VALEDICTORY FOR A SEASON
The Sri Lankan crisis continues, sourced in and stemming from two major flaws/factors:
(i) There is no comprehension that “justice must not only be done, but be seen to be done” and that what is legal in the narrowest sense may not be perceived as legitimate or ethical in the broader sense. The consequences for institutions, the long term health of the body politic and the larger national ethos are never considered.
(ii) None of the major political players have a correct grasp of the problem of evolving/constructing a broad, truly Sri Lankan national identity.
President Rajapakse had it right on the issue of the Tamil Tigers; the issue of fascist separatist-terrorism. He had it more correct than all his predecessors and his critics here and overseas. He has it wrong at least some of the time on the Tamil ethno national question. I say “some of the time” because he has broadly distinguishable positions on that issue and some of the time he has it right.
That he was right on the Tigers, and therefore we who supported him were also right and those in Sri Lanka and outside who opposed him were wrong, is fairly conclusively settled by the rarest of encomiums paid him by one of the world’s most respected intellectuals. Meghnad Desai, who initially earned his reputation as an authority on Marxian economics but is much better known as a renowned economic theorist, Professor Emeritus at the London School of Economics and member of the House of Lords, has credibly likened the role of Mahinda Rajapakse to that of Abraham Lincoln. In a piece entitled ‘Unity in Diversity: Sri Lanka @62’, Lord Desai writes:
“Was Abraham Lincoln a war criminal? He took the US or at least its northern states to a war with the south, which resulted in the largest loss of lives in that nation’s history. The south was ruined and did not recover economically for at least 50 years.
The Black slaves were freed, but their condition remained miserable for another 100 years. Lincoln fought in the name of the Union, not for the abolition of slavery, which did not happen till halfway through the War, while the Southern Confederacy fought in the name of States’ Rights. Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, remained a hero in the south as did General Robert E Lee. Lincoln remains a hero not just for the Americans but the world over.
I write this because within India’s neighbourhood we have had a civil war, which has just ended. The man who led the nation to a victory has just been re-elected President. Yet he is widely reviled internationally and even within Sri Lanka. Except that a majority of his people re-elected him, Mahinda Rajapakse has few friends in high places…
By some device or other, Rajapakse, whom many underestimated, took the decision that he would end the war regardless of the loss of life involved. The carnage was incredible but in the end, Prabhakaran was defeated and killed. The LTTE’s gamble had failed.
It may sound callous to say this, but Rajapakse would be regarded as the saviour of his nation. Modern nations, especially post-colonial ones, value the integrity of their territory and do not entertain violent sub-nationalisms. India has had its share in Khalistan and in the many struggles in the north-east and continues to have problems in Kashmir. Yet, Indian citizens have allowed their government to ride roughshod over human rights as long as national integrity has been preserved…”
The President’s distinguishable takes on the Tamil issue are four fold: village level devolution, the 13th amendment, the 13th amendment plus and a homegrown solution. Now the first and the last – village level devolution and a home grown solution—tend to go together as in a home grown solution that will lead to village level devolution or the other way around. But luckily, as Bess told Porgy (or maybe the other way around), “it ain’t necessarily so”, and the President occasionally indicates that a homegrown solution may result in the Thirteenth amendment plus, meaning the 13th amendment and a Second Chamber.
Mahinda Chinthana Mark II (MC2), the manifesto of the Presidential election 2010, for which the President has now obtained a clear mandate, correctly commits him to “implement and improve” upon the 13th amendment. However this is not what the President says in the text of his Independence Day speech this year, the first after the war and re-election:
“I am certain that the people in the North and East could stand on their own feet through a solution wrought by devolving powers to the villages and empowering them in the entire country.” (‘Sri Lanka Entering Golden Era of International Relations’, The Island, Feb 5th 2010)
Option one has the village as the basic unit of devolution. A variant is the district. This is supposed to be the “Panchayat raj” solution, except that the Panchayat Raj never purported to be a solution for this kind of problem – a problem of the framework of the state and its relations with the constituent communities – but for a different one of making development and governance more participatory of the rural peasantry and the poor. The second and third options (13A and 13A plus) take the province as the basic unit of devolution. The fourth is or seems silent on the unit.
An optimist may say that by pitching it low, the President is engaging in a pre-emptive negotiating tactic. The problem with that argument is that we have done this before and gained nothing from it. Instead we lost decades. This was when the UNP administration of President Jayewardene pushed for the district as the unit of devolution but had to settle on the province instead. Today we have the province. So why slide back to the village or district and have to be pushed back to the province by a process of negotiations and external pressure?
The first and fourth options require time, because the existing Constitution has either to be amended according to Constitutional methods or a new Constitution has to be drafted and promulgated. From one point of view, Colombo or we the people would thereby be “buying” time. From another, which I share with most of our Asian friends, we would be losing time, wasting time.
There are several basic problems with the “village level devolution” solution. One is that the problem is not to do with the village; it is not village-sized. The map of the war and that of the recent vote, reveal the contours and dimension of the problem: it is that of the Tamils and Muslims, primarily the Tamils of the Northern and Eastern provinces. It excludes the Sinhala majority areas of the East. It is certainly a provincial or regional level problem. The solution must fit the dimensions of the problem. This much was recognized even by Prime Minister SWRD Bandaranaike in the 1957 Pact with SJV Chelvanayagam. The Tamil nationalities question of the North and East cannot be reduced to fit the Procrustean bed of village or district level devolution by the political equivalent of Procrustean ‘surgery’.
The second problem area is that of our international relations and the balance of power. The state of Sri Lanka’s international relations is inextricably intertwined with the state of its interethnic relations. Mervyn de Silva used to say in the 1980s that the world community is interested in two issues: the economic and the ethnic. However, I would add that the salience of the economic has declined relative to the globalization of the market economy model (we are no longer a pioneer of the open economy in statist South Asia) and the dawn of the Information Age with its concomitant strengthening of global civil society has shifted the emphasis from the economic to the ethnic.
India has a vested interest in the 13th amendment or a variant, because it is then able to show the people of Tamil Nadu that the solution is something that contains a contribution by Delhi. The consequence of “village level devolution” could be that instead of providing us part of the Asian umbrella that has protected us from the West in all forums, India could dilute its support or stand aside. There are big and medium powers, including in the Third World, who take their cue from the Indian stand.
The administration and the Sinhala nationalists simply must grasp that the way in which the world – including Asia – saw the terrorist Tiger secessionists will be very different indeed from the way it will perceive an elected TNA led by the veteran parliamentarian Mr. Sambandan. The former had little or no legitimacy in comparison with the Sri Lankan state, while the latter may be able to compete in the arena of legitimacy with the Sri Lankan state, especially if state policy reverses existing levels of autonomy and instead offers village level devolution that is unrecognized as a solution to the ethno national question anywhere in the world.
The Sri Lankan state must not give the impression that it denies the existence of a problem that the world community recognizes exists, and denies the need for a political solution ( “what political solution?” ) that the international system and world opinion have long agreed is necessary. Worst would be non-violent mass protests by the Tamils, (an old Federal party tradition) honed by a new generation of activists and Western “public diplomacy” training camps, met with the heavy hand or rather, the mailed fist, of the Sri Lankan state (an old SLFP tradition as with Major Richard Udugama and the Satyagraha of 1961)—but captured this time on cell-phone cameras and carried into homes across the world by the international media. When ordinary American citizens are lobbied by Tamil Diaspora activists into calling their Congressmen; when we have a Kashmir or an Intifada in our North and East with Tamil Nadu in sympathy next door, then we will be in danger of losing in the arena of ‘soft power’ that which we won by the resolute exercise of ‘hard power’. We shall have fallen into the trap of our external and narrowly ethnocentric enemies.
One can must hope that on his important and long overdue visit to Moscow, President Rajapakse took time off to ask Prime Minister Putin how he followed up his successful war against Chechen separatist terrorism with the kind of political success in Chechnya. Putin stabilized and pacified the place politically by operating through a young Chechen ally who had partnered Russia during the civil war and represents Moscow. Today, Grozhny, the capital of Chechnya is economically modern and prosperous, the state of emergency has been lifted, and bands of residual or recidivist Chechen terrorists are being engaged in the mountains by the forces of the Chechen ‘president’ Ramzan Kadyrov. Putin did not seek to keep Chechnya united with and within Russia by trying to compete directly with Chechen nationalism on its own terrain in the aftermath of a bloody war. Instead of trying to unite it under his party flag or that of any Russian party, still less proscribe any party bearing the name of Chechnya, he kept it united by granting Chechnya some real autonomy and promoting a pro-Moscow Chechen political option.
There is a stated intention on the part of the country’s leadership that ‘everything that was lost to the nation shall be restored’. This is a splendid statement if the vision is one of a multiethnic and meritocratic Sri Lankan nation restoring the standards of its institutions, catching up for thirty lost years as the Chinese did for the “lost decade” of the Cultural Revolution, integrating with the revolution of Asian modernity and the resultant Asian economic miracle. The President also talks of equality, defined in his Independence Day speech as “equality of facilities”. Equality of rights and status as citizens would be as important. As Lord Meghnad Desai writes in his article that is so laudatory of President Rajapakse: “A nation is whole not just when its territory is single but only when its people feel they all belong to it equally”.
[Editors note: Dayan will shortly take up a post of Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Institute of South Asian Studies.]
11 Comments
Leave a Reply
Subscribe to Content Updates
iPhone app
The writer makes an important point about the need to build a Sri Lankan national identity that transcends cultural, religious and ethnic boundaries. I feel the best solution to achieve this is to ensure that all people are treated in the same way, irrespective of their ethnic, religious or cultural background. I am sad to say that Sri Lanka seems a long way from enshrining such equality as a core value shared by all citizens. If the pendulum of equality has swung too far in favour of the minorities in the colonial era, post-independence Sri Lanka saw too large a swing in the opposite direction with no indication that equilibrium would be reached. The time for setting in place the constitution and state institutions for achieving this equilibrium is now – the question is do our leaders have the strength of character to do it?
Coming to the writer’s points about the appropriate level and unit of devolution, I think Sri Lanka’s more pressing concern is the lack of governance structures that are run by people who are representative of the citizens and accountable to them. The absence of such representation and accountability leads to people having no trust in the politicians tasked to running the country (at whatever level of devolution) .
In the current setup it seems that neither MPs or provincial councillors are the directly elected representatives of a geographically co-located group of citizens. There are no requirements that people putting themselves forward for election should have lived amongst the voters whose seat in parliament they end up occupying. Similarly there is no tradition of elected representatives holding surgeries or other consultative meetings with their constituents once elected into office. As a result the politicians end up paying lip service to the sovereignty of the people at election time but ignoring them thereafter. A side effect of this system, I think, is that this lack of direct accountability to an identifiable constituency makes politics attractive to people with few scruples who are only interested in their own advancement and enrichment.
I feel the only way to re-establish the people’s trust in Sri Lanka’s political institutions would be to radically change the electoral system to enhance the representation of the citizens and also increase the elected official’s accountability to them. Whilst not a complete solution, I think the proposals put forward by Mr. UB Wijekoon (http://apeyswarajya.com/) are worthy of consideration as part of any discussion of constitutional reform.
Btw, I am no expert in constitutional reform or political science, so the above is probably quite naive, but I thought I’d share it anyway – this is a citizens forum after all!
Dear Lankan Thinker,
UB Wijekoon might be a far more civilized person than those who currently are in power, but his “Grama Rajya” idea (not too different from Mahinda’s “village devolution”) would be a disaster. This idea was originally articulated by Mahatma Gandhi and strongly criticized by Dr. Ambedkar, the father of the Indian Constitution, who said:
“The love of the intellectual Indian for the village community is of course infinite, if not pathetic….What is a village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness and communalism?”
This concept was implemented by Ayub Khan in Pakistan (“Basic Democracy”) and by King Mahendra in Nepal (“Panchayat” or “partyless” democracy). In both countries, this concept effectively diluted the political process and made it easy for the Chief Executive to maintain control.
Sri Lankans have a funny notion that eliminating parties will help the country, when it will actually make things far worse.
Dear Wijayapala,
I agree with you that not all aspects of the Apey Swarajya concepts are that appropriate. In particular the “no party” system is unlikely to work at all.
However, I think there is something to be learned from the principles of representation and accountability described in the proposal.
Also, whilst Mr. Ambedkar’s view of Indian villages may well be true, is it not a noble aspiration to empower local people, whether they be in villages or towns to elect representatives who will advocate for them at higher levels of government and at the same time be accountable to them? Also, isn’t there a possibility that such empowerment, if coupled with improvements in education and understanding of civic responsibility, will actually raise these local communities above the level of “sinks of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness and communalism”?
Thank you for responding to my post.
Dayan Jayatilleka is blinded by his hate for Ranil and UNP since he was not included. Just like any other sociological analysis, the put forwards the facts to prove his points. These theoretical analysis of things are useless. The facts remains facts. If people knew what MR did in the south when he got elected first, they will understand what he is doing now. Just like Prabhakharan only knew of the gun and bullet, MR only knows of his decades old thug tactics. MR will never solve the ethnic problem he has managed to divide the country even further. This is no longer an oppression of the Minority, it’s an oppression of the Sri Lankans.
MR is now imitating VP. God bless Sri Lanka…….No matter how best it is analysed the bottom line is obvious…..Dictatorship……first opressed the Tamils in the name of WAR….now opresses the Sri Lankans in the name of PEACE….
The Chechnyan solution would involve the appointment of Karuna or Douglas Devananda to run the province.
It also came at a heavy price: to quote the Guardian: “In return for peace Chechnya has been transformed into a totalitarian fiefdom with a flourishing personality cult that might make North Koreans blush. Grozny’s streets are lined with ubiquitous portraits of one man – Chechnya’s bearded 31-year-old president Ramzan Kadyrov. Kadyrov’s distinctive features can be seen at bus stops, along boulevards, and at the airport, where a giant poster shows him holding a bunch of pink flowers. Nightly local TV bulletins heap praise on the youthful pro-Moscow leader.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/22/russia
This may also explain why Dayan J has been pushing so hard for something unattainable – the 13th has no takers either in the government or even within the opposition – instead of advocating the simple measures that will really help: the repeal of the emergency to be followed later perhaps the repeal of the PTA and Press Council Acts .
to add to the above:
Is Dayan J a Stalinist at heart, rather than a democrat?
–old Man said,
February 11, 2010 @ 4:28 pm
to add to the above:
Is Dayan J a Stalinist at heart, rather than a democrat?–
Dayan is neither, just an unprincipled opportunist willing to sell his mouth and pen to the highest bidder. One can never buy his soul as it is only loyal to Dayan.
3. Dharshana, Conflict started with sidelining of SF without giving deserved credit to him. GR, MR wanted to sideline SF to elaborate own image to people. Even though GR, MR chose SR to be the Army Commander at the begning of war, later it boomeranged against popularity of MR & GR.
Being the president of the country by the time of war, MR has most credit of defeating LTTE. but it doesnt mean that we have to forget others who contributed to the victory. At victory celebrations, even patraits of SF were removed.
I have no issue with GR, MR, giving them the credit, my issue is not giving same credit for SF. He may have diferent political views, it is democracy. After sidelining SF, the mistrust between MR-SF grew up to a extent that they are paranoid of SF and charged him for ploting a coup. Being in the military for 40 year, SF must have his own fans and friends. SF might have got down friends and loyals to Colombo, now GR is claiming that was a part of the coup and want SF to be court martialled.
The statement of SF of tesifying for war crimes in Sri Lanka, it is merely keep GR suspense. That was a personal attack given under enormous pressure and intimidations on him by GR & MR. Even if SF is in custody or dead, his afidavit is already made and if he wanted he could have already sent it. Butif MR, GR keep harrasing him he will compell to do so.
By recalling all statements made by SF in the past defending Sri Lanka during 2006-2009, it is a pathetic situation for him to have treated this wat by the president to whom we have voted for freeing Sri Lanka while the strategist of the war is in a prison cell.
We know we can trust him(SF), perhaps it is hard to believe people around him(UNP,JVP.DNF,TNA,SLMC). That doesnt mean that we cant trust our General!
Taliking of Abrahim Lincon and Mahinda Rajapakse, Tamil citizens are our fellow citizens too. So by saying MR hasnt done such thing means Tamils are not our fellow citizens? I am not quite good in history and politics. I am talking with my common sense. I refer you to a political scientist, Dr. Dayan Jayathilake’s comment:
“It is interesting to contrast the bulk of the views ( and the dominant perspective) here with the Independence day essay on Sri Lanka by Lord Meghnad Desai, Professor Emeritus at the LSE, in which he writes with empathy about the Sri Lankan people, especially the Tamils and commends a path of reconciliation, WHILE PLACING MAHINDA RAJAPAKSE IN THE SAME CATEGORY AS ABRAHAM LINCOLN and explaining why he does so”
Link:
http://www.groundviews.org/2010/02/04/an-open-letter-to-the-remote-control-diaspora/#comment-14259.
Perhaps interesting for you to Dayan article on Lincon MR: http://www.groundviews.org/2010/02/10/valedictory-for-a-season/
About popularity, SF and MR both nationalists. We harldy know SF. SF can well be a threat, thats for sure. People vote Mahinda for gratitude, knowng he is a bad guy. Even I promoted him though I equally like SF.
I know MR wants to house arrest to avoid the threat of war crimes untill end of his term. But this is unnecessary fear. We will hang SF if he ever betray GR or MR or any other Sri Lankan and testify for war crimes, he will not.
I also invite you to visit my you tube channel “NoEalamInSL”
————-
2.
Darshana said: “If Sarath Fonseka is realeased, the next thing he’d do is to take a flight to Netharlands and testify against SL for war crimes (which is what he was planning to do).
Is it that Sarath Fonseka is some kind of God that no one should take any action of him? Needless to say that after his political appearance he has made many allegations including human rights allegations against SL.
And talking abt the political involvements, i think it goes well beyond ‘allegations’ as JVP and UNP mps have admitted they had discussions with him when he was the army commander. Now what would they have discussed? Can’t be about the war situation cos UNP was hell bent against the war. It’s pretty obvious that they wanted a regime change. Is that something that should be allowed in the future? So that any army officer can hold discussions with oppostion and do whatever they want. definitely no…. See More
And talking abt Abraham Lincon, he killed lakhs of fellow americans to unite USA. Mahinda hasn’t done that. Fonseka is not a political threat to him. In fact, he couldnt even find a party to get nominations for the general election. It is about stopping fonseka from completing his contract to the west to stop charging Sri Lanka with war crimes and putting embargos against Sri Lanka and what not. ”
———–
1.
We urge government to release General Fonseka immediately. Do no take advantage from alleged political involvement during presidential campaign and apply military rules on him. Sri Lanka is a democratic country and we respect different political views. Do not preach military laws in Sri Lanka. People must rise up against arrest of General. He saved our lives, we will fight for his life. He played a crucial role in defeating LTTE. Do not harrass him. Stop nepotism.
Prof. G.L. Peiris today said that retired General Sarath Fonseka was being tried for charges under the military laws enacted in 1949 and that there was nothing unusual about this. if the military did not have laws it was difficult to maintain discipline in a military establishment.
I thought MR was Abrahim Lincon type guy, but apparently heading towards Polpot type!
If General Fonseka is tried under military law, then Mahinda Rajapaks and Goatabaya should also be tried in an international court o atleast Sri Lankan court. Dont let blowout of proportion.
The Arrest http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdMsiIY0yJw
The Democracy, Monarchy, Military Regime http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBAomukK2f8
The evidences http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liQlig1Xwyg
Release General Now!
They say SF plotted to kill MR, killed Lasantha, private army, politics while CDS, treason and SF was arrested.
Dr. Dayan J, How justfiable is SF arrest? How should it be solved?
This is how CIA potted to kill Castro.
CIA Director Richard Helms on Ways to Kill Castro http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6RuM1DZSJQ
Many assassination ideas were floated by the CIA during Operation Mongoose. The most infamous was the CIA’s alleged plot to capitalize on Castro’s well-known love of cigars by slipping into his supply a very real and lethal “exploding cigar.” http://secretsofthecia.blogspot.com/s... Other plots to do in Castro that are ascribed to the CIA include, among others: poisoning his cigars (a box of the lethal smokes was actually prepared and delivered to Havana); exploding seashells to be planted at a scuba diving site; a gift diving wetsuit impregnated with noxious bacteria and mould spores, or with lethal chemical agents; infecting Castro’s scuba regulator apparatus with tuberculous bacilli; dousing his handkerchiefs, his tea, and his coffee with other lethal bacteria; having a former lover slip him poison pills; and exposing him to various other poisoned items such as a fountain pen and even ice cream. The US Senate’s Church Committee of 1975 stated that it had confirmed at least eight separate CIA run plots to assassinate Castro. Fabian Escalante, who was long tasked with protecting the life of Castro, contends that there have been 638 separate CIA assassination schemes or attempts on Castro’s life.
The CIA operation was based in Miami, Florida and among its other aspects enlisted the help of the mafia to plot an assassination attempt against Castro; William Harvey was one of the CIA case officers who directly dealt with the mafioso John Roselli.
William King “Bill” Harvey (September 13, 1915 in Danville, Indiana – June 1976) was a CIA officer, best known for his role in Operation Mongoose. He was known as “America’s James Bond.”
Harvey was the son of Sara King Harvey, professor at Indiana State Teachers College in Terre Haute, Indiana, now Indiana State University. He graduated from Wiley High School in Terre Haute in 1931, eventually enrolling at Indiana University and then graduated from Indiana University School of Law – Bloomington. He married the daughter of a lawyer from Maysville, Kentucky but, after that marriage ended in divorce, he joined the FBI in December 1940. He resigned from the FBI in July 1947 after breaking a FBI regulation and refusing a resulting re-assignment to Indianapolis, Indiana. He joined the CIA shortly thereafter.
Operation Mongoose was a CIA operation from Miami, Florida, that enlisted the help of the Mafia to plot an assassination attempt against Fidel Castro, the Cuban president. Harvey was one of case officers who dealt with John Roselli.
Harvey was also posted to Berlin, Germany as station chief in the 1950s, where he led the operation that built an underground tunnel to the Russian sector, to spy on Russian communication channels. This operation was called PBJOINTLY.
Harvey died in 1976 from a heart attack. The previous year he testified before the Church Committee on the some of the CIA’s past operations.
John “Handsome Johnny” Roselli (July 4, 1905 – August 9, 1976) (sometimes spelled Rosselli), also known as “John F. Stewart” (July 4, 1905 to sometime between July 28 and August 9, 1976) was an influential mobster for the Chicago Outfit who helped them control Hollywood and the Las Vegas Strip. Roselli was also involved with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) plot to kill Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro in the early 1960s. Some conspiracy theorists believe he was also involved with John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz (born August 13, 1926) is a Cuban politician, one of the primary leaders of the Cuban Revolution, the Prime Minister of Cuba from February 1959 to December 1976, and then the President of the Council of State of Cuba until his resignation from the office in February 2008. He is currently the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba.
He was born into a wealthy family and acquired a law degree. While studying at Havana University, he began his political career and became a recognized figure in Cuban politics. His political career continued with nationalist critiques of Fulgencio Batista, and of the United States’ political and corporate influence in Cuba. He gained an ardent, but limited, following and also drew the attention of the authorities. He eventually led the failed 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks, after which he was captured, tried, incarcerated, and later released. He then traveled to Mexico to organize and train for an assault on Batista’s Cuba. He and his fellow revolutionaries left Mexico for the East of Cuba in December 1956.
Al Qaeda Doesnt exist-1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek7ZHenQnu4
Al Qaeda Doesnt exist-2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnV_pNe_BB0
Commenting on “President Rajapakse had it right on the issue of the Tamil Tigers; the issue of fascist separatist-terrorism.”
Tamils and Tigers always had it right that Sihalese or any SL president/prime minister to date would offer nothing to Tamils, and on their facisit ethno superiority theorom. As it is repeatedly claimed SL is only for Sinhalese. SL can develop Sinhala identity but not national identity.
Authors such as Dayan will write rubbish like this, while thousands of Tamils held in barbed wired camps, years without trial in prisons, arbitarary arrests & killings by the government and turn their eyes away from the real problem.
Who are you trying to fool, the idiotic Sinhalese voters repeatedly elect government that has turned the South Asian country with most potential at the time of independence to a basket case. You do not need to fool them, they are idiots.