As the Human Rights Council meeting was in session the spokesmen for the Sri Lankan government have been quite busy, judging by the number of statements circulated through the internet that are trying to paint a picture of Sri Lanka as a great democracy and that all the critics of the government are agents of terrorism. One may dismiss all such statements purely as quixotic endeavours. However, since there is logic in this madness it is better to pay some them attention to it in the same manner that a psychiatrist might pay attention to the problems of a patient. Such attention to Sri Lankas problems would soon reveal the rather pathetic distortion of reality.
Quite a good example of such writings is those of the Secretary General of Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process (SCOPP). If his own style of the charaterisation of others is used it is possible to be dismissive saying that he is only doing this to justify his job. However, such mean tactics are not worthy of imitation.
The central argument of such spokesmen is that although there is a lot to be improved on in the human rights record of Sri Lanka that can only be done through the improvement of national institutions. And that for this, technical assistance from outside is needed but, that any form of monitoring by outsiders would be counter-productive.
The first question that arises is as to who is preventing the government of Sri Lanka from improving its national institutions on its own? By national institutions what is meant is the investigative capacity to investigate all allegations of crimes that also includes human rights violations, the prosecuting capacity to prosecute all such crimes and a judicial capacity to adjudicate on these matters according to the norms and standards of an independent judiciary. Since the spokesmen for the government admits that there is something wrong with these national institutions it would follow that the government is under obligation to do away with the defects and to improve them. Who or what is preventing the government from doing this if it has the desire and the will to do so?
Where is the need for technical assistance? Technical assistance basically is meant to improve the local capacity. This means that if the Sri Lankan police does not have competent police officers to investigate into violations of human rights it is necessary to improve that capacity with the training of experts from outside; if the Attorney General’s Department as the prosecuting authority does not have the competence to conduct proper prosecutions then the government must get foreign experts to improve their competence and if the Sri Lankan judiciary does not have the competence to do their job then foreign talent must be brought in to help with improving the local capacity. If the spokesmen for the Sri Lankan government are saying that the Sri Lankan investigators, prosecutors and the judiciary are suffering from the absence of competence then why do they not say so directly? They cannot say this directly because it would be so greatly false a statement that there will be both a local and an international uproar. So truly is the psychotic fashion that these spokesmen have to hide the actual problem and try to create a false problem hoping that others will be misguided by that.
Everyone knows that the Sri Lankan justice system does not suffer from a lack of competence. It suffers from restraints placed on the use of the competence that it abundantly possesses. The Sri Lankan justice system is like a big giant that has been tied so tightly that it is not able to manifest its capacity and to do the job it is quite capable of doing. The magic rope that ties the giant is the politicization of the whole process where corrupt politicians have used their powers to subdue this justice system. This is not a problem that can be cured by any technical assistance.
The spokesmen for the government are unable to state to their country and the outside world that there are no human rights violations. Nor are they capable of telling anyone that they do not want to stop these violations because the corrupt political system that exists within the country cannot survive without creating an enormous fear psychosis through continuously maintaining a state of violence. Any such honest statements will result in these spokesmen being dismissed from their positions in no time. The role of the spokesmen for a corrupt system is to create some sort of a camouflage to make things appear nice even when the actual political agenda for which they stand is nasty and brutish.
Despite of volumes of paper produced by these spokesmen the central issue that they do not address and cannot be expected to address is as to how you can improve the national capacity of the justice system when the government in fact wants to cripple that very system. No amount of explanations about the 17th Amendment will convince anyone who is aware of the facts of the emergence of the 17th Amendment, the short period in which some of these institutions were functioning and deliberate refusal to appoint the Constitutional Council, that there is any justification in discarding this particular amendment to the Sri Lankan constitution. When the 17th Amendment was adopted almost unanimously in parliament there was a consensus that the basic national institutions had collapsed due to politicisation and that some measures must be taken to revive them. It was a limited measure no doubt but could have been the beginning of the end of the process of undermining the national institutions.
The persons who are nominated for appointment to the Constitutional Council are quite competent local persons. They do not need any technical assistance from outside to do their job. However, they are crippled by a political scheme that does not want the operation of a legal scheme in which the appointments, promotions, transfers and disciplinary control of different institutions of the state are done by independent persons. As meritocracy and corruption cannot co-exist the realisation of the 17th Amendment has been deliberately crippled.
Such psychotic stories of falsification will continue as long as there is a political determination not to allow any undermining of corruption and the task of these spokesmen is to be defenders of the bandit capitalism which has also created bandit democracy. A bandit democracy and the making of national institutions into a phantom limb go hand in hand. In Sri Lanka today justice exists only in the same way as an amputated limb exists in the mind of a patient after such amputation.
