Seeing, is believing

'Seeing, is believing' is an old English adage that argues that it is easier to believe in the factual nature of something once one has seen it in the physical form whether as an image or as an activity. Relevant to a legal action last week is also another adage: that 'justice must not only be done, but must be seen to be done', which derived from a 1920s British court ruling.

Both these sayings are relevant to us because of a recent court ruling. Last week, a court convicted a former senior Police officer in what might become a landmark case in this country's modern legal history. A former Deputy Inspector General of Police and several others were convicted for murder of the first degree over a killing of a businessman.

The court sentence remains to be challenged in appeals. But it is historic in that very few members of either the police or the security forces have been found guilty and given strong sentences in a country with a long history of violent upheavals in which there have been literally thousands of cases of deaths, disappearances, torture, and other violations of laws where the finger of suspicion has been directed towards the very guardians of law and order and, national security.

Sri Lankans were, at one time, proud of their country's liberal democratic practices. That was long ago.

In recent decades, Sri Lankans have had to live in a worsening environment of brutality and cynical violence in which the perpetrators have been seen to be 'subversives', 'terrorists' and 'gangsters' on the one side as well as members of the armed forces and police on the other. By the 1990s, a succession of insurgencies and a counter 'dirty war' had already brought the citizenry to what appeared to be a near-crisis situation in terms of human rights and political repression.

It was the most recent decade, however, that brought Sri Lankan society its worst nightmare in which the ordinary citizen became trapped between insurgents and political murderers on the one hand and the officers of the law on the other who could be more relied on to take the side of the murderers rather than the side of the victims. Indeed, this nightmare became a farce as well when the government of the day itself made 'special inquiries' and even so-called presidential commissions into a kind of crude art of evasion of accountability and cover-up of murder and plunder.

The political changes of January and August this year were expected to herald a change in the environment of law and order and national security as well. The public had high expectations of the prosecution of plunderers and political assailants. But as the months dragged on, while investigations have been initiated by the hundreds, the actual number of prosecutions are very few and even those seem to have involved more the minnows rather than the sharks. The justice that the people have demanded through their emphatic electoral vote, is yet to be imposed in any convincing form.

The people have been waiting to see justice being meted out and the convictions in the Shyam murder case are the first. More such justice must be seen to be done if the people are to believe that their political choice in January and August this year have been the right ones.

Remembrance: military and militant

November in Sri Lanka has become the month of remembrance of various 'heroes' and 'martyrs', in addition to the passing on of our near and dear. In addition to 'All Souls' day, we also remember the 'war dead' of the First and Second World Wars - thanks to our colonial heritage.

The most recent commemorations that have begun to be observed in November are somewhat unconventional in that those being remembered are mainly young people who fought un-recognised 'wars'. They are the combatants in the insurgencies of both the North and South.

Barely had our first such 'insurgency' been crushed, bloodily, in the South in 1971, than, in 1975, there began another insurgency in the North. While the southern violent unrest abated for the next two decades, the insurgency in the North did not abate.

The secessionist insurgency grew over the decades - prompted, no doubt, by the clumsy force resorted to by successive national political leaderships - into a full-fledged internal war that almost tore apart the Sri Lankan State. At one point foreign military forces from our neighbour, India, also joined in the efforts to militarily suppress what is, ultimately, a burning and un-resolved political conflict among social groups within the country.

Today, while governments - Sri Lankan and Indian - remember those thousands of armed forces personnel who died in our internal wars, it is left to the citizenry, young and old, and also some political movements, to remember those thousands, if not tens of thousands, who were also killed in battle or on the sidelines in these internal wars. These dead are those who died fighting for social causes in which they believed or were led to believe.

Whether these dead - as with the armed forces, mostly youth - are called 'martyrs' or 'heroes' is only a matter of political perception. What is most crucial, however, is that they are all people of this country or of a friendly neighbouring country. They are people whose living and dying are real and cannot be 'deleted' as they can be done in the virtual reality of war gaming. Hence, the importance of Remembrance.