Four Brothers Who Ran The Country…Avarice Personified

By Vishwamithra1984 –January 11, 2017

“The lust of avarice has so totally seized upon mankind that their wealth seems rather to possess them than they possess their wealth.” ~Pliny the Elder

The guns fell silent. Victory cries echoed in the skies while jubilant Sri Lankans celebrated the war victory with Kiribath (milk-rice), Lunu-Miris (chili-peppered onion-chutney) and plain tea. The country at large, those who lived south of Vavuniya, claimed, in all rightful sense, a historic military victory over the forces of Tamil extremists who brought unspeakable terror, anguish, pain and death to many a Sinhalese-Buddhist community. The celebrations were justifiable; the claims were authentic and lofty hopes for a dawn of a new era with peace, prosperity and stability reached beyond the frontiers of reality. That was May 19th 2009. Now it looks so far and distant and the victory’s gleaming rays have paled into the dim-light of time.

People’s priorities changed; victors were rejected by the very people who hailed a modern Caesar who did not fire single bullet nor stopped one to shield the brother-soldier behind; the field commander who marshaled his men, the commander who planned and designed every single attack and counter-attack, the commander who led his brave soldiers in the trenches, the commander who nearly died from a suicide-bomber attack, became the first victim of the peace. While the siblings of the Commander-in-Chief claimed ownership of the victory, not of the war that consumed hundreds of the children of ordinary families of our nation, the Army Commander was found guilty of flimsy charges and put behind the unkind bars of Welikada prisons. Such were the great and cruel ironies of our times that followed the so-called victory.

From 1994 to 2014, twenty long years, on the military side, were filled with stories of great bravery; yet they were filled with unspeakable grief for innocent masses of our land who lived on the south side of Vavuniya. They tell a story of a nation, at times meandering between what to do and what not to do, sometimes making advances on the battlefield and retreating other times, a story of utter disbelief when their children didn’t come home on time; of tormented residents along border villages not knowing whether they would live or die the night they go to sleep, these were the years some would like to forget, yet they would be etched in their memories for a long time. The political leadership provided at that time switched from a Bandaranaike to a Rajapaksa.

But the pattern of politics did not change. The SLFP carried on with their caravan of populist measures on the economy and ultra-nationalist on the socio-ethnic issues. The policies and postures so adopted portrayed a regime hell-bent on teaching a lesson, not only to a terrorist army, but also to a segment of our own people, Tamil civilians. These are the years in which an emotion against terrorism turned into a war against a whole people. The divide between the Sinhalese and Tamils took root and those who controlled the coffers of the country controlled the mass psyche.

The tragic feature of this period is that no politician, no pundit, no NGO, no state institution, no civil organization, no media outlet, no segment of the clergy, took notice of the fact that the nation’s character is receiving irrevocable alteration, its culture is being debased, its inner soul is being consumed by the marketplace, its education is being neglected beyond any chance of a ‘correction’ and its role- model politicians were wining dining and in five-star hotels in the company of that new class of crony-capitalists. It was indeed a spectacle of macabre consumerism.

Those political leaders who used to pontificate about the purity of our cultural values have discarded those very values like early morning spit. And when the Rajapaksas assumed the mantle of power after Chandrika Kumaranatunga Bandaranaike, all focus was on the war in the North and thanks mainly to the incredible leadership of the commanders on the field and adequate political leadership at the center, the dreaded Prabhakaran and his Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam passed into history.

What followed this historic war victory is what destroyed the political victors. This war victory, the ruling family assumed, was an open license to use their political power to use it to accumulate wealth, to suppress the media, allegedly eliminate political critics and generally run amok with unlimited power. The notorious 18th Amendment was a byproduct of this great avarice the ‘Four Brothers’; their vulgar pursuit of physical pleasures manifested themselves in midnight race car rallies; their crude indulgences were of the ‘other worldly’ sort . The first decade of the Twenty First Century represented some of the best and worst in our short history from Independence to present. The beginnings of the winds of victory are lost in the reeking mists of corruption, nepotism and cruelty. This land of ours has a long history, a history that is rich with magnificent kings and reasonably steadfast democratic rulers; her history could boast about being magnanimous in victory because her victorious kings decreed that her subjects adhered to noble rituals of respecting defeated enemy-kings, her history built colossal stupas upon the sacredness of the teachings of the Thathagatha, the Enlightened One. For the first time in her long and cherished history, she submitted herself to the rule of ‘Four Brothers’. The eldest was the Speaker of the House of Parliament; next was the President and the other two controlled the most vital sectors of the country, Defence and the Economy. Among themselves was disbursed nearly 70% of the country’s budget.

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