.

Of pots and kettles

The big news last week was the government announcement that the death penalty is being brought back. It was timed for the Sunday papers with the obvious intention of getting maximum mileage for a decision which the current ruling establishment believes is in accord with public opinion. It was left to this newspaper to reveal that the self-same announcement had been made nearly four years ago - on June 19, 1995, if we are to give the exact date.

But nothing was done about stopping the automatic commuting of death sentences imposed by the courts by the use of the president's powers of executive clemency for over three and a half long years. Despite Justice Minister G. L. Peiris' grave pronouncement then, hurriedly made after parliament had unanimously adopted a private member's motion of Mr. Bharatha Lakshman Premachandra that steps should be taken "to re-implement capital punishment (gallows) which remains ineffective though imposed by the courts."

Particularly gruesome murders we have seen such as the Rita John killing and the wiping out of a whole family at Hokandara naturally caused public revulsion and strengthened the hands of those who believe the death penalty to be an effective deterrent against murder despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary. It is in fact the strength of this argument that has made the government decide now, as it did in 1995, that the hangman will be re-employed but with considerable safeguards for those sentenced to the gallows.

The doves might gain some satisfaction from the protection against indiscriminate hanging that this decision offers. Prof. Peiris, no doubt, was mindful of the strongly held views of liberals who support the People's Alliance and being liberal minded himself does not wish to go the whole distance the hawks would like the government to. There are good arguments on both sides of this question that are now being aired. But what we are concerned with here is that President Chandrika Kumaratunga sought in last Sunday's announcement to drag the UNP into the whole business of burgeoning crime re-introducing the death penalty.

That was ham handedly done. The news release issued by the presidential secretariat first made the point that the president had been concerned for "a considerable time" about the alarming increase in crime. It is safe to suppose that the three and a half years that elapsed after her justice minister announced that she would not routinely commute the death sentences handed down by the courts into terms of life imprisonment is also covered by the "considerable time" during which Chandrika Kumaratunga was concerned about the rise in crime. Despite such concern and the conviction that the death sentence is sometimes a necessary punishment for heinous crime, she breezily continued her previous practice.

But that is not all. As the release from the presidential secretariat informed the country, the alarming increase in crime "appears to have set in during the last two decades." So the seventeen years of UNP rule is neatly encompassed. If there was any doubt at where the presidential blow was intended, it would have been rapidly dispelled by what followed because the same old song that the country is now sick of hearing was sung all over again. Let us quote what Her Excellency President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga had to say on the subject:

"The erosion of traditional values under impact of a laissez faire economic policy devoid of any humane element followed by the previous government, was accompanied by a liberal attitude towards criminal elements. Persons in high positions consorted with notorious figures of the underworld. Criminals convicted of rape and criminal assault were given presidential pardons, some of them being elevated to positions of Justice of the Peace. A very liberal policy of granting remissions to prisoners was introduced."

So nobody need have any doubt about where the dart was intended. In fact the president herself and many of her PA colleagues often drop names of such characters like Soththi Upali and Gonawela Sunil. But Mrs. Kumaratunga seems to have forgotten the expose of how she herself once signed as guarantor for a loan that Soththi Upali took from a finance company! Could she then in good conscience point accusing fingers at her opponents?

The fact is that politicians of all colours and stripes have enjoyed the funding and support of questionable elements in society and pots calling kettles black is not a profitable exercise. If the government believes in good conscience that the reintroduction of the death penalty in the way it seeks to do will reduce the worst crimes, the country will accept it. But having continued the liberal remissions policy for the whole of its term up to now and commuted death sentences despite a promise not to do so as long ago as 1995, why continue this futile exercise of flogging the UNP bogey for everything that's wrong in the country? Let those in power remember that the criminals have to be caught before they are convicted. A lot of them, unfortunately, are not.

| NEWS | PROVINCIAL | POLITICS | DEFENCE | FEATURES | LEISURE | BUSINESS | SPORTS | ADS |