Terrorising in the name of terror?
By N Sathiya Moorthy
If there is one aspect of the Sri Lankan system that needs to be applauded but is not acknowledged by critics, whether nearer home or overseas, it is this. It may also be the reason why no government in the country has known enough to alter the status quo, and make Judicial Review into an automated appendage of the constitutional scheme. Under such a scheme, nations go through the motions of Judicial Review and democratic processes. However, for all practical purposes, the government’s decision remain, at least until it became too late the courts to change the course of history, which was pertinently unconstitutional and undemocratic, to begin with.
Way, waywardness
It was thus that law-knowing Justice Minister Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe could deflect the embarrassment of having to delay the tabling of the new anti-terrorism law in Parliament. Rather than there were not adequate consultations with stake-holders on the new law, he could get away by declaring that they wanted to give time for the ‘em all to move the Supreme Court with their objections when the Bill was tabled.
In doing so, the minister implied that they did not intend altering the gazetted Bill, or so it seems. For, if the bill were to be altered, in the aftermath of public and publicised criticisms, then by the same token the government would have to give even more time for studying the modified Bill before it is tabled in Parliament.
The fact is that nations and peoples get the laws they deserved, or get the rulers they did not deserve, or both. Most domestic critics at least imply that the nation did not ask for the incumbent leadership of President Ranil Wickremesinghe. The government, especially after the Aragalaya protests last year that brought made, rather than thanking them, seems to be punishing them, not necessarily for doing what they did, but for the way they did it.
The fact is that but for the protests, whatever the way and also the waywardness of some protestors, Wickremesinghe could not have become President in the first place. Does it mean that the protestors did the right thing by the man, and not the nation, per se?
On concepts, ideas
It is pertinent to note that governments, when faced with criticism to the existing Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), has never asked critics if they wanted all terrorism laws to go and forever. Had such a question been posed, possibly, the political Opposition of the day would have been divided.
The same would have been the case has the question been asked about the new Bill, which sought to replace the current law, which is said to be obnoxious of all such laws the world over. Most political criticisms, compared to those by professional and professionalised human rights activists, NGOs and INGOs, are about concepts and ideas.
They are less specific on specifics, where they need changes and amendments brought in. The implication is that they want this piece of legislation to be thrown out, lock, stock and barrel. Are they ready to support another one in its place? Or, are they ready to present an alternative drat law, for national debate, leading up to possible acceptance and adaptation by Parliament, after appropriate attestation by the Judiciary, or whatever parts that the courts find acceptable under the law and Constitution?
Bricks, not bouquets
Like the PTA, the Tamil polity, society and socio-political activists have promptly come down heavily on the new draft. All their perceptions of the future are conditioned by experiences, real and surreal from their troubled past. Tamils, rather, Tamil Christians, too, were victims of the Easter serial blasts in 2019. They too branded it as terrorism, but still do not want special laws to curb, if not, end, it.
The less said about the Muslims, who as a community have been victimised, for the acts and actions of a handful or more, the better. Unlike the community, who ended up identifying with the terrorist LTTE, in thought and word, if not action, the larger Muslim community was opposed to the likes of Zahran, the Easter blasts master-mind. Yet, the community has been branded and almost banished (where their Tamil-speaking co-brothers are partners in silence, with the majoritarian Sinhala majority).
The same cannot be said about the Sinhala-Buddhists, especially. Silently and otherwise, barring a few activists among them, most politicians and commoners wanted the PTA to stay and possible even more empowered, especially after the Easter blasts. Come the post-Aragalaya PTA arrest of JVP student leader Wasantha Mudalige, and a few others, including some monk-students in the nation’s universities, and suddenly most of them are anti-PTA, not anti-terror, anymore.
At least, if they still want an anti-terror law of some kind, the majority has not said anything in support, neither through the Letters column in newspapers, nor in TV talk-shows, or through social media posts of their own. If they stand aside silently now, they cannot complain when they end up having to remain silent, in the face of future terror acts. That is what the Aragalaya protest was all about – breaking the silence of the long past.
Ironically, all this is happening at a time when the nation as a whole has seemingly lost all interest and concern about allegations of human rights violations, which the UNHRC is seized of for a decade now, violations that purportedly that belong from two more decades earlier. This time round, there was the regular discussion on Sri Lanka, and also the once-in-four-year drama of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR).
Both processes came up with near-similar condemnation of Sri Lanka’s human rights policies, processes and protection, or lack of the last one. Barring what has become the customary annual criticism in some form of the nation’s human rights track-record by the US State Department, and the half-yearly pro forma criticism by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and their chosen mouth-pieces nearer home, the rest of the country was busy politicking about the local government polls that were not a reality.
Fighting against each other in the North especially, where the Sinhala majority and the Sri Lankan State did not matter, multiple Tamil parties were at each other’s throats instead, with only the local government elections as their goal. Even when the polls had become a distant dream and even when their places of religious worship had come under constant and continual attack, possibly more than any time under the forgettable Gota presidency, they have restricted their attack more as a socio-political attack by the Sinhalas, without involving the Sri Lankan State.
None of them conceptualised it all as human rights violations – right to religion and worship. Nor has any of them sought to describe it as an ‘act of terrorism’, which it should be. That is because there is more to terrorism than bombs and blasts, as even words and lesser acts aimed at provoking another holocaust of the 1983 kind should be provocation enough. So was 1983.
Rather than opposing anti-terror laws as an idea, the Tamils at least, with legal talent in their midst, nearer home and overseas, should help re-define terrorism nearer home and also prescribe measures and punishments that could discourage future acts that aim an targeting communal peace and societal co-existence, without just having to target the ‘State’ alone in letter and spirit.
(The writer is a policy analyst & political commentator, based in Chennai, India. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)
