Political Commentary

The political crisis that erupted unexpectedly on October 26 still continues and is now entering its fourth week. President Maithripala Sirisena’s unexpected decision to replace Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe with former President Mahinda Rajapaksa unleashed the problem on an unsuspecting country. The problem is that the former president has been unable to show he has the support of the majority in parliament to legitimately take his new position as prime minister. On two occasions in the past fortnight 122 MPs out of 225 have voted and signed documents of no-confidence in the newly appointed prime minister. On both occasions the President has refused to act citing procedural issues. The entire country is looking to see the deadlock end soon. Unless resolved soon the damage to the country will grow.

Several political parties and civic groups are to file appeals to the Supreme Court against the dissolution of parliament by President Maithripala Sirisena. Their common position is likely to be that the president has acted in violation of the 19th Amendment to the constitution. This amendment meant to restrict presidential power was passed virtually unanimously by parliament with only one dissenting vote in April 2015 shortly after the change of government that was occasioned by President Sirisena’s victory at the presidential elections earlier that year. At that time, and subsequently on innumerable occasions, the president referred to the unprecedented sacrifice he has made in curbing the powers of the presidency through the 19th Amendment. The president also received praise locally and internationally for his statesmanlike attitude towards power.

Even as the political crisis continues to drag on the cost to the country is immense. This past weekend I was in Deniyaya to meet with civil society activists for an activity that had been arranged prior to the political crisis. This was to create awareness in the rural areas about the mechanisms that the government set up during the past three years to enable people to protect their human rights. These are some of the fruits of the reconciliation process of the past three years since the Government of National Unity came into being. These include the mechanisms of the Right to Information Commission, the revamped Human Rights Commission and the Office of Missing Persons.

The dismissal of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe following the withdrawal of the SLFP headed by President Maithripala Sirisena from the government alliance has become yet another source of instability within the polity. It has also caused international ripples with the governments of many countries publicly expressing their concerns and the UK issuing a travel advisory to its citizens to be careful when traveling to Sri Lanka in the near future. Therefore the sooner this crisis is resolved the better it will be for the country. It is to be hoped that all parties concerned will act with restraint. The desire to corner the other and utterly defeat it can be a cause for further instability that outlives the present crisis.

For reconciliation to become a reality in Sri Lanka, no section of society should feel it is being marginalized or ignored. In a recognition of the need for all of society to be engaged, the Office of Missing Persons (OMP) is about to commence a campaign to generate empathy for victims. The value of public processes in giving a place to those whose sorrows have been long ignored to speak their truth was seen at the public consultation organized by the OMP in Colombo last week. This consultation was meant for people from the Western Province. The problem of missing persons is not limited to the North and East nor to the Tamil people. In the past three months since it was constituted, and commissioners appointed, the OMP has been holding consultations in different parts of the country.

Limping and internally conflicted thought it be, the government of national unity once again showed its value when it got the Office for Reparations bill passed through parliament. The margin of victory was narrow with just 59 MPs voting in favour and 43 against it. As both UNP and SLFP members of the government voted for the passage of the bill it can be believed that both President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe were in favour of the passage of the bill. They were joined by the TNA which also voted in favour of the bill. However, the voting figures show that most of the government MPs kept away from the vote. This was a shirking of their responsibility to take a stand on an issue of greatest importance to the national reconciliation process.

Soon after his return from New York where he addressed the UN General Assembly, President Maithripala Sirisena ordered the return of all land in the Northern and Eastern provinces that are owned by the people of those areas. He issued these instructions during a meeting of the Presidential Task Force overlooking the development of the Northern and Eastern provinces. The President has instructed the Presidential Task Force to plan out a time frame and a proper structure in order to implement the project and to present its progress at the next meeting. This is in keeping with the letter and spirit of UN Human Rights Council Resolution 30/1 of October 2015. When the president announced that he would go to New York and propose a new course of action before the UN, it was assumed that he might be taking a contrary course of action. Many nationalists hoped that he might announce that Sri Lanka would withdraw its assent to that resolution that immediately became a political matter of much contestation within the country.

There is a likelihood that constitutional reform will be on the political table again. The enactment of a new constitution in which a permanent solution to the ethnic conflict would be found is one of the unmet promises of the government. At its inception in 2015, there was much optimism on this score because the government held both a 2/3 majority in parliament and was also composed of the two main political parties that had hitherto opposed each other whenever one of them had sought a solution to the problem. In the early part of the government’s tenure in office during 2015-16 there appeared to be substantial progress but this slowed down thereafter and even seemed to have fallen off the political table.

The parliamentary committee headed by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe that was established to look into the provincial delimitation report has requested that they be given a further two months to submit their recommendations for electoral reform. The Prime Minister had assured that steps would be taken to avoid loop holes that might delay provincial elections further. These assurances are a repeat of what has been promised for the past several months since provincial elections were first postponed. With this further postponement there is no prospect of provincial council elections being held this year. Even in the optimistic case of the parliamentary committee deciding on a final set of proposals in two months the process of legislation through parliament, and calling for nominations, would take the elections to the month of March 2019 if not later. By then the focus will be on presidential elections.

The recent interventions of President Maithripala Sirisena into issues of governance brings out sharp differences of opinion within the government coalition he heads. The most significant of these is his bid to break free from the commitments made by the government to the international community with regard to issues of war time accountability for serious human rights violations. In October 2015 the newly elected government eased tensions that had been escalating between the previous government and sections of the international community and which had contributed to the imposition of economic sanctions. The European Union had withdrawn the GSP Plus tariff concession and there were indications of further sanctions to come. By co-sponsoring UN Resolution 30/1 at the UN Human Rights Council, the government pledged to embark on a wide ranging series of actions that would deal with the past and pave the way for national reconciliation.

An academic of Sri Lankan origin, Dr Minoli Salgado, recently conducted a workshop on Writing Truths: The Power of Testimony, in which key concepts in testimony studies were discussed in the Sri Lankan context with a view to developing a survivor-centred approach in the production and reception of testimonies in the country. As part of its commitment to the UN-mandated concept of transitional justice, the government has also pledged to set up a truth-seeking commission in which testimony will be given and recorded.

The past weekend saw a meeting between 120 members of district inter religious groups from Mannar in the Northern province, Puttalam in the Northwestern province and Nuwara Eliya in the Central province. Although diverse in region, ethnicity and religion, these community leaders demonstrated a high degree of goodwill in engaging with each other in private and group dialogue. Their meeting and their dialogue was a reassuring sign that that the vast majority of people in the country,

The further postponement of provincial council elections will be necessary now that the report of the Delimitation Commission has been rejected in parliament. The majority in parliament rejected the report with all 139 of those present voting against it while 86 MPs including those of the JVP, who supported the report being absent at the time of voting. The fact that no party voted in favour of the Delimitation report is an indication that all parties are wary of elections. Different political parties gave different reasons for their rejections. The ethnic minority parties felt that the proportional representation system which had previously existed offered them a better outcome in terms of the numbers of members they could get elected. The bigger parties objected to the 50:50 proportion between those elected on a first-past-the-post basis at the constituency level and those elected through the party lists as it contributed toward unstable outcomes.

The unexpected resurrection of former president Mahinda Rajapaksa’s hope to be a third term president of the country has taken the centre stage of political debate. It also highlights the vulnerability of the rule of law. One of the memorable phrases of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission appointed by the former president to cope with the international demand for accountability for war-time violations of human rights was that the Rule of Law rather than the Rule of Men should prevail if the tragedies of the past were not to repeat themselves. But to politicians whose quest for power is unlimited such principles of democratic governance may be dispensed with as and when the need arises.

One of the areas in which the present government has been underperforming is in the area of communications. Previous governments have been conscious of the importance of communicating their messages to enable the general public to be informed of their achievements. They have also acted upon that very strong political impulse. There was a cartoon in the early 1990s showing former president Ranasinghe Premadasa emerging from out of multiple television sets. This was at a time when the government had ordered all television stations existing at that time in the country to carry the government news bulletin at the same time. The plethora of television stations of today did not exist at that time and it was easier for the government to compel the few independent television stations at that time to fall into line.

With the next presidential election due before the end of next year, and with a possibility that an early election might be called even by January next year, the question of who might be the next presidential candidates is getting to the fore. There has been speculation that the felicitation ceremony for Health Minister Dr Rajitha Senaratne on obtaining an international honour was a launching pad for his bid to be a presidential candidate from the government side. The opposition has not been without its share of contestation too. The statement issued by former President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s office that he had not yet decided on who should be the opposition’s presidential candidate, and to disregard the claims that he had already selected his brother Gotabaya, is an indication of the tensions beneath the surface which are not limited only to the government.