Basil Fernando
A seven-year-old child, Pushpakumara Wijekoon from Kegalle, went to
school as usual and left around 1 pm.
He walked to the junction where his father
usually picked him up on his cycle to bring him home. As the child did not see
his father, he started walking back home. The distance was about a mile. His
brother, who was sixteen years old, reported to his father at about two that
Pushpakumara had not come home. The father rushed home and thereafter they
started searching for the young child. As they could not find the child after
much searching, they complained to the police. The police searched with their
trained dogs. The dogs stopped at an abandoned house and the police entered.
There, they found the dead body of the seven-year-old, strangled with his own
school tie, and with his clothes removed. The police are now looking for
suspects.
The incident has caused shockwaves in villages
around Kegalle. The general suspicion is that the child had been sexually abused
before he was strangled.
While the killing of a child after abuse may not
be a frequent occurrence, the spread of child abuse is in epidemic proportions
has led to many statements from child protection authorities, religious leaders
and non-governmental organizations. However, the government has ignored all such
expressions of concern as it, as a general rule, ignores every kind of protest.
What the people of Kegalle have learned through the tragic death of
seven-year-old Pushpakumara are the consequences of such defiance of protest by
the government.
The government has entered into a course of
action through the 18th amendment which has deprived it of the capacity to
control crime and create a social milieu where criminals fear committing crime
due to serious consequences that would follow. When the criminals have no fear
of the consequences of breaking the law, anything is possible. That is exactly
what has happened in this instance.
Recently, in an interview by the 24-year-old
Russian girl Victoria Tkacheva, who was raped and seriously abused while her
partner Khuram Shaikh was assassinated, she complained of the impunity enjoyed
by the perpetrators of this heinous crime. She vowed to fight back. It would not
be an easy fight. The chief suspect is Sampath Chandra Pushpa Vidanapathirana,
the head of the local council in Tangalle. He, like Duminda Silva and very many
others, enjoy the patronage of the Rajapaksha family, who, without any kind of
embarrassment, protect “their” criminals. The overall policy of the government,
entrenched by the 18th Amendment to the constitution itself, is to be
crime-friendly.
A crime-friendly government is, in the normal
understanding of governments, a contradiction in terms. Thomas Hobbes (5 April
1588 – 4 December 1679) observed that a government comes into being by way of
agreement between people and the sovereign, where the sovereign takes over the
obligation of protecting people from the crimes they commit against each other.
Ever since, the development of the theory of the state has emphasized the
primary obligation of the state as being to prevent crime and to ensure security
for everyone within its jurisdiction. Thus, a government that is crime-friendly
is an abnormality. It suffers from a malignant disease which is destroying
itself.
When criminals perceive that the government is
crime-friendly, they lose the fear of committing crimes. From this, daring
comes. The heyday of the perverts. Lawlessness begets perversity. How far such
perversity has gone in Sri Lanka is evidenced by this child’s tragedy. However,
it is not confined to sexual perversity. What has been happening in the stock
markets and in almost every sphere of life in Sri Lanka demonstrates how
lawlessness and perversity join hands and reign in Sri Lanka while the
government, as a matter of policy, sticks to the course of impunity.
Political implications of lawlessness and
perversity
When the law is not a major concern for the
government, democracy simply cannot exist. The essence of democracy is to make
the government accountable and responsible for its citizens. The only mode
within which the state could be held responsible to its citizens is through the
law. In fact, the test of responsible citizenship is also the observance of the
laws that hold a community together. When the state itself becomes
crime-friendly, then the law has no place in that society and the result is
disintegration.
In Sri Lanka, disintegration is often understood
only in terms of ethnic relationships. A nation divided in terms of ethnicity is
a common theme since the 1956 language policy and the racial riots that
followed. However, what everyone has ignored is a far deeper disintegration of
society that is taking place in Sri Lanka due to the failure of the state to
uphold law.
This division disintegrates all communities,
including even small village communities. What the people in Kegalle are
experiencing in terms of the brutal murder of this seven-year-old child is the
disintegration of morals and societal protection of each other, which has gone
out of all bounds. When parents have to fear sending their child to school
because of distrust of their own neighbors, it indicates a societal crisis in
its worst forms.
In such a situation, what could democratic
practices such as elections mean? Within a lawless society it is not possible to
hold free and fair elections. All claims of such fairness are nothing more than
hypocrisy. The government organizes such things as elections merely as a game to
deceive the population and to create some semblance of legitimacy for itself.
Lawlessness contaminates everything and acts like leukemia on the bloodcells of
a human being. That is where we are.
The major issue on which public protests should
emerge in the context of Sri Lanka is the issue of lawlessness. No family can be
safe, as shown by this incident, until this great monster is defeated. However,
as people like Victoria Tkacheva are learning, defeating this monster is not an
easy task. A crime-friendly government uses crime itself in order to ensure its
survival. However, if Sri Lanka is to cure itself of the depth of disintegration
it has been facing for decades, then the people themselves have to find their
own solutions to face this kind of situation. When mythology speaks of great
monsters and the heroes who fought against them, what they symbolically show are
the kind of situations that Sri Lanka is faced with now. The government, which
should be the protector, has turned out to be the monster that deprives people
of security.
When bodies of the children of Ambilipitiya were
dug out of a grave inside an army camp, one of the mothers present was quoted
saying,” this is worse than animals”, referring to the perpetrators. Pushpa
Kumara parents will join, tens of thousands of others who would utter similar
words. A Dutch journalist made a documentary which he entitled Murder
Land referring to Sri Lanka in the late eighties. Title fits even now. It
may remain so , as long as the government remains crime friendly.
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About AHRC: The
Asian Human Rights Commission is a regional non-governmental organisation that
monitors human rights in Asia, documents violations and advocates for justice
and institutional reform to ensure the protection and promotion of these rights.
The Hong Kong-based group was founded in 1984.