The Rajapaksa regime is probably the most embattled government in Sri Lanka’s post independence history. Not only is it fighting the terrorism that has dogged all governments since the 1980s, but it has now to contend with conditions that were faced by the Sirima Bandaranaike government of the 1970s as well. One of the factors that brought the Sirima Bandaranaike government down was the world fuel crisis and the world food crisis of the mid seventies. The same crises have now come to dog the Sri Lankan government again with skyrocketing fuel prices and rice prices. It would have been very difficult to weather storms like this even in the best of circumstances, But for a government locked in battle with what is now officially acknowledged by the USA as the world’s deadliest terrorist organization, and which is simultaneously under siege by the west which wants the war against the LTTE stopped, this task would be nothing less than truly Herculean. If President Rajapaksa can survive the world fuel crisis, the world food crisis, the LTTE terrorist problem and the enormous pressure exerted by the western nations to have the war against the LTTE stopped, then the present columnist would have no hesitation in declaring that Rajapaksa is the greatest Sri Lankan leader in post independence history – greater than even those truly great figures D.S.Senanayake and J.R.Jayewardene.

Rice and bullets

Neither DS nor JRJ had to face the situations that Rajapaksa has to face today. DS led a peaceful and prosperous Sri Lanka and his greatness lay in his foresight and caution as the man who gave leadership to the first independent government of Sri Lanka. If all subsequent leaders had followed his path, many of the problems that we face today, ranging from the food crisis to the ethnic issue may not exist. J.R.Jayewardene’s greatness lay in being the revolutionary who set the tune for latter day Sri Lanka – a path which even his detractors had no option but to follow. In this he was more successful than DS. The order that DS put in place lasted less than a decade whereas the order that JRJ put into place has lasted for over three decades and is set to last well into the foreseeable future. JRJ also had to face the terrorist problems, both from the Tamil and Sinhalese side. And it was during the JRJ government that it became a habit for western governments to demonize the Sri Lankan government under the influence of the Tamil Eelamist lobby.

But at that time, international interference particularly from the west was not as invasive as it is today. India interfered in Sri Lanka’s problem, but this ultimately ended with the Indians battling the LTTE. Even when it came to the JVP insurgency and the draconian measures adopted to crush it, western pressure was not too heavy on the government. And in any case even if there had been western pressure, the JRJ and Premadasa governments would have ignored it anyway because when it came to the JVP it was simply a case of either kill or be killed. Be that as it may, JRJ never had to face a situation where there was a worldwide fuel crisis, food crisis, a terrorist problem and western pressure to give in to those terrorists all at the same time.

As of now, the Rajapaksa government is surviving entirely due to luck. On the military front, the government has suffered terrible embarrassments - the LTTE’s air raids on Colombo and the Katunayake air base, the ground and airborne attack on the Anuradhapura air base, last week’s Muhamalai FDL debacle, are just cases in point. But on every such occasion, the government was able to bounce back. After the LTTE’s air raids, the govt was able to clear the east. After the Anuradhapura air base attack which destroyed many aircraft, the government was able to kill Tamil Chelvam. Then after last week’s Muhamalai debacle, with the Ravaya putting the number of soldiers killed as 118, the govt was able to announce that they had captured the Madhu church and its environs.

The LTTE was also under pressure to vacate the Madu Church that they had been occupying both by the Catholic Church and the international community. The fact that it comes so soon after the Muhamalai debacle is a useful face saver for the government.. Up to last week, the uncanny run of luck that this government has been having on the military front has thus continued and the impression that the LTTE is now weaker than it was is something that has pervaded the thinking even of the UNP as many UNPers privately admit.

This remarkable luck was also evident on the rice front. Due to various reasons like weather conditions and diseases, the world stocks of rice has been reduced to the lowest levels since the mid 1970s. By any reckoning, this is a worldwide crisis. Even Thailand and Vietnam, the world’s number one and two rice exporters, which are not facing any domestic shortages, had to put ceilings on exports simply to prevent price increases in the domestic market. The mere fact that rice was in short supply outside the country was causing price increases in Thailand and Vietnam. Sri Lanka too suffered jitters over rice and until last week, everybody was talking only of rice. In fact, had the rice crisis continued, people would not have even noticed the Muhamalai debacle or the Madhu victory, so great was the preoccupation with food.

The reason why the Muhamalai incident gained the attention of the public was because by last week, the government had managed to get on top of the rice crisis. Unlike Thailand and Vietnam, Sri Lanka is not a rice exporting nation, but thanks to the projects put in place by the UNP government of 1977-94, Sri Lanka is in most years self sufficient or close to self sufficiency in rice. Because rice is produced locally, there was no actual shortage or rice, even though crops had been ruined in some areas due to untimely rain.

What happened in Sri Lanka was what happened in Vietnam and Thailand – hoarding and jacking up of prices due to expectations of price increases. One might also say that the lack of prior planning and management by the government, contributed to this situation. When the government knew that a worldwide rice crisis was brewing, they should had some buffer stocks to release into the local market to prevent artificial jacking up of prices by traders seeking to make a killing on the worldwide rice crisis. If this happened in Thailand and Vietnam it is no surprise that it happened in Sri Lanka but the government did not act fast enough. This must be viewed in the context of the agriculture minister’s brother and a deputy minister being the country’s biggest rice millers. However, last week after price ceilings were announced, and raids conducted on errant traders, things began to come back to normal. For the time being the government seems to have weathered the storm. If the government plays its cards successfully, the world rice crisis may actually end up strengthening the Rajapaksa regime, not weakening it.

Attitudinal problems

The Rajapaksa regime appeals more to the rural folk rather than the urban voter. And as of now, paddy farming has acquired a new importance. Cultivators of tea, rubber, and cinnamon have been doing very well for quite some time with high prices for their produce and now the boom has spread into the paddy sector as well. Farm gate prices are higher than they were ever before and abandoned paddy lands are being brought into cultivation. In the south, after the last harvest many weeks before the rice crisis, children had descended on harvested fields in order to collect the grain that had fallen off during the harvesting. Rice was a precious commodity even before the rice crisis. With the world food crisis expected to last some years, the constituency that votes overwhelmingly for Mahinda Rajapaksa, can expect an affluent future – if the weather permits and diseases are kept under control. The eastern province which is one of the largest rice surplus producing areas in the country, will benefit enormously from all this.

Other than terrorism and the worldwide food shortage, the other great obstacle facing the Rajapaksa government is the attitude of the western nations. In many ways, this is nothing but a continuation of the demonization of Sri Lankan governments by the west, which began with the J.R.Jayewardene government in the 1980s especially after July 1983. In the case of the Rajapaksa government the most immediate issue is the extension of the GSP+ facility given to Sri Lanka whereby our garment exports enter the European Union market without any import duties. In today’s Ravaya, Victor Ivan states that the government of Sri Lanka has not done anything that should lead to the discontinuation of this facility.

He lays the blame instead, on the judiciary saying that the judiciary in two recent judgments had questioned the authority of the Geneva based Human Rights Committee of the UN and the International Labour Organisation and that it was judicial actions like this had brought the applicability of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in Sri Lanka into doubt. The recent consultative decision made by the Supreme Court to the effect that the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights was applicable in Sri Lanka was, says Ivan, a case of too little coming too late. Ivan states that this was a simple legal matter that could have been rectified with a constitutional amendment with the government and the opposition co-operating. The issue raised by Ivan highlights the point made by European Parliament member Niranjan Devaditya to the effect that a legal abstraction was being used to penalize the poorest of the poor in Sri Lanka.

Ivan scoffs at the idea that the withdrawal of the GSP+ facility will lead to the ruination of the Sri Lankan garment industry. He says that if the GSP+ facility is discontinued, it will only be a set back but not something that would wreck the industry. In this he was echoing the sentiments expressed by Nivard Cabraal, in his recent interview with the BBC to the effect that the GSP+ facility is a subsidy that the industry should learn to do without as any kind of non-reciprocal subsidy given can be withdrawn by the donor. No industry should be too dependent on such things. This probably is the correct approach because with a donor who thinks nothing of using the lives of hundreds of thousands of female workers to get their own way with the government, there’ll be no option but for the government to say "You do your worst, and well do our best".

With the abolition of the quota system into the US, some thought that the garment industry in Sri Lanka was finished, but it survived. Likewise, if the GSP+ scheme is withdrawn, there may be a setback, because Sri Lankan products will become more expensive for European consumers. But one advantage that Sri Lanka has is that even though there are cheaper locations in Asia for producers to shift to, none of these locations can give guarantees of satisfactory working conditions in garment factories like Sri Lanka.

Last Thursday, CNN carried a report which said that shrimp farms in Thailand and Bangaladesh, two of the largest suppliers to the west, was using child labor and unacceptable labor practices in their farms. An adverse report like this, would put off consumers, and if it happens in the apparel sector, that may even lead to an organized boycott of the offending companies. The fear of such adverse publicity may hopefully motivate European importers to stick with Sri Lanka as a source of supply rather than shifting elsewhere.

What is at issue here is the morality of the EU. Officials of the EU have been trying to use the threat of withdrawing the GSP+ facility to twist the arm of the government. One official had told minister G.L.Pieris, that she would like to see a change in the ‘attitude’ of the government. Presumably, if the attitude of the government was different, even if the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights was not applicable in Sri Lanka, they would still consider extending the GSP+ facility. To use the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people – the poorest of the poor in Sri Lanka, engaged in the garment industry in Sri Lanka, to get the Sri Lankan government to change its ‘attitude’ does not seem to be right according to the creed being preached by the EU itself. We often hear of the west trying to protect the people of some country or another from its own government. Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is a case in point. The message usually carried by the west to third world countries is "We love you even more than your own government!". But here is a case of the European Union actually penalizing ordinary people with the hope that that would make them oppose the Rajapaksa government.

G.L.Pieris, the minister who has been handling the GSP+ issue on behalf of the government was in Acra last week for an UNCTAD meeting during the course of which he had the opportunity to discuss the GSP+ issue with the trade ministers of EU countries, and some of them had expressed dissatisfaction at the ‘inscrutable’ processes by which the European Commission arrived at decisions. In an interview with the Island, Niranjan Devaditya, a member of the European Parliament, had earlier said that the European Commission was the world’s most powerful non-elected administrative body and that they acted even without consulting the European Parliament.

UNP hedges its bets

Last week the UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe was in Australia attending the International Democratic Union meeting. It’s a moot point as to whether the UNP has been putting its best foot forward at this election. All the UNPers that the present columnist spoke to seemed to be fairly optimistic about their party’s chances of winning the eastern elections. Some said the chances were fifty-fifty, others said the chances were good. But nobody said that the UNP may be defeated yet again. The split in the JVP has considerably reduced the pressure on both sides in the eastern fray. Before the JVP split, the government didn’t know whether they would be able to get the next budget passed. And the probability was that if they won the eastern elections, they would have held elections for the other provincial councils as well on a staggered basis and after thus creating a losing trend for the UNP, held a parliamentary election.