The Hallucination Of Ranil’s International Support

Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka

The Geneva calamity was caused by and is proof of the fact that neither President Ranil Wickrem-esinghe nor his Rajapaksa sponsors understand how the contemporary international system works.Ranil is a political dinosaur who lives in a Reagan-Thatcher time-warp. He assumes that his adherence to economic neoliberalism going even beyond the IMF, his monarchist-conservatism and close association with ideologically antediluvian personalities like Nirj Deva (known to be part of a Christian Right, hostile to Pope Francis) ensures him western support in all domains.Ranil has forgotten that the formula didn’t work for the UNP even in the 1980s, when at crunch-time, the West told the Jayewardene government to settle things with India.

MORAGODA METHOD MIRAGE

Like Gota before him, Ranil seems to have believed in the Milinda Moragoda doctrine. Like CA Chandraprema, Sri Lanka’s Ambassador/PR to the UN-Geneva who has just set a record for SL’s lowest UNHRC vote, and Prof Rohan Gunaratna, advisor to the Ministry of Defence and Secretary/MoD General Kamal Gunaratne, Milinda Moragoda was a close associate of Ranil’s (in Rohan Gunaratne’s case, the Jayewardene administration’s) before he slid (as did the others) on a seamless rightist-Republican continuum, to Gota’s side.

The Moragoda doctrine, adhered to by CA Chandraprema and Rohan Gunaratna (both of whom may have arrived at it independently), holds that Colombo can de-link Delhi from the Tamil issue, devolution and the 13th amendment, through the twin tactic of economic inducements and RSS connections. A bitter enemy of the 13th amendment and the Provincial Councils, Milinda Moragoda had no such problems with the Interim Self Governing Authority (ISGA) of 2003 preseted by Prabhakaran and the LTTE. (The same criticism cannot be made of Chandraprema and Prof Gunaratna).

Both Gota and Ranil bought into it, and didn’t move on activating on the 13th amendment and holding, or in Ranil’s case, declaring, elections to the PCs. The moronic Moragoda-Gunaratna-Chandraprema Doctrine came apart in the decisive Indian stance and statement in Geneva this year.Far from reinforcing the Rajapaksas, Ranil and the Rajapaksas are drowning each other internationally and nationally, and in so doing, drowning the country as well.

COSTLY HOLLOW MYTH

Almost twenty years ago, the main Opposition party the UNP was reeling from serial defeats, including most notably the Presidential election of 1999. Ranil Wickremesinghe headed off a revolt which was crystallizing around Karu Jayasuriya as alternative leader, by appointing the respected former chairman of the UNP, NGP Panditharatne, a top professional and a confidante of UNP icon JR Jayewardene to undertake an investigation of the UNP’s downward spiral and to recommend measures of rectification.Mr. Panditharatne undertook an island-wide tour. His report concluded that the vast majority of UNP office-bearers and activists at the grassroots asserted that the party could not win with Ranil Wickremesinghe at the helm. He was not acceptable to the majority of people. He was the problem which had to be solved. The Panditharatne Report was buried by Ranil, who remains UNP leader.

What kept Ranil as UNP leader while the party’s electoral performance was in freefall, was a collective ‘class delusion’, which in recent years, has possessed the Rajapaksa clan too. That myth is that Ranil Wickremesinghe was a ‘made man’; he had connections; he knew people who knew people in the White House, at Langley and at No 10.The UNP believed him when he said that he had complained to President George W. Bush about his dismissal at the hands of President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga (2003) and the decision would be flipped. The Bush White House rightly didn’t lift its little pinky and the Sri Lankan electorate kept Ranil out of office for 15 years. CBK and more crucially Lakshman Kadirgamar had a far better international profile than Ranil Wickremesinghe.

The whole notion was a lie from the beginning and only a UNP “comprador” or neocolonial mindset which regards the mirage of international support as politically more important than national support and acceptance could have been so entranced for so long and at such great electoral cost, by this delusion about Ranil.The degree of social, political and ideological decay and desperation of the Rajapaksa Clan is such that it has embraced and clung to this delusion even when the progressive-populist Dullas Alahapperuma would, as President, have given Sri Lanka a reformist new look domestically and internationally.

RANIL ISN’T TRAPPED

It isn’t a question of President Ranil being “trapped by this government” as a stridently preachy Opposition parliamentarian so absurdly averred. It is just Ranil being Ranil.When he won the parliamentary (Pohottuwa) vote for the presidency at what will surely remain the height of a long undistinguished political career, no one ‘trapped’ Ranil into stopping off while driving out of the parliamentary grounds, to address the military and the police for defending the parliament against an effort – invisible, I might add – by the Aragalaya to overrun, invade and occupy it.Ranil wasn’t ‘trapped’ into visiting the Ministry of Defence that evening, the evening before the military launched a pre-dawn raid, brutally beat and evicted the residue of peaceful protesters on Galle Face Green. Some ‘trapped’ prey or victim, Ranil!

The Geneva UNHRC vote enabled us to catch a glimpse of that regime and its governance, in the international mirror. This is a ‘Walking Dead’ ruling-bloc that can neither gain endorsement from the international community nor face an election even at the lowest level, nationally. In Geneva, the regime scores an all-time low, failing to get into double digits.

The Rajapaksas thought they had played a master-stroke and got themselves an Abrams tank (or T-90) to climb into and shield them from international scrutiny and condemnation. They sure got that wrong. In the same week as the international condemnation comes the spotlight shone by the Sri Lankan Supreme Court, giving leave to proceed for the case filed firstly by Dr. Mahim Mendis, Prof Neavis Moraes and others, against alleged perpetrators of economic crimes.The UNP, for a long period the largest single party in the country, became under Ranil, a party without a single elected representative in the legislature. With the same leader, the same fate will befall the economy and the country.