Politicians and other criminals

Editorial-January 7, 2014,

President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s eldest son and UPFA parliamentarian Namal Rajapaksa has managed to end a protest at Bogambara. A group of death row prisoners called off a roof-top fast following a discussion with Rajapaksa. The young MP may preen himself on his successful mission, but, we think, the starving inmates were so desperate to end their hunger strike that they would have listened to even the President’s youngest son and climbed down!

The protesting prisoners demanded that they be either hanged or set free. Instead of making such demands, they should be thankful to successive presidents for sparing their lives. They don’t seem to know what it is like to be hanged! They are lucky that they are living in a criminals’ paradise where laws are in their favour and politicians are partial to them. Else, they would have been pushing up daisies by now!

Self-righteous political leaders have no qualms about condoning extra judicial killings. Many youth have died violent deaths at the hands of governments that resorted to savage methods to quell uprisings. The Matale mass grave is a case in point. We have also witnessed wayside tyre-pyres where many suspects were burnt alive. It was only a few moons ago that a military crackdown on a protest at Rathupaswala, where irate civilians were demanding clean water, left three persons dead and many others injured. But, strangely, politicians responsible for such violence are wary of sanctioning judicial executions!

Scores of savages sentenced to jail for heinous crimes such as rape and murder have walked free during the past few decades thanks to their political connections. The Bogambara prisoners may have thought that since dangerous criminals had been given presidential pardons previously, they, too, should be treated in a similar manner.

While the Kandy prison protest was going on some resentful people argued that anyone who resorted to such methods to win freedom, in spite of the severity of crimes he had committed, should be brought down at gunpoint and beaten in such a way that he would regret the day he was born. We don’t approve of such brutal action against prisoners. Instead, we believe, the political potentates who have created a very bad precedent by abusing their power to release dangerous criminals should be pinioned to lamp-posts and flogged.

Meanwhile, the Bogambara prison officers should be called to account. Inmates couldn’t have gained access to the roof where they staged their fast but for a serious lapse or connivance on the part of prison guards. Prisons stink of corruption and many jailers and their superiors are beneficiaries of wealthy criminals’ largesse. It is because of these bad eggs that prisons are awash with drugs and other banned items. Parties thrown by rich inmates for their cell mates as well as guards are reported from time to time.

Much publicity was given to a recent incident where a ‘ball of narcotics’ was thrown into the Mahara Prison over a boundary wall. Somebody is apparently trying to dupe the public into believing that outsiders are responsible for smuggling drugs into prisons in this manner. But, in reality, narcotics find their way into state pens through prison officers themselves. Drugs have been detected in their pockets and even inside their underwear. If prisons are to be kept trouble free without inmates clambering up roofs and water tanks every now and then to make various demands, corrupt officers have to be weeded out.

Conditions on which the Bogambara prisoners agreed to end their fast are not known, but under no circumstances should the government reduce the sentences of those dangerous criminals. Law-abiding citizens are living in fear of being harmed by robbers, rapists, extortionists, homicidal maniacs and other anti-social elements. It is a crime for the government to aggravate their predicament further by releasing convicted criminals sentenced to death or life imprisonment.