by N Sathiya Moorthy 29 October 2019
When Parliament appointed the PSC to probe the ‘Easter Sunday blasts’ of 21 April, no one expected it to come up with a report that could escape politicisation of every kind. Coming as it does after the President’s Commission Report on the very same incidents and also the continuing police investigations and court cases, challenging some of the arrests, if not findings at this stage, the politicisation part of it is going to be more, not less.
For starters, no one expected SLMC Minister Rauff Hakkem to be caught napping over his PSC membership. Leave aside the Opposition SLFP-JO charge of ‘conflict of interests’ in his membership and part-authorship of the PSC and its report, respectively, there can be no denying political propriety in such matters. If a future Parliament, post-polls, were to appoint another PSC of the kind, it may not be justified, yet, it cannot be unjustified either.
There are reasons. First and foremost, the SLFP-JO conveniently stayed away from the current PSC, chaired by Deputy Speaker Anura Kumarasiri. Like 13-A, where the parent SLFP disowned authorship and even part-ownership, they can have a PSC of their own, if their nominee Gota Rajapaksa were to become President, and they also get a Parliament of their choice, before or after fresh elections, due by August next year.
Going by the PSC media briefing by Chair Kumarasiri and a few other members after submitting their report to Parliament, the panel has found President Maithripala Sirisena, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and a host of other officials and official agencies variously guilty of non-performance in stopping the Easter blasts from occuring. Now that Sirisena is a ‘toothless’ Tiger, he having opted out of the presidential race, it should no surprise anyone if parts of the report are quoted / mis-quoted to deny Wickremesinghe the prime minister’s job – if his UNP nominee Sajith Premadasa were to become President, instead.
It is too early to jump to conclusions otherwise, based on selective media-briefing, though considering that the Chair and other members were present, should make it clear that they were only speaking of and from their own findings. Hence, it is confusing, if not contradicting when they say that State Intelleince Services (SIS) and chief, Senior DIG Nilantha Jayawardena, were culpabale for not stopping the carnage.
On the one hand, the PSC memebrs said that Nilantha had passed on intelligence received from foreign and local sources to higher-ups for action. On the other, they say that the SIS wanted the Terrorism Investigation Department (TID) tracking of possible suspects in Kathankudy and elsewhere in the Eastern Province withdrawn, contributing to the blasts.
Legal culpability
Unless they could have established this one as a fact in their full report, there is no knowing how the SIS demand for the Government to withdrawi the TID from the epi-centre of Islamic extremist activities in the East could have been a culpable act in the melee. At least in the news conference, the PSC members did not seemed to have said that the SIS was authorised to direct the TID to withdraw from a scene of action, In which case, the decision for the same should elsewhere, the SIS can at best be blamed for making the suggestion — which is not a culpable offence under the law or other administrative procedures, too.
The same cannot be said about then Defence Secretary Hemasiri Fernando and IGP, Pujith Jayasundara. They are already in prison, with court-ordered remand-extension, for allegedly seeking to influence witnesses in the original case of criminal culpability in not stopping the carnage. Again, the legal issues remain if they could at all be charged with ‘murder’ as originally slapped against them, or their being ‘accessory to the plot, before or after’, to make their decisions or indecisions, punitive. No one is definitely accusing them of being a part of the plotters’ team.
The same however cannot be said of some of the nation’s top Muslim leaders, now starting with Minister Hakkeem. Already, the names of Minister Rishad Bathiudeen and former Eastern Province Governor, M L A M Hizbullah, have been muddied for their alleged association either with blasts plotter-in-chief, Zahran Hashim. True, Zahran killed himself in the blast, and is thus unavailable to the police investigators, especially, but the ghost of Zahran seems wanting to haunt the nation, especially the Muslim polity and society, for a lot more time to come.
It is thus that it becomes imperative for the police investigators to clear the chaff from the grain and produce before the courts specific and provable evidence, to show up any or all of senior Muslim political leaders as culpable under the law. It may not mean the absence of evidence in a mass-murder trial may exonerate them from moral culpability and political accountability for whatever acts of commission, omission and lapses on their behalf.
The ‘needle of suspicion’, as the report in neighouring India’s judicial probe into the ‘Indira Gandhi assassination’ (1984) would still point at them, and it is for them to come out of the mess their political indiscretion, if any, has landed them in. If nothing else, their names will continue to find a place in facilitating the ‘circumstances leading’ to the Easter blasts, as one of the two judicial probes into the LTTE’s killing of former Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi (1991), found in the case of the sacked DMK Government in southern Tamil Nadu, did.
9/11 Report or what
There is a need to study the full report, to see if it is as comprehensive as the post-9/11 Report of the US Congress was. At least, no one suspected political bias in the concept of the 9/11 panel, nor in the one-sided composition of the same, as with the PSC now. If nothing else, the hurried and at times harried way Parliament went about it gave the impression that they wanted to offset whatever ill-effect that the three-member Presidential Commission might have had to say about select political and administrative leaders of the country.
At the end of the day, the taste of the pudding is in the eating. The Presidential Commission’s hasty report has not produced anything to avoid a recurrence of such non-culpable responsibility on those that are tasked to stall such things from happening – or, so it seems. Now, the Executive Summary and the media briefing have outlined recommendations for the Government to consider and act upon for and in the future. How detailed are those recommendations, and how implementable some of them are at present, with or without new laws and/or restructuring of existing institutions, all remains to be seen.
At the end of the day, turf-war between intelligence agencies are as bad as those between political parties and leaders even from the same party or region or ethnicity wanting to move up the ladder. The ‘Easter blasts’ is one clear case in which ‘foreign intelligence’ – in this case, from neighbouring India – has poured in, possibly with specific details, almost for three weeks and almost up to the last hour, had poured in, but no action was taken.
The question if future reorganisation of institutions alone would suffice, or if there has to be ‘accountability’ for such actions, on the lines otherwise demanded by the international community (read: West) and the SLT Diaspora and local polity, against the armed forces, on allegations of ‘war crimes’ and ‘HR violations’ during the period. There again, no one really had, or has, sought any action against the politicians, whose fate was left to the Sri Lankan electorate to address and answer.
Letting it linger…
The Executive Summary of the PSC Report and the news briefing by its members clearly indicate that Muslim community and political leaders, had been cautioning authorities about the doings of some of their ‘estranged youth’, almost for three to four years before the Easter blasts. To be fair to them, they had also looked the other way, without joining issue, when the second Rajapaksa Government, launched massive action against private radio stations that some community members were running in Colombo and elsewhere in the country, or when police liquidated suspected anti-socials of every which kind, many of whom happened to be Muslims.
This is where contradictions galore. If there were Muslim leaders who might have been benefitting, even if indirectly, from ‘importing’ religious fundamentalism bordering on extremism, leading to terrorism, there were others who were at seeking to ‘expose’, one, if not the other. The same could have been said of the SLT community leaders and political bosses of the time, viz emerging ranks of youth militancy in the community of the seventies, until ‘Pogrom-93’ left them with little or no choice or option.
The same, however, cannot be said of the majority community, starting with the otherwise politicised sections of the Buddhist clergy. Until it became too late, the latter class did not condemn, one of them, namely, Gnanasara Thero and his BBS, began attacking Muslim establishments and places of worship, disturbing and destroying the post-war communal amity that the nation very badly needed and longed for after thirty long years of war and violence.
Nor did the political class, those then in the UNP Opposition, say anything worthwhile about it, either inside Parliament or outside Parliament – especially when then Government, especially present-day presidential candidate Gota R, then Defence Secretary, was allegedly behind the BBS operations. They only let rumours and international anticipations of the kind linger in the air, for them to capitalise upon the same, electorally.
Yet, if someone out there thought that they could wish away the nation’s Muslims as they did with Upcountry Tamils of Recent Indian Origin (IOT) as early as the early months of Independence, it is just not going to happen. They might have attempted it afterwards with the SLT community, in the aftermath of disenfranchisement and statelessness of the IOT, but that did not happen.
Maybe, some in the SLT community may have used, misused or abused the opportunity of war, violence and HR violations to seek and obtain political asylum and/or citizenship overseas, as ‘economic refugees’ in reality. But those that have stayed back are the ones most feared by the Sinhala political leadership, as those empowered to choose the nation’s next President and Prime Minister, in his turn, this time, as in the past – and possibly in the future, too.
The article appeared in the Ceylon Today on 29 October 2019.