28 April 2022 02:53 am Views - 400
We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
- Elie Wiesel, in his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech (Dec. 10, 1986)
More than 6.9 million people voted for the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) candidate Gotabaya Rajapaksa at the November 16, 2019 presidential election and he was sworn in as Sri Lanka’s 8th executive president on November 18, 2019 while more than 5.8 million voted for the SLPP at the August 5, 2020 general election and Mahinda Rajapaksa was appointed Prime Minister. Subsequently, the newly appointed government managed to garner a two-thirds majority in Parliament with the support of a few opposition parliamentarians for the passage of the 20th Amendment, which vests in the current President, absolute political power.
In such a backdrop, the fall from grace of the once all-powerful President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his government is even more telling. It also underscores the fact that when governance goes haywire and the economy is mismanaged because of incompetence and inefficiency resulting in burden after burden being heaped on helpless people; it is not surprising to see tens of thousands of them coming out into the streets to express their anger, frustration and displeasure.
Long queues at petrol sheds to purchase diesel, petrol and kerosene, a severe shortage of food, milk powder, medicinal drugs, medical equipment, domestic gas, and fertilizer; daily power cuts, lost livelihoods and the skyrocketing cost of living provided the necessary catalysts for the unprecedented countrywide protests gathering momentum by the day, especially at Galle Face Green in the vicinity of the presidential secretariat now on its 19th consecutive day.
On Sunday, barricades, some of them with sharp metal spikes covered in opaque polythene sheets blocked the roads leading to the main protest site now named by the apolitical protestors as ‘GotaGoGama’, did not deter the thousands of inter-university students from marching to the Galle Face Green, while on their way even picketing for a couple of hours outside Prime Minister Rajapaksa’s official residence at Wijerama Road in Colombo 7.
The humanitarian crisis took a turn for the worse when police fired live bullets at unarmed protesters at Rambukkana last Wednesday, killing one of them and injuring 24. It was reminiscent of the shots fired some years ago, at fishermen in Negombo asking for fuel at a reasonable price, at workers in the Katunayake Free Trade Zone agitating for the withdrawal of an arbitrarily introduced pension scheme by the then Rajapaksa government and at the residents of Rathupaswela killing one of the protesters and injuring several others all because they were clamouring for nothing more than clean drinking water. There is no gainsaying the fact that shooting unarmed protesters pleading for a means of living from this government cannot be condoned under any circumstance.
The ongoing unprecedented humanitarian and economic crises confronting this island nation is only bound to worsen, in the wake of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa adamant to cling to their posts despite an overwhelming number of people demanding that they step down, the absence of any immediate relief from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the severe shortage of foreign currency to pay for imports of essential commodities.
Meanwhile, the protesters mostly youth describing themselves as the ‘new generation’, from all walks of life and from all parts of this battered country, rising above artificial differences of caste, creed or ethnicity have banded themselves together to demand an end to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s government and an end to nepotism, fraud and corruption. These protesters, who are unwaveringly continuing with their protests even in the sweltering heat or the heavy rains have taught us a significant lesson; that of no longer allowing ourselves to be misled by scheming politicians, who harvest religious and ethnic divisions to gain political office and amass filthy lucre by robbing this country of its national and natural resources.
The protesters have also taught us that no longer could we remain a politically passive and an uncaring people, swimming with the tide, not the least concerned or bothered as to what is happening to this country, to ourselves and to our neighbour but that instead we should be civic conscious, politically alert and humane citizens fully aware of our rights and whose sovereignty is not to be sold, mortgaged or leased out to self-serving, self-seeking and calculating individuals and together forge a Sri Lankan community where selfless service, servant leadership and unity in diversity, will be the most enlightened way forward.