All in a long week: From Oprah’s One Shot to Weerawansa’s Backstabbing

by Rajan Philips

A lot more can be added to the title as stories making news last week in Sri Lanka and around the world. The 2021 International Women’s Day (IWD) arrived on Monday, March 8. Even as Monday was dawning in much of the eastern hemisphere, Oprah Winfrey was upstaging The Crown while it was still Sunday evening in west coast Los Angeles. Netflix, the streaming giant and the producer so far of four seasons of the popular royal series – The Crown, could not have imagined what Ms. Winfrey pulled out of her “carrier bag” as a real-life story starring a real-life and eloquent prince (Harry) and his biracial and TV-genic American wife, Megan Markle. Their dramatic recounting of the intersections of race, gender, royalty, and the English tabloids presaged the 2021 Women’s Day.

Hours later, female farmers from Punjab and Haryana stormed the ramparts of Delhi, continuing the months-long farmers’ siege on the Modi government and its agricultural laws. Black Sunday protests had already started in Sri Lanka over government’s pussyfooting around the 2019 Easter Sunday tragedies and the masterminds behind them. Later in the week Sri Lanka’s heavy-footed parliament began debating the Presidential Commission report on Easter Sunday, with the SJB and the TNA supporting Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith’s call for international investigation of Easter Sunday bombings.

On Tuesday, March 9, the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, a non-governmental organization in Washington, released a report prepared by 50 global experts in international law, genocide, and the China region, which claims that the Chinese government “bears state responsibility for an ongoing genocide against the Uyghur in breach of the (UN) Genocide Convention.” It is apparently the first time a non-governmental organization has undertaken an independent legal analysis of China’s treatment of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has pre-emptively dismissed the report and said that allegations of a genocide in Xinjiang “couldn’t be more preposterous.” However, the matter was raised by President Joe Biden at his virtual summit meeting, on Friday, March 12, with the other three leaders of the four Quad countries: Prime Ministers Narendra Modi (India), Scott Morrison (Australia), and Yoshihide Suga (Japan). It will also be raised by Secretary of State Antony Blinken with his Chinese counterpart, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, in their bilateral meeting a week later.

Thursday, March 11, was the first anniversary of Covid-19 being declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization. It has been quite a year for everyone born during the last 100 years after the Spanish flu had come and gone. The global toll of Covid-19 is astounding: nearly 120 million infections and close to three million deaths. The impact on women has been patriarchally disproportionate. The global vaccine rollout is anything but proportionate. The UN theme for the 2021 Women’s Day could not have been more fitting: “Women in leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world.”

To mark the occasion, if not the theme, the world media carried the picture of Sister Ann Rose falling to her knees pleading with Myanmar soldiers to shoot her and spare the children. The military junta is struggling to contain the escalating civilian protests against the suspension of democracy in Myanmar, even as the UN Security Council is running out of non-veto votes to roll back the junta’s auto-coup to shut down parliament and keep itself in power.

The Pope and the Cardinal

The start of the crowded week also saw Pope Francis making his first international trip after Covid-19. Following his October encyclical “Fratelli Tutti,” the Pope visited Iraq over four days travelling from modern Baghdad, to historic places in the old Mesopotamia, among the cradles of human civilization: the ancient City of Ur where Abraham was born, Mosul on the west bank of Tigris, and Ninevah Plain on the east bank with its Christian towns. There have been mixed reactions to the Papal visit during the pandemic. But as Moises Saman told the National Geographer, Pope Francis brought a “spark of hope and validation” to a “country and its people … deeply scarred by conflict. … it felt like a turning point, for people of all faiths, to have a person of his stature come to Iraq—despite the pandemic, despite security concerns, despite all these obstacles.” The Pope met with the 90 year old Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in the holy city of Najaf and called for an end to violence and extremism and for unity among the Muslims and the dwindling number of Christians in Iraq.

In Sri Lanka, Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith invoked the Pope’s visit to Iraq and called it as an inspiration for unity and peace among peoples of all religions in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. To his credit, the Cardinal is calling for justice without alienating the Muslims. His disenchantment is with the government for its half-hearted approach to act on the recommendations of the Presidential Commission. The approach is also censorial as the Attorney General is denied access to the full report apparently for security reasons. We learn from news reports that the Attorney General has met with the Cardinal, but we have not seen any report about his meetings with the Minister of Justice or any Minister of consequence.

But the Cardinal might be the government’s lesser worry now, with National Freedom Front (NFF) leader and Industries Minister Wimal Weerawansa stirring the pot again by alleging that there are “clandestine links between a section of the government and All Ceylon Makkal Congress (ACMC) leader Rishad Bathiudeen, allegedly involved with those responsible for 2019 Easter Sunday carnage.” This is the lead story in The Island on Friday (March 12), which goes on to say that SLPP parliamentarians are “furious” with Mr. Weerawansa’s latest outburst and that they think he has “stabbed the government in the back.”

Reader in Chief

This is a curious departure from the circus of the yahapalanaya government. The chief clown then was also the Head of State, given to periodical outbursts against his Prime Minister in public. Nothing powerful or politically purposeful went on between the two men (Sirisena and Wickremesinghe) in private. Now the carping clowns are everywhere in government, but the Head of State has gone quiet in Colombo. The current President keeps his counsel for sharing only with captive audiences in the villages. He is becoming the nation’s Reader in Chief, touring villages and reading selected passages from a Presidential Commission report. A breather for the President and a benefit to the country from the 20th Amendment. But others in the government might be breathless with anxiety about the upcoming UNHRC vote on Sri Lanka.

All in all, quite a scatterplot of news stories out of national and international political and cultural variables. Everyone of these stories can be dissected and discussed at length. But they also have an instant effect on people watching television or looking at their mobiles. Oprah Winfrey’s interview made a big splash in the US with 17 million viewers, mostly favourable to the prematurely retired Prince and his feminist wife. In the UK, the reaction has been different but greatly divided along generational lines.

Everyone is respectful to the Queen, whose stature has been enhanced by Netflix’s series, The Crown. Even Oprah Winfrey’s ‘One Shot’ was all adulatory about the Queen. In one of the episodes of The Crown, Queen Elizabeth visits her uncle Edward III in Paris ten days before his death in 1972. The uncle who abdicated the throne for his American wife, praises the Queen, whom he had once called Shirley Temple, for her success as a monarch. “The Crown, he says, “always has a way of finding the head for it.” It is Her Majesty who has been finding it hard to find a successor. The latest real life episode in Los Angeles might make the succession in London all the more challenging. And it is a different challenge for the people as they have to periodically renew their elected leaders even in the UK.