president, non compos mentis

7/27/2019 President, Non Compos Mentis

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President, Non Compos Mentis?

| by Tisaranee Gunasekara

....the

paragon of transgressors, the man who holds nothing sacred and who fearlessly assumes

every from of hubris. - Ren Girad (Violence and the Sacred)

( October 3, 2013, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) It was a moment of ultimate self-

exposure. President Mahinda Rajapaksas reply to Al Jazeera-interviewers question about anti-

minority violence revealed a mindset and a worldview which is not quite lucid: There were

incidents. There were attacks; some incidents. What was in the background? Why were they

attacked? Now see a girl was raped. Seven years old girl was raped. Then naturally they will goand attack them whether they belong to any community or any religion. The people when they

heard about it they were so upset, relations everybody. There were incidents like that. All

incidents have some background to that1.

The President is lying, again. Child rape is rampant in Sri Lanka, but there has been

no incident of a Sinhala-Buddhist child being raped by a Tamil/Muslim/Christian, up to

now. Even the fecund imagination of the BBS has failed to come up with a lie so

deadly. The Sinhala-Buddhist extremists who instigated the attack on Pepiliyana

Fashion Bug used a false rape story to incite anti-Muslim hatred, but even they did

not place the age of the alleged victim at seven, as the President of Sri Lankaunblushingly did.

The Presidential lie is worrying. But his thinly veiled attempt to justify the recent spate

of anti-minority violence is terrifying. President Rajapaksa could have condemned the

anti-minority violence, at least from a rule-of-law angle. He did not. Instead he tried to

render the attacks on minorities valid and understandable by labelling them acts of

just-retribution. He indicated that the minority-victims were attacked because they
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committed some heinous crime, a la child rape. Wasnt that a tacit endorsement of

mob violence and vigilante-retribution? Given this climate of official-approbation, is it

surprising that Sinhala-Buddhist thugs (lay and ordained) feel unafraid to take law into

their hands? (In the latest such incident, a mob in Athurugiriya accused three women

of the non-existent crime of conversion, tied their hands and handed them to the

police).2

So in Presidential eyes, the alleged crime of a Tamil is a Tamil-crime, the alleged crime

of a Muslim a Muslim-crime and the alleged crime of a Christian a Christian-crime.

When a Tamil/Muslim/Christian allegedly commits a crime, his/her community

becomes guilty by extension. And the Sinhala-Buddhist extremist mobs, in their self-

appointed role of Nemesis, have the right take to punish these transgressors, sans a

legal-trial let alone a legal-conviction. .

That was how the Black July happened.

Karl Dietrich Barcher in his analysis of the Nazification of German society called it the

proliferation of insane notions3. When such deranged notions as minorities were

attacked because they were child-rapists et al are articulated and diffused by the

President himself, wither heads Sri Lanka?

Demonising the Victims

Demonising the victim is a very old vice. The entry for Negro in the 1798 edition of the

Encyclopaedia Britannica reads, Vices the most notorious seem to be the portion of

this unhappy race. They are strangers to every sentiment of compassion4 How

else could the civilised West justify the unimaginable horrors it visited on Africa and

Africans? The lascivious/murderous/criminal Jew who preyed on Germans in general

and German women in particular was a staple of Nazi ideology and propaganda.

The fact that President Rajapaksa made the child rape accusation in an interview with

an international news channel, for a global audience, is particularly telling. Clearly the

President does not think the child rape charge is too outr, but regards it as logical,

possible and eminently believable. It is fairly certain that Mahinda Rajapaksa has not

heard of either Julius Stericher or his atrocious Der Strmer. But he seems a perfect-fitfor that victim-baiting milieu, going by the lan with which he brandished the child

rape charge.

According to Theodore Adorno, One of the most sinister features of the fascist

character (is)the paranoid tendency of projecting upon others ones own violent

aggressiveness and then indicting, on the basis of this projection, those whom one

endows with pernicious qualities5. The habit of demonising the victim seems visceral


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to Rajapaksa rule. Gotabhaya Rajapaksa used the charge of terrorism to justify the

attempt to expel all North-Eastern Tamils from Colombo lodges in 2007. In a recent

policy statement, de facto CJ Mohan Peiris reportedly justified the mass-eviction of

Colombos poor by accusing them of criminal tendencies: Low income earners in the

city of Colombo resort to various vices because they have no proper housing facilities.

Illegal acts such as narcotic rackets are evident in this environment6 (clearly the

urban poor will never get justice from this court). In any normal country, such an

obviously classist statement by the apex judge would have caused a tremendous

uproar. In Sri Lanka, both the polity (including the Opposition) and the society

responded with a deafening silence.

Mohan Peiriss utterance is a curious echo of a previous statement attributed to

another appendage of the Defence Ministry: Intelligence units have revealed that the

crime wave in the country is centred in the Apple Watte area of Maligawatte, Dinamina

reports. According to the police the Apple Watte area has been identified as a main

drug trafficking centre in Colombo. According to the Police Environmental Unit, thepositioning of the houses in the areas provides a secure environment for criminals to

evade the law, the newspaper further reports.7

The people of Weliweriya were accused of being Tamil Diaspora/NGO pawns. The

Rajapaksas would not hesitate to demonise even members of their own core-

constituency when it is in their political/pecuniary interests to do so.

Just after he tagged the child-rapist charge onto the victims of anti-minority violence,

President Rajapaksa praised Sri Lanka as a happy haven for its minorities: Because

in Sri Lanka this is the only country that I think Muslims, Hindus, Catholics, Christians

all are practicing their religion without any any any issue8. The implication is that

Sinhala-Buddhists never attack good minorities; therefore any minority-victim of

Sinhala-Buddhist violence is bad by definition, and deserving of his/her fate.

All civilian Tamil victims of the Fourth Eelam War became Tigers under the Zero-

civilian casualty principle.

All urban poor who will be rendered homeless will become criminals; any peaceful

demonstrator who is attacked by the army/police will become a traitor.

And all the disappeared have either gone abroad or eloped!

In a pluralist country civic peace cannot be, if differences are liable to be criminalised.

This does not mean that people have to like each others lifestyles/approve of each

others beliefs. They just need to develop a sense of tolerance, a live-and-let-live

attitude. Such a spirit of benign acceptance becomes especially difficult in times of


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economic hardships. As living-conditions worsen and their place in the social order is

undermined, people tend to seek some certitude in their primordial identities. In such

times, people become more superstitious, more wedded to their primordial myths and

more intolerant of their fellow citizens who believe in different myths.

When such a perilous land is led by men of unsound mind, who diffuse deranged

notions about the ethno-religious Other and justify anti-minority violence, can it

escape an infelicitous future?

1 https://www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/video-talk-to-al-jazeera-mahinda-

rajapaksa-this-is-all-propaganda/

2 http://www.hirunews.lk/68449

3 The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure and Consequences of NationalSocialism.

4 Quoted in Toward the Light of Liberty: The Struggle for Freedom and Rights that

made the Modern Western World AC Grayling

5 Wagner, Nietzsche and Hitler

6 https://www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/no-mercy-for-shanty-dwellers-

challenging-uda-from-de-facto-cj/

7 Sri Lanka Mirror 20.3.2013

8 To justify his own record, the President said that in a country which he does not want

to name, 109 mosques were destroyed when a soldier was murdered on the road. He

was clearly referring to the beheading of British soldier Drummer Lee Rigby.

Subsequently several mosques were attacked, but none was destroyed.

http://www.muslimnews.co.uk/newspaper/top-stories/british-soldier-hacked-to-death-

mosques-attacked/. President Rajapaksa is either an inveterate liar, habitually

misinformed (and never bothers to check the veracity of his information) or incapableof distinguishing fantasy from reality.

president, non compos mentis

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