End To Dr Shafi Saga Meaningless; If ‘Business As Usual’ For The Conspirators!  

By Mohamed Harees –MARCH 29, 2022

Lukman Harees

“Truth has come, and falsehood has perished. Indeed is falsehood, [by nature], ever bound to perish”- Al Quran 17:81

 It was on May 23rd 2019, Divaina journalist Hemantha Randhunu wrote an unsubstantiated news item with a sensational headline titled, ‘‘4000 Sinhala Buddhist mothers were sterilized by a ‘Thawheed Jamaat Doctor who performed caesarean operations’”. Today, this story stands exposed as fake news and a racist ruse intending to create hatred towards the Muslim community. The allegations levelled against Dr Shafi Shahabdeen implicated in this case has now been proved to be as much of a big lie as they then seemed on first glance. Even belatedly, he has been cleared of all these false charges and was reinstated, while AG recently informed the Court of Appeal that steps are being taken for the payment of arrears of salary and allowances for the period he was on compulsory leave over these false accusations. Another tragicomedy indeed! But the damage was done. Thus, an aspiring career of a young doctor ended so pathetically, being an innocent victim of scheming of political conspirators hell-bent on bringing a devious family dynasty back to power at any cost. He was summarily arrested, put in jail, tarnished his image beyond repair, and his family life will never be the same.

Sri Lanka has had a storied history of these types of witch hunts. The trial by a racist media with political patronage, based on the aforesaid ‘Divaina’ fake news, in the court of public opinion ensued; but its outcome was a fait accompli, creating a lunacy among a greater section of the population to see a terrorist in every Muslim. Citing the purported sterilisations as justification, one of Sri Lanka’s most senior Buddhist figures, Asigiri Chapter Prelate Warakagoda Sri Gnanarathana Thero publicly called for the doctor to be stoned. The allegations levelled against the doctor clearly served to further heighten then prevailing tensions. Because of Shafi’s case, several Muslim doctors who worked in densely populated Sinhala areas couldn’t practise and had to shut down. The story was picked up by local television channels and widely shared on social media. These were also then widely shared in India and elsewhere with racist, anti-Muslim overtones.

This major local Sinhala newspaper in publishing this news too claimed that this Muslim surgeon was a member of a terrorist group linked to the Easter attacks. The report also claimed that the secret sterilisations were performed without the knowledge of the women involved by tubal ligation while they were undergoing caesarean section surgeries. A FB Sinhala post by a Buddhist monk Kottawagama Dhammajothi uploaded May 23, 2019, stated: “Realise the danger now? This is Wahabism. He is a worse terrorist than the terrorist who carried out the bombings.” It called for the doctor to be given “punishments meted out during the era of ancient kings” — a reference to torture. An extremist Hindu group post in India asked , ‘How many Hindus are sterilized here?’

It was clear that Shafi accusations were largely “stage-managed” by the Rajapaksa camp to create a fear psychosis building up on the post-Easter heat, ahead of 2019 Presidential election. Although it was medically absurd, Shafi was arrested nonetheless, on a different trumped up charge planned by powers that be, while this allegations were being investigated. Imagine a citizen being brazenly denied the presumption of innocence, until proven guilty, as the country’s Constitution provides! True! this is not how justice should work; this was the opposite of justice. This was persecution. But, then, he happened to be a targeted Muslim doctor living in the Post Easter Sri Lanka, caught up in the greater scheme of things and in a political conspiracy, to ensure the re-election of the Rajapaksas!

Investigations into the sterilization scare at Kurunegala showed the underlying conspiracies even earlier on, with the discovery that medical administrators colluded with law enforcement officials and even the magistrate to fabricate evidence and alter judicial records.The CID reported to court that the director of the Kurunegala Teaching Hospital, A.M. S. Weerabandara, was fully aware that the sterilisation allegations against a Muslim doctor were untrue. According to the documents submitted, the CID investigation, led by Inspector Adrian Nishantha Silva, interviewed more than 40 employees at the Kurunegala Teaching hospital, including operating room nurses, OBGYN specialists, resident doctors and hospital attendants, who had worked with Shafi. The CID report said that some of the staffers had assisted Shafi in over 500 C-sections.According to the witness testimonies cited in the CID report, no one witnessed Shafi “using his hands or any surgical equipment to damage the fallopian tubes” of any patient on the surgical table. Prof. Hemantha Senanayake, Head of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Colombo, insisted that the absence of an impartial, speedy and transparent investigation could have a negative impact not only on Sri Lanka’s achievements in maternal care and health but create a situation where people would be afraid to have babies delivered in hospital.

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