Of April explosions and warnings

Wednesday 5th May, 2021

April is apparently the cruellest month in this country, as we said in a previous comment, with apologies to T. S. Eliot. In April 1971, the country was plunged into a bloodbath. The Easter Sunday carnage happened in April 2019. The current national health crisis took a turn for the worse in April 2021; the pandemic now snuffs out more lives than it did during its first and second waves. It is also during April that the highest number of lives lost in road accidents is reported year every year.

The Attorney General (AG) has indicted former IGP Pujith Jayasundera and former Defence Secretary Hemasiri Fernando for murder, etc., in the Colombo High Court over their failure to prevent the Easter Sunday bombings despite having received repeated warnings of possible terror strikes. The matter is best left to the learned judges, but it needs to be added that Jayasundera and Fernando were not alone in failing to prevent the carnage; there were many others, and legal action must be instituted against them as well if justice is seen to be done.

The government must not baulk at allowing legal action to be taken against former President Maithripala Sirisena, named by the Easter Sunday Presidential Commission of Inquiry (PCoI) as a person who should take responsibility for negligence and serious security lapses that led to the terror attacks at issue. The PCoI final report specifically says, in its recommendations (p 471), “The Government including President Sirisena and Prime Minister is accountable for the tragedy.” So, all those who were responsible for national security during the yahapalana government and failed to prevent the Easter tragedy must be prosecuted.

The incumbent government is in a spot as regards Sirisena, who is the leader of the SLFP, a major constituent of the ruling SLPP coalition. The SLFP, which has 14 members in the government parliamentary group, has issued a veiled threat that it will break ranks with the SLPP in case of legal action being taken against Sirisena. The SLPP finds itself in a Catch-22 situation, but it must not let its political problems stand in the way of justice, which the families of the Easter Sunday bombing victims, the Catholic Church, and, in short, all right-thinking Sri Lankans are demanding.

When one looks carefully at the Easter Sunday carnage, which destroyed about 270 lives, and the onset of the current wave of the pandemic, which is killing people at the rate of about 10 a day, one sees that both of them were due to failure on the part of those in authority to heed prescient warnings. Now that legal action has been taken against Jayasundera and Fernando for their failure to act on warnings of the Easter Sunday terror, all those who did not heed repeated warnings of an explosive spread of Covid-19 during the National New Year and thereby caused people to die must also be brought to justice. The Covid-19 morbidity and mortality rates have increased drastically of late because the government higher-ups, the health authorities and others tasked with controlling the pandemic chose to ignore independent health experts’ warnings that there would be an upsurge of infections unless travel restrictions were imposed during the festive season.

Everybody knew the country was sitting on a ticking viral time bomb, as it were, and the government politicians and the health authorities should have taken precautions before and during the New Year to prevent an explosive transmission of the pandemic. Instead, people were allowed to do as they pleased to all intents and purposes. There were avurudu shopping sprees. Huge crowds gathered in Kataragama and Nuwara-Eliya. New Year festivals were also permitted. Those mass gatherings were a recipe for disaster. The government obviously did not want to curtail the freedom of the public during the festive season for political reasons, for travel restrictions and lockdowns are hugely unpopular. Those in authority who did not act on dire warnings from independent experts and triggered the so-called avurudu wave of the pandemic must be severely dealt with.

Criminal negligence, in all its manifestations, must not be allowed to go unpunished.