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When I am asked as to whether Sri Lanka has a ‘genuine chance’ to bring about ‘justice for survivors of the country’s many conflicts,’ this time under a National People’s Power (NPP) Government which excels in rhetoric promising the same, the question calls for a longer pause that would be merited.

 No communalism in governance

This is a loaded question to which there are no easy answers. There is, of course, no limit to the many instances where the leaders of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) led NPP, including President Anura Kumara Dissanayake have publicly pronounced their determination not to allow communalistic and divisive politics to dominate the political stage. To be scrupulously fair, they have also followed that dictum to a large extent when conducting themselves in governance.

That is more than what can be said for their predecessors, if we are to be gentle. That being said, the President resorts to a frequent warning when addressing public servants, the armed services, and most recently the police. To paraphrase, that refrain is to the effect that, ‘we know that all of you are not bad. We know that there are decent and honourable people among you. But to those who commit crimes, we also warn that there will be no mercy, the law will take its course.’

Addressing an audience including the top ranks of the police service on Sri Lanka’s 159th Police Day a few days ago, President Dissanayake went a step further to stress that ‘time will not be a barrier’ to prosecute criminals. ‘Political influence will no longer prevent investigations of criminal activity’ particularly in the dark underworld of narcotics trade, he said. All this is well and good, three cheers and hurrah as the optimists might applaud.

Discarding political self-indulgence

But unless and until the NPP Government has the collective courage to discard a highly self-indulgent if not dangerously misleading political defence that it has been pursuing before and after succeeding to state power, this push for official accountability will come to naught. Instead, it will, itself become a victim of its own propaganda in time and Sri Lanka will lose yet another chance to put her ‘ghosts of the past’ to rest. That will be a pity, as much for the NPP as for the people of this troubled land.

To put it bluntly, that defence comprises two strains of insidious propaganda obviously framed by JVP ideologues as a winning path to victory. Its first component, strongly propagated by JVP front-liners is that the NPP is somehow untarnished by and/or not responsible for the dark stains of extraordinary human rights abuses and abuse of power that have pockmarked Sri Lanka’s post independent history.

That argument is obviously far from tenable given the part played by the JVP not only in two blood-splattered insurrections in the South of Sri Lanka but also in pledging ‘conditional support’ to the Mahinda Rajapaksa regime administration in its military strategy against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the Wanni. To be clear, this is not to enter into judgement in regard to either one or the other aspect of the JVP’s
famously chequered past.

The JVP led NPP cannot shrug off its historical burden

Rather, this is to underscore a historical fact which must be acknowledged by the NPP as volubly as it promises to ‘clean the politico-crime underworld’. The fact that the political ‘beam’ in one’s own eye is ignored while focussing on the motes in the eyes of ‘others,’ as the Biblical warning goes, is not reassuring. In fact, that contradiction came strongly to mind when fleetingly hearing the NPP’s Justice Minister speak at an event to mark International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances.

The promise here was that, ‘even though we are not responsible for this problem’, his Government will take concrete action to address the persistent question of justice for victims of Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict. Such easy claims of shrugging of ‘responsibility’, as indicated by the collective sign of ‘we’, invites profound derision if not acute dissent. No Sri Lankan political party, including the JVP led NPP, can blandly excuse themselves of ‘responsibility’ in regard to decades of horrific atrocities which have shaped and condemned this country to the (literal) graveyard that it has become.

Elsewhere, Government politicians have been active in voicing their determination to bring perpetrators of mass killings of civilians to justice, whether in regard to the mass atrocity of the Chemmani gravesite in the North (suspected to be victims of state driven enforced disappearances of Tamil civilians and the Kurukkalmadam mass graves in the East (the site of mass killings of Muslim civilians by the LTTE), circa 1990’s. These gravesites join mass graves in Mannar, Matale, Suriyakande, Embilipitiya and countless others.

No martyr’s cloak can be wrapped around the Government

A common refrain in all these instances is the identification of the JVP/NPP with the ‘victims’; thus, it is articulated that, ‘we are also victims, we also have not got justice.’ But the truth is far from the case. The JVP is certainly – as much as the LTTE – a perpetrator-victim in equal measure however much it may be parroted that the injustices of the State drove them to take up arms, (which is also true in the weighted political consciousness of those times).

But the point is that neither the JVP nor the LTTE has the privilege of wrapping around itself a martyr’s cloak of ‘victimhood.’ That is deplorable in essence and in part, answers the question asked at the start of these reflections this week. Justice will not come despite sporadic criminal prosecutions of political opponents. Only unedifying spectacles will ensure as was the case when spirits of the Batalanda torture chamber (circa 1990s) were briefly awakened from their restless sleep and then allowed to ‘disappear’ again.

Such efforts have the potential to badly backfire. This we saw very well in the recent arrest and remanding of former President Ranil Wickremesinghe for allegedly siphoning off public money on a ‘private’ transit in the United Kingdom while returning from a state visit to the United States and Cuba. That was (extraordinarily) sought to be justified by a key JVP ideologue/NPP Minister on the basis that, ‘we know that this may seem trivial but this ex-President should have been in jail fifty years ago, we are bringing justice.’

‘Disobedience will not be tolerated’

Second, an equally sinister line of thought forms part of the NPP’s thinking which is tied to its ‘unprecedented’ electoral mandate in 2024. Simply put, this is to the effect that the mandate gives it the legitimacy and the authority to reshape the State in any form it wishes.  In other words, that includes the power to override mechanisms in the Constitution and statute law to ensure the independence of systems and institutions if that is contrary to the NPP’s driving force.

Questioned on what the Government would do in regard to a National Police Commission (NPC) vilified for putting obstacles in the way of the Government’s ‘police reforms’, an NPP Minister was heard to say a few months ago that, this ‘disobedience will not be tolerated.’ ‘We have a mandate, we have to perform according to that mandate’, he said. At least, he was being ‘honest’ if we are to be tongue-in-cheek.

That is in line with the Government’s articulated wish that the composition of the Constitutional Council and the ‘independent commissions’ should be changed ‘each time a Prime Minister changes.’ If this wish had been articulated by a Wickremesinghe or Rajapaksa regime howls of outrage would have arisen.

Strangely, there is profound silence this time around.