF, and handing some of the powers to Jayasuriya. The Jayasuriya camp claims that 40 MPs back them, and that President Rajapakse has offered the Prime Ministership to Jayasuriya if they cross-over and join him. The other option they say they have is to sit as an Independent group in Parliament. Wickremesinghe seemed unruffled by these threats, and continued with his plans to visit Vietnam during the holiday season. He may need to learn some guerrilla tactics of his own from the famous Viet Cong while on vacation. |
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