CRISES AND CHOICES!

Crises and Choices.......................by Tisaranee Gunasekara

Bishop Desmond Tutu defined post-Apartheid South Africa as a ‘rainbow nation’. Barrack Hussein Obama is a ‘rainbow man’ who synthesises in himself many ‘antithesis’ and demonstrates, with his qualities and achievements, the value of diversity, both to individuals and to nations.

Mr. Obama, the son of a White American mother and a Kenyan father, once compared a gathering of his extended family to a meeting of the United Nations. The election of such a man to the Presidency of the United States demonstrates that any civilisational divide can be bridged and that the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ need not be the future of the world any more than it was the world’s past.

Before the election of Mr. Obama it was easy to deride, dislike and attack America. This was especially so during the Bush years; ignorance and arrogance made up an unpleasant combination, which even traditional American allies found intolerable. If John McCain and Sarah Palin won, the worst perceptions and expectations of the world about America would have been realised. With America’s tectonic shift towards égalité and fraternité, the global mood too underwent a transformation, from contempt to admiration, from dislike to respect. "This week Americans voted in record-smashing numbers for many reasons, but one of them was an abhorrence of how their shining city’s reputation has been tarnished. Their country will now be easier for its friends to like and harder for its foes to hate" (The Economist – 7.11.2008).

Successful empires were the ones which accepted diversity. Rome was the byword but other successful imperial states, from Persia through the Caliphate, the Ottomans and the Moguls to the British embraced diversity and practiced tolerance to various degrees. The failure of imperial Spain was sourced mainly in her intolerance; her ceaseless attempts to impose uniformity enthroned unreason and killed creativity, paving the way for external defeats and internal unravelling. Because of the election of an African American to the Presidency, America’s global standing and her moral right to lead have been immeasurably strengthened (an irreverent aside: one already misses George W Bush, that ‘divider’ with a ‘bunker mentality’, in the words of the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd). Mr. Obama’s victory embodies the defeat of the irrational and the triumph of reason and progress. Since hegemonic empires set political and economic trends, America’s return to the ethos of Enlightenment offers a modicum of hope for the entire mankind, in the current conjuncture of multiple crises.

Two Zeitgeists

The historic victory of Barrack Hussein Obama reflects a new Zeitgeist, characterised by diversity, tolerance and pluralism. Colin Powell evoked this new spirit in his response to a question about Mr. Obama’s religious affiliations: "No the correct answer is Obama is not a Muslim. But the really right answer is what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven year old Muslim American kid believing that he or she could be President?" (quoted in The Guardian – 19.10.2008). As the world celebrated the election of America’s first Black president, the CNN asked its global viewers whether a member of a minority community can become the elected leader of their countries. The answer, in the absolute majority of cases, would be a resounding no. That step towards racial equality, that ability to transcend historical divides, that capacity to trust a member of a minority community with executive power which made Mr. Obama’s victory possible would seem unappealing, if not dangerous, to most countries in the world, including Sri Lanka. After all, in 2004 we could have had our Obama moment. Lakshman Kadirgamar was a Sri Lankan patriot, a Tamil whose commitment to an undivided Sri Lanka and whose opposition to the Tigers (who eventually killed him) were beyond doubt. But Mr. Kadirgarmar was not a Sinhala Buddhist and that fact was potent enough to bar him from premiership in favour of a far less able and intelligent Mahinda Rajapakse.

‘Sinhala Only’ was not just a language policy. It symbolised a particular vision of Lanka premised on linguistic and ethnic inequality – with primacy accorded to the Sinhalese and second class status to non-Sinhalese. There is thus a clear line of descent between the ‘Sinhala Only’ and the majoritarian supremacist stances of some of the political and military power-wielders of today. Three days after the election of Mr. Obama, a large number of Lankan Muslims protested against the incendiary utterances of Minister Champika Ranawaka who claims that Sri Lanka is a Sinhala country and the non-Sinhalese are mere guests, living on sufferance, without any inherent rights. The fact that a cabinet minister is articulating such extremist and anti-democratic views publicly, with impunity, is a sign of the times. Equally expressive of the Zeitgeist of the Rajapakse era are the remarks by the current army commander, Gen. Sarath Fonseka: "The truth is that this country is ruled by Sinhalese for centuries and centuries. China is ruled by Chinese, England by the Englishmen and Germany by Germans. This is because these countries are ruled by the majorities…. This will prevail today and even tomorrow…. What is wrong by saying that this country, which is historically ruled by the Sinhalese will be ruled by the Sinhalese" (The Sunday Observer – 5.10.2008).

The Army Commander’s version and vision of Sri Lanka has many critics, but the LTTE is not among them. "There is nothing wrong in Sri Lankan Army Commander wanting to tell his young Sinhala officers and soldiers, who are risking their lives everyday to save their motherland that there is a Singhala nation called Sri Lanka exist which totally belongs to the Singhalese. On the same token the very same people do also have to accept the fact that Tamils, mainly the young Tamil soldiers need to be told that they are fighting to free their once flourished Tamil Eelam nation from the clutches of the Singhala state. They need to be told that Tamil Eelam belongs to Tamils (Tamil Eelam News Service). This Tiger stance is hardly surprising. If Tamils are equal to Sinhalese in every way, if they and other non-Sinhala Buddhists are accepted as co-owners of Sri Lanka, there would be no justification whatsoever for separation. That is why the Sinhala supremacist words and deeds of the regime would strengthen the LTTE, giving it a new lease of life, despite the military defeats.

In less than two weeks Vellupillai Pirapaharan will make his Mahaveer Day speech. With one eye on Tamilnadu (the state assembly of which greeted President Rajapakse with a unanimous resolution demanding a ceasefire on behalf of ‘700 million agitated and angry Indian Tamils’) and the other on President elect Obama, the LTTE leader is likely to highlight the Sinhala supremacist nature of the Rajapakse project - because that is the best justification for a separate Tamil state. And thanks to the likes of Sarath Fonseka and Champika Ranawaka, Sri Lanka is assuming the appearance of a racist state, a state that seeks to keep its minorities as second class citizens. Such a country will be easy to oppose and harder to defend, as America was in the Bush years.

Fast Forward to the (economic) Past


Barely 24 hours after Barrack Obama was declared the President elect of the US, President Mahinda Rajapakse presented a budget which made a decisive shift towards a disastrous economic past – the era of 1970-77.

Ill planned import substitution is the core of Budget 2009. The government has imposed high import taxes on a number of products which are not being produced locally in adequate quantities, from milk and sugar to paper and onions. This will result in high prices, scarcities and shortages and low quality products. The sensible policy would have been to adopt a gradualist approach, and increase import taxes in stages, in proportion to the increases in domestic production. The massive tax hikes will also place many consumer durables, from fans to refrigerators and televisions, beyond the reach of lower middle and middle classes, turning them into luxuries affordable only to the rich and the politically connected.

The reduction of the prices of fuel and of bus fares provides the economically beleaguered masses with a welcome relief. On the negative side funds allocated to health and education have been reduced. Such cuts are particularly indefensible given the granting of Rs. 600 million for the resurrection of Mihin Air and the proposed wage hike for parliamentarians. As the recent landmark Supreme Court judgement revealed the government has been using funds earmarked for development activities to keep its ministers in clover: "….nearly Rs. 21 billion have been transferred by the Treasury officials during the period from the ‘Development Activities Programme’ to other activities… many of them have been for foreign travel, purchase of vehicles and other miscellaneous items of expenditure far removed from ‘Development Activities’".

Sri Lanka is facing a financial scissors crisis consisting of rising expenditure and falling income. The regime’s irrational and inane attempts to deal with this by limitless borrowing have led the country into a debt trap. As the Supreme Court warned in the above judgement, "…the government was caught in a veritable ‘debt trap’ in which debt service payments for the current year were met by raising further debt in that year thereby increasing the debt service payments for the succeeding year. These facts have been kept away from the public…. The staggering debt service payments of Rs. 722 billion for the financial year of 2009 reflect an accumulation of public debt over the past year that has resulted from irresponsible and reckless handling of public finance by the Treasury and the failure on the part of parliament to exercise full control over public finance…"

The Supreme Court has ordered the government to take steps to rectify these errors, which are in violation of the Constitution. Otherwise the two relevant sections – clause 2(1) and 6(1) will have to be passed with a two thirds majority. The government is thus in a bind. If debt service payments are included in the budget in toto, the budget deficit will increase exponentially. If the loopholes used to misuse development funds are closed, maintaining the ministers in the style they have become accustomed to may become harder. On the other hand a two-thirds majority will be impossible to obtain under the current conditions. That is the government’s dilemma, and how the President deals with it will determine the country’s political landscape in the coming year.

Globally commodity prices have fallen sharply; the Reuter’s CRB index fell by 22.3% in October, the biggest drop in the index’s 48 year old history. Many economists are moving beyond the R word (Recession) and mentioning the D word (Depression) in characterising the evolving global economic crisis. The Great Depression gave birth to the New Deal in the US and brought Hitler to power in Germany. Sometimes crises propel countries and people forward, enabling them to remake themselves more progressively. This is the path the American electorate opted for, with the election of Barrack Hussein Obama as President. But crises can also make countries become more insular and more xenophobic, more prone to search not for innovative solutions but for convenient scapegoats, to retrogress rather than progress. Will that be the fate of Sri Lanka?

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