A look back at that "most repugnant moment''
Athurugiriya is now almost over and done with, but the recent resurrection of the Athurugiriya issue brought back certain memories of a pre 4/11 episode on television.

Tilak Marapana was facing the cameras, and interviewing him was one of those made to order television anchors. Marapana was dressed in full regalia -- you could say only the waistcoat was missing from the ensemble. Anyway, the questions revolved around defence matters, and Marapana was asked about army informants. He was asked what the Ministry of Defence has to say about the string of informants numbering more than 40 that were killed by the LTTE after the ceasefire.

Marapana said "these informants are employed by us for a certain period of time.'' "For example'', he told the interviewer, "I can employ an informant for two months to spy on you. He may be a person employed in your office. After his two month assignment he ceases to be my employee. He is then no longer needed by us. He is no longer our man, and what happens to him is not our lookout.''

Then Marapana deadpanned with a response that might be characterised probably as the most nauseating two minutes. He said: "in fact, informants who are known by the enemy to be informants may be a liability to us, and it might be a good thing that they are assassinated by the enemy.''

The made- to- order interviewer moved onto the next question. He did not have the gumption - - or maybe the presence of mind -- to ask Marapana which informant is going to help the Sri Lankan forces hereafter, if the attitude of the Sri Lankan military hierarchy is so callous as to consider informants as expendable as used condoms? Use them and lose them, that's exactly what Marapana said. Flush them down the toilet.

The Marapana answer brings under the microscope one of the most colossal weaknesses of the UNF government. Which is that its spin is too clever for its own good.

Marapana in his enthusiasm to spin (to use the racy current American argot for 'distortion of fact') he forgot that informants are not used condoms -- that if the state does not provide security for them, then, the state will lose all it has in terms of a bulwark of intelligence in the North and East which can be used to counter the venom of the LTTE.

The answer also showed that politicians are just talking heads if they have lost sight of the fundamentals, and if they don't have a real moral core that will keep them from blabbing and spinning answers to questions that have far reaching repercussions.

It showed that even in a country that's fast losing its bearings -- one still cannot govern if the leaders have lost their moral compass. It seems that it's this glaring lack of a grasp of the moral dimensions of the peace initiative that finally cut down the UNF government. One may argue that the UNF government is still down but not out, but the fact is that it is gasping for breath and might soon need some sort of artificial respiration to be resuscitated.

On the other hand however, the economy was gaining under the UNF, and there was a ceasefire that meant that civilian killings both in the North East and Colombo had come to an end. What the UNF had therefore was a vast moral lacuna at its core, even as it succeed in delivering the goods.

But, the second element, that of delivering the goods is one that's perennially ignored in this country. This is not necessarily so in other polities.

So many authoritarian or morally untenable governments have been tolerated in many parts of the world before -- purely because these governments were perceived to be delivering on the economic front. Mahathir Mohommed was tolerated and even idolised by the Malaysians even though he put his political opponents in jail and had them locked up for the rest of his tenure. Clinton was the most popular American President in recent times because the American economy was booming in his time, despite the fact that he was only one vote short of being impeached for moral turpitude involving perjury in court.

We haven't still had an election to decide whether people will excuse the UNF government's moral turpitude in exchange for its relatively successful handling of the economy compared to the PA government that preceded it, (at least speaking of the Sinhala dominated South for the moment.)

Some political purists may find it embarrassing to give equal weight to the economic dimension and the moral dimension of a government's performance. This has been the central pivot of the PA and alliance opposition to the UNF government -- that the UNF is a moral disaster, because it let the Tigers run amok and put the lives of soldiers and the lives of civilians in the long term in the North East and South in jeopardy in a short sighted one-track pursuit of the peace process.

But the UNF can quote the World Bank representative who says it is "now or never for Sri Lanka'' or those such as the keynote speaker of the SAARC investment summit recently who said that "Sri Lanka is a role model for the South Asian nations in terms of its economic progress.'' This man actually said "Sri Lanka is the most progressive and forward looking country in South Asia.'' (!)

Sri Lanka as a role model? Is this guy a delegate straight from hell? A bickering divided fissiparous cauldron as a role model for South Asian states?

But that seems to be an almost axiomatic paradox in modern governance. Those who deliver are often moral failures. They make morally untenable compromises - - and some of them in government sound as absurdly repugnant as Marapana did when he answered that question about the informants. Though it is correct that one cannot ask for complete uprightness/100 per cent rectitude in governance, the question is whether the UNF will or will not be forgiven a lack of a moral base in governance because it did better in the department of delivery?

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