A new political party takes shape

January 30, 2016, 9:08 pm 

Sri Lanka is indeed a country like no other as the tourist brochures say. We have a president, a prime minister, a cabinet and a parliament where the PM commands a two thirds majority, but no functioning government. There is no sense of direction and no decisions are being made. An ambitious programme to promulgate a new constitution was inaugurated as the first major task for this year but it seems to have ground to a halt even before it began. At the SLFP executive committee meeting held last week, constitutional reform was one of the main items discussed and President Maithripala Sirisena’s view was that what was needed was not a new constitution but amendments to the present constitution to ‘reduce’ the powers of the executive presidency and for electoral reform.

President Sirisena now avoids the word ‘new’ when talking about constitutional reform and ‘abolition’ when it comes to the executive presidency. This was the line he toed at the SLFP executive committee meeting. What this means in effect is that the constitution making process of the UNP has effectively been derailed by Sirisena. This is not the first time that he did this. The 19th Amendment which purported to reduce the powers of the executive presidency was also sabotaged by him in just the same manner. Of course so long as he persists in this kind of sabotage, the UNP is not going to agree to electoral reform and there we will be stuck. It’s not just in the field of constitution-making that this cold war has intensified. Last week the president told the BBC that he is against foreign judges participating in the judicial mechanism to try our war heroes and soon afterwards the prime minister told Channel 4 that the participation of foreign judges has not been ruled out.

As always, Sirisena was trying to feign that he ‘did not know’ the contents of the UNHRC resolution that his government co-sponsored last March. It is of course a fact that for the first time we have a Head of State who is not proficient in English and he has no way of reading and understanding the UNHRC resolution that his government co-sponsored. However he has advisors who can read and explain to him the contents of what his government agreed to in Geneva and in any case former President Mahinda Rajapaksa highlighted the contents of the UNHRC resolution in Sinhala on several different occasions and that alone should have been enough to educate Sirisena as to what the actual contents of the UNHRC resolution were. The doubt that has entered the minds of many UNP types is whether Sirisena is trying to play the patriotic card as a cover for refusing to abolish the executive presidency.

The suspicion that Sirisena may be playing this card to side step the abolition of the executive presidency has led to speculation on the part of pro-UNP websites whether Gnanasara’s antics in the Homagama magistrate’s court were orchestrated with encouragement by Sirisena. The meeting that Gnanasara had with President Sirisena just days before this incident was widely reported in the press. The patriotic line certainly goes well together with an attempt to retain the executive presidency because many patriots think the executive presidency is a constitutional bulwark against federalism. Indeed it is certainly a cause for suspicion that the president has not said anything about the incident at the Homagama Magistrate’s Courts even though the prime minister has been tearing his hair out and berating the media over its coverage of the incident.                             Read more...