The buffer zone - what's it a buffer for?
"We have to be soft on them because they have already suffered from the tsunami, '' deadpanned a police officer when he was interviewed on an international television channel on the subject of civilians protesting against the 100 metre beach zone.

The buffer zone has potential of becoming the law and order fiasco of the decade. The government could be manacled by it for political campaigns to come. It is unpleasantly similar to the issue of the July strikers, whom the late Lalith Athulathmudali said in an unguarded moment "will all be despatched to the cemetery.'' Mr Athulathmudali wasn't advocating the death penalty; he just wasn't familiar with the local idiom. What he meant to say was "we will bury the strike.'' But in his Sinhalese which had to be regained after some years at a British educational institute of some repute, Athulathmudali tripped on his metaphor and it came out as "we will bury the strikers.''

But that became a rallying cry against the UNP for decades. The tsunami buffer issue has now been taken up by Arthur C. Clarke, but it's not this science fiction writer of British origin who decides the temperament of the Sri Lankan electorate. The tsunami issue despite Clarke's utopian visions of mangrove forests, is the government's time bomb.

This is not science fiction: a gentleman in Galle who had his business in Main Street, has now been told by the Banks that there will be no loans granted for reconstruction. The state has now made it clear that every obstacle will be placed in the way of those who rebuild in the buffer zone, and this was clear from a TAFREN notice which appeared in the newspapers saying that certain exclusive rights will be granted to tourist establishments to rebuild, while all others will have to relocate. The Main Street businessman is one of thousands who are held to ransom by the tsunami law. They have nowhere to turn for help, and they have no means of earning the money needed for rebuilding because their business premises and their merchandise have all been destroyed.

Civil disobedience is the only recourse for them because they have no organised power such as in unions or political parties. But, they are unable to do even that because the government has clamped down an Emergency.

In India, the people have been 'sold' a 500 metre buffer zone, claim the Indian newspapers. But authorities have failed to convince people in this country, because the preferred tactic here has been the use of force. Emergency regulations, police action and now, finally, a call to the army indicates that the Sri Lankan government has opted for the strong-arm method to tactics of persuasion.

But, can the government throw the book at the people when no state agency was able to warn the people of the tsunami, which makes the state culpable for negligence in this day and age when tsunami warnings were all over the internet??

The state, considering all of the above, is certainly not on a hearts and minds operation. Emergency has been declared, and tsunami victims who persist in re-building in tsunami zones have been left to their own devices.

Also, the tourist sector has been exempted. It's a situation in which the sate seems to be going for the jugular. But why go for the jugular with people who have been left destitute by a tsunami which had seen an unprecedented worldwide outpouring of grief?

One possibility is that there is more than what meets the eye in the in the buffer zone contretemps. If people are to be protected from future calamities, the best way to do it is to install an efficient tsunami warning system. That it's the people's interests which the government has at heart therefore sounds hollow, particularly taken in the context that tourist hotels have been encouraged to rebuild. Are tourists immune from tsunamis?

Or, more likely, are they to be given the lien on the coastline, so that they can have miles of unspoiled postcard-beaches where they will be shielded from the sight of unsightly locals getting about their daily routines, not to mention their daily ablutions?

The bigger picture emerging from all of this is that the government has crossed the line from governance into ham-handedness considering that in the state's conduct of the buffer zone issue there are shades of the Sarachchandra assault which blighted the J. R. Jayewardene UNP, and shades of the perennial emergency which cast a pall upon UNP governments prior to 2001 and the SLFP government of the Sirima Bandaranaike period..

This authoritarian strain is also coming at the most inconvenient time for civil rights activists who want to keep their pulse on these developments because the President and the JVP are both untied by one desire which is to keep the UNP out of power. The coalition can go the straight and the narrow and hold Presidential elections on schedule, but this means the coalition is coveting the dreaded risk factor. Political watchers, as they are called, therefore have been ruminating about the possibilities - - such as will she or won't she? Will she run again, after a constitutional amendment, and will she use the emergency to ram through a political arrangement that suspends democratic and constitutional rights??

It cuts to the heart of the debate on whether Sri Lanka continues to be a democratic polity that exists on the twilight zone between real democracy and two star democracy of the Robert Mugabe variety. Though it can and often is argued that all democratic states have their dalliances with dictatorship, in real democracies the periods in which Rule of Law is held in suspension are essentially periods in aberration. Indira Gandhi’s state of emergency which has been celebrated in novels such as Rohington Mistry's 'A Fine Balance' (forced sterilisation, dynasty-mania for Sanjay Gandhi the anointed one) were all nasty detours in an essentially democratic polity.

But Sri Lanka's experiments with authoritarianism have been so much more frequent that we can be slotted into that permanent twilight zone. From this twilight we veer into darkness and light, with1989 for instance being one of the darkest periods, no doubt brought upon us by an armed putsch for power.

All that can be said at the moment is that there are elements in the governing coalition belonging to both parties whose eyes light up when they consider going down the route of emergency-politics, in which electoral maps are rolled up, and constitutions are only good for use as paperweights. Some say that politics has got inexorably more sophisticated. Now, if the system has to be subverted, it has to be done more subtly, and from within, such as via the various arms of the state. The stomping elephant tactics of J. R. Jayewardene are believed to have died with him. But others are not so sure. Chandrika Kumaratunge has been JRJ's best mimic. Whether she will go the whole hog in that direction time will tell, even though it does appear unlikely.

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