Dont tell me Sri Lanka is not a failed State

In judging whether a country is a failed state or not, I have chosen to measure life in Sri Lanka by my experiences and those of my family and friends. Here is a litany. A (seventy-year-old) friend is picked up by the Police and remanded for the crime of having in his possession an old air gun that he uses to drive monkeys away from the house in which he lives in the middle of Kandy town. One of the policeman who took him in claimed that since my friend lived on the route that the Kandy Perahera took one night during the Esala season, he was in possession of “a deadly weapon” with which he could have shot an elephant in the eye! His real crime though was that he had a Tamil name.

The case was ultimately thrown out when the prosecuting constable claimed that expert evidence could not be obtained to establish the nature of the “weapon.” This would have merely been ludicrous, except for the pain of mind caused a seventy year old who had led an exemplary life, both as a youth and as an adult.

A kinsman of mine who doesn’t live in Colombo, ran afoul of the one-way system which even Colombo residents have difficulty in keeping pace with. He found himself going the wrong way on a one-way street and was promptly stopped by two traffic policemen who shouted and screamed at him about “dangerous driving” etc. etc. When he was in the process of fishing his driving licence out of his open wallet, one of the cops reached in and picked two one thousand rupee notes out of the wallet and rode away! Stranger than fiction? Yes, sometimes fact is precisely that!

Rights of way and use and abuse of them by local authorities is something that was brought home most forcibly to this writer over the past couple of years. The local Pradeshiya Sabha (P.S.) has established a garbage dump and continues to use it despite the Department of the Environment having stated in writing that they should not.

More of that anon, but let me revert to the first sentence of this paragraph. The Pradeshiya Sabha has wrecked the approach road to this dump by running a tractor (with tyres meant for traction in wet paddy fields) pulling an over-loaded trailer up the steep approach to this site, several times a day.

A major part of this road is the only means of entry and egress for several families living within a radius of several miles of it. The P.S. refuses to maintain it claiming that it is not designated as being one of “their” roads. However, they claim the right to use it whenever and however they want. Very soon, this road is only going to be navigable by an agricultural tractor and the people depending on it, particularly for emergencies, will have to walk a distance of several miles to reach a motorable road.

This has been a motorable road for nearly a century and will cease to be so thanks to the depredations of a level of government which clearly has the responsibility to provide services such as roads to residents within its boundaries.

Back to the garbage dump. This writer has raised the illegality of this dump with several people in the Environment Ministry and has been, basically, given the run around.

This is despite photographic evidence showing the contamination of drinking water thanks to this abomination; proof of the fact that a hitherto malaria-free area now has cases of malaria diagnosed close to this dump; not to mention the stench of rotting or burning garbage and the millions of flies that make a living hell of life for those living within its reach. My suspicion now is that, despite my Kandyan Sinhalese grand-mothers, I have been taken for a “Suddha” foreigner of some kind thanks to my given and surnames, and this has resulted in my pleas being ignored. Given the racist track record of the Jathika Hela Urumaya and its illustrious representative in the Cabinet, this seems the only logical explanation.

When the other member of this household chose to move some of her furniture that she had left with friends in Colombo to our home, she was told she had to have a permit to do so. This had to be obtained from a Government department in Battaramulla, having first taken an officer from that office to where the furniture is currently stored to list and inspect it. That one has to prove that one’s own goods and chattels have not been stolen from someone else is certainly an invasion of the privacy of any law-abiding citizen.

I really would like to know whether His Excellency, Mahinda Rajapakse, had to deal with all these bells and whistles in order to move any of his personal belongings from Medamulane to Colombo? But then, we are but ordinary citizens of Sri Lanka whose every move must be checked and double-checked to ensure that we are not thieves seeking to re-locate the fruits of their criminal endeavours!

As for noise pollution in our rural habitation, a temple on an adjacent hill has its (very efficient) loudspeaker system pointed directly at where we live. Sometimes at 4 a.m and every morning by 5, for sure, someone inserts a cassette or a CD into a player and we are subjected to reveille in the form of religious chanting at extremely high volume. Entreaties to the local constabulary to please persuade the “entertainers” to turn down or turn off their amplifier system have, so far, been met with deafening silence.

This is but a small sampling of contraventions of law from which a citizen of this country has no relief through what should be the usual channels for the maintenance of law and order. A complete list would require a quite substantial book for its telling.