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Overkill

The inimitable Wijesoma said it all in his cartoon published in yesterday’s issue of The Island and Divaina depicting a bemused man with a plastered face and a broken head on top of which four birthday candles had been stuck. The caption underneath merely said Fourth anniversary celebrations.

Everybody in the country now knows that July 15, 1999, is the fourth anniversary of the broken promise to end the executive presidency, an office that Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga has continued to enjoy and to which she aspires for re-election despite a solemn profession to abolish it very quickly after her 1994 election victory. She set the date herself - July 15, 1995 - in a letter to the JVP, but the promise was as good as bread at Rs. 3.50 a loaf. That, at least, the people had for some months.

We run an interview with Housing and Urban Development Minister Indika Gunawardene in this issue of our paper where he stresses the need for a correct relationship" between the leader of the government and the leader of the opposition. The fact that he said so is a clear admission that we do not have such a relationship today. If anybody had any doubts on that score, which is most unlikely, what happened on Thursday when UNP demonstrators were attacked with tear gas and rubber bullets by police is convincing evidence.

The propaganda organs of the state have made a pathetic effort to say that the ``UNP Mafia" was marching on "Temple Trees." No doubt the UNP intended going up to those premises where President Kumaratunga lives and does much of her work. But any Sri Lankan knows that "Temple Trees" is so well fortified with a veritable army of guards, chainlink fences and anti-aircraft guns that no slogan shouting petition carrier backed by a few hundred marchers could ever have been able to do much more than expel some hot air rhetoric and hand over a petition if anybody from within the hallowed precincts would have cared to receive it.

There is no doubt that the way in which the UNP was bashed up was deadly overkill on the part of the police. What is most frightening is the part that the Presidential Security Division (PSD) of the police had allegedly played in Thursday’s events. There are accusations that men of this division in civvies were wielding iron rods on the demonstrators. Why the military’s rapid deployment force (RDF) was brought into Thursday’s operation is also inexplicable. Nothing that the regular police could not handle happened although soldiers with automatics slung on their shoulders speeding on motorbikes was part of Thursday’s scene.

When the JVP brought the country to the brink of anarchy in 1988-89, many politicians were given official bodyguards for protection against very real danger. It didn’t take long for some of these security details to become private armies of some politicians. The country has believed that this sorry situation has now been ended. But what happened first at the Wayamba Provincial Council elections, then at the Cricket Board elections and now the attack on the UNP demonstrators suggests that men of the PSD have been present in places where they had no business to be.

Ranil Wickremesinghe had said at a press conference on Friday that their supporters who had converged at Havelock Park, Maradana and Borella were to gather at Lipton Circus. There had been published reports that a petition was to be carried to "Temple Trees" and the PSD, charged with the safety of the president, should no doubt have kept tabs on any march there. But if its men in civvies had wielded iron rods against the demonstrators who were obviously no threat to the safety of the president, its already tarnished reputation would be further soiled.

We do not know whether the UNP demonstration was legal or not, whether police permission was necessary for people who converged in public places to march to some other place is necessary. Wickremesinghe is on record saying that if the police so wished they could have asked these people to go in single file. Probably this is so that other road users will not be obstructed. Ideally, the organisers of the protest and the police should have interacted to ensure that there was least possible inconvenience to ordinary people not concerned with the protest. But we have reached a point where no opposition party, for good reason, has any confidence in the police acting fairly and independently in any matter in which the government of the day has an interest. This is as true for previous dispensations as for the present one.

The tragedy is that Velupillai Prabhakaran who is fighting a deadly terrorist war against the Sri Lankan nation must be laughing his sides off at the games that the government in office in Colombo and its principal opponent are playing in the south. Thursday’s incidents can only mean that the desperately needed good relations between the leaders of the government and the opposition is as far away as they ever can be. That has serious consequences for the ending of the war which must be Sri Lanka’s top priority.

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