POREG VIEW: The result in the local council elections doesn’t come as a surprise though scepticism about change marked the electioneering. President Mahinda Rajapaksa contributed to the good showing by the erstwhile LTTE proxies by his procrastination on the issue of devolution – 13th amendment – plus solution. First he dilly-dallied the issue for 26- long months after he emerged as the darling of the nation by ending the dreaded Tiger scourge. And, then on the eve of local council elections, he referred it to a Parliamentary Select Committee.
Politicians have the habit of frittering away hard earned goodwill by becoming hostages to the coterie that emerges from nowhere. While it is no body’s case that the human rights campaigner turned full time politician is cut in the traditional mode, the results show that he had missed the opportunity to convert the goodwill into votes by not acting on the Channel Four documentary, ‘Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields’.
In a manner of speaking, New Delhi provided Rajapaksa with an opening to wriggle out of the tangled human rights tapes, when the foreign office spokesman said ‘The sequence of events during the last days of the conflict is unclear. The Government of Sri Lanka would need to go into the matter in greater detail. The concerns that are being expressed in this regard need to be examined’.
The spokesman went on to say that a fair and reasonable settlement of the political issues concerning the minorities in Sri Lanka is ‘of utmost importance and the historic opportunity offered by the end of the conflict should be availed of at the earliest’.
Obviously, Rajapaksa and his political managers expected that a victory for their allies would blunt the calls for an international war-crimes investigation. Now they have to return to strategy sessions. How they will like to go about the task will be keenly watched.
The local elections were an essential step towards healing Sri Lanka’s wounds from three-decades of decades of civil war which was as much a result of a Tamil megalomaniac as Colombo’s blunders. It may be unfair to say that the victory of Tamil National Alliance, a collection of political parties that long served as the political wing of the Tamil Tigers, will prove to be a set back to the normalisation process.
With control of nearly two-thirds of the local councils in the north and east, (TNA won 20 local councils out of the 25 it contested and President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s ruling United People’s Freedom Alliance coalition secured five councils), the TNA lawmakers have a vested interest to prove their sceptics wrong.
No surprise, the Tamil politicians have termed the results as a mandate ‘to pursue change’ and ‘to work with the Government in Colombo in achieving a genuine political settlement’.
Victory or defeat is part of electoral games which in reality are an accountability test for leaders and parties. The result shows the Government of Sri Lanka must work with the Tamil leaders to solve the problems amicably. Put differently, the people of the North and East have voted for a political settlement.
In so far the Channel Four footage is concerned, it is surprising why the famed Sri Lankan diplomacy has frittered away the opportunity to strongly put up the case of the emerald island as the victim of terrorism. Colombo has tons and tons of evidence to turn the tables on the so called bleeding hearts in the West for the suffering ethnic Tamils. The footage and, indeed, the very appointment of a Ban Ki-moon panel should have been used for a PR exercise to match decibel for decibel.
Denials don’t offer Human Rights nirvana. Neither in the past nor in the past. Turning a deaf ear to a friendly advice is no way out either.
In fact, these denials have forced an IOU search in the diplomatic circuit and it did not endear the Rajapaksa government locally and outside the country.
Probably, there is still time to blunt the criticism not with a doctored video but by demonstrating to the world that the Rajapaksa regime has nothing to hide and it was and is never an Idi Amin clone.
