Shashi Tharoor is the prize-winning author of twelve books, both fiction and non-fiction, including the classic The Great Indian Novel (1989), India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997), Nehru: The Invention of India (2003) and The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone: Reflections on India in the 21st Century (2007). He is an elected member of the Indian parliament, former Minister of State for External Affairs and former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations.

Our hour-long conversation at the Festival was anchored to The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone: Reflections on India in the 21st Century, a collection of essays on India which I noted flows naturally from his earlier collection Bookless in Baghdad.

We begin our conversation with an exploration of relative truths, and whether under India’s national motto (“Satyameva Jayate” or literally, “Truth Alone Triumphs”) a dalit’s truth, for example, is perceived to be as true as Shashi’s, and how if not, the construction of truth occurs in 21st Century India. We move on to a detailed description by Shashi about how Information and Communications Technologies in general and the mobile phone in particular have changed the modes of production, access and dissemination of information in India, and through that, impacted many aspects of social, political and cultural life. Shashi talks about the Indian government’s vastly different attitude to telecommunications from the 1980′s to date. He also noted that the impact of mobile phone on Indian life flagged his book is woefully outdated today, given the strides made in regulatory reform and the growth of markets since it was first published.

We move on to cultural symbols and 21st Century India’s cultural fabric, with a question anchored to a letter by one Shahnaz Habib quoted in Shashi’s tome who asks “why are there so few Muslim or Christian symbols in our public spaces if cultural assimilation has been so successful” and goes on to note that she wishes for Shashi “… the knowledge of what it feels like to be a minority”. I noted that given Sri Lanka’s own post-independence history of ethnic marginalisation, this was quite a resonant turn of phrase, and asked Shashi to place his locate his optimism over India today against real, systemic problems of governance and government.

In his book, Shashi’s essay on Indians who shaped his India includes only two women. Flagging Kiran Bedi, Kalpana Chawla, Hema Malini, Rekha, Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle, Arundhati Roy and even Aiswarya Rai, I asked him why he didn’t consider more fully the role of women in the shaping of India. His answer naturally progressed to the furore over his essay on the sari, and whether he regretted as a columnist ever saying or writing something (Shashi comes back to this point when a member of the audience, during question time, asked him about his ‘cattle class’ tweet!)

The rest of our conversation probes a number of areas – from diaspora engagement (NRI’s to ABCDs!), the freedom of expression and the censorship, including of online media, to Shashi’s deep scepticism over Indian elections as an event juxtaposed against his faith in Indian democracy as a larger process that warts and all, works. He also took a number of interesting questions from the audience that gave him an opportunity to reflect on Indian life and politics today.

The organisers of the Galle Literary Festival kindly provided the following podcast of our conversation. Total playing time is around an hour and five minutes. To download the file as an MP3, click here. The audio file is around 77Mb.

• Shyam Selvadurai: Literature, identity, politics and the Galle Literary Festival
• Humans vs. elephants: Sri Lanka’s tragic on-going conflict
• Watch Moving Images at Kandy International Film Festival (KIFF)
• A conversation with Kumudini Samuel
• New Festival to Promote Unity in Sri Lanka

Photo courtesy asianews.it

“I was on my motorcycle going through this area behind a couple on a motorcycle. The woman was pregnant and they were out probably to do some shopping. The couple was coming fast. They signalled to me and I moved aside to let them overtake. I suddenly saw the couple fall down for no discernible reason and the man writhing in agony. He had been hit by a bullet from the army’s side. I stopped and the pregnant woman pleaded with me to take her husband to the hospital. Most people passed us by engrossed in their own problems and such things had become a daily occurrence. The man whose lower jaw had been blown off was vomiting blood and the situation looked hopeless. What had happened was that when we passed that area on motorbikes, it was our custom to dip our heads as low as possible to minimise our chances of being hit by an army sniper. Because the man had ridden fast and taken a curve in overtaking me, he lacked the balance to dip his head as a precaution.

The stricken man’s wife was helpless. To carry the man to the medical post at Valaignarmadam required a third person on the bike so that the injured man could be sandwiched between us. My bike being too small for that, I asked the wife to help the man onto the bike so that he could sit behind leaning his head on my back. In this manner I took the man to the hospital. By the time I reached there he was dead. It was then that I noticed my own state. A good part of my person was drenched in blood and covered in flies. The flies formed also a thick layer upon the dead man. This brought home to me the absolute squalor of the place.

I was once travelling on the main road when unexpectedly I saw an RPG shell fired by a soldier across the lagoon landing in front of me. I considered and decided that there was no point in stopping and rode on and another RPG shell fell behind me. I warned people travelling in the opposite direction not to proceed as there was an ambush waiting. But no one seemed to take notice. How does one explain such behaviour? On the one hand there is constant danger from shelling and from small weapons fire and ideally children should be inside bunkers. But on the other, you see children playing on the beach and even flying kites, indifferent to sudden death that strikes unawares.”

UTHR(J), Special Report No: 34, Let Them Speak: Truth about Sri Lanka’s Victims of War, December 2009

Moderating the session with Dr. Abuelaish Izzeldin, the author of I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity at the Galle Literary Festival this year was memorable not so much for what Dr. Izzeldin said, but for the audience reaction. It may have been the only session where the speaker was applauded after every response and received a standing ovation at the end of the session.  From the vantage point of the elevated stage, I could see dozens – women as well as men – in tears, or fighting hard against them. The questions had a predictable preface – Dr. Izzeldin’s book made people cry.

With a redesign of The Nation in the offing, columnists were asked to limit their submissions to around 800 words. Around 580 of this column reiterate an inconvenient truth about the human cost of victory. There are hundreds of families, not unlike Dr. Izzeldin’s, not far from where you read this. Dr. Izzeldin survived. Many in Nandikadal did not. Dr. Izzeldin went on to write a book. The horrific stories of those caught between the advancing Sri Lankan Army and the frothing madness of the LTTE aren’t as well-known, even though they are in the public domain. Perhaps grief is easier when its focus is farther away in geography, time or identity? Perhaps the optics and politics of grief, recognition and memorialising – the monuments, statues, renaming of roads, commemorations, garlanding – that take place in the South for war heroes are accepted as more authentic and necessary than the grief of a family in the Vanni whose children were killed or conscripted?

Dr. Izzeldin was visibly moved when he spoke. I remain unconvinced he has come to terms with his own catastrophic loss, and hope he finds peace. For us in this country, we are told we are at peace. Moved by the violence of distant lands, we care not to read our own stories. There are many. Grief is not the exclusive domain of anyone, or any one community. But grief today is unequally recognised, and the space to grieve is unequally framed. If a family in Gaza is able to move us to tears, can 580 words depicting a larger horror move us to tears too?

And if we don’t care enough to read, to ask, to know and to grieve, we must acknowledge that we too are authors of violence.

###

This article was first published in The Nation newspaper on 29 January 2011.

• Like Slaves In Jaffna
• Inquiry into a Sri Lankan Man’s Stolen Bicycle
• A recent trip to Vavuniya: For the future looks dark and gloomy
• Let this be the moment that defines us
• War IDPs

There are a lot of websites in the US that have gone black to protest against the proposed Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). Wikipedia has gone to the extent of taking down its site for the day, and lists its reasons here. Action across such a large number of key internet companies based in the US is unprecedented, and demonstrates clear opposition to the two pieces of legislation. The White House has itself distanced itself from both in their current form. And yet, they remain for consideration by lawmakers. As Wikipedia notes,

…neither SOPA nor PIPA is dead. On January 17th, SOPA’s sponsor said the bill will be discussed in early February. There are signs PIPA may be debated on the Senate floor next week. Moreover, SOPA and PIPA are just indicators of a much broader problem. In many jurisdictions around the world, we’re seeing the development of legislation that prioritizes overly-broad copyright enforcement laws, laws promoted by power players, over the preservation of individual civil liberties.

Neither SOPA nor PIPA affect Sri Lankans today. But if passed, they can contribute to web censorship on a massive, global scale, led by the US entertainment industry. The clear dangers of the legislation to censor existing content on websites and key social media platforms is brought out in the following video. As it notes, the indirect effects of these acts, if passed into law, can quite literally mean the end of the Internet as we recognise it today. Worse, such legislation in the US can spark off similar legislation in other, more repressive regimes. This domino effect could spell the end of not just online dissent, but all dissent given how much of it today is published on, produced for, mediated through, disseminated, archived and engaged via the web and the Internet.

Few may recall that Sri Lanka also tried to bring about its own variant of SOPA and PIPA in 2008. Called the Private Television Broadcasting Station Regulations of 2007, the Government attempted to pass it into law in October 2008. It’s so alike SOPA and PIPA in spirit and form that it’s uncanny. At the time, I wrote a detailed brief of how detrimental this bill was for freedom of expression online, that fed into the affidavit of a case lodged in the Supreme Court – one of many – that challenged the proposed Bill. As noted in it,

• The stipulation for all ‘broadcasters’ to enter into an ‘agreement’ that is unspecified in the Gazette, with the Internet Service Provider who provides access to the web and Internet is a draconian measure pointedly designed to curtail and block independent and free production, access and transmission of, inter alia, video content over the Internet and the web.
• This is particularly concerning since, to expand on what was flagged in Point 4 of this document, video over the Internet also encourages and facilitates easy audience participation in the form of text and video feedback and comments. Holding ‘broadcasters’ in Sri Lanka, including ISPs, responsible for not just user generated content, but also user generated comments to content published from other sources, is a regulatory nightmare and technically impossible to comply with.
• The lack of any clearly defined framework for the nature and scope of the ‘agreement’ enumerated in Regulations 9 (b) and 10 (b) has disturbing and negative implications for the rights of all wired and wireless broadband customers in particular – including all ADSL, 3G mobile telephony and 3G HSPA mobile broadband modem users – as well as all citizens, since those who may not be a customer of an ISP could still use the internet to disseminate video productions (e.g. video content that is uploaded through a cybercafé).

SOPA and PIPA, if allowed to pass in the US, will under the guise of progressive legislation contribute to precisely this sort of regulatory control in the US. It will occur, as flagged in the video above, to a point of absurdity. For example, a copyright violation claim over the soundtrack of a song on the domestic video of a cute cat playing with a ball of wool, uploaded to the web, can result in the entire website being blocked (think about YouTube).

As the Globe and Mail notes, serious concerns with the bills include, inter alia, the fact that,

…. provisions of PIPA and SOPA allow the government – and, in some cases, the individual copyright holders – to compel online payment services, ad networks and search engines to stop doing business with or listing targeted websites. And unlike other laws that focused on websites involved primarily in piracy, the bills expand the focus to include sites on which any infringing content is found, no matter how minuscule. As such, American users of cloud storage or video hosting sites could find the entire site, along with their own content, suddenly much more difficult to access, because a single user uploaded a piece of copyrighted content.

It comes down to this. The bills are at present of greatest concern to those in the US. Yet their potential to influence bad legislation globally, and undermine key websites and social media platforms that are an integral part of democratic change, revolt, dissent and debate is very high. This is a cogent example where what the US preaches, it seems it is unwilling to practice – the freedom of expression it promotes, along with the circumvention technologies it directly supports are at complete odds with the thrust of SOPA and PIPA.

I’ve gone ahead and signed a petition on WordPress.org against the SOPA and PIPA.

I strongly urge you to do the same.

• Web censorship in Sri Lanka: Documenting a growing trend
• Groundviews on Twitter
• Groundviews YouTube video channel
• Archive of Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) submissions and media reports
• Online journalism is the way forward, but tell this to Sri Lankan media companies

I was delighted when asked to review Right of Way: A journey of resettlement by Sharni Jayawardena and published by the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA). Sharni’s skill in photography is enviable, and was the co-creator of Walkabout: Slave Island, supported by Groundviews. At the time of review, the publication was not in the public domain, and given what I had seen of Sharni’s previous work, I expected it to be a largely photographic record, in a coffee table book format, of the human displacement that occurred as a result of the E01, Sri Lanka’s first highway. And yet the book features few photos. 72 pages long, the book has just 8 photos included in it. I’ll come back to why I think this makes for a less compelling way of grappling with what the book sets out to do.

Thousands, since E01 opened late last year, have taken the highway to Galle from Kottawa. The focus when on the road, particularly if one is driving, is on safety at 100kmp/h. In its early days, the highway was a high-speed slalom of road kill and stray dogs. Today, even a driver is more at ease to take in, especially if driving around sun-rise, the spectacular beauty of the countryside the E01 snakes through, without the visual pollution of billboards.  Few if any would have given even passing thought to the issue this book deals with – the displacement of thousands to make way for the highway. The book’s aims are three-fold. One, it “is an attempt to document what happened to the people who had to move, and the different impacts the project had on their lives. It is based on a structured monitoring process carried out over four years, that involved a survey of 400 households, more than 30 group discussions with affected households, and over 450 individual interviews with residents, experts, local government officials and donors” (page v). Two, it attempts to show how “the Road Development Authority, comprising engineers whose primary task was supervising the road building, also implemented the project’s social programmes, often under difficult and contentious circumstances, working with a diverse group of people who, as in any real-life situation, acted and reacted in diverse ways” (page v). Finally, “it attempts to visualise the place and circumstances as it used to be, before the road came” (page vi). The first and second aims are achieved far more than the third.

Sharni’s style is easy to grasp, avoids jargon, convoluted sentences or arcane references.  Right of Way is very readable, well researched and insightful. It sees the E01 through the perspectives of those who are affected by its development – the families forced to relocate and in some cases, live close to a highway on which traffic volume will continue to grow with little or no benefit to those passed by at 100kmph. Sharni quotes the statistics, but what the book does is to go beyond the numbers and through personal narratives, humanise these vexed issues. The statistics alone are revealing. As the book notes,

“An estimated 1,338 families were displaced by the Southern Transport Development Project (STDP), of which 509 families obtained land in 32 sites provided and developed by the Road Development Authority (RDA). This figure would have been much higher if the project had not made a deliberate attempt to avoid highly populated areas, sometimes though at considerable cost to the environment as well as to agriculture. Much of the land acquired was agricultural; consisting of paddy, tea, rubber and cinnamon cultivation, and close to 4,000 households were affected due to loss of their landholdings. In addition, about 550 households were indirectly affected.” (Page 3)

Even approximately, the number of those affected in some way by the development of the E01 is mind-boggling. At a conservative 4 members per family, around 5,300 children, women and men were displaced. Another 4,000 had their incomes disrupted, and their livelihoods placed at risk. It’s currently 400 rupees one-way from Kottawa to Galle or back on the E01. Few of us give a second thought to paying that amount. Sharni’s research highlights the hidden costs of E01’s development, where to date, families that had for generations lived where they did, had stable income, well-established business and fecund land were forced to give it all up. It’s a humbling, vital narrative. Sharni deals with the history of how the E01 came about, but the process and politics of compensation, relocation are the book’s most important contribution to public record. It is unclear, as the book itself notes at the end, how much of what was employed during the construction of the E01 to deal with displacement feeds into current and future mega-development projects. Recording and sharing failures as much as lessons learnt is vital, but it’s also quite obvious that neither is done well in Sri Lanka. And yet, the book flags what was done well, and the innovation – not just in terms of mechanical engineering but also in terms of compensation and responsiveness to human displacement – seen during the construction of the highway. As it notes,

“The project’s Resettlement Implementation Plan (RIP) took a radical departure from Sri Lankan law on land acquisition, compensation and resettlement and the Land Acquisition and Resettlement Committee (LARC) could be considered its most important mechanism. LARC was notably different from the instrument the State usually turns to when it wants to acquire private land for public purposes – the Land Acquisition Act (LAA) No. 9 of 1950. A key difference is that the LAA does not deal with the broader issues of restoring livelihoods or living standards of the displaced people.” (Page 9)

The book goes into great detail about LARC, and the legal aspects aside, it’s interesting to take-away from this example how, if government authorities set their mind to it, they can choose to be more citizen-centric and less heavy-handed in their approaches. The research brings out some notable facts with broader implications. For example, in negotiating compensation, the report notes that the LARC process “especially benefited two contrasting groups: households seen by the Committee to be particularly vulnerable and households with well-informed family members who were able to convincingly argue their cases.” This has implications for Right to Information legislation for example, where vulnerable people through access to information are better able to negotiate with higher authorities, and all communities stand to benefit from more accessible information on governance. Perhaps more expensive for government in the long run, but the fear of heightened public spending over compensation is its own potent mechanism for better developmental planning and strategies. Sharni deals with the complex process of compensation and appeals, particularly for those displaced, extremely comprehensively. Particularly with regard to the exact sum of compensation, there is great scope when reading through the book for the development of decision support systems that aid both government and citizens, on the lines of Smartsettle.com for example. Sharni examines in detail the constitution, efficiency and effectiveness of bodies like the Grievance Redress Committees (GRCs) and the so-called Super LARC, a process of appeal. On page 17 there is a very interesting breakdown of the type of households that fed into the sample that the report is based on. More could have been done with this data. For example, there’s no comparison between the compensation first offered to and subsequently agreed upon by male and female headed households, the working assumption being that a male headed household would have a higher median than a female headed household. The report itself flags this,

“But there were some instances where female householders perceived that they were not taken seriously simply because they were women. “My husband was abroad when the acquisition took place and I had to deal with it until he came down. I think they paid us less compensation because I am a woman.” (Householder, female, age 39, 2006)” (Page 21)

There is however no further study of this in the report, which is a gap. I could also find no explanation as to how and who exactly, for the E01 project, defined what was an ‘extremely vulnerable household’. The term is often used by never clearly explained. There are other shortcomings. A trivial one is the strange inclusion of a Sinhala phrase (Honda sahayogayak dunna) in the excerpt of two female householders on page 22, when the entire book is in English, even though the responses would have been largely if not all in Sinhala. Not clear why Sharni thought it fit to keep this one phrase in. More seriously, gaps emerge in comparative analysis. On page 22 the book notes,

“About 60% of the displaced householders opted to move into other plots they owned or to buy a new plot. The project also provided 32 resettlement sites, which was the preferred choice for relocation of the balance 40% of displaced householders, who did not have a viable alternative or could not afford to purchase land.”

There is however no study into whether the resettlement sites identified and offered by the RDA where better (infrastructure facilities, quality of construction) than the plots and areas selected by the affected families, that on their behalf, the RDA negotiated the purchase of. Again, Sharni deals with what appears to be significant variance in passing, noting on page 33 that,

“The infrastructure facilities at resettlement sites are generally well developed, even if this development did not always take place at a consistent pace. However, there seems to be some differences in the quality of the infrastructure provided both within and across sites, often due to factors that could not be immediately dealt with by the project.”

Highlighting the nuanced interplay, the study of caste, gender, profession, skill, neighbours and a sense of home by Sharni make the book more interesting than just a cold survey of numbers and statistics. Yet we don’t find the voices of youth and children. From memory, the youngest voice reflected in the book is 30. How the youth feel about development and displacement is vital to how the E01 will be perceived and used in the years to come, and arguably more important to record than the opinion of a septuagenarian farmer. Through the book, graphs underscore points Sharni flags in the text, but on page 36, there is an illustration with smiley faces that is impossible to fathom. Some of the smiley faces are truncated, it is not clear what the two stick figures holding hands represent or what the unit of measurement is for a smiley face that is whole. It is noted in the book that there is a definite drop in productivity related to all crops as a consequence of relocation. This is a major economic and existential challenge, and yet the book doesn’t explain, how, if to any degree, local chambers of commerce and industry have stepped into help and support SMEs and farmers during and after the construction of the E01.

Sharni notes that during the 10+ years it took to build the E01, “People had to live for an extended period of time with severe air and noise pollution, and vibrations caused by blasting, compaction, pilling, and heavy vehicle movement.” Driving down it now, you don’t even think of this. But the scale of this air, noise and visual pollution is many times more than the ruckus and fuss we create when there’s a pavement been made, or a road re-tarred in our own neighbourhoods. It’s hard to imagine how it must have been for those close to and living in this maddening environment for so long. The last chapter deals with how the best features of dealing with resettlement, relocation, displacement, compensation and grievance mechanisms around the E01 can and must be more broader applied. It is unclear whether author or publisher intend to follow up on the E01 development beyond Galle, and revisit this study and the sample base say 10 years hence, to ascertain to what degree lives, livelihoods and perceptions had changed.

Right of Way is a genuinely useful contribution to the sadly sparse debate on balancing infrastructure development with human development, and how the former is often ill-secured by an insensitive, centrist, obdurate approach to the latter. I do wish however the book played to Sharni’s strengths as photographer more, or as much as her skill in writing. CEPA itself has the model. As Kannan Arunasalam notes, “CEPA’s photography ‘policy’, an informal understanding which came about as a reaction to the way ‘poor people’ are generally photographed by photojournalists and development organisations, taken without thinking of their rights to privacy and profiting from the use of their ‘faces’, was another challenge that we needed to creatively work around.” Kannan went on to create To Escape or Maximise: The estate worker’s dilemma, CEPA’s first audio visual ‘think piece’, aiming to communicate the findings of its substantial research on the plantation sectors of Sri Lanka to a wider audience. It is a compelling presentation of a complex issue through photography. I wonder why a similar model wasn’t used for this book. CEPA and Sharni could have also gone beyond, and given those affected their own (cheap) cameras to document, through their own eyes and process of selection, the change in their lives brought about by the construction of the E01. Juxtaposed and curated, this could have been a marvellous photographic essay and collection, mediated not through Sharni’s occasional visits and eye, but by those at the heart of the issue the book deals with. Such an approach would have made it far more effective in the book’s avowed goal of being a visual record of the E01’s development.

Yet warts and all, Sharni through this book brings to light a distressing world beyond the dotted lines usually followed on the E01, and the blur of lush green. Sharni ends the book by noting that,

“When we take to the expressway, perhaps we should spare a thought for the many who gave up their rights over this land – their right to use it as a home, a business a cultivation – to allow others the right to travel on an expressway.”

I couldn’t help but think after I read Right of Way cover to cover that it’s not really our right to travel on the E01, but more a privilege we enjoy only because of the real, incredibly hard and on-going sacrifices of those who lands we traverse in our vehicles.

Let they not be forgotten.

• The Incomplete Thombu: A compelling interlace of architecture, drawing, memory and art
• Homeless in one’s homeland
• The Muslim question and resettlement of Muslim IDPs in post-war Sri Lanka: Two comprehensive interviews
• Human displacement
• Forcible resettlements in East

The Hansard of 20th September 2011 records a question posed by Dr. Harsha de Silva in Parliament over the campaign finances and the asset declaration of Mayoral candidate Milinda Moragoda. See high resolution image here. Download the Hansard from 20th September as a PDF here.

Dr. de Silva flags questions repeatedly via Facebook and Twitter Groundviews posed to the Moragoda campaign on these issues, all to no avail. Milinda Moragoda: The gap between promise and reality catalogues the disconnect between what Moragoda says and actually does in more detail. In Why is Right to Information in the Moragoda Mayoral Manifesto? Prof. Rohan Samarajiva, the Head of the Policy Planning Group, Milinda for Mayor Campaign, flags Moragoda’s commitment to the Right to Information (RTI) and ends with a plea to support him on this score. Dr. de Silva, who at the time of writing is the head of the Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte Municipal Council (SJKMC) campaign committee for the UNP notes in Local government elections: Military puppeteers, elected puppets, right to information and people’s liberties his deep scepticism over the Moragoda campaign’s RTI promises.

A rough translation to English of Dr. de Silva’s comments in Parliament follows. Only the relevant sentences are translated from Sinhala.

“There is the Groundviews website. It is done by the Sri Lankan Sanjana Hattotuwa. The site notes it is “Journalism for Citizens”. Milinda Moragoda is using Facebook and Twitter for his campaign. Groundviews has asked (Moragoda) to “declare his assets and liabilities” on Facebook. They have asked this on Twitter. Moragoda doesn’t do politics like us. He is very sophisticated. Very hifi. He does politics on Facebook. He does politics on Twitter. On Facebook it is asked of him “Did you declare your assets”? This has been asked for four or five days. He does not open his mouth. There is a saying “Preach to others only when one is principled”. Isn’t that so?… Gotabaya Rajapaksa is not standing for elections. It is Milinda Moragoda who is standing for elections… Please tell Mr. Moragoda that before he gives out other information he can start with declaring his assets and liabilities.”

Other bloggers have asked the same question. No answer.

tweeted:

Others on Twitter, like Nalaka, Anupama, Roel and Thilina have asked the same question. Repeatedly. Yet, no answer.

Indi Samarajiva, Moragoda’s web media manager has been asked the same question on his personal blog. No answer.

Prof. Rohan Samarajiva, the head of Moragoda’s Policy Planning Group has been repeatedly asked the question over many web fora. The answer? Bizarrely calling existing election law hypothetical and that Moragoda will reveal his assets and liabilities (one is really asked to believe) if and when elected. Inter alia, given the present antics of the campaign to illegally use CMC hoardings (State property) for electioneering, this is particularly rich.

In fact, I along with many others have been kicked out of the Moragoda Facebook page for flagging these and other hard questions. As Roel notes on Twitter,

tweeted:

Awful and familiar. That about captures the Moragoda campaign to date. But surely, doesn’t Colombo deserve the unfamiliarity of a candidate who eschews hypocrisy and expedient politics to really practice what he preaches?

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Also read Fundamental questions for AJM Muzammil and the UNP

• Fundamental questions for AJM Muzammil and the UNP
• Groundviews on Twitter and Facebook
• Hacking mayoral campaign promises
• Groundviews on Twitter
• Milinda Moragoda: The gap between promise and reality

Last Friday, I was slated to interview the UNP’s Mayoral candidate AJM Muzammil on public television. After his media manager expressed a keen interest and confirmed his participation, Muzammil backed out the morning of the interview giving no reason at all and asked it to be rescheduled for the following week. This mirrored the behaviour of the UPFA’s candidate Milinda Moragoda, who also promised an interview and at the last minute, cancelled without giving any reason. It’s almost as if they both were advised that hard questions, for which they would have no easy answer, would be asked.

Though no coherent answers are, to date, forthcoming, questions directed at Milinda Moragoda are public. Critical questioning of Muzammil’s policy statement has been comparatively less visible and sustained, but also because Muzammil’s presence on the web is far less adroit than Moragoda’s. His Twitter account for example incredibly has just a single tweet to date. This is, politely put, is deeply embarrassing. His Facebook page is just a stream of bad consciousness with absolutely no engagement whatsoever with those who are on it.

Though it never really occurred, once the interview with Muzammil was initially confirmed with his campaign, readers/fans of Groundviews on Facebook and Twitter were asked to send in their questions over the candidate’s policies. Save for what was emailed in, the rest of the questions are in the public domain. Prof. Rohan Samarajiva’s responses to Muzammil’s policy statement were taken off his Twitter account.

I’m not at all interested in going behind a candidate who seems to believe that inconvenient questions can be evaded through non-engagement. In line with my short essay Hacking mayoral campaign promises, please use the following questions to critically evaluate Muzammil’s campaign. Pose them to him in person and through every means available online and via other media. The UNP may criticise Moragoda’s campaign, but are they really any better and do they set an example?

All the questions are edited for language, length and clarity.

Via email: 

1. The CMC is infamously known for being one of the most corrupt government departments in the country. Its rampant corruption and complete inefficiency was used by the current central government to shift authority from the CMC to an Authority headed by the defence secretary. What steps will the candidate take to ensure the complete eradication of corrupt practices and to enhance transparency? Will he begin by declaring his assets and make it mandatory for others within the Council to follow suit?
2. About his proposed cycle lanes. Has he not seen colombo? Where the devil are we going to have cycle lanes? We should have separate bus lanes!
3. What does the paragraph about social and cultural values really mean?
4. He’s spoken about garbage collection but not garbage disposal … nice that they will increase frequency of garbage collection but where are they going to put it and whats going to happen to what is already there?
5. Interesting that there is no mention of under-employment. And the plan for vocational training for unemployed and self employed – how are they going to identify? How are they going to go about it – funding/ selection/ deciding on what type of training to give (this is where consultation would come in) / they need to identify demand in market and offer vocational training for those accordingly. I’ll like to know more about the details of these plans I guess.
6. Considering he’s a politician of the old times, interesting to know what his take on social media as a tool to engage with voters and inform them? He doesn’t interact with people at all on FB except to say thank you.

Via Twitter (posed by NalakaG):

1. Have you declared your assets as required by election law, and are you willing to disclose it to voters? (A question I’ve already asked of Muzammil and his campaign over Facebook and Twitter, to which to date they have given no answer.)
2. How do you plan to co-exist with the UPFA government that controls urban development, without being bulldozed by them?
3. As a candidate who has tweeted just once so far, do u think social media matter in engaging Colombo’s voters?
4. Have you had any criminal or corruption charges made against you by a law enforcement or state body? If so, what?

Via Twitter (posed by @samarajiva,the Head of the Policy Planning Group, Milinda for Mayor Campaign)

1. Finally, Muzammil manifesto out. No citizen charter, surprisingly. Lots of freebies. How is it all funded? Still, focus on city services is good.
2. Compare language on making CMC efficient & citizen centric in @MilindaMoragoda & @ajmmuzammil policies. Can unreformed CMC deliver services?

• Milinda Moragoda’s ‘Right to Information’: A sordid record of its real nature and limits
• Groundviews on Twitter and Facebook
• Hacking mayoral campaign promises
• Groundviews now on Yahoo! Meme
• Groundviews on Twitter

Photo from Asian Mirror

In Open-source policy formulation for Sri Lanka’s capital, an article published on the Lanka Business Online website recently, the Head of the Policy Planning Group, Milinda for Mayor Campaign and renowned policy analyst Prof. Rohan Samarajiva looks at how mainstream politics can be made more participatory. The promise is of a direct democracy model with the aid of web, mobile and Internet technologies. Prof. Samarajiva captures well the shortcomings of a traditional approach to manifestos and public policy,

“The traditional approach is to rely on expertise. Experts formulate policy. Other experts debug it. Not very different from what goes on at the Redmond Campus of Microsoft.”

It is a beguiling vision. Co-creating public policy transparently is infinitely better than codifying in closed groups. This is the Wikipedia model, adapted to fit a political campaign. Experts, like Prof. Samarajiva, assume a curatorial role in the campaign – sifting through citizen-generated ideas, refining and combining them to create a representative and responsive policy framework. Seeing a coherent vision and a participatory model, citizens feel empowered and join the debates. In fact, Prof. Samarajiva notes many from Colombo and elsewhere already have. Even at face value, this is not something we’ve seen in elections held previously. Bitter invective and partisan rhetoric often inform campaign propaganda. Prof. Samarajiva promises something very different, both during the campaign and also in the model of governance were his candidate to win.

This is the ideal. What is the reality? A general critique of citizen or user-generated content is that most of it is rather poor in expression and execution. Experts, as Andrew Keen in ‘The Cult of the Amateur’ argues, aren’t obsolete. In fact, they are wanted more than before to stem a tsunami of cute cat videos on YouTube, relationship woes on Facebook, celebrity chatter on Twitter and badly focussed holiday photos on Flickr. Opening up policy making doesn’t necessarily mean better policy-making. The majority of comments on the Facebook pages of candidates consists of a single adulatory line. Some ask for jobs. Others ask for help in setting up a business. Hardly ideas generation for better public policy.

The promise of ostensibly ‘opening up policy making’ can also mask entrapment of a different kind. Think Apple, the computer company. Apple offers beauty in simplicity. Its iconic software and hardware has a cult following because it’s visually compelling, encouraging prolonged use and exploration so long as Apple’s rules are followed. And there’s the rub. Examples of the company’s intolerance with developers and users who attempt to question it and go beyond its rules are legion. In sum, what Apple offers is something beautiful to own and look at in return for little or no space for transparency or critical questioning. Few of course realise this, because few see a need to move beyond what it offers, and promises to make available in the future.

Apply this to Colombo’s future. An open city is an attractive prospect – in the sense of open physical spaces as well as transparency in governance. The former is already a reality. The latter remains elusive. Walls are coming down. Trees are being planted. Yet we don’t know why walls are coming down, what will be built in their place or why trees are being cut only to grow others in their place. We are taken in by what we see and are promised, but the reality is that we are all hostage to rules hardwired into a system beyond reproach or easy public scrutiny. A far cry then from a meritocracy or democracy. For all the online public participation touted by Prof. Samarajiva, the real scope of engagement is woefully constrained. Worse, attempts to enlarge it are actively censored. Questions on ethics, principles and in particular, adherence to election laws go unanswered. Politely put and repeatedly asked via email, Twitter, Facebook and the plain old telephone service, candidates with a web presence and saying they are for transparency simply do not engage.

If the promise of ‘open-source policy making’ is to hold true, it’s not just hyped-up cosmetic engagement that matters. The model promised need to be the model employed. Current mayoral web campaigns fall far short in this respect. I’ve repeatedly asked the candidates, including Prof. Samarajiva’s preferred choice, to open up campaign financing and declare personal assets. Others on Twitter, Facebook and blogs have asked the same question. Revealingly, the campaigns have no response. Bizarrely, some even go to the extent of claiming that existing law, requiring all candidates to declare assets, is ‘hypothetical’.

Rather than a partisan response, here’s my suggestion. Hack all the Mayoral web campaigns. The suggestion isn’t to technically disrupt but systematically decry the lies by proactively and repeatedly engaging. If actively debarred from asking hard questions in official online fora of candidates, voters should redouble efforts to hold candidates accountable though their own online media. Many in Colombo have a Facebook and Twitter accounts. Use these to decode web propaganda. Use them to create new threads of conversations, spin-offs in online and mainstream media platforms that hold candidates and campaign staff accountable to the law, and what they promise. Engage in Tamil and Sinhala to ascertain the real limits of trilingual promises by a candidate’s campaign staff. Be active on official campaign websites. Post content and ask for responses. If censored or restricted, tweeted:

There is emphatically no need to be rude or even sarcastic. The questions are their own power. For the average citizen, these online conversations and unanswered questions are a vital public record. For the candidates, these are equally vital repositories of discontent and support, scepticism as well as hope. Hacking the campaigns now will help us elect a more accountable Mayor, and nail him to his promises. Engaging robustly now benefits us all by pointing the debates to not just what we want to see, but how we want to get there.

It asks us all to be the change we want to see.

###

Authors note: A version of this article first appeared in the Sunday Leader on 25 September 2011. Also read Milinda Moragoda: The gap between promise and reality.

• Milinda Moragoda’s ‘Right to Information’: A sordid record of its real nature and limits
• Fundamental questions for AJM Muzammil and the UNP
• Groundviews on Twitter and Facebook
• Groundviews on Twitter
• Groundviews now formatted for iPad

Milinda Moragoda’s on-going mayoral campaign is interesting on many counts. Particularly appealing to me is that it is extremely web media savvy. The campaign’s central website, http://www.ourcmb.com, is leagues ahead of what any candidate, at any election in Sri Lanka has produced. Aimed to elicit public feedback on a 12 point, 100 day plan for Colombo, the website is a model for how politicians can use the web to co-create policy in what is promised is an open, transparent manner. Milinda’s Facebook group, growing apace in the number of fans, is something other candidates have done in the past, but not to this degree of curatorial prowess. He also has a presence on YouTube and Twitter. All this would prima facie suggest a politician unafraid of public scrutiny, genuine engagement on critical issues and uses these tools to be the change he proclaims he wants to see.

Sadly, not so. In an article titled ‘Open-source policy formulation for Sri Lanka’s capital’ the Head, Policy Planning Group, Milinda for Mayor Campaign Prof. Rohan Samarajiva, though he doesn’t identify himself as such in the article, makes a great deal of the approach adopted by the Moragoda campaign. He may not even know it or immediately recall that his son, though far less coherently, first mooted the idea open source government over 8 years ago. Noting the flaws with the traditional approach to manifestos and public policy, Prof. Samarajiva notes,

“The traditional approach is to rely on expertise. Experts formulate policy. Other experts debug it. Not very different from what goes on at the Redmond Campus of Microsoft.”

A more apt description would have been to Apple and Steve Jobs. The message however, for the non-geeks, was clear. Co-creating policy transparently is infinitely better than codifying in closed groups. This is the guiding mantra of the open source movement, a process of production and development that promote access to the end product’s source materials. Jobs recently stepped down as CEO of Apple, but his command and control of the company is the stuff of legend. He has been called a Genius Control Freak, unwilling to relinquish control even over the slightest aspect of design and development, wielding an incredible degree of personal oversight as fondly recalled by Vic Gundotra of Google.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa is to Milinda’s campaign what Jobs was, and perhaps to a degree still is to Apple (coincidentally, Gotabaya seems to be a fan of Apple products!). He, and he alone, determines policy. This is not just our speculation or submission. It is quite openly acknowledged by leading bloggers actually heading the media relations for the Milinda Moragoda campaign as well as mainstream media that it’s Gotabaya who runs Colombo. Not the Colombo Municipal Council. Not the post of Mayor. The Secretary of Defence post-war has branched out into urban renewal, and with the unlimited resources of the Ministry of Defence, is going about revamping the city and its environs as he sees fit. There is no public access to his plans. No one really knows how much of money is involved, to whom tenders are awarded, or on what grounds. We are told there is a plan, and to trust its implementation to the hands of the man who won the war. Few, if any, are willing to question that. Following from this, the central argument to support Moragoda’s campaign is, as the Sunday Leader, succinctly puts it, that ready access to Gotabaya guarantees Moragoda a much better chance than any other candidate of developing Colombo to the city we all want it to become. Amongst the candidates then, he is primus inter pares.

Gotabaya’s singular character traits are well known. Here is a man who conflated terrorists with Tamils and actually defended the overnight eviction of hundreds of hapless Tamils from Colombo a few years ago. We recall his shrill comments on and dismissal of Lasantha Wickremetunge’s murder. We now know through Wikileaks that within government, he was the most intolerant of dissent and the freedom of expression during war. Even today, reading through the cables, it’s mind-boggling the degree to which he was in control of or responsible for the suppression of independent media in Sri Lanka. We know that even before these details came to light courtesy Assange, RSF called him a predator of media freedom. A single word from Gotabaya was enough to send any detractor into panic and flight. Worse, he does so with complete and utter impunity. He was heinous in 2007. Four years on, he is no better, and though less shrill now pontificates on matters of governance to boot. As noted by Dr. Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu years ago,

“The relationship of the Defence Secretary to the President and the structure of power institutionalised by this regime, give his pronouncements and opinions greater weight than that of any other cabinet minister including the Prime Minister. Furthermore, his minister is none other than the President, his brother. Gotabhaya Rajapakse’s behaviour begs the question of the militarisation of government and governance in this country. Shocking though it may seem, there is the story doing the rounds that Sri Lanka has in fact a militarised if not military government without having a military coup.“

Emphasis mine.

It is important to not forget who Gotabaya is, what he is capable of and how unbridled his real power is. If and when Milinda Moragoda wins these elections, it’s Gotabaya who will run our city. It’s Gotabaya’s plans, vision and apparatchiks that will define our city, not, emphatically, Moragoda’s frameworks of public engagement and accountability. In many ways, this is going back to the Premedasa era of governance, where most are interested in getting stuff done, not on how it’s done and at what cost. Ergo, Moragoda may speak of Right to Information, but this is rendered nonsensical given the regime’s vice grip on everything, and everyone. To argue therefore that Moragoda’s candidacy is viable above all others because of access to this individual is in effect to suggest that constitutional rule, the rule of law and civil administration – all of which have been systematically and egregiously undermined by the Rajapaksa regime – are non-issues in these elections. In fact, the single most important factor in Moragoda’s campaign was flagged by Wikileaks,

Interestingly, the head of Milinda’s Policy Planning Group, Prof. Samarajiva, writing in 2010 noted,

“The events of the past few months (and indeed the past few years) in Sri Lanka have puzzled me. The President and his coterie are flagrantly violating the Constitution and laws. That is shocking, but what is more shocking is the casual acceptance of this behaviour by all concerned. What is surprising is not that the President violates the law and disregards explicit directions from lawful authority, but that the citizenry seem to accept it. Not that the President tries to impress university teachers by inviting them to dinner at Temple Trees, but that most of them go, and some even kiss the hands of their host. So it appears that the political elite’s dalliance with Constitutionalism has about run its course, 60 years after independence. We are reverting to our native Feudalism: not just the ruling family but large swaths of the populace, including opinion leaders and intellectuals.” From Sri Lanka under Rajapakse regime becoming feudal kingdom with constitutional veneer

Emphasis mine. If he looks in the mirror, one wonders if Prof. Samarajiva recognises that what he warned us against is what he has allowed himself to become?

The Ranil factor
On Twitter, and defending his decision to back the Moragoda campaign, Prof. Samarajiva observed,

A lot of the arguments around supporting Moragoda are anchored to, politely put, the ineffectiveness of the Leader of the Opposition, Ranil Wickremesinghe. Interestingly, the media relations / campaign manager for Milinda Moragoda and Prof. Samarajiva’s son was, on the Sri Lankan blogosphere, one of the first and most vocal champions of Ranil Wickremesinghe, only to lose interest by 2010 and ask him to leave his office. He’s not the only one disillusioned. Wikileaks mentions Moragoda around a 148 times. The cables range from January 2003 to December 2009. Moragoda’s character, role and relevance to various governments at various times is evident when reading through them in chronological order. Equally evident is his growing disenchantment with the UNP’s leadership. To quote the US Ambassador in Sri Lanka in 2007,

“There is no doubt that a substantial part of the UNP is unhappy with Wickremesinghe’s autocratic leadership style, and with some of Ranil’s strategic decisions. There are others who, nearing the end of their public lives, may in fact simply be yearning to end their careers as ministers. Basil Rajapaksa’s assurances notwithstanding, the President has aroused expectations of change by announcing publicly that he would undertake a major cabinet reshuffle and expected a number of UNP crossovers. Ranil will have his work cut out to head off a defection by the dissidents in his party and get the President to back off on his plan to recruit them for his cabinet.”

In 2011, the very real prospect of an electoral loss in Colombo for the UNP is what the fall of Killinochchi was to the LTTE, the end of the road. An enervated Opposition today will become a ceremonial one, which then refocusses our attention on Prof. Samarajiva’s point – are voters only left with individuals who promise what they do because of who they know and have access to? I think not. A year ago, the Professor agreed. To quote again from his seminal essay,

“Constitutionalism is not words on paper, but broad acceptance across society that certain kinds of words on paper have binding authority and must be respected. It is what will give meaning to the word of a candidate… The larger question is the governing framework. Do university teachers rush to kiss the ring and vice chancellors prostrate themselves before presidents in modern societies? Can we have a modern economy, when the largest companies in the country obey patently illegal directions from regulators? Is it normal to name a government-owned, money-losing airline for the head of state and paint the tail of the leased aircraft with his campaign livery? These are symptoms of a transition from a Constitutional State to a feudal one.”

Sans any real democracy in Sri Lanka, http://www.ourcmb.com is actually not a framework for public engagement. Rather, it is essentially a platform (arguably a rather parasitical one) to get the best ideas from amongst us and make them hostage to the parochialism of a single ruling family that circumscribes in turn what Moragoda – if he should win – can and should do as Mayor. Ironically, in this position, he is akin to party leader he left behind – both largely symbolic figures sans any real authority, one a hostage to a blinding ego, the other never able or willing to question the excesses of a regime that in effect demarcates the boundaries of his power. If this is too dystopic, consider the following video. This was broadcast on public TV. It isn’t the creation of someone against the Rajapaksa regime or the Moragoda campaign. In fact, it features the President’s son speaking in public. At around one minute in, Namal Rajapaksa says something quite revealing in a tone and expression that doesn’t translate, but a Sinhala audience would understand full well,

“But, Mr. General Secretary, I told the President that if they don’t give us votes, go put them elsewhere [Applause] Why (should we) make houses and others get the votes? Isn’t it? But no one will be put outside this area. But remember what I told (you) earlier.”

I asked Moragoda about what his response to this thinly veiled threat was, especially in light of Point 6 of his manifesto which notes,

• The Government has to relocate people in certain circumstances to fulfill its commitment to give decent, liveable housing, but I will ensure that no citizen is relocated outside of metropolitan Colombo. (See here)
• Before any relocation plans are made, communities will be included in the process and consulted. (See here)

To date, the candidate has not given an answer, which in a sense, is its own answer.

The foibles of the campaign
Moragoda’s adoption of new media could suggest he’s actually a more engaged candidate with those online. Colombo’s surely got the highest per capita penetration of broadband in the country. Though nowhere close to what tweeted:

Groundviews immediately chastised for a hidden agenda, and asked if we were paid to ask hard questions. When we said tweeted:

The somewhat farcical public engagement extends to Facebook. When I attempted to engage on the Facebook platform, the response from Milinda Moragoda’s campaign manager was tragi-comic, almost as if the fan page was set up for adulatory messages instead of real, hard engagement on vital issues. In response to the questions we published on Facebook, the son of Prof. Samarajiva, Milinda’s media campaign manager, accused the Centre for Policy Alternatives, in fact no stranger to the candidate himself of ‘coordinated personal attacks’. Note the word personal. And what were these ‘attacks’? The following questions apparently, amongst others that are in full public view,

On the issue of religious tolerance

On the Right to Information

Sampath, Chief Editor of Vikalpa, makes the point here that the copy and paste tactic of the campaign demonstrates the paucity of original thought and genuine engagement.

On Namal Rajapaksa’s comments

Note there is no engagement at all here with Namal’s comments. And the ‘Milinda Moragoda’ isn’t really Milinda Moragoda. More on this anon.

On Moragoda’s non-compliance with election law in 2010 and again during the present campaign

On the inability of the campaign to deal with hard questions (in Sinhala)

On attempting to dodge hard question by facile logic

This question alone generated an exchange of over 25 comments between the media campaign manager, Prof. Samarajiva and I. It is evident the campaign cannot come up with an answer to the questions asked, most notably why Moragoda to date has not made public his declaration of assets, as per election law (and never did in 2010 either). What is also evident is a media campaign manager who cannot manage hard questions, and a Head of Policy Planning, infinitely more capable of dealing with vital issues yet unable to engage as robustly as he can on account of a day job. In sum, a rather dysfunctional campaign to deal with anything other than the sporadic citizen input, and that too if sycophantic or supportive in nature.

It gets worse.

The optics of engagement, or lack thereof
Twice during the day on Moragoda’s Facebook page, I noticed that ‘Milinda Moragoda’ said something that in minutes was magically attributed to Rohan Samarajiva. I flagged this to the campaign.

Yes despite assurances this has been fixed, one sees strange anomalies. For example, the following notes that even though the identity that appears is ‘Milinda Moragoda’ its a member of his ‘staff’ that is posted the response.

However, in the case of the example below, that which appears to come from Milinda Moragoda, one suspects actually comes from Prof. Samarajiva.

This may well be a temporary technical glitch. I’m not suggesting that Prof. Samarajiva deliberately misleads voters, but this is just not the way to build public confidence in authentic online engagement. Moragoda we are told only posts content himself in the morning and the evenings. We aren’t sure then whether this post on Milinda’s avowed celebration of diversity was actually posted by himself or not. There is no comment moderation policy. There is certainly comment moderation (not all comments that are submitted go up), but this isn’t made explicitly clear. What you see on Facebook may only be a subset of what is received by the campaign, with content published at their discretion not really giving a sense of what fans really send in, want to see and think. What one immediately notices is that up until today, there was not a single hard question or policy related discussion on the Facebook page. The only status a bit different to the rest was this hilarious yet revealing post,

Is any of this of consequence?
“I am persuaded that Constitutionalism, the rule of laws, not men, is most conducive to the happiness of our people. But I am open to persuasion that what is appropriate for the Sri Lankan climate is something else.” Prof. Rohan Samarajiva, Sri Lanka under Rajapakse regime becoming feudal kingdom with constitutional veneer

Prof. Samarajiva may have been persuaded to believe that supporting the proxy of a feudal kingdom is the best way forward. So too, many others? Now famously quoted, the Gallup Poll reveals that the President’s popularity is at 91%. A recent poll by Social Indicator, the social polling arm of the Centre for Policy Alternatives on perceptions of post-war democracy in Sri Lanka indicates that 58.8% of Sri Lankans think that the country has been the most democratic under President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s period. This view is shared by 69.9% of Sinhalese respondents. 62.2% of respondents in the 18 – 30 age category consider the country most democratic under President Mahinda Rajapaksa. The latest age breakdown for Colombo’s inhabitants I could access was from 2001. It’s clear though that the appeal of the Rajapaksa regime will possibly translate into votes for Moragoda in a city with a younger demographic. The concerns Groundviews noted below are quite possibly non-issues to the majority who vote.

Nalaka Gunewardene (a close friend of Prof. Samarajiva’s), along with Groundviews, attempts to hold Milinda Moragoda accountable to a higher standard than the rest of the candidates via frequent engagement on Twitter. As Nalaka avers,

Perhaps Nalaka and I are wrong in seeing him differently to any other politician, particularly during elections. But Moragoda says, repeatedly, that he is different. Wielding the tools of public engagement online, Moragoda suggests that he is capable of robust conversations on engendering real change in a participatory manner. He wants to deal with issues. Yet, he eludes the inconvenient ones. He wants to bring about a new expression. Yet his campaign wastes no time in precisely the kind of expression his opponents are vaunt to use. He says he is for the Right to Information. Yet he flouts election law by not revealing his assets. Despite all this, I have little doubt he will win Colombo. On Facebook, Prof. Samarajiva wanted me to “Nail us (meaning Moragoda and himself) to the wall if we do not deliver after getting the mandate. That seems to be the only practical course, if you do not want to get all candidates to adopt RTI.”

My response to him on Facebook is a good note to end,

“Thanks again, but I think the thrust of my point is at variance with your submission. My point is the trust deficit – not a hum in support of RTI after his defeat last year, on *principle*. One can not be in a position to implement, but stand up for something nevertheless? I get what you are saying too, but I think you place too much of power in my / voters hands. Once and if elected, he is the frontman for a regime that trucks no check or balance, no critical question. Moragoda himself closed Twitter and YouTube the day after he lost in 2010. What gives us hope he will continue to be held accountable through these fora once elected? Your involvement in the campaign and your early tweet “ tweeted:

” is that much more cruel in this context. You may be, but the context of electoral democracy in this country is just not set up to ‘nail’ you (or any politician) on performance. You and Moragoda ask for faith, in essence. I have little of it in Moragoda, and none at all in the regime that backs him.”

Many of course will disagree, and say that Moragoda is the best choice in an irrefutably illiberal context. I do wonder how we got here.

• Chaos in Colombo: Mêlée over jobs indicates a serious economic problem in Sri Lanka?
• Photographic evidence of war crimes in Sri Lanka, or not? (Updated)
• Ground report: Widespread public perception of military links to ‘grease devils’?
• Milinda Moragoda’s ‘Right to Information’: A sordid record of its real nature and limits
• Fundamental questions for AJM Muzammil and the UNP

I met Joshua Roman, a TED Fellow, at TED 2011. TED audiences are very hard to please. Because of the nature of the TED Fellows, speakers and performers, the bar for any presentation is set so high that an appearance on that stage is absolutely nerve-wracking. Many in the audience pay thousands of dollars to attend TED and come from the wealthiest families in the US, corporate giants and Hollywood. In sum, they are usually those with a passion for new ideas and a penchant for music, art and culture. That Joshua received standing ovations every time he performed on stage in front of this critical audience is a singular measure of his musical prowess. As Yo-Yo Ma notes,

“Occasionally I get to meet an extraordinary young musician. Such is the case with Joshua Roman. … To me, Joshua is one of the great exemplars of the ideal 21st-century musician. He’s deeply grounded in a classical tradition and he is a fearless explorer of our world.”

Chatting with Joshua during TED I was surprised to discover a person almost embarrassed by the praise showered on him, who complained in a whisper that too many people wanted to just touch his cello case (possibly because during TED he had on loan a cello worth several million dollars)! Joshua’s deliciously sardonic wit and his wide interests in reading were appealed to me as much as his musical talent. Given his family connections to Sri Lanka, I asked whether he would like to come and play over here. I was delighted when he responded enthusiastically.

Accompanied on the piano by Eshantha Peiris, Joshua plays in Colombo on the 26th at the Wendt and again in Kandy on the 30th, at the Mahaweli Reach Hotel.

If there’s one concert you attend this year, let this be it.

Recorded live at TED 2011, the following video features Joshua playing with the equally talented Robert Gupta on the violin.

It’s a master class in collaboration as violinist Robert Gupta and cellist Joshua Roman perform Halvorsen’s “Passacaglia” for violin and viola. Roman takes the viola part on his Stradivarius cello. It’s powerful to watch the two musicians connect moment to moment (and recover from a mid-performance hiccup). The two are both TED Fellows, and their deep connection powers this sparkling duet.

This video is from Joshua’s YouTube Channel.

• In conversation with Joshua Roman: Videos and photos
• In conversation with Mandhira de Saram
• In conversation with Prof. Anil K Gupta: Grassroots innovation and development
• The Travelling Circus on video: Looking at war and IDPs through theatre
• Thoughts on the play ‘Pusswedilla Part 3’

For the second time in a fortnight, subscribers to the Daily Mirror newspaper have been entreated to an interesting disinformation campaign that appears to be conducted with those embedded within, and possibly with the full support of the Sri Lankan Army and its network of patriots.

The full page ad above was published on the Daily Mirror on 23rd May. A high resolution scan can be downloaded here. At the bottom, the advertisement is attributed to the ‘Free Mass Media Movement’. No such movement exists, or has existed. With the clear intention to obfuscate rather than enlighten, the name is a spin off from the Free Media Movement, which for a variety of reasons, is well known to government and also amongst media freedom activists.

To be fair, the concerns expressed therein about the handling of Osama Bin Laden’s murder raise very serious concerns over the ability of the United States to practice the very policies and practices it preaches abroad, including to our own government. The disconnect between advice and action is stark, but fundamentally, the space for robust, critical discussion and debate within the US over its government’s actions is far greater than the space in Sri Lanka, even post-war.

What is most curious about this ad is that within the text, there is reference to an ‘International Accountability Network’. To reiterate, while the ad itself is attributed to the ‘Free Mass Media Movement’, the text refers to the ‘International Accountability Network’. It was this same ‘network’ that on 11 May 2011 ran a full page ad against the UN Secretary General Panel that looked into allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Sri Lanka. We did some digging and tellingly found that the sole member of the ‘network’ we could find was the person who set up what is a largely dysfunctional site. When we exposed him, he proceeded to take his CV off the web, but not before we saved a copy of it. As we noted before,

The ’International Accountability Network’ is a fascinating, recent creation. It was registered late March 2011 by an individual called Chirasthi Perera. The domain name record notes the registrant as one Arnold Chira, though a simple Google search of the associated email (a Gmail account) reveals the real name, and a personal website which has his CV. Clearly, the man has some technical training, but particularly revealing is that the one non-related referee noted in the CV is Dr . Thiran De Silva, Head Of IT, Sri Lanka Army along with the fact that this individual is currently a Web Consultant/Trainer to Sri Lanka Army. The ’International Accountability Network’ website is, politely put, a dysfunctional mess with content largely automatically generated from various web (RSS) feeds. The little human curation of this content suggests that the site’s owner seeks to expose the double-standards of the US in supporting the UN Panel’s report in light of the events surrounding the murder of Osama Bin Laden. Absolutely no details about what is exactly is ‘international’ about this ‘network’. Few of the links on the site in fact work. This is most unfortunate, because Chirasthi Perera is associated with other leading sites like Colombo Fashion (as its CEO), Sri Lanka: Awake in a Miracle (sic) and the yet to be launched Colombo Night Life, sites that are clearly about issues of war crimes, crimes against humanity, justice and accountability. Not.

In sum, there is no network, there is no real interest in accountability and there is nothing really international about it other than the money which could have flowed in from ‘patriotic’ diaspora individuals and networks to fund the ad campaign.

In fact, The Hindu paper called this a “mocking ad” of President Obama. Speaking of The Hindu, something quite peculiar happened there as well. Sri Lanka mocks Obama, Ban Ki-Moon was the headline of a story that was published on its website on 23 May 2011, around 14:59:28 GMT. The original URL of the story was http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/article2041735.ece. It has since been deleted. Though we cannot say exactly when it was deleted, the Google Cache version of it appears here. A PDF version can be downloaded here.

In general terms, it’s rather silly for a paper of the stature of The Hindu, which must surely have at a minimum one person at least slightly knowledgeable about web media, to believe that something published on its site could be successfully erased off the web, even if it wanted to. More specifically, we wonder why The Hindu – known be extremely partial to the Rajapaksa regime – deleted this article? It is not just The Hindu. The Daily Mirror, after having published a news story that exposed what was clearly a outrageous lie by Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister, proceeded, perhaps on account of pressure, tweeted:

A final concern lies with media institutions that run these ads – which are in effect supported by those working in the Sri Lankan armed forces. NGOs engaged in rights advocacy and governance reform, and even this site, are repeatedly and viciously berated for the funding their receive, which somehow makes them everything from agents of the CIA hell bent on regime change to apparatchiks of the West, who can only send their tourists here, and emphatically not their democratic ideals or liberal institutions. But one can employ the language of hate and harm because the sources of funding are in the public domain – online, audited, with the Central Bank, tabled in Parliament with varying degrees of accuracy, published in the media, spat out on TV and radio.

Where does the funding for the ‘Free Mass Media Association’ and the ‘International Accountability Network’ come from? If we are principled in a robust quest for greater transparency, which rightfully includes civil society, then it is particularly revealing that the majority in Sri Lanka today don’t apply these high standards to content that is congruent with the government’s strident propaganda, and can in effect be traced back to its armed forces. While somewhat poorly expressed, the essence of Sohan Fernando’s serious ethical concerns over the publication of dubious ads such as this are useful for mainstream media to consider.

We suspect, however, they won’t. The bogus ‘Free Mass Media Association’ and the ‘International Accountability Network’ offer mainstream media what they need most – money, and lots of it. A full page, full colour ad in the Daily Mirror runs into several lakhs, and perhaps closer to six figures.

Ethics at bay, when coffers are at play?

• Opposition to the UN Panel report: Any method to this madness?
• Reconciliation and accountability after the UN Panel’s report: Challenges and opportunities for Sri Lanka and the UN system
• Groundviews blocked in Sri Lanka (Updated)
• Sri Lanka’s Post-War Crisis: War Crimes and Channel 4
• Send us content for publication

I was elated to take delivery of my copy of The Cage by Gordon Weiss yesterday. Having pre-ordered it off Amazon UK, I fully expected it to be held up by Customs officials in Sri Lanka, given the incendiary issues the book is anchored to and its author, an erstwhile employee of the United Nations (UN) in Sri Lanka. As a friend quipped, they probably thought it had something to do with the Dehiwela Zoo. This may be true for now, but it is highly unlikely, in a country that has repeatedly even blocked issues of The Economist with articles perceived to be against the incumbent government, that this tome will be freely sold in bookstores.

The publication and release of The Cage comes soon after the hugely controversial and deeply distressing report by the UN Secretary General’s Panel of Experts, which found credible allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity by both the LTTE and government armed forces in the final months and weeks of the war. Just today, no more than 24 hours after I first picked up this book, Kumaran Pathmanathan (alias KP), the former head of the LTTE’s arms procurement department, said in the media that the UN and West were prepared to send in a ship to rescue LTTE leaders towards the fag end of the war[1].  As I sit down to write this, the sonic booms of Kfir jets over Colombo, once a familiar sound, herald preparations for the second anniversary of the end of war. Last year, the President proclaimed that the armed forces did not kill a single civilian and that they “carried a gun in one hand and a copy of the human rights charter in the other”. It is a powerful fiction – simply told and sadly, simply believed. A few days hence, this compelling fiction will drive the proceedings of an international seminar, organised by the armed forces, aimed to share the government’s unique ‘mojo’ of defeating terrorism with the rest of the world[2].

The Cage is a page-turner. Gordon’s prose is lucid and compelling. This is not a book you can easily put down once picked up. There are around 60 pages of notes and background reference material – Weiss has clearly done his homework. The book is anchored to the final few weeks of war, but holds lessons more broadly applicable, and covers issues as diverse as geo-politics and international relations to international humanitarian law and its application in the Sri Lankan context. Weiss is also clearly well versed in the art of communication – for example, demonstrating a rare insight into how to humanise a large tragedy, he compares throughout the book the size of the sand spit where the war ended and tens of thousands of civilians were trapped in to the size of New York’s Central Park, London or Hampstead Heath. This is powerful writing, because it communicates far more effectively the cramped landmass than any figure in square kilometres or miles can.

As I read the book cover to cover in a matter of hours, it reminded me so much of another book – David Blacker’s A Cause Untrue, first published around 2005. As I noted in a review of A Cause Untrue,

“the strength of Blacker’s writing is that it is hugely believable. We know we are reading a work of fiction, but the familiar names, places, incidents – all serve to sharpen the illusion of reality. Intense, thrilling and intoxicating – the Schumacher pace of this book fuels the careening progress of its plot. The thrill, primarily, is in reading the fictional accounts of familiar actors– the Government of Sri Lanka, the Special Forces of the Army, the LTTE etc.”

Weiss does not intend his book to be perceived or judged as fiction. It invariably will be by many. The comparison between Blacker and Weiss is perhaps unfair, but with certain merits. Both books deal with Sri Lanka’s 30-year-old war that ended decisively in May 2009. Both portray, albeit very differently, the Liberation of Tamil Tigers Eelam (LTTE), which at its zenith was one of the most ruthless terrorist groups in the world. Blacker’s fiction renders operatives of the Sri Lankan armed forces like Fleming’s Bond – as suave, raffish international operators. In contrast, many accounts of the armed forces in The Cage are ferociously barbaric, visceral. Just as much as I observed that Blacker’s work intersperses the real with the fictional, many sections of government, the armed forces and even the UN in Sri Lanka and New York will see Weiss as a talented but tainted author of a book that isn’t pegged to any evidence on the ground.

Sadly, some of the irresponsibly written and edited content in The Cage will support this response. Weiss notes that his first introduction to Gotabaya Rajapaksa – who is featured extensively in the book – was just after the suicide attack against him in December 2006[3], stating that it was a Mercedes that saved his life. It was in fact an armour plated BMW 7 Series that saved Gotabaya’s life and ironically, one that the former President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunge imported to Sri Lanka[4]. On page 6, Weiss notes that on the day Prabakaran’s death was announced through the media, “there was little of the air of celebration one might have expected at the end of such an epoch”. I do not know which part of the country Weiss was at this time but it was one big, riotous party in and around Colombo on the 18^th of May[5] and extending for the most part of a week. On page 145, Weiss asserts that Sri Lanka’s current Foreign Minister, G.L. Peiris, was in May 2010 the Attorney General. He never was – Weiss confuses Mohan Peiris with G.L.  Peiris. There are other revealing ambiguities, over for example the portrayal of the Sri Lankan armed forces. On Page 180, quoting an article that appeared in the Hindustan Times by Suthirto Patranobis, Weiss avers that an ‘unnamed Indian doctor’ said the true death toll had been ‘brushed under the carpet’. Weiss could have researched this better. The Indian doctor does in fact have a name – he was Dr. Tathagata Bose, and before the Hindustan Times report, the first we heard of his observations treating those coming out of the war zone was on Groundviews, where he said “If an infant could not be protected, imagine the plight of older children and adults. The so-called ‘Sri Lankan Solution’ being touted as the panacea for dealing with terrorism worldwide needs a thorough relook.”[6] Page 186 is nearly entirely devoted to high praise of Sri Lankan doctors working in the front-lines during the end of war in horrific conditions and the kindness of front-line soldiers. As Weiss avers,

“During the course of research for this book, dozens of Tamils described the Sinhalese as inherently kind and gentle people. The front-line soldiers who received the first civilians as they escaped to government lines, those who guarded them in the camps and the civilian and military doctors who provided vital treatment distinguished themselves most commonly through their mercy and care.”

Further on in the book, Weiss gives examples of soldiers who tried their utmost to distinguish between LTTE combatants and civilians in incredibly confusing and stressful ground conditions, gave up their own rations to feed those who were dying of hunger in the internment camps established by the government just after the war and other incredible stories of compassion and mercy towards injured Tamil civilians – mothers, children, infants and men – in the hellish last weeks and days of war. This ostensibly echoes what for example Brigadier Prasanna de Silva from the 55^th Division says in the film directed by Guy Guneratne The Truth That Wasn’t There[7]. However, Weiss also then unequivocally asserts that “this does not mean that soldiers did not directly kill thousands of civilians in the heat of combat” and notes that “… Survivors testify that advancing soldiers lobbed grenades methodically into bunkers that often held civilians.” Gordon’s attempt to portray the armed forces through a wide-angled lens of complex emotional, psychosomatic and combat responses to war is commendable, and indeed, more rounded than what most other writers, including those in civil society, have penned to date. It is sadly a leitmotif left abandoned in the book. Weiss offers no larger analysis of this tragic fragmentation between spontaneous compassion and calculated mass scale atrocity, and its affects on the civilians caught in direct or cross-fire.

Sections of The Cage therefore will be flagged as authentic by government, most other passages, violently derided as conspiratorial fiction. Unsurprisingly, given the reaction to the UN Secretary General’s report, the sections the government will be most upset by and why this book will never be openly sold in Sri Lanka will be those dealing with ground conditions in the Vanni from around January to May 2009 in particular, plus the content on page 225, dealing with the assassination of the LTTE’s leadership even after the conditions and path of surrender had been worked out with those in government.

The vociferous support of the UN Secretary General’s report by many sections of the pro-LTTE Tamil diaspora is pegged to its repeated and deep consternation over instances where government armed forces actively targeted civilians. What the UN report also makes explicitly clear and Weiss in The Cage repeatedly underscores are the unimaginably barbaric actions of the LTTE “to fire artillery into their own people” based on “the terrible calculation that with enough dead Tamils, a toll would eventually be reached that would lead to international outrage and intervention.” Here’s the rub – with their leadership decimated, there’s no one in the LTTE to hold accountable.

Not so with the armed forces.

Chapter Five (Convoy 11) is a damning indictment of the Sri Lankan armed forces. Weiss quotes at length eye witness testimony and the experiences of two military men – retired colonel Harun Khan from Bangladesh and the UN’s security chief Chris Du Toit from South Africa, also a retired colonel. The chapter is based on their experience of accompanying the 11^th WFP food convoy into the Vanni. It is a mind-numbingly harrowing account of violence that supports what the UN Panel of Experts says are credible allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Weiss takes pains to emphasise that the appalling details are based on reports by two men who each had significant experience in active combat. Throughout the chapter it is made very clear that the Sri Lankan armed forces were driven by the single-minded pursuit of decimating the LTTE. As Weiss notes regarding the establishment of the so-called No Fire Zones (NFZs), “The decision to unilaterally declare an NFZ in that particular location, hard up against an unpredictable and eroding front line had little to do with protecting civilian lives and everything to do with their removal as an obstacle to unrestrained firepower” and goes to say that “… it was reckless and dangerous strategy that had everything to do with political expediency and little to do with the duty of care owed by the government to civilians. It also said much about how the Sri Lankan leadership valued the lives of the ‘Tiger’ civilian population”. The Sri Lankan armed forces, in sum had towards the end of war become a mirror image of the terrorist group they were fighting against. Pages 116 – 120 are, simply put, difficult to digest even after reading the macabre details published in the UN’s own report and others from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Weiss speaks of photographic evidence of the carnage taken by Col. Khan, but there is none to be found in the book itself. Dismembered babies may have been too gruesome to include in the tome, but are photographic evidence of the deliberate targeting of civilians. Weiss does not say who has these photos, but we can assume, amongst others, the UN does. The Cage goes on to deal with what is now, sadly, the well-known shelling of the PTK hospital guided by what Weiss claims “to be the result of a frantic SLA push to seize the town before Sri Lanka’s annual independence celebrations on 4 February”. On page 133 Weiss calls out the mentality of the government and the armed forces towards the end of the war, which believed “that the failure of civilians to make the perilous crossing of the front lines in effect amounted to complicity with the tactics of the Tamil Tigers.”

The Cage then, though in form different to the UN Panel’s report, supports the same significant concerns over war crimes committed by the armed forces and the LTTE. There is however one other development that arises from this book’s publication when juxtaposed with the official version of the UN Panel’s report, released late April. The justifiable caution over and confidentiality of sources in the UN Panel’s report is ruined by the revelations in The Cage, attributed by Weiss to specific individuals.  Pages 23 to 24 of the UN Panel’s report, in particular sections 83 – 89, also deals with Convoy 11’s experience. No names of the sources however are given. After reading The Cage, it is a matter of simple extrapolation that the sources were in fact Col. Khan and Col. Du Toit. It is unclear how the UN itself will respond. Weiss makes it clear that those accounts that are attributed to individuals was done with explicit permission. The situation reports they would have submitted to WFP and other UN agencies would obviously have informed the Panel’s report. What Weiss has unwittingly done here is to add fuel to the government’s propaganda machine and its most vicious, voluble proponents. It also runs counter to the author’s own assertion (page xxix) that he has done his best “… to interpret and use publicly available information, and has not drawn on confidential correspondence or internal reports, discussions…”. I pride myself on being rather well informed about what is in the public domain dealing with the end of war, but cannot once recall or find any record of what Du Toit or Kahn refer to in The Cage outside of the book, or published anywhere before it.

Annoyingly, The Cage also features the off-handish inclusion of disturbing allegations. On Page 211, Weiss passingly mentions the use of phosphorus shells exploding amongst civilians. This is in fact an extremely serious allegation, and though it has also been reiterated in Tamil media in Sri Lanka, it is one that the government and the armed forces have vehemently denied[8].

That said, The Cage is much more than the narration of carnage so violent, that it defies easy comprehension. Weiss’s book is an attempt to contextualise this violence in the history and ethno-politics of Sri Lanka, and here he succeeds better than most. Weiss calls himself ‘an informed observer’ early on in the book. At the beginning he asks several questions – and vital ones at that – on whether the Sri Lankan government had any alternative to what they ended up doing to end the war. This book is a scathing critique of what the author sees, and those like Louse Arbour also agree as the UN’s “complicity with evil”, but no more so than the report by the UN Secretary General himself. Some soul-searching has been promised, but it is clear that it will take time and will involve problematic investigations into the culpability of highly placed officials in the Secretary General’s cabinet, the resident representative of the UN in Sri Lanka at the time and heads of other UN agencies. The strongest condemnation however is directed at the armed forces and government. Weiss on page 145 (and again on page 197) offers an alternative denouement to the war, though noting that it is now impossible to determine how the government would have reacted to a UN system more proactive in its condemnation of civilian deaths. The alternative proposed by Weiss is interesting reading, but utterly divorced from the (Sinhalese) mentality and sheer hatred of the LTTE that drove government and the armed forces, who having whiffed the decisive end to the war through the decimation of the group’s leadership, weren’t interested in anything or anyone that stood in their way.

Tellingly, the resulting gory and for example the unearthly conditions of Menik Farm remain, at best, of peripheral interest to the majority in Sri Lanka. They are issues and people out of sight, out of mind. The Cage will have about as much impact in Sri Lanka as banning issues of The Economist. Dozens of copies of the book will invariably make its way into Sri Lanka. Much like my own copy, they will be passed on from hand to hand to inform a few concerned about war crimes allegations and are in favour of robust, independent investigations into such allegations. Internationally, The Cage will guarantee it’s author a slot in the literary festivals circuit (sans the Galle Literary Festival) for the next year at least, coupled with media interviews, reviews such as this and op-eds to plug the book – all of which will keep the spotlight on Sri Lanka’s tryst with war crimes. Will this result in any demonstrable change in Sri Lanka? I think not.

If anything, The Cage is more than a disturbing scrutiny of the final phase of war.  Weiss also flags in some detail a corrupt, dysfunctional judiciary and the erosion of democratic governance, even before the 18^th Amendment. In highlighting the murder of the fifteen aid workers in 2006, Weiss underscores what Amnesty International has also clearly flagged – no commission of inquiry or process of investigation into killings that have involved the State has brought the perpetrators to book. The Cage looks the significant role China played in the guarding Sri Lanka against UN condemnation and sanctions both in Geneva and at the Security Council in New York as well as supplying the armed forces with weapons. The author places Sri Lanka centre and forward in the new ‘Beijing Consensus’, and sees China’s complicity with the war’s end as the building block of deep and lasting economic partnerships over the coming years. The considered position of an informed observer gives Weiss a unique vantage to see how the systemic decay within Sri Lanka, coupled with the shift of geo-political advantage to the East in international fora played into the carnage in the Vanni.

For me, it was a single sentence in The Cage that captured the tragedy of war’s end, and how it has so violently defined our country. It wasn’t anything to do with the effects of shelling and shooting point blank children, lactating mothers or the elderly. It wasn’t about the entrails that adorned burning landscapes after the shelling ended. It wasn’t in fact anything to do with the violence rent by arms. Page 185 deals with how even in sheer destitution and despair, civilians in makeshift camps sandwiched between the armed forces and LTTE tried to make the most of their perilous condition. Weiss notes that ,

“There was a shortage of material for everything, and people were compelled to use their colourful, expensive wedding saris, which usually handed down from mother to daughter.”

For most Sri Lankans and especially for Tamils, this is an image extremely resonant and more than a little saddening. This tragic loss of dignity and identity to just survive through the night are not wounds that heal easily. This loss of what it means to be human is not regained by the year on year growth of GDP or the increasing influx of tourists. During the war, the government perceived all Tamils as LTTE, even in Colombo[9]. After the war, nothing – nothing at all – of what the government has done meaningfully addresses legitimate grievances that gave rise to the heinous entity that was the LTTE. From the violence of the 18^th Amendment to that of government ministers in Jaffna[10], the treatment of those interned in Menik Farm, the wasteful and outrageously insensitive celebrations over the second term of the President[11], the millions of dollars the government spend son bids for the Commonwealth Games and entities like Bell Pottinger to whitewash its name[12] and yet can’t spend on those uplifting the livelihoods of those most affected by war, including families of armed forces personnel killed or MIA – these and so much more of what the Rajapaksa regime does suggests we are all hostage in a cage much larger than what Weiss flags in his book, and arguably harder to fight against and escape from. The necessary opiate to keep inconvenient questions and truths away from public scrutiny remains a language of hate and harm – viciously denying, decrying, defiling and denouncing anyone, in Sri Lanka or outside, who questions the President’s assertion, parroted by his brothers, government and unprincipled schmucks in the UNP that no war crimes were committed by our armed forces.

In January 2010, the discerning Sri Lankan voter faced a horrible choice in selecting a viable post-war President. Equally egotistical and megalomaniacal, Mahinda Rajapaksa and Sarath Fonseka represented the girders of this larger cage. One won, the other lost more than expected, but indirectly or directly, they are both responsible for allegations of war crimes and crimes of mass atrocity against our own people. These are allegations that will certainly not result in any quick regime change, but are as unlikely to ever fade away. They will keep coming back, again and again and again. Until and unless there is a meaningful process of truth-seeking and truth-telling, we risk losing out on the verdant democratic potential of our country post-war and a descent into what Weiss ominously notes in the final sentence of The Cage as a “tyranny where myth-making, identity whitewashing and political opportunism have defeated justice and individual dignity.”

The Cage is published by Bodley Head, Random House and available at the time of writing on Amazon UK.

• When allegations become evidence
• A robust debate on No Fire Zones (NFZs) and International Humanitarian Law: Artful dodging of war crimes in Sri Lanka?
• The cynical manipulation of international law: Murdering civilians in No Fire Zones and other war crimes allegations
• Opposition to the UN Panel report: Any method to this madness?
• Exclusive interview with Callum McCrae, Director of ‘Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields’ produced by Channel 4

“The Sri Lankan government rejected a surrender offer by Tamil Tiger rebels at the end of the war, reports released through the Wikileaks website say. They say that Defence Secretary Gothabaya Rajapaksa dismissed US pressure to allow a mediated surrender with the words “we’re beyond that now”. The leaked US cables suggest requests for the International Red Cross to go into the war zone were refused. Sri Lanka’s government has repeatedly denied all these accusations.”

In light of the recently released report by the UN Panel appointed by the Secretary General to look into issues of accountability in Sri Lanka, this is old hat. What this cable does offer is a glimpse into the drafting process of official statements in general and in this case, a statement by the US State Department dealing with one of the most important events on Sri Lanka in 2009. It also reveals how the edits can reflect US concerns over the end of the war.

The draft text of the statement, taken off the cable (Situation Report 74) published on Afterposten’s website is as follows,

The United States welcomes the fact that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam LTTE an organization that has terrorized the people of Sri Lanka for decades, no longer control any territory within Sri Lanka. This 26-year-old conflict has cost tens of thousands of Sinhalese and Tamil lives, uprooted countless Sri Lankans from their homes, and has brutally divided the nation. We especially recognize the tremendous loss of life and hardship endured by civilians in northern Sri Lanka during the past weeks and months.

To truly defeat terrorism, the Government of Sri Lanka must immediately begin to heal the wounds of the conflict and work toward building a democratic, prosperous, tolerant and united Sri Lanka. A lasting peace in Sri Lanka depends on Sinhalese, Tamils and all other Sri Lankans working together to achieve new power sharing arrangements that safeguard and promote the rights of all Sir Lankans.

The United States remains deeply concerned for the welfare of the hundreds of thousands of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) uprooted by the recent fighting. We call on the Government to open additional sites for IDPs to ease overcrowding in the existing facilities. We welcome and urge the Government of Sri Lanka to abide by its commitment to return the majority of IDPs to their homes by the end of this year. We also urge the Government to work hand in hand with the UN, ICRC, and non-government organizations to ensure all IDPs are accorded rights and care meeting the highest international standards.

The final text as published on the US State Department website on 19 May was as follows,

The United States welcomes the cessation of fighting in Sri Lanka and the apparent conclusion to its long-running conflict. This 26-year-old conflict has cost tens of thousands of Sinhalese and Tamil lives, uprooted countless Sri Lankans from their homes, left thousands maimed or wounded, and has brutally divided the nation.

The United States remains deeply concerned for the welfare of the hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) uprooted by the recent fighting. We especially recognize the tremendous loss of life and hardship endured by civilians in northern Sri Lanka during the past weeks and months, and are relieved that this loss of life has ended. We urge the Government to allow humanitarian access to the camps and to work hand in hand with the UN, ICRC, and non-government organizations to ensure all IDPs are accorded rights and care meeting the highest international standards. We are prepared to work with the Government to provide for the basic needs of all of its citizens, and abide by its commitment to return the majority of IDPs to their homes by the end of this year.

To truly defeat terrorism, the Government of Sri Lanka needs to begin to heal the wounds of the conflict and work toward building a democratic, prosperous, tolerant and united Sri Lanka and work toward justice and reconciliation for both sides. A lasting peace in Sri Lanka depends on Sinhalese, Tamils and all other Sri Lankans working together to achieve new power sharing arrangements that safeguard and promote the rights of all Sri Lankans.

Aside from the obvious edit to move the second paragraph in the draft text to the end of the final version, there are some interesting shifts in language and emphasis. A Wordle visualisation highlights some of these.

Visualisation of top 50 words in the draft statement.

Visualisation of top 50 words in the final statement.

Evident in the final version is a greater emphasis on the words ‘thousands’ and ‘conflict’. Each word occurs three times in the final statement, as opposed to two in the draft. The final statement notes, “This 26-year-old conflict has cost tens of thousands of Sinhalese and Tamil lives, uprooted countless Sri Lankans from their homes, left thousands maimed or wounded, and has brutally divided the nation.” Emphasis ours. The draft version does not flag those maimed or wounded. This can reflect US concerns over its own intelligence networks reporting on serious issues that the UN has now made public.

A more telling change is how the statement starts off. In the draft version, there is a strong emphasis on the LTTE and its terrorisation of civilians. It notes, “The United States welcomes the fact that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam LTTE an organization that has terrorized the people of Sri Lanka for decades, no longer control any territory within Sri Lanka”. In the final version however, the emphasis of this sentence is completely changed. It reads “The United States welcomes the cessation of fighting in Sri Lanka and the apparent conclusion to its long-running conflict”. No mention of the LTTE at all, and the inclusion of the word ‘apparent’ which prefaces ‘conclusion’ and again resonates with concerns the US may even at this time have had over the conduct of the government during the final stages of war.

The final statement also takes a markedly different tone to that in the draft. The draft notes that “To truly defeat terrorism, the Government of Sri Lanka must immediately begin to heal the wounds of the conflict…”. The final statement revises this to “To truly defeat terrorism, the Government of Sri Lanka needs to begin to heal the wounds of the conflict…” The word ‘immediately’ is erased. As noted on this website,

“We also use ‘must’ to express a strong obligation. When we use ‘must’ this usually means that some personal circumstance makes the obligation necessary (and the speaker almost certainly agrees with the obligation.)”

To avoid sounding too sanctimonious, the US eschews the use of ‘must’ and instead posits ‘needs’ which is, not just a simple grammatical shift. As this website notes, the use of “must” is when one imposes requirements and the use of “needs to” refers to the basic necessities of humans and also echoes, from a psychological angle, the “higher” needs of humans in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The obvious spelling error in this paragraph (Sir, meant to be Sri) is also corrected in the final version, underscoring just how meticulously every word and sentence is crafted for statements such as these. For example, in the final statement, the State Department makes it explicitly clear that the US is “…prepared to work with the Government to provide for the basic needs of all of its citizens…”. There is no record of this willingness in the draft.

Finally, the official statement contains eight sentences, whereas the draft has nine. Whereas the draft version calls on the government to “to open additional sites for IDPs to ease overcrowding in the existing facilities”, for whatever reason, the statement officially released from the US State Department has no mention of this.

A side by side comparison follows, with colour coding to help understand the major edits to the text.

• Visualising Sarath Fonseka’s key campaign issues and manifesto
• A first hand perspective of Sri Lanka’s largest IDP camp: Are they really ‘our people’?
• US Defence Attache’s observations on the end of war in Sri Lanka (Updated with US State Department response)
• A difference of 3 days: V. Anandasangaree on the killing of Tamil civilians in the Vanni
• Update on Menik Camp flooding: More images and reports from the ground

Image from ‘Rondo’

Image from ‘My Other History’

“We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue… And then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”

George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose

In early 2011, Tracy Holsinger of Mind Adventures Theatre Company and Jake Oorloff of Floating Space Theatre Company were awarded a grant from the Sunethra Bandaranaike Trust to interrogate, through theatre, the idea and theme of reconciliation. The resulting plays were staged in April under the title (Un)making Time and featured two compelling productions – ‘Rondo’ directed by Tracy Holsinger and Arun Welandawe-Prematilleke and ‘My Other History’, written and directed by Jake Oorloff. Though bound by a central theme and shared leitmotifs, the productions were fundamentally different. Brief impressions of both have been recorded on this site. Capt. Elmo Jayawardena said,

“Little plays like ‘My Other History’ wake us to re-think. The message was clear, it wasn’t in fancy drapes and opulent neon but in dimly-lit candle-light. It showed the soul of the matter, surrounded by looming shadows that stalked to scare the admittance of the reality in each of us”.

Award-winning human rights activist Sunila Abeysekara had this to say of ‘Rondo’,

“In the context of contemporary Sri Lanka, perhaps one expected a piece of theatre more directly related to our own current reality, in which the aftermath of a bitter and bloody war haunts our present. And perhaps not, actually. When the reality is too complex and difficult to even attempt to represent it, when the silences and absences that surround you are too enormous to be taken apart in a piece of theatre, allegory and fable become instruments of storytelling that challenge an audience to think about that reality in a different space, metaphorically”.

I watched ‘My Other History’ first, staged at the newly refurbished Park Street Mews. This is a familiar venue for Floating Space, where just a few months ago, the Company staged a re-run of ‘Gaza Monologues’. The renovated warehouse isn’t an ideal venue for theatre – there is in fact no proper stage, seating is limited and ventilation is poor, making it uncomfortable for both actor and audience particularly given the sweltering April heat. However, no one who saw ‘My Other History’ that I know of had any complaints. Running for just shy of an hour, the production felt much shorter. Admittedly, I went in a sceptic. Having sadly missed both runs of ‘Gaza Monologues’, my last experience of a Floating Space production was ‘War Reporter’ staged the Goethe, a production that at my most charitable I recall without expletives as being somewhat bizarre. Refreshingly different, ‘My Other History’ was solid theatre, an almost back to basics production pitched just right. Basic lighting and blackouts plus a single multimedia projector was about as complex as this got in terms of staging. The technical prowess of the actors was another matter. Ruhanie Perera was almost faultless on stage, bringing a mannerism, idiomatic expression and a finely nuanced understanding of a character negotiating multiple realities and identities to stage. I hadn’t seen Ruhanie actingbefore, and this was a rare treat also because so few of English theatre’s best directors act anymore. Thushara Hettihamu, who directed ‘Othello’ at the Wendt last year, turned out to be a better actor than director, but that’s not saying much. He was the weakest link in this production, though his expression at the play’s dénouement looking at the Jaffna mangoes – one pregnant with conflicting emotion that rents asunder a confirmed worldview and conviction – was very nicely done. For the rest of the production, he never really convinced us of anything he was trying to say or do, which differentiated his acting from his stage wife, with whom an audience could immediately empathise. His character was complex – a Tamil man, married young and with family, displaced multiple times, traumatised and sans any connection to the land of his birth or the property he owned, both destroyed by war. The character is unhinged, an outsider even to himself. Hettihamu tries hard to render this complexity, but ultimately fails, which is a pity. Amaz Irshad playing the son was good – stiff and self-conscious at times, but generally able to pull off someone searching for an identity to define himself linked to a geo-location to call home. Freya D’Almeida, who appears only briefly in person and is for the most part projected via video, is also a natural on stage. The stage sister of Irshad, she brought a natural flair to her character – never going into caricature, but portraying what so many of us who have gone abroad for higher studies have felt about identity and home from outside of Sri Lanka.

Tracy Holsinger’s ‘Rondo’ was in form and spirit, very different theatre. For starters, it wasn’t anchored to any narrative, location, process, person or event in Sri Lanka. This was a courageous move by the directors, and could have so easily gone awry. It didn’t. ‘Rondo’ works, and works so well, because it is not rooted in this country and because it affords the audience the space, using memory and perception, to complement or contest the production’s narrative, during and after performance. This is the second devised theatre production of Mind Adventures. The first, ‘Travelling Circus’, I loved. ‘Rondo’, however, is different. With ‘Travelling Circus’ the allegory was more direct, the locations more specific, the temporal cues more succinct, the characters distinctly local. With ‘Rondo’, Mind Adventures eschews the local to paint a more dislocated space and time. The cast was much larger than ‘My Other History’, and a few clearly stood out. Tehani Chitty as the overtly vampish yet deeply sensitive Tally brings to any production a quality of acting and stage presence that raises the bar for everyone else in it. Ruvin de Silva, a permanent member of Mind Adventures, gave his most impressive performance to date. Ruvin’s raspy rendition of The Watcher, a character of indeterminable intent and location, was as compelling as his memorisation of line after line of iambic pentameter, delivered with a fine brio. Subha Wijesiriwardena, another member of the Company, was equally memorable as O. O’s character, for those who know Subha, mirrors a passion for petitions and activism in real life. That said, Subha wasn’t just playing herself. O’s petition against marriage results in a solitary vigil – she is very alone, and soon realises it. The blackout that soon results reflects our own blacking out of so many inconvenient truths – from the murderers of Lasantha Wickrementunge who are still free to the outrageous 18^th Amendment to the constitution. The disdain towards O by those in control of the fictive town mirrors the violence against dissent in Sri Lanka by those in government. Subha in real life is no stranger to these stark realities, and brought to this production a nuanced rendition of a character that resonated with many who have, even in small numbers, stood very alone in Lipton Circus and elsewhere in Colombo, candles in hand, hope at bay. Venuri Perera is one of the most accomplished contemporary actors, and is almost overshadowed here by the stage-presence of others. And yet, the few times during the play she does appear as Marina, she commanded attention. Marina’s history and her future are framed choices beyond her as well as those in her control. Her character resonates with O’s submission that we control that truths we like to believe. Marina’s desire for revenge is countervailed by love for an outsider who implores her to not repeat history. We are left unsure whether this is a panacea, for it is unclear what Marina would have done had the character of the Good Man not died. And that is the power of this production, which never once offers easy resolution or answers. Mind Adventures wanted to avoid a play that was didactic or moralistic. They largely succeeded. It is doubly annoying therefore that the production on one occasion seemingly succumbed to self-doubt. Brandon Ingram’s rather long monologue in the middle of the production is most unfortunate, both because Ingram is an annoying feature in any production he is part of and because through his monologue, the audience is told what happened. Reconciliation is never a monologue and neither is history. Ingram as the Mason could have been trying to alert us to the dangers of writing and regurgitating, for example, the Mahavamsa’s three new chapters on Mahinda Rajapaksa, but woven into the rich texture of ‘Rondo’, this was a weak fit.

You cannot compare ‘My Other History’ with ‘Rondo’. The success of (Un)making Time was in getting two of Colombo’s leading English theatre companies to grapple with an issue as contentious as reconciliation. Commendably, both Floating Space and Mind Adventures have not shied away from the interrogation of war and peace. It may not be immediately evident, but it is tough on many levels to do this. The economics of the sponsorship of theatre in Sri Lanka do not support serious, critical productions and indeed, actively try to drown them out or shut them down. Both companies are in a constant struggle to find financial support for the theatre they are interested in performing and producing.

Beyond this, even post war, Sri Lankans understand reconciliation to mean very different things. My own bias towards a meaningful process of truth-telling, truth-seeking and accountability often jars violently not just with government, but with ordinary people who cannot immediately understand why an end to suicide bombs and a perceivable increase in the quality of life must be questioned. Here too, the productions succeeded, because what they opened up was a debate on reconciliation and not a particular worldview on it, or what it should be and mean. This independence from what I know to be the own sensibilities of the directors is commendable, and couldn’t have been easy. ‘Rondo’ and ‘My Other History’ are powerful because they force us to confront our own bias, our own self-constructed truths. It calls upon us to see that to propose any one idea of reconciliation is as bad as opposing or violently excluding another by someone else. The plays reveal that the contestation of multiple identities, both within and between individuals, deeply informs our perception of and approach to reconciliation.

And yet, it is sad that the State doesn’t hold as enlightened a view as the directors. Sri Lanka’s Public Performance Board censored ‘My Other History’. The Board’s somewhat convoluted vision, as expressed on its website, is to build “… a disciplined society, appropriate and comparative governing of public performance taking social responsibility to pave the way for a better Art.” Emphasis mine. A ‘disciplined society’ today is a subservient one that should not, for example, question the Mahinda Chintanaya in its written form, or its wild interpretations that range from a schizophrenic foreign policy to the greatest systemic decay in constitutional governance this country has witnessed since independence. ‘Social responsibility’ is taken today to mean the promotion of everything that conforms to the sensibilities of a regime reeked in Sinhala-Buddhist majoritarianism, and ill-placed as a consequence to even understand how violent in expression and deed this is to the multitude of other communities that make this country Sri, Sanskrit for revered. The lines that were censored in ‘My Other History’ referred to the civilian aircraft used the Sri Lankan Air Force to bomb Jaffna in the 80’s, which lobbed burning barrels of combustible material from the air resulting in more collateral damage of Tamil civilians than any great loss to LTTE combatants. The word the inhabitants of Jaffna used to call these aircraft and air-raids offended the sensibilities of those in the Public Performance Board, flagging a larger and more disturbing inability to even countenance, leave aside celebrate, multiple truths in art and theatre, or a history richer than the official versions recorded and promoted by government.

And yet this systemic failure is in fact supported by our indifference. Both sets of directors and producers, when speaking about their respective productions and completely independent of each other noted that they expected low audience figures. This was a revealing commentary on what is a marked disinterest in reconciliation as a process or idea in post-war Sri Lanka beyond that which is conducted and promoted by government for its own parochial ends. As Tracy Holsinger notes online,

“I suppose the biggest stumbling block for me as a director is that I don’t believe that there is any attempt at reconciliation taking place in our country right now, that we have even begun to understand the pragmatic realities that accompany the full implications of that word.”

The plays compel us to confront difficult realities. Many cried during the performance of ‘My Other History’. Sunila Abeysekara observed an audience that, even after ‘Rondo’ ended, continued to sit for a good minute or two, trying to digest what had just happened. In a larger sense, do we know what happened in Sri Lanka? Do we care enough to give a damn? ‘Rondo’ and ‘My Other History’ are lightning rods to help us recognise the need for and challenges of reconciliation beyond that which we are made to believe, and ourselves would often like to believe. Yet, even after seeing them, if we are still unwilling and unable to ask ourselves and others vital questions on as issue so central to a just and lasting peace, perhaps as Shakespeare’s Ceaser said, the fault lies not with the stars, but with ourselves.

• The Travelling Circus on video: Looking at war and IDPs through theatre
• In conversation with Tracy Holsinger
• The Travelling Circus: A different take on IDPs in Sri Lanka
• A brief impression of ‘Rondo’
• Floating Spaces: Theatre and censorship in Sri Lanka

Image courtesy Canadian Committee for Press Freedom

Two years ago in Ratmalana – the suburb of Colombo I grew up in – Lasantha Wickremetunge was murdered in broad daylight. Every weekend, as I pass the spot he was killed on the way to see my parents, I wonder how many others remember him today, the significance of that place, his work, life or legacy.

Photos taken from the memorial service held in the morning at Lasantha’s grave in Colombo. Courtesy Vikalpa

Groundviews published a number of articles, including poems by award winning poets, condemning Lasantha’s murder and celebrating his life. In Memoriam: Lasantha Wickremetunge, Editor in Chief, Sunday Leader is a collection of this writing, and the debates they generated that are still, tragically, resonant today.

Following Lasantha’s murder, our website transformed to black for a week, as a mark of protest and defiance. In March 2009, we reproduced in full a letter from Sonali Samarasinghe, herself a senior journalist at the Sunday Leader, to the Inspector General of Police, asking him to record ‘very important details’ known to the Sri Lankan President and at least one other senior government minister, based on the minister’s own admission, pertaining to the identity of her husband Lasantha Wickremetunge’s killers. Groundviews was told that no other newspaper in Sri Lanka was willing to carry this letter in full at the time. Writing again a year after her husband’s death, Sonali noted,

“It is indeed remarkable that despite the climate of total impunity for attacks on journalists and their places of work, there still exists that small but indomitable minority of scribes and editors in the ever-diminishing independent media… Our duty today then, is to extend to this minority of brave people all the support we can muster. We must speak out for freedom. If we fail in this duty now Lasantha, and all those who have paid the supreme price for the liberty that we ourselves enjoy, will have died in vain. History judges harshly, and future generations must not point to us and say it was we who failed them. We must not fail.”

Today, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) noted that it is,

“…appalled by the fact that the Sri Lankan government is doing nothing to solve this murder and in fact is clearly preventing the truth from coming to light. By blocking the investigation and by fostering a climate of impunity and indifference, the government has become an accomplice.”

Just one thing wrong with the RSF’s take. The Rajapaksa government was always an accomplice in this murder.

• Is the President hiding Lasantha Wickremetunge’s killers?
• Chandrika Kumaratunga responds to Dayan Jayatilleke’s comment on the murder of Lasantha Wickremetunge
• One year later: A murder unresolved, a government unashamed
• Protest march by lawyers over Lasantha Wickremetunge’s assassination
• The murder of Lasantha Wickremetunge and Sri Lanka’s future

“The first is that, in Sri Lanka, it would never be possible for any one to play “Julian Assange” and dare face an open media briefing in Colombo, to justify his or her claims on war crimes and torture. Right or wrong, excessive or not, that “democracy” is nowhere within the shores of Sri Lanka and would not be, for many decades to come. There is also no possibility of any lawyer, any public litigant, requesting Courts to “order” relevant authorities to begin investigations into allegations of crimes committed during war, as in Britain. Relevance if any on such democratic practices, is almost naught.” – From WikiLeaks to WikiLanka: War Is Definitely Savage Though “Accusations” Differ, Kusal Perera

The unprecedented release of US diplomatic cables (i.e. confidential briefings) by Wikileaks is, at the time of writing this, only just making it to global news media. Called Cablegate by Wikileaks (which was subject to a massive denial of service attack earlier in the day, but is now back online), it is quite simply the world’s largest classified information release, breaking a record Wikileaks itself had set earlier with the release of documents pertaining to the Iraq war earlier in 2010. As noted on Wikileaks,

“The cables, which date from 1966 up until the end of February this year, contain confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the State Department in Washington DC. 15,652 of the cables are classified Secret… The cables show the extent of US spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in “client states”; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for US corporations; and the measures US diplomats take to advance those who have access to them.”

What is interesting for us is that material about Sri Lanka, and from the US Embassy in Colombo, constitutes a significant section of the dataset. This includes thousands of cables classified Confidential, hundreds classified Secret and many more that are unclassified, but not obviously meant for public consumption.

Image courtesy Wikileaks, Cables by Origin

Contained in the dataset are 3,325 of cables from the US Embassy in Colombo, from 1986 to 2010. There is one cable on 19 May 2009 (the end of the war) and 4 on 26 January 2010 (the day of the presidential election in Sri Lanka). The last 3 cables are from 26 February 2010.

This visualisation / infographic by The Guardian gives an idea about how large the dataset is.

High resolution version here.

Meta descriptions and associated tags of all the cables from the US Embassy in Colombo can be accessed here. Groundviews has also compiled this list as an Excel spreadsheet. The full body text of the cables is part of the original data file that no one save the likes of the New York Times in the US, The Guardian in the United Kingdom and Der Spiegel in Germany have had access to at the moment. Wikileaks itself says that,

“The embassy cables will be released in stages over the next few months. The subject matter of these cables is of such importance, and the geographical spread so broad, that to do otherwise would not do this material justice.”

Groundviews visualised the classification tags of all the 3,325 cables since 1986.

CE stands for Sri Lanka. Cables on PREL (External Political Relations), PGOV (Internal Government Affairs), PTER (Terrorists and Terrorism) and PHUM (Human Rights) feature heavily, with ECON (Economic Conditions) also significant. Cables tagged with LTTE and Peace Process, unsurprisingly, also feature heavily.

However, from 1 January 2010 to the date of the last cables in late February, neither the tag LTTE nor peace process make a significant appearance. Revealingly, what the US is more concerned about during this time – which also saw the presidential election, the re-election of Mahinda Rajapaksa and in early February, the arrest of Sarath Fonseka – is human rights, internal government affairs and external political relations. Given that the war is now long over, it is also interesting that a significant tag in these cables is MOPS, military operations. One assumes these cables deal with military operations from the previous year(s). There is also a significant increase in the mention of EAID, or Foreign Economic Assistance, which when read together with the other key tags, suggests contextualisation of aid within analyses of internal government affairs and its military operations of yesteryear.

A full glossary of the tags can be accessed here.

Through Google, one can see an overview of the frequency of the cables over 2009 – 2010.

But it is not just through the US Embassy in Colombo that Sri Lanka falls into the spotlight in Cablegate. As reported in The Guardian, the US state department asked US diplomats around the world and at UN heaquarters to provide detailed technical information, including passwords and personal encryption keys for communications networks used by UN officials. This included,

“Views and intentions of UNSC, UN human rights entities, and members regarding Sri Lankan government policies on human rights and humanitarian assistance; UN views about appointing a Special Envoy for Sri Lanka.”

Clearly then, the US is very interested in war crimes in Sri Lanka. But what does this mean for human rights defenders and activists in Sri Lanka, particularly those who may have confidentially, or in fora under the Chatham House rule, divulged information reflected in these cables that even today, if revealed, places their lives at great risk?

The New York Times, in what it already has and will publish, first sent material to the State Department for them to react, though it did not always follow ‘recommendations’ for content to not be disclosed. Questions posed by readers to the NYT Editorial Board are essential reading in this regard. As noted in an editorial note justifying the publication of the Wikileaks cables, the New York Times avers,

“The Times has taken care to exclude, in its articles and in supplementary material, in print and online, information that would endanger confidential informants or compromise national security. The Times’s redactions were shared with other news organizations and communicated to WikiLeaks, in the hope that they would similarly edit the documents they planned to post online.”

But the point is that the dataset is even today available as a torrent file directly from Wikileaks. It is unclear to what extent Wikileaks itself has redacted information that can compromise the safety and security of individuals, and this includes human rights defenders. It is likely they have not, since it is impossible for any one organisation to make a judgement call about this kind of information without deep, localised knowledge and context. This means that over the coming weeks and months, there is a high probability that some of the cables – and these include cables from the US Embassy in Colombo – will place human rights activists, already under scrutiny and a Damoclean Sword at even greater risk.

Here again we recall Kusal’s words,

“The Obama and Cameron governments are no different to the Rajapaksa regime in denying and accusing those who throw up issues relating to war crimes and breach of international human rights law, where they conduct war. Their “national safety and security” rhetoric, politically allies with “patriotism” in Sri Lanka. They too therefore imply the “war against terrorism” they are involved in, “is a humanitarian war” in liberating the people from “terrorism” as Rajapaksa claimed his war was.”

On 22nd November 2010, tweeted:

For the US in particular, that which it would have loved to keep secret is now in the open. Not all of this is progressive. Much of it will in fact be very problematic and ironically, immensely helpful for the very governments Wikileaks seeks to name and shame. It raises the question as to whether what is in the public interest in the US, and defined by say the New York Times, is in the public interest for other countries. Without editorial oversight, mature judgement, curation and contextualisation, this information can be used in any number of ways to further erode democracy and human rights. How this will play out will be interesting, but there is no closing Pandora’s box.

• A tragi-comedy? The UN Advisory Panel and war crimes in Sri Lanka
• From draft to official text: Wikileaks reveals the US response to the end of war in Sri Lanka
• Sri Lanka and war crimes investigations: Nothing to Lose, but a World to Win
• WikiLeaks, Swiss Banks and Alien invasions
• From WikiLeaks to WikiLanka: War Is Definitely Savage Though “Accusations” Differ

Photo of kiri bath courtesy le sauce

Most performances of Dhananjaya Karunarathne’s brilliant script Last Bus Eke Kathawa (The Story of the Last Bus) are memorable not just because of the acting, but also because the audience becomes, without at first knowing it, part of the theatre. Chewing gum or boiled sweets are distributed to the audience before a performance begins. Most take one. Some take a lot. Everyone takes a bite. It is only at the dénouement of the play that the deeply troubling story behind the sweets is revealed.

Much like Karunarathne’s script, those who take one bite, or many from the world’s biggest rice cake (kiri bath) in Colombo today may come to realise that what they have eaten into is actually an outrageous obscenity.

Let get the facts. The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP), as of September 2010, was feeding,

• 25,000 IDPs in camps
• 50,000 IDPs in host families
• 110,000 people on 6‐month return packages immediately following resettlement
• 120,000 people on extended rations after the 6‐month return packages
• 300,000 children under the school meals programme in the Northern and Eastern Provinces
• 200,000 pregnant/nursing mothers and children under five years in the Northern and Eastern Provinces
• 35,000 people under regular Food‐for‐Work and Food‐for‐Training programmes
• 30,000 people under soft Food‐for‐Work programmes

Furthermore, the WFP is the sole source of rice for 96% of hosted IDPs in the Jaffna district. To reiterate, it is the United Nations through foreign aid and NOT the Government of Sri Lanka that is feeding hundreds of thousands of citizens in our country, even post-war.

Though exact figures are hard to come by, the WFP has noted that it provides about 400 grams of basic food needs per person per day for most IDPs, consisting of 200 grams of rice and 200 of wheat flour. So for a week, an IDP would consume 1.4kg of rice.

In comparison, the President’s record-breaking rice cake is 12,000kg. We can break that figure down in a number of ways. For the same quantity of rice,

• A single IDP could be fed nearly 165 years.
• An IDP family of 3 adults and 2 children could be fed for 41 years.
• As of 8 October 2010, even if half the remaining 25,000 IDPs in Menik Farm are adults, they would require 17,500kg of rice per week. Over just a single day, the President’s rice cake takes up nearly 69% of that requirement.

This obnoxious rice cake in Colombo will feed just a fraction of the children, women and men still displaced in Sri Lanka without proper food, and worse, many who don’t need to eat rice cake for their primary sustenance. Even if the President wanted to have his cake, could it not have been distributed amongst those far more deserving, and genuinely hungry? Leave aside the IDPs – often out of sight and out of mind for most of us. There are thousands in and around Colombo who, after recent floods, could have used rice rations.

Satiated somnambulism, particularly in the South, appears to be a good recipe for the President’s second term. Life does have an ironic way of imitating art.

• The Prime Minister’s call will exacerbate Horizontal Inequality in Sri Lanka
• Vaharai starves – International Community is Silent
• Breaking News: IDPs in Zone 3 and 4 in Menik Camp affected by flooding
• War IDPs
• Queue For Pongal Rice

We are no closer to nation building post war than we were during it, and before it. More accurately, we are no closer to the recognition that nation building needs to embrace the possibility, and arguably, desirability, of many nations in a State. This brings with it the complex challenge for a democracy to manage, based on the need for social cohesion, the centripetal and centrifugal forces of nation building – an enduring contest between inclusion and exclusion. These challenges can be in the domain of ideas, or they can be in the theatres of war, but they never go away. Nation building’s telos is not some nirvana of harmonious co-existence. It is a process, and like any other that involves history, emotions and multitudes of peoples, it will always be messy. And yet, how is it that we have failed so tragically to agree to a broadly shared vision – call it a supra-national, Sri Lankan identity – that in comparison India, even with its incredible diversity and difference, has managed to find in much greater abundance? Again, this is not to project a model of perfection to our Northern neighbour’s jai hind. It is to flag the singular absence of a Sri Lankan equivalent.

We have seen violent conflict in our country because we have dramatically failed to negotiate the ideas debate that undergirds nation building. Ideas that seek to define, devolve and sometimes deny determine a nation. This is a fluid dynamic, for ideas mutate as much as a context changes. There is no going back for example to ideas of nation building that dominated the politics of the 50’s and 60’s in Sri Lanka. These failed, and how! The challenge then becomes how we now foster ideas that flow from, but are not hostage to history. You can look at this through the lens of politics, education, language, media, rights, gender, law, identity, religion. Each will submit that nation building is founded first and foremost on that specific pillar, but the reality is what in Sinhala can be expressed as ‘mana sankalanayak’ – a bricolage of ideas. This is reflected in this volume, with contributors recognising that nation building is not a construct or process divorced from the politics and negotiation of identity and language. It also focuses on education, and in particular, the importance of a civic identity – how we see ourselves, and how we want to be seen. I believe ‘new media’ – media that leverages or is based on web, Internet and mobile technologies can help in this regard. In the vernacular, but also in English, leveraging new technologies can help those usually without voice take part in and feel part of debates that post-war, seek to define what and where we must go, be, avoid and emulate.

Often, these are definitions arbitrarily, self-servingly created and sustained by politicians, then justified by apparatchiks in various domains. The danger – much like WMD’s in Iraq – is that fiction risks, if it is repeated enough times being perceived as fact. Post war Sri Lanka’s nation building efforts smack of denial, decrying violently any counter-narrative to what is projected by government as the whole and only Truth. This is not just detrimental under the present regime, it sickeningly exacerbates a larger systemic problem – the rabid fear of what the Economist calls the “severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress”. Simply put, if we don’t have the confidence to embrace difference and its expression as the foundation of nation building, we risk seeing the mere absence of war as the best glue that binds our peoples. A timbre of debate that celebrates participation over domination, difference over conformity, creative conflict over supine compliance, critical questioning over mindless submission still eludes us.

The Editors Note to this volume suggests that nation building is “about upholding ethnical values, high standards in morality, about sharing and about redressing people’s grievances”. I feel it is also essentially about human dignity. We are used to seeing its tragic loss in the IDP camps post-war. These images endure, and it is a grave mistake to think that any meaningful nation building will occur in an ahistorical vacuum removed from the emotions and violence they generate today, and will continue to generate even outside Sri Lanka.

Perhaps nation building post war should tap into progressive ideas within diasporas. A growing number of groups such as Lanka Solidarity are forging progressive networks and generating ideas that contest and transcend what they have been told by elders, often those who left Sri Lanka in the early 80s, to be immutable facts. This can and must surely encourage radical thinking within Sri Lanka, for the most progressive processes on nation building will be despite governments and politicians. They will begin with dignity and respect, include diversity and tolerance, debate identity and difference and denounce hate and harm. Nation building’s success is when we see it not as some pretentious academic or partisan political construct, but a process that continuously defines what is the best of us – a proud peoples, at peace with ourselves, progressive in our outlook, courageous in our ideas, innovative in our governance and confident in our democracy.

• Strengthening democracy in Sri Lanka: An open invitation to generate fresh ideas
• Rajapaksa vs Fonseka: Tweedledum vs Tweedledee?
• Your opinion on a war ‘over in 3 weeks’ and a ‘post-LTTE’ Sri Lanka?
• Interview with Kanak Mani Dixit
• Let’s just be Sri Lankan men!

I recently asked the illustrious Bijayini Satpathy, Director of the Odissi Gurukul at Nrityagram how she negotiated the contest between tradition and modernity in her interpretation of Odissi dance – the oldest surviving dance form of India, but only revived less than a century ago. It is in fact a broader question concerning the arts – the perennial contest, not always civil or progressive, between what is acceptable to the old guard and creative reinterpretation, between the fight to retain the ‘essential’ and countervailing tendencies of artistes to attempt answers to and be shaped by the zeitgeist. The best artistes reside – with varying degrees of success and comfort – on the knife-edge of this contest, courting controversy by redefining their art and at the same time, demonstrating fidelity to form and tradition that undergirds a deft expression. Bijayini’s answer to my question was that innovation in form and expression occurs in two ways – through choreography and the expansion of what she called the vocabulary of dance.

‘Dancing for the Gods’, the recent production of the Chitrasena and Vajira Kalayathanaya staged at the Lionel Wendt reminded us that this contest is alive in Sri Lanka as well, and fully embraces both aspects Bijayini flags. Justifiably, reviews in the mainstream media have captured the nature of this performance in superlatives. The totality of the production placed both the dance form and the dance academy on a pedestal well above the theatrical dross usually staged at the Wendt. One of a few to have seen the performance during rehearsals, the final production was not so much new as it was refreshing, to see again through new sinew and light the same Promethean drive that animated Vajira and Chitrasena to reinvent dance.

And it is here that this production marks a break for the Kalayathanaya as well. As a small child, I was first told of Vajira’s and Chitrasena’s prowess (and the off-stage antics of greats like Amaradeva and Punchi Gura) by my grand-mother and mother, part of their dance ensemble decades ago. These received memories were anchored to strict tradition and rigour. Only much later was I to learn, as I read more into the history of dance championed by both Vajira and Chitrasena, that the forms they co-created were in fact reinterpretations of local ritual and dance traditions, interestingly accentuated through western influences. Though Chitrasena is often primarily identified with this creativity, Vajira too played a vital role. As Chitrasena himself noted in an interview,

“Vajira arrived at a distinctive landmark in her career with the production of Gini Hora in 1968. The conception and execution of this ballet were entirely hers. It was very modern in concept, no doubt influenced by the contemporary Western ballet. Her bold departure in the almost futuristic dance movements, the imaginative and sometimes startling use of lights combined to make it an electrifying experience.”

Here, over four decades ago, is a cogent example of the combination of choreography with the expansion of dance form contributing to an elevated production. It is precisely this spirit that resonates so vividly in the dance of Thajithanjani (Thaji). She is, simply put, the future of this dance company. This is not just because she is a very good dancer. It is also because she is young, and brings to stage a raw sensuality now largely missing from the older generation of dancers. This is necessary and inevitable. If the Chitrasena and Vajira Kalayathanaya wants to evolve beyond the reputations of its founders, Thaji is the keystone. In and through her is ritual pegged to history straining creatively with a vitality driven by youth, resulting in performances such as those in ‘Dancing for the Gods’ that are as technically precise as they are refreshingly ingenious.

This was evident in the performance of Kuveni, played by Upeka. The enactment of Kuveni’s inner turmoil was symbolic, for it is Thaji who animates Upeka’s feelings, an age difference of nearly forty years erased, nay complemented in a performance that so perfectly balanced what is already undeniably good about the Foundation with what will be great. And in this greatness also lies the rub. The Kalayathanaya’s fetish of family must not shy away from seeking and nurturing of talent beyond it. If Vajira and Chitrasena respectively embodied, in their heyday, the epitome of male and female form in dance, their dance company today is bereft of a male lead who is Thaji’s equal. This lacuna will deeply affect the nature of future productions.

Mitigating this to the extent possible will Heshma – Thaji’s first cousin. ‘Dancing for the Gods’ was Heshma’s vision. It is a compelling one – modern, invigorating, anchored to ritual and yet no hostage to it. Herself an accomplished dancer, the ability to bring to life a production through light, sound and staging that Heshma is gifted with has invariably elevated recent performances of the Kalayathanaya. She also realises that choreography on par with the best is vital to capture and retain the interest of contemporary audiences, who will appreciate technical precision and professionalism, but not necessarily connect with or know the rich history of the Kalayathanaya.

In Chitrasena, Art and Politics, an essay I wrote a few years ago I noted that,

“Chitrasena’s art probes our milieu and explores the most tenacious issues we are faced with in our construction of nation and State. We seek escape in his dance, but are acutely aware that through his art, the concerns he addresses are those with which we grapple with every day. There is no easy resolution in his performances to the issues he confronts.”

Upeka’s and Thaji’s performance of Kuveni in ‘Dancing for the Gods’ reminded me of these lines again. Here, the Kalayathanaya is able to define the essentially political through aesthetics that one can enjoy even though it portrays, if we care to look closely enough, an enduring anguish over the divide between promises made and delivered. Kuveni’s curse is very much alive in polity and society in Sri Lanka today, and also why the Kalayathanaya needs to engage more with the contemporary. This does not mean productions more overtly political or partisan, but the continuation and indeed, sustenance of revival and revision central to both Vajira’s and Chitrasena’s notion of dance – which run counter to dominant narratives today that seek to purge all ‘foreign’ influences from our cultures and performance spaces. This facile censoriousness, championed by the incumbents in power, also has a pernicious bent, suggesting that it is only some (fictional) ‘purity’ of yore, invariably seen through a Sinhala Buddhist lens, to which all art and cultural practices must also unquestioningly yield. It is, quite simply, inimical to that which Chitrasena and Vajira devoted their lives to.

‘Mana sankalanayak’ is an expression in Sinhala that captures well the Kalayathanaya’s contributions and approach to dance over the years – an amalgam of, inter alia, ancient ritual, western ballet, mime and Kandyan dance to the musical score of drummers no less varied or accomplished. After a dance recital in 1970, the French newspaper Dernieres Nouvelles d’Alsace noted that,

“Two hours of astounding geometry described in space by the bodies of the dancers – geometry of an infinite grace, of an extraordinary force, of an overwhelming charm, and of a harmony as subtle as it is perfect.”

Thaji and Heshma, both individually and together, represent a new chapter of this sublime dance company.

Much then is expected from them.

• Heshma Wignaraja: Thoughts on dance and choreography
• In conversation with the Chitrasena – Vajira Dance Foundation on theatre in Sri Lanka
• An appeal to support Kumbi Kathawa (Ant Story): A Dance Drama
• Interview with Vajira, Sri Lanka’s Prima Ballerina Assoluta
• In conversation with Bijayini Satpathy, Director of the Odissi Gurukul at Nrityagram

My conversation with Lakshan Dias, Programme Manager, Centre for Human Rights and Development, was pegged to the issue of human rights in post-war Sri Lanka. Lakshan was in the news recently when he appeared for Sarah Malanie Perera, an author taken in custody over bizarre circumstances. While we touched on this specific case, the interview also looked at broader legislation that undermined human rights in Sri Lanka post-war. I also got Lakshan’s take on the government’s repeated assertion that continued vigilance is vital to thwart any re-emergence of the LTTE, on account of which anti-terrorism legislation is justified even post-war.

We talked about the awareness of human rights amongst the general public, and as Lakshan noted, the polarisation of the Sinhala and Tamil communities over human rights issues.

Lakshan stressed the need for reconciliation, trust building and healing post-war, processes he noted that could not be addressed through a national security mindset. Lakshan warned that lack of public confidence – even in the South – over this government’s measures to look into allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity was the result of many other commissions of inquiry that in the past had virtually no meaningful impact on reparations, restitution and healing.

• The ramifications of the Channel 4 documentary ‘Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields’
• Seeing mobile phones as a basic human right
• Land in the North and East of Sri Lanka: Concern and confusion over Government circular
• ‘Heal Lanka’ by Ras Ceylon
• World Cup cricket aiding reconciliation in Sri Lanka: Fact or fiction?

Interview III – Dr. Harsha de Silva from Young Asia Television on Vimeo.

I recently spoke with Dr. Harsha de Silva, now a National List MP from the United National Party (UNP). I first interviewed Harsha a little over a year ago, on the context leading up to and the fall out of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) bail-out package and the general state of the Sri Lankan economy.

This time around we spoke about his entry into parliament, and one of the younger and more dynamic individuals entering for the first time into a chamber hitherto not known as a locus for progressive debate and policies. We spoke about Harsha vision for economic development and what he thinks needs to be done for better fiscal management. We also spoke about the UNP itself, and how as a new representative of the party, he feels about its crisis of leadership. Our discussion also centred around what Harsha feels is a new spirit of collaboration, respect and bi-partisan cooperation amongst younger members of parliament. Noting cordial relations with both Namal Rajapaksa, the President’s son and Basil Rajapaksa, the President’s brother, he seemed to believe that interest in a robust debate of ideas, eschewing venomous personal attacks, was a common ground shared between new entrants to parliament.

Watch the full interview for more interesting insights.

• Behind the IMF bail-out and the state of the Sri Lankan economy with Harsha de Silva
• In conversation with Prof. Sumanasiri Liyanage
• In conversation with Dr. Jayampathy Wickramaratne
• Post-war Sri Lanka: A conversation with Shanthi Sachithananthan
• “Sound is no substitute for argument”: Exclusive video of TNA MP M.A. Sumanthiran’s speech in parliament against 18th Amendment