Political naivete

The Daily News reported yesterday that President Chandrika Kumaratunga has ordered stern action to be taken against SLFPers who have been involved in election related violence. The Daily News is the authoritative journal on the president just as much the Ossavatore Romano ( Vatican’s Paper) is on the Pope. Thus, the public will be eagerly awaiting how the Central Committee of the SLFP which has been asked to sit in judgement on the offenders will get about implementing this all important presidential order.

It would have done the people of the North Western Province much good had such an announcement been made immediately after reports about complaints of incidence of election violence were made as the election campaign commenced. But President Kumaratunga and her political lieutenants said that such reports were the figment of imagination of independent journalists and it took the murder of the UNP office bearer to prove that all the carnage and mayhem reported were not creative journalism of the independent media. An early pronouncement of disciplinary action being taken on her own party supporters, if they were found guilty of such offences, would have prevented the regrettable events. It would have compelled the UNP and JVP leaders too to make such pronouncements and implement them.Such a move by President Kumaratunga would have won the plaudits of her bitterest critics. But that was not to be.

In attempting to get about implementing the all important presidential order, how would the Central Committee of the SLFP get about it ? Will SLFPers come forward and point out their colleagues who committed such offences ? Only those living in cloud cuckooland will expect such a thing to happen. If justice is to be done, the Central Committee must get the records of complaints made against offenders from the police. Better still, they should ask the JVP and the UNP for names of those people against whom complaints were lodged.

Can election monitors help the investigating Central Committee? The government must find out whose funding these election monitoring agencies, a media man who had been a leading light of the Colombo NGO establishment for long years and recently departed from his NGO over a dispute on foreign assistance, had said. His suggestion, got a positive and immediate response from some of his friends who are cabinet ministers. The Island too has not been enthusiastic about media monitors. We expressed our reservations in an editorial titled Monitor the Monitors on January 8. We pointed out to this question of foreign funding of these organisations as well as their inability to comprehensively monitor an election in a vast electorate as well as the likely poltical partiality of some monitors. In the past, election monitors have not been able to point out directly at instances when unfair practices were committed. What they had been able to do is to record the allegations made. In this instance , however, they have named some ministers as committing election offences. This has resulted in the ministers threatening to sue the monitors for defamation.

Now comes the 24 million dollar question , as the Americans say. Can the Central Committee of the SLFP investigate and deliver an impartial judgement on members of their own party ? Sri Lankans will be reminded of the trite Sinhala saying: Horage Ammageng Penne ahanawa wagei ( Like asking a crystal ball gazer whether her son was the thief). Undoubtedly many in the Central Committee are honourable men, in fact honourable ministers. But in politics, political partisanship is inevitable. Even the Senate Judiciary Committee of the United States with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court presiding, is being accused of political partisanship in the issue of the impeachment of President Clinton. Can the Central committee of the SLFP do better ?

In our view it is extreme political naivetŽ for any one to think that the people of this country will believe that the Central committee of the SLFP could find any person guilty of committing election violence, particularly if some of those accused will be cabinet ministers. This is as naive as some of the arguments based on selected electorates being interpreted as proof to say that there had been no election rigging. If those arguments are correct, then the UNP should have won the elections! These attempts could be described in the Sinhala saying: As Bandung— attempts to blindfold the public’

If the intention is to see that the guilty are punished, a team of impartial police officers and officers of the Attorney Generals Department be called in to investigate the complaints and prosecute offenders against whom there is evidence.