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| Sunday, 29 May 2005 |
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Features |  |
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The federal challenge The Federal Option for Sri Lanka by Prof. Kumar David (2005) Free Trade Union Development Centre, Colombo. "Our home, and our extended civic family, have been in crisis for decades. Having lived in crisis, the crisis has become our home. Worse still: the crisis is contagious: It becomes generalised, internalised and inheres. Nietzche once said that if you continue to gaze into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you. Having dwelt within the crisis, the crisis dwells within us." Dayan Jayatilleka in The Crisis Cage Our social and political crisis is the crisis of the state. The solution therefore must lie in the nature of the state. Thus the challenge is to restructure the state in order to defuse the crisis that we are living in. Professor Kumar David asserts that federalism is perhaps the answer to the crisis of our state. And if we replace our current unitary state with a federal structure, we can begin the journey back from the brink. Our crisis is however not merely in the configuration of the state. It goes deeper. It is a reflection of the extent to which the state has been instrumental and given itself to be manipulated. At a political level what matters is the fact that the state has been abused and used by one segment of society, against another segment of society. Because certain political elites have used the state against the Tamil-speaking people, the latter have become progressively alienated from it. This alienation process has a long history, a history of legislative differentiation, administrative discrimination and finally state-sponsored violence. These streams converged in 1983, when after six years of anti-Tamil invective and violence President J. R. Jayewardene said: In July of that year, almost as a reiteration of that statement, the Jayewardene-Premadasa Regime unleashed a devastating campaign of violence against Tamils, right across the country. In the words of the International Commission of Jurists "for day after day Tamils were beaten, hacked or burned to death on the street, on buses, on trains - sometimes in the sight of horrified tourists." As a concomitant, the Jayewardene-Premadasa Regime then went onto enact the Sixth Amendment, aimed specifically at driving out of Parliament the elected representatives of the Tamils and thereby disenfranchising them. The result was a complete alienation of the Tamils from the state and their mass exodus from the island, as Tamils in their thousands took refuge overseas. It was at this point in history, that the global community, realising the extent of the alienation of the Tamil-speaking community, supported the introduction of international mediation in an effort to work out a constitutional solution that would address the concerns of an alienated Tamil-speaking community. First India and now Norway have been playing this role. The consensus that has emerged over the last two decades is that greater devolution of power from the centre must form the basis of a new constitutional arrangement. Despite its title, Professor Kumar David's book, is not prescriptive. Rather it seeks to initiate and contribute to a discussion about the nature and form of a future Sri Lanka state. His plea is not for a specific constitutional arrangement. He is more concerned with the promotion of a new political climate, one that can take over from the climate of war and conflict that has prevailed in the last quarter century. Professor David realises that a generation of civil war has at one level left Sri Lanka politically exhausted and bereft of enthusiasm for political debate. But such debate and discussion are imperative if the ceasefire between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Government of Sri Lanka is to be consolidated and carried to its next stage. Towards this end Professor David has opened up for discussion, all of the key issues pertinent to a constitutional settlement. For instance there is an important discussion on the number of units a future state should contain. Should they be eight, as in the case of the extant Provincial Council make-up, or just two - a northeast and a southwest? And he lays out the pros and cons. In order to draw in as many models and examples, he brings to our attention the electoral arrangements of not just the major states or traditional models, not just the UK, US, India and France, but less known though perhaps more pertinent prototypes: Japan, Thailand, Philippines and Korea. He does not shy away from the difficult issues. While refusing to be dogmatic, he explores the complexities that the Eastern Province presents. He says "nobody has a monopoly on creative ideas or the whole truth... if this document gives rise to a healthy, reasoned and constructive discussion, it would have more than served its purpose." Professor David has had a life-long association with the Sama Samaja movement to which he has contributed as one of Sri Lanka's foremost Marxist thinkers and writers. Over the years he has made a significant contribution to a Marxist understanding of the national question. The book has been written for and published by the Free Trade Union Development Centre, 11/36A, Ananda Rajakaruna Mawatha, Punchi Borella, Colombo-10, as a seminal document for discussion among trade unions. It attempts therefore to take the discussion of a political solution to the Sri Lanka crisis, outside the fora to which it has been confined and make it the subject of discussion among the wider community. - Jayantha Somasundaram |
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