Militarizing schools and dismantling civil society

By Ranga Jayasuriya-2013-03-04 Military is like cholesterol. You need to maintain its correct levels. If you enlarge its role over the desired limit, that would be deleterious to the public. And if you relegate it, again, you would soon be heading towards a far worse mess. As far as the latter scenario is concerned, Sri Lanka itself has its fair share of bitter experience. During the first two decades of Independence, Sri Lanka relegated the role of the military, turning it more or less into a ceremonial army. That was not the most ideal period for complacency, especially when communism was gradually bringing down a large swathe of the world under its iron curtain. We learned the lesson the hard way, when a Lumumba University dropout, who was armed with mob oratorical skills and a megalomaniac grand plan, and hundreds of despondent local youth to boot, launched a revolt to topple the popularly elected left-leaning government in 1971. It took only locally made galkatas and a consignment of arms alleged to have been sent by the psychopathic late 'Great Leader' of North Korea, for Rohana Wijeweera and his ragtag guerrillas to lay siege to an entire nation. The country was saved from a Cambodian-style killing fields or a Soviet gulag archipelago, one of which would have been an inevitability had the JVP succeeded in its 1971 uprising, thanks to the timely military support from India, the US and the Soviet Union and, of course, excessive use of force by ill- trained and ill-prepared military and police personnel. But we did not learn the lesson and thought we were immune from internal troubles until another megalomaniac hailing from the North took the nation to ransom. Velupillai Prabhakaran's ragtag LTTE in the early 80s grew into a ruthless semi-conventional army by the early 90s. However, the freedom of action the LTTE enjoyed was largely due to the fact that all we had at the time in the name of military was a ceremonial army. Responsibility of a government Thomas Hobbes famously described that life without a government would be 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' That is self explanatory in some of the wretched parts of the world, ranging from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Mali, where weak governments which fail to provide security for its citizenry have created hellholes on the earth. The key responsibility of the government is to provide security for its citizens. Machiavelli was the first to advocate that the states maintain professional armies instead of relying on mercenaries in order to achieve this purpose. And in the modern day militaries, the military leadership is subordinate to their political, often elected superiors. Hence, the army or the military is an organ of the State and not vice versa. But, if an army has a country, as some critics say, tongue in cheek, in reference to the enlarged role in the country's affairs of the Pakistani military that would be a cause for concern. And, when the military expands its tentacles, it does so gradually, often with the tacit, sometimes, active complicity of the civilian rulers. At the creation of Pakistan, the new State had two institutions which functioned in tandem: A civilian bureaucracy and a professional military. However, by the end of the 50s, the military had emerged the only institution within the Pakistani State after the bureaucracy gradually subordinated itself to the military. The existential threat from India, which ranked at the top of Pakistan's strategic culture made it easier for the army to consolidate its hold. Since its independence, Pakistan has been through repeated military coups and military governments, and until the advent of another military dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharaff, who however, had a liberal bent, Pakistan did not have an organized civil society. This rather long introduction is to set the tone for a discourse on the recent government decision to absorb another batch of school principals into the Cadet Corps. Letters have been sent to 4,000 principals of the Sri Lanka Administrative Service to attend interviews for recruitment to the Sri Lanka Cadet Corps. The interviews would be held on 4, 5 and 6 March. The principals will be commissioned in the ranks of Lieutenant, Captain and Major, after completing a training programme running into 45 days. This would result in more than 50% of the 9,662 schools islandwide, being brought under the military. Inculcate 'discipline' This is dangerous business. It clearly smacks of militarization of civilian life. Students of Pakistani history would recall how the militarization of the country was fast tracked after the civilian bureaucracy, the remnant of the British Raj, subordinated itself to the military. The argument in favour of this initiative is that it would inculcate 'discipline' among the principals. This very argument gives the impression that other agencies are incapable of inculcating 'discipline' into themselves. It alludes to some unexplained special merit in the military and its superiority over the other agencies and organs of the State, which therefore should take a subordinate role. Looking back at the history of countries where the military had claimed disproportionate influence over the country's affairs, from Suharto's Indonesia to Zia-Ul-Haq's Pakistan, the military expanded its tentacles at the behest of civilian leaders. Both Sukarno, Suharto's predecessor, and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the first elected Prime Minister of Pakistan, enlarged the role of the military, in order to address personal political concerns, before they became the victims of the strongmen they nurtured. The path the Rajapaksa regime is taking has stark similarities to those countries. And the current regime does so at the expense of the other organs of the State, such as bureaucracy, judiciary and other independent institutions. Second, what benefits would the schools have by having a military officer at its helm? Schools are meant to be bastions of learning. They are meant to provide a solid foundation for future professional, academic, entrepreneurial and intellectual pursuits of their students. When they are turned into military bastions with military men at the helm, the whole notion of education is disfigured. What can the government therefore do to improve the standard of our public schools? Sri Lankan public schools and their principals have refused to change, despite schools and curriculums of many of our Asian counterparts having changed. For a fraction of expenses that the government plans to spend on training principals by the cadet corps, the government can bring down a group of principals from British public or government schools, or for that matter, experienced professionals from Singapore, to train our principals on the best practices in school education. Limitations of the military The Cadet Corps has neither the expertise, nor the intellectual vigour to embark on an initiative of that magnitude. It is interesting to note that even the best military academies in the world, such as West Point or US Naval Post Graduate School have a much larger civilian academic staff. That is in recognition on the part of the advanced militaries and their military planners, the limitations of the military boundaries in certain areas where its expertise is minimal. However, Sri Lanka appears to have taken a different trajectory. One would only hope that it would not be a course that the nation will live to regret, one day in the future. (Correction: In reference to my story " Unfulfilled promises: Govt. falls way short of implementing LLRC recommendations," which appeared in Ceylon Today, dated 3 March (Page 6), Military Spokesman Brigadier Ruwan Wanigasooriya said that the Army Court of Inquiry had not denied the occurrence of collateral damages and that it has only cleared the military of allegations of shelling civilians. He said the Army Commander will submit the report to the Defence Secretary in due course, and it would include his own observations and recommendations. My reference to the denial of collateral damages by the Court of Inquiry was based on the Army's insistence of its 'zero casualty policy' and the absence of a convincing explanation in the report for the large scale civilian casualties. Any misunderstanding on the issue is regretted.)