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Taking
responsibility ourselves
much to assess
the measure of the changes that it has effected in governance but
- for a change - turn the finger pointing elsewhere. We have had
three decades of conflict in this country, costing us countless
lives both in the South and in the North. We had during the last
five years or so witnessed the severe erosion of public faith in
institutions such as the police, the public service and the judiciary.
The weakening of each institution indeed, had a ripple effect on
the other until it seemed that the basic democratic structures of
the society that we lived in, were collapsing around us. Whichever
way it went, the conflict was held to blame. Now, we have a fragile
peace in place - for what precise price we would only know much
later down the line. Regardless, it is time to examine our collective
responsibility for the constitutional and political mess that we
find ourselves in right now. This kind of
inward thinking is highly necessary for one simple reason. It may
well be said that the most striking feature of the late nineties
was the manner in which civil society, activists and religious leaders
in this country defaulted on issues which should have brought them
out onto the streets. We should have had a non-partisan and apolitical
consensus on what was increasingly going wrong with the manner in
which we were being governed in Sri Lanka. If such a critique had
taken place, perhaps, we would not have seen such excesses being
committed in our political life. Instead, we had academics engaging
unashamedly in politically partisan exercises such as asking the
people to vote for a particular political party, the media driven
by its own political affiliations and the rest of us being studiedly
silent even when a new Constitution was attempted to be pushed down
our throats. The list of
issues crucial to democratic living that have gone by default in
the past several years is far too long to detail here. One particularly
striking example in this regard, however, has been the issue of
the independence of the judiciary when the Chandrika Kumaratunga
administration started visualising itself as the victim of particular
decisions of the Supreme Court in the mid-nineties. If at that time,
members of the legal profession, civil society leaders and academics
in this country had made the point strongly enough that such an
overreaction was highly unnecessary, the consequent disastrous politicisation
of the Court culminating with an impeachment motion against a sitting
Chief Justice in 2001, (indeed the eye of the storm which displaced
the Kumaratunga administration from political power), might well
have been avoided. It is also in like manner that we had an avoidance
of key issues regarding the deterioration of our elections culture,
resulting in Wayamba and shades of the same thereafter in elections
that followed. So we had at
the end of 2001 a new regime succeeding to power. The United Front
Government came into power with many handicaps, chief of which was
the office of the Presidency and the personality of its present
incumbent, aggravated as the whole was by an unstable majority in
Parliament. As the months went on, we had an end to war in circumstances
which appear to have crucified the people of the North and East
to their fate as exhaustingly detailed in the annual bulletins of
the University Teachers for Human Rights (UTHR), (Jaffna), one of
the few critically activist organisations still functioning in this
country. In the South, we went about our own sybaritic way. And
our apathy in all except the most personal of concerns, continued
to have an inevitable effect. Thus, as far
as issues of governance was concerned, we had the apparent functioning
of the 17th Amendment and the appointing of a Constitutional Council
envisioned to bring about a new public order. What has happened
mid-year, however, is that the Council has become frozen in controversies
regarding its powers while there is political scurrying around to
safeguard the life of the present Parliament and constitutional
amendments tailored to the same. Currently, we await with not so
intense anticipation, the judgements of the Supreme Court on both
these issues. What follows thereafter in the months to come is anybody's
guess. What is, however, certain is that nothing very much is going
to change if we do not engage in critical introspection and recognise
a significant failure of ourselves as a people, to bring about a
society that we feel proud to live in. It will only be then that
constitutional and political structures fall into place and public
institutions like the police, the public service and the judiciary
return to their historical role as the bulwarks of our society.
This is something that Commissions cannot achieve. It is appropriate
in this context that issues of life, liberty and security which
remained in the balance during the past two decades in particular,
still pose serious questions in Sri Lanka. This week, we saw the
releasing of a report of the Hong Kong based Asian Legal Resources
Centre (ALRC) which has exhaustively recorded a number of testimonies
in the South demonstrating that torture has now become synonymous
with police interrogation. One case in point is Nandini Herat from
Wariyapola, regarding which, this column commented on a few weeks
back as. The ALRC Report details a list of testimonies from individuals
who have been similarly tortured in police custody showing a pattern
not only of police brutality but of similar intimidation of relatives
and legal counsel of detainees. The Report
makes particular recommendations with regard to the manner in which
practical changes could be brought about in this "torture culture",
addressed variously to the Government, the Attorney General, the
National Human Rights Commission, legal and medical professionals
and civil society. Meanwhile, five police officers have been reportedly
transferred out of the Wariyapola police station this week after
Nandini's case was publicised and reported to the Human Rights Commission.
The transfer orders had been made by Wayamba DIG R.H. Seneviratne
on the direction of the new Inspector General of Police T.E. Anandarajah.
The OIC of that particular police station, who had been severely
implicated in the torture acts and has been charged, however, has
not been transferred. And the question as to whether the transfers
themselves could be considered as adequate action given the gravity
of the alleged action that they had engaged in is a different issue
altogether. Ultimately,
what is so ironic is that yet - after so many mistakes in the past
- and on almost every issue from constitutional amendments affecting
our basic governing structures to issues of life, liberty and security,
we still appear to be content with makeshift solutions that barely
address the core of the problems that we are confronted with. |
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