by Dr. Victor Rajakulendran; originally published February 24, 2004
An open letter to Sri Lankan President and the Prime Minister
February 12, 2004
Her Excellency, Chandrika Bandaranayake Kumarathunga
The President of Sri Lanka
His Excellency, Ranil Wickramasinghe
The Caretaker Prime Minister of Sri Lanka
Your Excellencies
Re: The current political crisis
Your Excellency the President, you have decided to use/misuse your executive power to dissolve parliament and call for fresh elections. By this action you have walked away from the written promise you gave to the Speaker of the House. That is, you will not dissolve parliament as long as Prime Minister Ranil Wickramasighe’s (RW) government holds a majority in parliament. Moreover, by maintaining silence without giving a valid reason so far, why you dissolved parliament, you have demonstrated that you are very undemocratic too. There were caretaker governments twice before under your presidency. You did not meddle with the cabinet at all during the period prior to those two elections. Then why did you remove 39 non-cabinet level ministers and deputy ministers this time? You have given the reason as they could use the ministry resources such as vehicles for their election campaign. Didn’t those ministers in the previous two caretaker governments use the same resources for their election campaign? Didn’t you allow them to do because they were from your own party?
When you prorogued the same parliament for 2 weeks in November 2003 and took over the responsibilities of 3 important ministries including the Defence, you said that you were doing that to safeguard the security, territorial integrity and sovereignty of your country. What have you done during the last 3 months to improve the security of the country? You and your paid adviser and former Foreign Minister Kadirgamar, were making big noises about LTTE, before you took over the Defence Ministry, accusing them of building a camp in Trincomele area and it is a threat to your naval base. Why you all did not even talk about it after it came under your jurisdiction, if it was a threat to the security of the country as you all shouted before?
Your Excellency the President, you decided to shake the apple cart in November 2003 because time was running out for you to change the constitution in order to abolish the Executive Presidential system and re-introduce the Executive Prime Ministerial system. Many in the International Community (IC) may not know that you cannot be the President of the country for the third time as the Presidency is restricted to two terms only. You needed RW government’s support to achieve this. You decided to get this support, knowing RW very well, through intimidation. This is why you decided to shake the apple cart first and then to offer him the idea of forming a National Government of Reconciliation and Reconstruction (NGRR). Knowing you well, RW without rejecting your idea completely agreed to test this at the provincial government level after the forthcoming provincial government elections. You did not want to trust him on this. Therefore you decided to intimidate RW further to make your ends met and decided to form an alliance with the Marxist party, Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) to create the feelings in RW’s camp that you are preparing for an election. As you expected, RW went through a knee jerk reaction. RW, who insisted that you should return the Defence Ministry back to him all this time, suddenly decided to compromise and agreed to share the Defence Ministry with you. If you had agreed to this compromise, peace process would have continued and elections would have been avoided and you could have re-visited the secondary thing (to others) of changing the Executive Presidency at a time, when a change in the constitution is required to implement the outcomes of the peace process.
Your Excellency the President even if you had wanted to do this way, circumstances did not allow you to choose this path. Once you have reluctantly agreed to form the alliance with your former enemies the JVP, you have become a hostage of the power hungry politicians of your party as well as those of the JVP. All they want is to become Ministers and Deputy Ministers of a new government. Therefore they recommended you to dissolve parliament and go for elections immediately. You were trapped and you had no alternative other than to follow their recommendation. But you should be well aware that a 2/3 majority in parliament that is needed to change the constitution is impossible to get at this stage. In that case you are not going to achieve what you initially planned in November 2003, when you prorogued the parliament and took over the three ministries, through this election you have called for now. That is to create an opportunity for yourself, to continue to contest for the executive position (ie. an executive Prime ministership under a changed constitution).
Your Excellency the President, therefore, if you are lucky and your newly formed alliance manages to get a slim majority in the elections, you still have to woo the RW’s party to join you in a NGRR. Then only you could keep the doors open for you to be a contender for the executive position in the next round. On the other hand if RW’s party wins in the elections with an increased majority, they probably would take a much-hardened attitude towards you and may force you to go into political wilderness after you finish your present term or even before you finish your present term in office. Therefore it is clear that the crisis you have created this time is a futile attempt to grab power and an exercise of sending a portion of the country’s resources (at least $7 million as election related expenses) down the drain. Your actions also have further delayed the resumption of peace talks and created the dangerous situation of Sri Lanka disappearing from the Radar Screen of the donor nations.
Your Excellency the Prime Minister, you claim that people gave you a mandate to negotiate with LTTE to find a peaceful political settlement to the Tamil problem, in the last general elections. No one can dispute the fact that you took a bold step to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the LTTE leader and initiate negotiations with the help of Norwegians. However, the way you handled things after President took over the three Ministries casts doubts on your sincerity about achieving peace in your country. When the President invited you to form a NGRR with all the parties in parliament, you declined to accept this invitation. The President then tried to scare you with the threat of dissolving parliament by repeatedly telling of forming an alliance with JVP. Because this threat from her was there for more than a year, you thought that was not real. But when the newly formed alliance was registered with the Election Commissioner in a rush, you realised that this threat was real. This was only within few days from the dissolution of the parliament. At this stage you proposed an arrangement similar to what was prevalent during late President J.R. Jayawardene(JR). That is, President to remain the Defence Minister, and like Late Mr. Lalith Athulathmuthali and Ranjan Vijayaratne in the President JR’s and President Premadasa’s governments respectively, you to become the National security Minister looking after the cease-fire agreement and the peace process. But you were late, as the miscreant in the newly formed alliance have already pushed the President down the disastrous path.
Your Excellencies, both of you have demonstrated that none of you have the capability of putting your country before your self-interests. Going through another general election is not going to change either of your’s attitude. Unless both of you are prepared not to make the same mistakes again, put the country before yourselves and are ready to make compromises soon after the elections, for the sake of peace and prosperity in your country, both of yours concern that the territorial integrity of Sri Lanka is in jeopardy will become a reality.
May the almighty God guide both of you during this time of turmoil and help the innocent people of Sri Lanka to benefit from a permanent peace in your country.
Yours truly
Dr. Victor Rajakulendran
Sydney
AUSTRALIA
CC:
Hon. Jan Peterson, State Secretary, Norway
Hon. Jack Straw, Foreign Secretary, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, London
Hon. Javier Solana, Secretary General, European Union Council
Mr. Colin L. Powell, Secretary of State, US Department of State, Washington DC
Ms. Yoriko Kavaguchi, Foreign Minister, Japan
Hon. Alexander Downer, Minister Foreign Affairs and Trade, Australia
Mr. Yasusi Akashi, Japan Special Peace Envoy to Sri Lanka, Japan