Our Fears Keep Us Down, Bereft Of Freedoms

By S. Ratnajeevan H. Hoole –OCTOBER 8, 2020

Prof. S. Ratnajeevan H. Hoole

On 5 October 2020, I had the pleasure of attending AFRIEL’s program in Moondru Murippu in Vavuniya with the Election Commission to engage youth in politics. The event commemorated AFRIEL’s Seventh Anniversary.

AFRIEL’s Director Ravindra de Silva is truly an internationalist in values. Hailing from Vavuniya he is fluent in Sinhalese and Tamil, and of course English.  He had taught Sinhalese at my alma mater St. John’s College Jaffna. His wife Grace En-Tzu Chang  from Taiwan who came as an International Observer for the 2013 Northern Provincial Council Elections stayed on and is Manager (Voluntary) at AFRIEL. Her services are invaluable insofar as she makes female youth at AFRIEL feel comfortable. Two hundred and fifty young people came from 15 districts. There were Tamils, Sinhalese and Muslims. Translations were provided making everyone comfortable.

According to de Silva, youth affiliated to AFRIEL regretted the proposed Twentieth Amendment and the change of direction the country is taking with regard to human rights and the dangerous situation regarding the Amendment. They asked for a forum where they could discuss these matters with elders. So the meeting was organized.

Two Intelligence men turned up. They asked all sorts of questions including why  the organizers had not informed the police. The organizers in response asked why they had to inform the police but got no answer. Told that Inspector of Police, Mr. Paramuna, was a speaker, the suspicions of the police did not abate. The two men waited through the meeting. This is a foreboding of what life will be like after the Twentieth Amendment.

The incident brought back horrible memories of 29 May 2011. The Noolaham Foundation archiving books for posterity and research was meeting in Jaffna. The topic was preserving pictures of historic buildings and their architecture that were fast disappearing under development. The army barged into the meeting and disrupted it. We were finally allowed to proceed only with an intelligence officer sitting with us and taking notes and pictures. Prior to leaving, our identity cards were recorded. An unchanging  feature in our Tamil experiences is our reluctance to insist on our rights. I as a Board member issued a Press Release. Some UK Board Members were reportedly upset that I made an issue of it and presumably made the relationship with the army difficult for future meetings! My relationship with Noolaham trailed off with that. In Moodru Murippu, the involvement of Sinhalese like de Silva and Ruki Fernando helps to bring out this incident. When we fear, the bullying army gets the upper hand.

Our accepting the police trammeling our rights is like our COVID Curfew. On Sunday 4 October, 2020 M.A. Sumanthiran at a public seminar on the Twentieth Amendment made the statement (as he had done many times earlier) that curfews declared by the President’s media office have no force in law. The strength of these illegal orders is our fear. We obey in terror of the armed forces who then have their unlawful way.

Mr. Paramuna spoke first and went away immediately. Chairman Mahinda Deshapriya spoke in his usually entertaining way. Next was the forum that I chaired. Deshapriya announced that my views on the Twentieth Amendment are known by the fact that I filed a case in the Supreme Court against it. He asked that no questions be therefore asked about it. Nonetheless, there was a question which I ducked by saying it is sub judice – but there really is no bar to discussing my views on the amendment and I did do so to the TV crew that was there and it was aired on prime news that very night.

Similarly Nagananda Kodituwakku  told the Commission when he came on 6 Oct. to defend his party’s application for registration that he had filed a preliminary objection with the Chief Justice hearing the petitions requesting  that the CJ recuse himself. The grounds were that the CJ had lost all credibility by advising the Sirisena government in 2018 when he was Attorney General that it was all right for him to dissolve Parliament before its four and half years had expired. He was made CJ. As related by Kodituwakku, the CJ at a later break in the hearings had ruled Kodituwakku’s objections out of order but agreed to let him address the Court as a Petitioner although he is suspended from practising law for three years by the Supreme Court as of 18 March 2019. He was found guilty of defaming the former appeal court judge, Vijitha Malalgoda. His being  allowed to address his own Petition I presume is not practicing law. That this interesting episode in court has not been (or perhaps rarely) reported shows how emasculated our press is, muzzling itself in fear that there could be a contempt finding. If one looks at popular websites permitting comments, the comments have dried up since 5 August. A chilling self-censorship.

So as usual, at the Forum we ignored the rogue elephant in the unlit room like the blind men in the dark who imagined the leg of the element to be a tree trunk, the tail a brush, etc. without recognizing the danger they faced from being crushed by the elephant –  the Twentieth Amendment which has weakened our democracy and muzzled our press even before it is passed – while we stage dramas about our model democracy.

All these days I had the freedom without fearing removal from the Commission to allege and try to charge the Minister of Justice for violating the laws of the Presidential Elections Act by his threatening violence against Muslims if they failed to vote for then presidential candidate Gotabaya Rajapaksa. If the Twentieth Amendment is passed, I could be immediately removed from the Commission. The amendment therefore takes away a strong pillar of democracy – the independence of the Commission. Likewise, I challenged the dissolution of Parliament and was upheld by the Supreme Court. But after the amendment I could be subject to removal as some rowdies in parliament have threatened to do. In April this year when the Commission was under pressure to hold elections on 25 April, we stood our ground citing national health. After the amendment that independence will not be possible, and the Commission would have its head under the guillotine.

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