Jehan Perera
("Dr."), in his latest Sunday missive, writes on (the need to have) dialogue between
government and civil society (he inserts the TNA into this, but that is a different
story altogether). The man who for decades stayed shut over abuses committed
and flaunted deplores this government’s lack of response to grievances past and
present. This of course begs many questions, but for the time being let's lay
them aside. What’s important here is that Jehan is playing his usual game:
fact-twisting.
He doesn't play
it openly, though. He’s too smart for that. So he hides his game beneath a barrage
of clichés and feel-good pronouncements. Civil society activists in Sri Lanka
are, I believe, handpicked for their ability to string two words together. They
learn quite a lot about euphemisms. Jehan is no exception to this. So he boosts
the TNA over their recent visit to India. “They are now seen as a force to
reckon with, as they enjoy India’s backing,” he writes. WTF moment, anyone?
But this isn't
all. He strangely writes about the “lives of Indian soldiers lost in the vain
effort to disarm the LTTE.” “Vain” hardly comes close to describing India’s
love affair with the LTTE, and for all Jehan’s crocodile tears he conveniently
leaves out the rapists, murderers and plunderers who came here with the IPKF.
One wonders why a man so aggrieved over the plight of Tamils in this country
doesn't remember how those same Tamils were harassed by these “peacekeepers.”
One can only guess what he is insinuating by way of playing the forget-game
here. Telling.
To be fair by
him, though, he does admit that India’s message to the TNA is one of finding
solutions within country without recourse to external intervention. However, this
is footnoted as part of his exercise of appearing fair and balanced. He writes of the failures of Tamil parties at political engagement
leading them to place reliance on external intervention, forgetting here that these
same failures were part and parcel of the Tamil leadership’s deluded, blatant,
myth-based race politics.
I don’t want to
write too much on Jehan’s missive. Let’s be honest here. NGOs are certainly not
run according to national dictates. A perusal of Jehan’s own organisation, the National Peace Council, will convince anyone that its basic polity has always
been about hobnobbing with foreign donors. I don’t like to bring up conspiracy
theories, but when it comes to (un)accountability and backhanded dealings NGOs are
streets ahead of even the government. For all those doubting Thomases out
there, it would do well to read Professor Susantha Goonetilake’s book Recolonisation
for a more nuanced “reading” of what these organisations engage in.
Strangely
enough, those condemning government bodies exercising ultra-vires
(beyond authority) powers seem to be clamouring for full-and-unconditional
implementation of the 13th Amendment and LLRC, laying aside the fact
that both these go beyond legal mandate. Now I am most certainly not calling
for the removal of the LLRC, but when it comes to the 13th Amendment
it’s definitely another story altogether. It is, to put things pithily, the
latest in a series of trump-cards on which the (so-called) Tamil leadership
subsist on. We have seen 50-50, Federalism, and Eelamism come and go. Trump
cards are the bedrock of the TNA (I really don’t need to state the obvious, do
I?). The TNA alone isn’t to blame, of course; there’s politics and then there’s
civil society politics. NGOs figure in here somewhere.
Governments have
their share of critics and champions. It is a popular fad to champion the former and
vilify the latter. The world does not kowtow to nor accommodate black-and-white
binarisms, and when it comes to criticising champion and championing critic
what is forgotten is that neither is an unblemished cherub. For all the hype
the media have spurted out against the likes of Rajpal Abeynayake, a reporter
who despite the blackguarding he has been subjected to remains as candid a
journalist as you’re ever going to get here, I am yet to see anti-regimists and
“pro-minorities” take issue with the documented, double-checked, and
substantiated allegations of corruption levelled against them.
To top all this,
we’ve been repeatedly told that this is a unipolar world. Black-or-white logic
which does not favour nor allow for a middle ground holds sway. Partly owing to
actual past power-abuse, this government is finding itself at the receiving end of
protests and rights agitators. Civil society is celebrated, hence, as a paragon
of virtue. The world, going by this, can be divided into rights-violators on the one hand and white-faced angels opposing those
violators on the other. The media along with international agencies tend to
black-face (unfriendly) regimes and whitewash those (apparently) decrying
them.
Sorry, but it
doesn't work that way. Life isn't a movie and neither for that matter is
politics. It is all too easy and feel-good to angel-title the likes of
Paikiasothy Savaranamuttu. It is also easy to lend credibility to their "activism" by highlighting meetings, speeches, and appeals made to
international agencies. All this is flaunted as “good works” to the public, mainly (but not only) through the media. You can’t fool all the people all the time, some may
say. Stuff and nonsense. Duping is the name of the game, as is doctoring. And
these men know how to play both.
Thankfully,
though, we live in an Age of Communication. Crocodile tears may be shed. But
it has become easy to see through activists. Fatally easy. Veiled scandals do not
remain veiled. Deception doesn't hold. Not for long. We have apologists for
organisations and "peace-wagons" of dubious repute. It doesn't take
long to realise what they really stand on, and for that matter how they stand
on. Dollars and cents are the real bandwagons here, notwithstanding all the bleeding
hearts these men (and women) advertise for all to see.
That is why we
see them lamenting over the “state” of IDPs in the North. Why we see them regretting security outposts scattered right
across the country. And why we still have no proper reply
forthcoming from them about all the transparency scams which still dog their organisations.
Jehan’s latest
missive needs to be looked at. Seriously. According to him, the TNA is a “force
to reckon with.” I don’t know whether he suffers from short-term memory loss,
but this force to “reckon with” continues to flatly refuse dialogue with the
government. Adding to this, he thinks that this “dialogue” remains void owing to the government. Cute. One can only conclude that he has failed
to do his homework, but then again this is the same man who kept (and keeps) on
spinning statistic after statistic trying to prove the prevalence of
non-Sinhalas over Sinhalas in the East. No two points for guessing whether
these statistics have been (as they always are) doctored. I rest my case.
Lessons are
there to be learnt. That’s obvious. We live in a country which once had a rigid
teacher-student relationship, referred to as “guru-mushti.” To put it shortly,
the teacher was supreme. Revered. Never prone to blame or critique. The student, meanwhile, had to genuflect. Unconditionally. Today, though, things have
changed. For the better. Just as the teacher holds sway over a student’s
conduct and result, so too the student has a prerogative to demand justification on
the teacher’s part.
This, in a very
large way, holds true for politics too. Vote-givers have right of
demand when it comes to abuse of power. But this doesn't whitewash private
outfits. Nothing of the sort. It’s time we exercised this right, then. Time
we asked all the Jehan Pereras, Paikiosothy Savaranamuttus and Kumar
Rupesinghes to justify claim and statistic. And of course financial (underhand) dealings.
Lessons should be learnt, after all. Even by lesson-conductors.
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