After the Farce of the APRC: where next can Sri Lankans go for a Solution?

R Ranasinghe

Its official and out in the open, the UNP, TNA and the NGO's have formed an unholy alliance against the Singhala Buddhist majority of Sri Lanka. Part of this antipathy towards the Singhala Buddhists comes from the ingrained hostility the Christian elite have for the aspirations of the Singhala Buddhist majority. It is they who aided the Evangelical churches who tried to force villages to convert to Christianity only a few years ago. And again, it is they who form the backbone of the alliance to hold down the social change that is coming; change that is coming as a result of the economic growth that is not only happening inside but also outside the Colombo metropolis. In the parlance of Marxist rhetoric they are the Comprador caste created by a long expired colonial power who created small dependent elites - in Sri Lanka's case Tamils and Singhalese Christians - to do menial tasks such as controlling and administering the daily lives of the natives. Independence left them isolated and insecure about their future.

The failed coup in the Sixties is just one example where they showed their hand. SWRD Bandaranyake gave vent to the frustrations of the Singhala Buddhist majority. A frightened Christian dominated Comprador elite fearing for their status and tried their best to overthrow a democratically elected government. They failed then. But now when economic growth is coming fast despite the turmoil created by a deranged separatist movement, an unholy alliance of the Colombo elite made up of the urban rich, Singhalese and Tamil Christians along with hair brained advocates of partition have reared their heads above the parapet in an effort to stop the Singhala Buddhist majority from achieving their goal of economic development and social equality with their urban cousins. For some pointless reason, perhaps his desire to be inclusive in the settlement he makes with the self-exploited and ravaged Tamil community, the President has roped in another lot of these very unpatriotic recidivists into the All Party Representative Committee (APRC).

Consequently, the President has again received poor advice from yet another constitutional convention, in the guise of the APRC. Rather than attempting to reach a consensus these products of British Colonial management chose to sabotage the convention. The members of that committee who were given the responsibility of drafting the final report have made a mockery of the assignment they were entrusted with. Their proposals have turned out to be a direct challenge to democracy, the independence of the judiciary and the existence of Sri Lanka. It seems their desire to have the most senior body of the judiciary wholly populated by individuals who have no knowledge of the law would seem unthinkable in any other country in the world. To have them appointed by Non-Governmental Bodies (NGO's) is positively bazaar

In Sri Lanka, as we all know, the NGO's have adopted a partisan position openly supporting the antics of the LTTE terrorists. Rather than being impartial at the very least, as one would expect them to be they are in fact more likely to hand over the North and the East to the Tiger fanatics. It seems as though the APRC has been taken over by a bunch of mischievous school children bent on creating as much havoc and discord as they can through the publication of this ill considered Report.

Naturally, the usual suspects such as S.L Gunesekra of the Manel Mal Movement (MMM) and the others in The Alliance of National Organisations (ANO) were goaded into a venomous riposte calling the Report "a set of treacherous proposals". No one was surprised by the reaction of the Nationalists to this ridiculous document. What is saddening is that this was yet another lost opportunity for the "great and the good" in Sri Lankan society to come up with serious and considered set of proposals the President could use as a basis for a settlement of the national crisis. But for some unfathomable reason, perhaps I suspect their own political immaturity, the APRC wasted public funds and considerable amount of time drawing up a pointless piece of drivel. All this while the international community continues to press GOSL to come up with a set of proposals that will be agreeable to all parties to the conflict. An exercise made ever more impossible and less realisable when a set of schoolboy pranksters are let loose on the job.

There seems to be a wilful desire on the part of Sri Lankan society, namely its westernised Colombo centric elite (its compradors), to act as though their only purpose in life is to continually engage in unhelpful juvenile games of cocking a snook at the rest of the Sri Lankan community. The more the various interest groups in society look at the future of the country as though it were an adversarial conflict between different sporting teams (UNP versus SLFP) the further the country's political establishment moves away from producing a document that will heal the wounds that are tearing the nation apart.

In the past leaders of the country have exploited this national psychosis by avoiding their responsibilities and simply procrastinating on the issue. What Sri Lanka's elite understands best is taking advantage of the power and authority they are given by the electorate to loot the national coffers at will. Every one of them understands how to line their own pockets but unfortunately have very little idea of how to act in the national interest when it is imperative.

The LTTE have been up to now very successful in manipulating these self-destructive habits of Colombo's ruling elite: a psychic schism that has driven Sri Lanka to the edge of imploding in on itself. Frequently oiling the palms of those who are easily corruptible in our community has brought the LTTE to the brink of victory. The consequences of this disease was brought under the spotlight with the treacherously defeatist actions of Runil Wickramasinghe, when he concocted the Ceasefire Agreement (CFA). I do not wish to imply that other people across the world are incapable of betraying their own kind it's just that Sri Lankans have turned it into an art form. The members of APRC who were responsible for the conclusions of the Report have shown themselves incapable of looking beyond their own personal political and financial gain.

Where does the nation go now in search of a solution to its ethnic differences? The problem facing the country is clearly the intransigence of not only the Tamil separatists but also the anarchistic antics of the opponents of the country's provincial Singhalese Buddhist majority. There appears to be an erroneous idea prevailing in the country that we have to prostrate ourselves at the feet of westerners in order to have them invest in our country. Whatever a Westerner says is treated as received wisdom; if they say partition the country then that is what a sizable section of the population are unquestioningly prepared to accept.

What the APRC should have done was to ask themselves a number of fundamental questions before they began to draw up their Report. The first of them should have been to focus their attention on what was the illegality of the way in which the North and the East were arbitrarily fused together by J.R. Jayawardene at the behest of the Indians. Whether they supported it or not, is not the issue, what is at stake is the nation's democracy. No one whether they are a foreign power or a violent bully in Wanni should be able to take away the right of the people of those provinces - separately- to decide whether they want to live in a merged province. The current situation is not only unworkable it's also constitutionally illegal. Undermining the judiciary is not going to solve anything and certainly will do nothing to heal wounds but merely exacerbate them.

Then they should consider impartially, no matter what the foreign powers may say, either collectively or individually, the viability of a nation partitioned into a totalitarian state in the North and East alongside a democratic society in the South. Do they really believe the endless stream of internal refugees will end once Prabakaran has his own personal fiefdom? Can anyone truly believe border disputes and conflicts over natural resources will be resolved with gentlemanly handshakes when Sri Lanka has to deal with a racist fascist regime established under the iron grip of the LTTE? By demonstrating their deleterious and reckless attitude towards the most important issue facing the country, it is eminently clear they wish to play no part in the future evolution of Sri Lankan society and have been prepared to ultimately leave the President once more with the job of producing a new constitution all by himself. Quite frankly, it is not something any society should defer to a single person. After all, what is at stake is the task of creating a process of national reconciliation in a free society.

More poignant it should have been one of the primary duties of the APRC to interrogate the representatives of the Tamil community to find out what in essence forms the cornerstone of the grievances they have with the constitutional system as it is at present. So far, the Tamils have not cared to expand on their use of the term "discrimination". From what is known of the grievances of the Tamils, their leaders having singularly failed to coherently articulate the term "discrimination" they so frequently use to describe their status, we can make out a few nebulous and rather hazy issues.

The difficulty with concretising their disaffection lies in what no one can dispute is their present status in society. Nobody can say they do not have a sizable presence in parliament; or say they are not represented in at the highest levels of the public service and at the highest echelons of the business community; nor even could it be said they were barred from owning property anywhere in the country - which is certainly not the case for the Singhalese. We can however, establish the use of the word "discrimination" is very vaguely associated with the economic underdevelopment of the provinces the Tamils are a majority in - a condition one should note as being universally experienced by Sri Lankans across the land - and their belief that under the present system of government a Tamil is never going to be a President of Sri Lanka.

The grievances of the Tamils, as far as one can discern from their propaganda, can be put down to a sense of being cast as a permanent minority in society dominated by a Singhalese Buddhists. Can their sense of alienation from the heart of the national consciousness be reconciled in a new multi-ethnic Sri Lanka? There has to be a way Sri Lankan Tamils can be drawn into the centre of the nation's life.

First of course, we must stop fighting among ourselves, and that includes Colombo's compradors who seem afraid of their own non-cosmopolitan cousins. Perhaps then we will be in a frame of mind to appreciate the greatest lessons we might do well to learn from India and that is its constitution allows the Presidency to be held by a person from anyone of its multifarious ethnic communities and the fact that every recent government in India has been a coalition of national and regional parties.

Though the position of the Presidency has a limited legislative role and its function is more of a formal constitutional one it has a meaningful significance in the process of the governance of the country. The presence of ministers from regional parties within the national cabinet has also gone a long way to placate the numerous potential separatists across India into a belief that the national government is not just a representative of one community but truly a coalition of many (if not all) the disparate communities that make up multi-ethnic India. May be there is an answer somewhere in those particular aspects of the Indian system we should draw on next time a constitutional convention is appointed by the President to produce a new set of proposals, one which can be crafted without us believing we have to surrender our freedoms or our sovereignty before a solution can be found.