“Yahapalanaya” Vs “Ohey Palayang” Government

By Emil van der Poorten –February 14, 2016

Emil van der Poorten

I have to acknowledge my gratitude to a friend who shall remain nameless for coining the second term appearing in the title of this piece. I believe he very accurately described the dismissive attitude that our current government has adopted towards those who put it in power and its attitude towards those it claimed to represent in the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka.

The increasing equivocation of this lot is, at least, something that our recently-deposed would-be Emperor could not be accused of. Even in the vilest acts that were performed under the Mahinda Rajapaksa regime (MR1), there was seldom the dimension of vacillation in the matter of decision-making. This was true even when those decisions were driven solely, it seemed, by the needs of shifting political expediency. In any event, MR1’s over-arching threat, terror and ruthlessness took care of any perception by the general public of anything resembling weakness or vacillation!

Apart from the political flotsam and jetsam that constitute a large part of our multi-party Cabinet, this government chose to appoint to very senior administrative and management positions those who never so much as dissented while the MR1 bunch were acting with absolute impunity. What this amounted to was best expressed by what I was told a senior member of the United National Party had said when taken to task for seemingly-endless silence during the heyday of impunity: “What to do, machang, have to put petrol in the Benz no?” That is the attitude that is in the process of being rewarded by the Maithri/Ranil (MR2) dispensation.

Then there were the senior government functionaries who, without question or apology, carried out the diktats of the MR1 dispensation. Many of these were not only unprincipled but criminal by any definition. By virtue of their “seniority” I am told and “their ability to do a good job” they have been installed or re-installed by the current government where they can do us, the great unwashed, more damage again and proceed to walk off scot-free to display their administrative skills even when, God forbid, there is a return to MR1.

At this point, let me deal with a constant excuse I hear from the apologists for those creatures who wielded considerable power and exercised it with abandon more times than I care to remember. That excuse is, over and over again, “they were only doing their job.”

Those who operated the gas chambers at Auschwitz were also “only doing their job.” Do I have to be more explicit in the matter of my opinion of these functionaries who performed the bidding, without complaint, of those pulling the levers of power during MR1?

I don’t – and I don’t see how anybody pretending to even some basic code of morality or principle – subscribe to a system of forgiveness that not only permits these people’s transgressions being going unpunished but permits and encourages their elevation to positions of influence and power to do more of the same, in what amounts to a gesture of approval.                                  Read More