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| Rajapaksa, a small-town lawyer without a university degree, is thus very different, |
As host of next month's
Commonwealth heads of state meeting, the president's human rights record
is under close scrutiny. For some he's a robust leader dealing with the
bitter legacy of civil war. For others he's a brutal despot
Down in the deep south of Sri Lanka,
where life usually moves at a leisurely pace, there is one small town
that is less tranquil. Hambantota – population 20,000 – is expanding
fast. There is a vast new deep-water port, built with $360m of borrowed
Chinese cash; a new 35,000-seater cricket stadium; a huge convention
centre; and a $200m international airport. A broad-gauge railway is
under construction. Powerful people have ambitions for Hambantota. None
is more powerful or more ambitious than President Mahinda Rajapaksa,
born nearby in 1945.
There is much construction in Sri
Lanka these days. The island nation was already one of the wealthiest in
south Asia but its economy had been held back by decades of civil
conflict. Now the war is over and growth rates, the government claims,
are touching 7%.
Last week a new section of motorway
was opened. Undeniably one of the best roads in a part of the world
where rutted single-lane highways still link many major cities, it joins
the international airport with Colombo, the political and commercial
capital. David Cameron, 51 other leaders and Prince Charles will drive
down its tarmac next month when they fly in for the Commonwealth heads
of government meeting.
The summit is controversial.
Rajapaksa, now in his eighth year of power, is much reviled – at least
in the west. The chief charges against him are serious: that he ignored,
condoned or even encouraged war crimes committed by Sri Lankan troops
in the final bloody phases of the campaign to crush the brutal
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (popularly known as the Tamil Tigers);
that he has again ignored, condoned or possibly even ordered a wave of
repression directed at those who contest his or his government's
authority; that he has made no serious effort to reach out politically
to Sri Lanka's Tamil minority; that he aims to ensure that his family's
grip on the island nation is without challenge for decades to come.
In short, it is alleged that under his
rule Sri Lanka is becoming a nasty, authoritarian quasi-rogue banana
republic. If there is some truth in many of the charges, the reality,
like the man, is more complex than appearances suggest. In person,
Rajapaksa is more avuncular than ogre. Tall, heavy-set, with an
astonishing bouffant as solid, glossy and black as polished coal, he
exudes the hearty bonhomie of the rugby player he once was. He remembers
names, slaps backs, happily strips to the waist when he visits temples,
and makes sure his guests, even journalists who have come to grill him,
have been offered a cup of tea. One reporter watched astonished as the
president went off to fetch biscuits. Such gestures reveal a canny
politician with a carefully cultivated folksy style.
Almost all Sri Lanka's
post-independence leaders have been smooth, English-speaking, often
educated abroad, and from Colombo or its environs. Rajapaksa, a
small-town lawyer without a university degree, is thus very different,
even if he does come from a political family. Rarely seen in western
dress and never in a suit, he is supposed to enjoy a traditional country
breakfast of buffalo milk curd and cane sugar treacle. His trademark
rust-brown neck scarf deliberately recalls the sweaty rags of farmers
and is supposed to represent the millet they sow. He usually speaks
Sinhala in public – though he can get by in English, albeit without the
fluency of many south Asian senior politicians, and has learned some
Tamil.
One problem for his critics is that,
though elections are marred by intimidation, violence and the misuse of
state resources, few deny that Rajapaksa's successive poll victories
reflect a genuine mandate. Even his opponents in Colombo admit that he
remains without a serious local political challenger. His heartland is
rural, conservative, Buddhist and dominated by the Sinhalese majority.
It was these voters that, as a
24-year-old novice politician armed with a law degree and a famous
father, he won over to enter parliament for the first time in 1970. The
same voters backed him in 2005 when, after a year as prime minister, he
stood for president, and still back him now. Part of the dislike, and
the fear, that Rajapaksa inspires in Colombo's political elite is his
unashamed exploitation of his status as a political outsider.
The emotions Rajapaksa inspires in
many Tamils, who comprise 10%-15% of the population, have their source
elsewhere, however. A key election pledge was to end the bitter war
against the Tamil Tigers, the de facto government in much of the north,
by negotiation. This stance shifted. Here his brother, Gotabhaya, the
defence secretary, played a key role, as he would do in the campaign to
come. During the 26 years of conflict there had been a number of truces,
most recently in 2002. These, the Rajapaksa brothers and the senior
military believed, were simply used by the Tamil Tigers to resupply and
reorganise. This time the Rajapaksas decided there would be no truce,
whatever the international pressure.
The military was expanded hugely. The
ceasefire collapsed entirely. One senior Sri Lankan official remembered
how, when a report of heavy army casualties arrived on the president's
desk, Rajapaksa called Sarath Fonseka, a junior general with a ruthless
reputation who had been picked to command the new campaign, to express
his concern. Fonseka said that if the president wasn't prepared to have
men killed, he would resign. He stayed.
Only during the last few weeks of the
conflict did the world begin to take notice of events in the rough,
scrubby plains of northern Sri Lanka. As they retreated, the Tamil
Tigers took hundreds of thousands of civilians with them. In a series of
interviews with the Observer last month, non-combatants spoke of chaos,
"no-fire zones" that were not respected by the army, and orders from
the Tamil Tigers to leave their homes. What is also clear is that the
Tigers made little effort to separate combatants from civilians,
particularly towards the end of the fighting, when huge numbers,
including fighters and the Tamil Tiger high command, were packed into a
tiny area between a lagoon and the sea. They may have shot some people
who tried to escape.
But the army bombed, shelled and strafed the area indiscriminately, killing the Tigers' leaders but also thousands of civilians.
"For many days we did not leave our
bunker. It was just shells all the time," one refugee from the town of
Puthukkudiyiruppu recalled last month. "Finally we decided we would die
unless we ran. So we waited until a break … The army was only a few
hundred metres away but on the way we passed maybe 25 or 30 bodies, men,
women, old people, children."
There are also reports, backed by
images shot on soldiers' phones, of large numbers of summary executions
of captured rebel cadres and some civilians. These are the alleged war
crimes that the UN wants credibly and independently investigated –
something the Sri Lankan government has so far failed to do. Rajapaksa
has called the allegations "propaganda" and accused the UN of doing the
bidding of "big countries" who "bully" little ones.
Such rhetoric plays well at home,
particularly from a man whose career has been built on an image of the
straight-talker from the backwoods, and can be useful globally too. No
one in Rajapaksa's neighbourhood is very keen on lectures from the west
either. "We can live with it, but the public finger-wagging doesn't help
anyone," said one senior Sri Lankan diplomat.
Since the end of the war other
concerns have intensified. There have been scores, some say hundreds, of
abductions. Journalists are systematically threatened. Trade unionists
and human rights activists receive regular "warnings" or are roughed up.
The constitution has been changed to allow Rajapaksa a third term.
Dozens of his relatives hold government posts, controlling, according to
one estimate, nearly half the state expenditure. A son is being groomed
as a successor. There are widespread allegations of graft and an
upsurge in sectarian violence.
"It is a situation of total state capture," said JC Weliamuna, a leading human rights lawyer in Colombo.
This is south Asia, of course, where
zero-sum politics, dynasties, massive development in the native towns of
incumbent leaders, marginalised minorities and corruption is
unexceptional. Tourist visits and revenues are up – though not by as
much as the government would like, or, probably, claims. Foreign
investment worth $2bn is expected this year, officials say. But even
regionally there are now worries about where Sri Lanka is headed.
These concerns will all be carefully
obscured next month. So far the only invited leader not attending the
Commonwealth summit is Canada's Stephen Harper. David Cameron says
"tough messages" are best delivered in person. Rajapaksa will no doubt
be his usual bluff and cheery self at the meeting. But if anyone is
delivering a tough message, it will be him.
- www.theguardian.com
