Politicizing disasters

President Ranil Wickremesinghe has said that he would appoint a committee headed by a Supreme Court judge to look into the allegations levelled by Britain’s Channel 4 that the State Intelligence Service Chief Suresh Sallay conspired to engineer the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings. 

The controversial channel quoted Azad Maulana, the former Private Secretary to State Minister Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan alias Pillayan as saying that he arranged a meeting in 2018 between Sallay and Zahran Hashim, the leader of the National Thawheed Jama’ath (NTJ), the organization that had been behind the Easter Sunday carnage. 

The President had also said that a Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) would be appointed to probe the statement made by former Attorney General Dappula de Livera before he retired that the terrorist attacks on April 21, 2019, were a result of a conspiracy. 
Despite one being unable to predict the outcomes of the committee and the PSC that are going to be appointed by the President, one’s pessimism on these investigative mechanisms cannot be brushed aside, given the negative experience the country had gained from the similar mechanisms put in place by various governments in the past. 
It is interesting to note that not a single person was made accountable for the disappearance of more than 80,000 persons by the six Commissions appointed for the purpose by three Presidents since 1992. 
Five Commissions were appointed by Presidents Ranasinghe Premadasa and Chandrika Kumaratunga to look into the disappearances of 60,000 persons during the insurrection in 1988/89 in the southern parts of the country while another was appointed by President Mahinda Rajapaksa to trace around 20,000 persons disappeared in the north and east during the three decades long war. 
After having appointed four Presidential Commissions of Inquiry (PCoI) by two Presidents (Udalagama Commission, LLRC and Paranagama Commission by President Mahinda Rajapaksa and Navaz Commission by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa), the government’s integrity is still being questioned even at the ongoing 54th Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC).
Even though President Maithripala Sirisena has appointed a committee and a Presidential Commission headed by Supreme Court judges, apart from the PSC appointed by the Speaker Karu Jayasuriya in respect of the Easter Sunday attacks, Christians, the victim community in particular and the country, in general, is demanding the authorities now to expose the mastermind of the crime that killed 269 people.
The suggestion by Channel 4 that Gotabaya Rajapaksa is the mastermind is no doubt a cruel irony, as he was expected to resolve the mastermind issue even by the leaders of the victim community when he was voted into power.  
Politicization of everything including disasters and the lack of political will on the part of the political leaders to take chances in the face of popular perceptions stand in the way to the resolution of any problem in Sri Lanka. 

The LTTE attempted to use the 2004 tsunami to achieve its political end through a programme that was professedly meant to support the victims of the tidal waves. The government of the day on the one hand ignored the danger of ceding to that programme, just to politically mollify the separatist rebels. 
Many politicians attempted to drag the names of their political rivals – even Sinhalese and political parties led by Sinhalese - into the Easter Sunday crime, from the beginning. Ironically many of them are now in the same boat that attempts to crash into the government ship that wavers in the economic storm. 
Dr Shafi Shihabdeen of Kurunegala Teaching Hospital was first introduced by the media as Thawheed Jama’ath Doctor, without an iota of evidence. 
The PSC that was appointed after the Easter Sunday disaster, apparently distracted by certain politicians wasted days on the date palms and the Arabic signboards in Kattankudy. 

This is a country where politicians scorned the capture of the Eastern Province by the security forces which turned the tide of the thirty-year-long war. Finding the mastermind of the Easter Sunday carnage would not be so easy in a country where politicians lack honesty and political will and politicize any disaster.