Ring tones of dirty politics
 The demand for government to tear up agreements with other parties is
not new in Sri Lanka. Back in 1958 there was the spectacle of Buddhist
monks doing satyagraha outside the Rosmead Place home of then Prime
Minister SWRD Bandaranaike, demanding that he tear up the Bandaranaike
Chelvanayakam Pact. The UNP, defeated in the polls and marginalized in
parliament, played a big role in manipulation of the opposition to the
B-C Pact. In the event the pressure on SWRD was so much that he finally
walked up to the verandah of this house and tore up the Pact.
Prophetic statement
 In doing so he made what was to be a prophetic statement that the
consequences of this tear up he was compelled to do, would be seen and
felt twenty years later. It was the same SWRD who decades before
independence proposed a federal system for this country, once it
obtained freedom from colonial rule.
Since that fateful day in 1958 when the B-C Pact unceremoniously was
torn up, the many other proposals made, agreements entered into, and
legislation passed such as the 13th Amendment, to address the issue of
power sharing in Sri Lanka have gone much further than that agreement
between SWRD and SJV. Yet we are today facing a similar demand over the
Ceasefire Agreement, which concluded its inglorious fifth year last
week.
Later in the early 1960s we also saw abrogation of the Dudley-Chelvanayakam
Pact, which also sought to address the same issue that later developed
into the current war of separation, waged so brutally by the LTTE.
Obviously there are people who take delight in seeing agreements torn up
with little regard for the consequences that may follow. One does not
know whether those who make this demand suffer from any psychological
condition that has been identified. That there is a perverse delight in
the tearing up of pacts is noticed in the UNPs, and particularly Ranil
Wickremesinghes taunt to the Government asking why it does not tear up
the CFA.
What the UNP, which manipulated the tear up of the B-C Pact in 1958,
and could not go through with its D-C pact in the 60s, is daring the
Government to do is tear the CFA which was signed by none other than its
own leader.
There is no doubt the UNP is just now in tear-up mode, with its new
chairman Rukman Senanayake rushing to tear up the UNP-SLFP MoU no sooner
than 18 members of their party took office in the Rajapaksa Government,
which is seen by many is an extension of the MoU.
The UNPers, including Ranil W who ask why the government does not
tear up the CFA, as some of the campaigners for the President said would
done once he is elected, has a strange belief in adherence to election
promises. Was it in keeping with any election promise that the UNP
leader signed such a dangerously flawed CFA with the LTTE? And, did he
have any mandate to play ostrich as the LTTE kept on flouting the CFA
from the day it was signed? If the UNP has any claims to responsibility
in national politics, and is not blind to the repercussions of a
unilateral abrogation of the CFA that it imposed on the country, it will
urge the government to go on with it, and not play chicken with the
Government over tearing it up. Yet, such a sense of responsibility is
not the stuff of these elephants from JR in 58 to Ranil in 07.
There is an interesting response from the Government, to these shrill
cries from those seeking to gather public support for questionable
politics by demanding the immediate tear up of the CFA. The rhetorical
question asked is: What there left to tear up in an agreement that has
been torn nearly 8000 times? If the CFA had so many loopholes in it as
to allow a whole packs of tigers to go through it from the time it was
signed, what is the big deal in carrying out a symbolic tear up act
today?
Paper
Everyone is now agreed, with the exception of the SLMM and Erik
Solheim, that the CFA is nothing but the paper it is signed on. Even
this can be questioned when one considers the nearly 8,000 violations of
it by the LTTE.
It's not only a badly battered piece of paper that has not prevented
the LTTE from carrying out its terrorist atrocities against the people;
but has also not stopped the Government from responding to the LTTEs
terror, to be point of driving them out of most of the East. That the
CFA is a dead letter is conventional wisdom, so why spend so much
political energy demanding its destruction.
Self destruct mode
It was put on self destruct mode from the time it was signed by Ranil
W and Prabhakaran, with the blessings of Erik Solheim. The CFA is as
dead today as the Indo - Lanka Accord of 1987 however much some would
like to revive it or claim its still breathing. Why is it that those who
today want the burial of the dead CFA, especially the bell-boys in red,
not demand the burial of the Indo-Lanka Accord too, which they opposed
much more vehemently and violently too, when it was signed? It is
obvious these bell-boy leaders take a macabre delight in destruction,
death and burial. Yet, the ring tones of dirty Politics of the Burial
Ground can have little relevance to the day-to-day lives of our people.
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