BETA

On May 10th the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) will conduct an election for the Eastern Provincial Council. It is investing its last political rupees in this gamble hence working hard to win it by any means.

The opposition especially the United National Party complains bitterly about intimidation and violence against them. UNP parliamentarian Laxman Kiriyelle has accused the paramilitaries for involvement in distributing blank polling cards and warned that the GOSL is preparing for a large scale election rigging.

In an interview with a state-run television station, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s younger brother and the Defence Secretary has called on the government to ban independent media that publish “harmful” stories. He has described journalists who criticise the war effort as traitors.

The Army Commander has also called people who criticise the military as traitors.

Tamil people in the East are living in fear of intimidation and threat says Campaign for Free and Fair Election (CAFFE), a civil society organisation.

In the meantime President Rajapakse has suspended Parliament sessions for a month.

This is how the current affairs in Sri Lanka is unfolding.

While the world is anxiously looking for solutions for the “silent tsunami” of food crisis, the ruling elite in Sri Lanka threatens and intimidates journalists, civilians and opposition parties.

Pathetic isn’t it?

Tamil East used to be the rice bowl of Sri Lanka. Tamils used to be the majority now they are in the minority.

This demographic change and destruction of local economy have been made a reality by years of concerted effort by the Sri Lankan Army and the GOSL. This bloody enterprise of pacifying Tamils at any cost has been going on since the independence of Sri Lanka. This highly organised effort involves ethnic cleansing of a large number of Tamil villages or making Tamil villages into no civilian high security zones. Thus the Tamils have been made a minority in their own homeland and forced to go around with a begging bowl for their next meal.

The East was annexed with the Tamil North in 1987 as part of a political settlement. The GOSL was arm twisted by the international community in order to do so. The settlement failed miserably because the GOSL and the Army were against it.

For almost 20 years GOSL waited to separate this so called North-East merger and to completely destroy the Tamils in the East. They have succeeded in de-merging the Northeast in 2007 and are now trying to legitimise their pacification programs through election and electioneering.

Sri Lankan local elections do not usually attract too much attention in the international media unless these are held in the Tamil Northeast. Thus this election in the East is exciting lot of people.

Unfortunately we, the Tamils do not get excited by these pseudo-democratic festivals sponsored by GOSL. This is because we know the exact game plan behind this election and other pacification programs of GOSL targeting the Tamils.

For us Sri Lankan democracy is a lot like the Turkish variety. That is these have a multi-party system; but have a long undemocratic tradition of oppressing minorities and they are to a large extent ruled by the army.

In Turkey there is full awareness to this anti-democratic tension between the elected parliament and the military, and the conflicts are often played out in the open.

In Sri Lanka the tensions between the Army and the elected leadership are almost completely covert, both because the army is a constant participant in the actual leadership, and because unlike in Turkey, in Sri Lanka there has not yet emerged even a single political actor that stands up against the army. And also the politicians and the Army collude with each other for their hold on the levers of power and support each other when their interests are threatened by events such as failing economy or battlefield debacles.

No matter how often Sri Lankan officers and spokespersons are caught in cover-ups, dirty intrigues and outright lies (their war-crimes are simply denied), no matter how much waste, carelessness and corruption any Sri Lankan soldier sees whenever he is in the army, polls show that the Sinhalese public trusts and respects the army more than any other institution of the Sinhalese Buddhist state, including the civil service and the judicial system. In fact, the officially nurtured Sinhalese political culture and identity is being organised ever more around the army, with the obvious price of excluding the minorities (they do not join the army), and a general preference to solve problems by violence rather than by negotiations and compromise.

Thus who really rules Sri Lanka is an important question.

Cabinet, Parliament, political parties etc. play a marginal role in Sri Lanka: they serve as democratic fig-leaves, to distract attention from the actual centres of power, and to give comfortable jobs to those who serve the junta best, with retired officers over-represented all along the line (retiring officers usually “go shopping” among the bigger political parties and also the diplomatic service and join the one that offers them most).

In fact, Sri Lanka is not run by its elected government, but by a triumvirate consisting of the Commander in Chief who is also the President, Chief of Staff (or the army top) and the defence secretary. It has been so for decades, but severed considerably in the last two years. The Fourth Eelam War which was started by the current government radically changed the balance of power between cabinet and army in favour of the latter.

Thus we can comfortably say that Sri Lanka is not a state with an army, but an army with an affiliated state.