A speech made by President Kumaratunga recently at Mirigama suggesting that South Asian countries like South Korea and Malaysia have been able to develop and arrive where they are economically mainly due to authoritarian rule — with one party, one newspaper and no trade unions etc. — has sinister implications. What she said went largely unnoticed although it did attract the attention of Trotskyite MP Vasudeva Nanayakkara to write to the President chiding her for toying with ideas that went beyond the pale of her democratic mandate from the people. Why we wonder this deafening silence —particularly from the UNP which should have been quick to respond as a responsible opposition and guardian of the rights of the people?
The President’s open espousal of authoritarianism as a spur to economic development smacks strangely of the late President Jayewardene’s vision for Sri Lanka. Having had a taste of JR’s Executive Presidency and yet lambasting JR’s dictatorial style President Kumaratunga appears to be paradoxically haunted by the late President Jayewardene’s ghost.
It was Felix Dias Bandaranaike, then the elder Ms. Bandaranaike’s super-minister who once said “a little bit of totalitarianism’’ was a good thing. At least he spoke his mind. But what the people of Sri Lanka went through only those who lived through those times will know.
Are we right in seeing in President Kumaratunga’s comments the beginnings of a new vision of her own veering into what we can only assume is a shift into a dictatorial mode? Dictatorships may throw up some good economics but let us not forget the darker side to their shimmering faces. Aren’t we seeing what is happening in South Korea today with two ex-presidents in jail for corruption?
Does our President want to emulate such a corrupt system? Set against the few examples she perhaps dreams of there are several others which have bubbled up from time to time where dictators have transformed themselves into petty kings while the people under them lived like beggars. If she tunes in to CNN or Sky News television she will see what is happening to a despot like Mobutu in Zaire (now again Congo), a man who bled the country dry before finally having to run away from his palaces at home.
Staggering figures of this plunder most foul were revealed by new leader Laurent Kabila’s aides and confirmed on Friday by US and IMF officials. They revealed that Mobutu ran the biggest financial empire in the world with personal assets valued at a colossal four billion US dollars — some Rs. 250 billion, all plundered from one of the poorest countries which is so bankrupt today that it has no money even to pay public servants’ salaries.
Mobutu has one villa in France valued at US $ 4 million, another in Belgium valued at US $ 11 million and billions stashed away in secret Swiss bank accounts.
There are many other dictators of the Mobutu - kind who have unleashed untold suffering and damage Let President Kumaratunga take a lesson from such happenings and quickly erase from her mind any thoughts she may harbour of moving away from the democratic path whatever its shortcomings — stepping away into an abyss of no return.
Very soon, on July 15, it will be two years since she reneged on her once solemn promise to abolish the Executive Presidency. History may judge her in whatever way she deserves — that is yet a matter to be seen. But let her not be judged as a despot.
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