Will Sri Lanka Elect the Devil It Knows?

The Sri Lankan President

Mahinda Rajapaksa; December 11, 2014.
BY SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN-JANUARY 6, 2015

If a Presidential candidate refers to himself as a devil, chances are hes in trouble. Last
week, campaigning ahead of this Thursdays election, Mahinda Rajapaksa, the
incumbent Sri Lankan President, tried hard to endear himself to an audience in the
northern city of Jaffna. The crowd consisted almost entirely of Tamils, the islands
largest minority, a community that regards him with suspicion and anger. There is a
saying that the devil you know is better than the unknown angel, Rajapaksa said. I
am the known devil, so please vote for me. These two sentences encapsulated the swift
and intriguing fall of the once-mighty President.
In January, 2010, when Rajapaksa last ran for relection, the circumstances were quite
different. The previous year, his Army had ended a nearly three-decade-long civil war,
routing the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (L.T.T.E.) guerrillas, who had
been fighting for an independent Tamil state. As the war ground to a close, it emerged
that the Sri Lankan Army was inflicting horrific damage on Tamil civilians, shelling
them indiscriminately in the quest to wipe out the L.T.T.E. (Jon Lee Anderson wrote
about this in the magazine.) Rajapaksa ignored the mounting talk of war crimes;
instead, he styled himself as a hero who could deliver a united Sri Lanka into a
peaceful and prosperous future. In a land fatigued by conflict, this was an appealing
pitch. The defeated and frightened Tamils, in the north and the east, voted against
him, but Rajapaksa still won almost sixty per cent of the popular ballot, relying upon
the Sinhalese majority for his support. A couple of months later, his coalition of parties
won a hundred and forty-four of two hundred and twenty-five seats in Parliamenta

strong enough majority to pass any laws.

I lived in Sri Lanka for ten months in 2011 and 2012, and I saw Rajapaksa everywhere:
on billboards and as looming cutouts, on posters plastered on the flanks of buses, in
giant advertisements in the newspaper. In photographs, his hair was always tidily
brushed back, his moustache draped thickly across his upper lip, and his jowls smooth
and shiny. Even when he smiled, he glowered. His attire was so unvaryinga white
shirt and sarong, a maroon sash around his neck, a golden talisman in his handthat
he seemed like a mascot for himself, styled as the protector of Sri Lanka and, in
particular, of Sri Lankas Sinhalese Buddhists. Once, riding through Colombo, a friend
pulled me out of our trishaw and onto a traffic island, where a pillar rose up amid a
quartet of stone lions. At the top of the pillar was a gray disk representing the Buddhas
Wheel of Life; at the base was a quotation in Pali: Sukho Buddhanam Uppado(Joyful
is the birth of the Buddhas). A plaque in Sinhalese explained that the pillar was a
monument to Rajapaksaa tribute to the man who had saved Buddhist Sri Lanka from
the Tamil Hindus and Christians who had tried to carve it up.
Under Rajapaksa, who was first elected in 2005, Sri Lanka has become a troubled,
disquieting place. With remarkable obduracy, he has shrugged off internal and
international pressure to investigate the Armys human-rights abuses during the wars
final months. (The United Nations estimates that as many as forty thousand Tamil
civilians died in that time.) In fact, in the years since the war the Army has only
tightened its hold on the north and the east, policing the people and swallowing their
land. Rajapaksa has amended the constitution to remove term limits for the
Presidency, marking his intention to linger as long as he can. Many people believe that
he has allied himself with Buddhist nationalist groups; he has refused to hold them to
account even when, in the past three years, they have turned on Sri Lankas Muslims,
the countrys other significant religious minority. Last June, one such group, the Bodu
Bala Sena (Buddhist Power Force), attacked Muslim homes and shops in southwestern
Sri Lanka, killing four people and injuring eighty. With the explicit support of the
government and the Army, Buddhist chauvinists have been colonizingtheres no
other word for itHindu and Muslim areas,renaming towns in Sinhalese, planting
pagodas where there were once temples or dargahs, and rewriting history along the
way. On bus rides from Colombo to Jaffna, I saw, on either side of the A9 highway, the
quick growth of holy Bo trees and ovoid pagoda domes, all installed, tended to, and
guarded by soldiers.
Rajapaksas family has moved into the government wholesale, as if it were an ancestral
house; two of his brothers are ministers, another is the speaker of Parliament, and
nearly forty other relatives hold various major and minor posts. (When I visited the old
Kataragama temple, in the countrys south, the head priest complained that the

custodian was transforming its character from Hindu to Buddhist. The custodian, no
surprise, was a Rajapaksa.) The family has acquired a reputation for corruption, and
for employing squads of thugs to settle scores. Dissent is not well received; journalists
and activists live in fear of what is known as a white-van abduction, in which they are
yanked off the road either to receive physically administered lessons or to vanish
altogether. The Committee to Protect Journalists ranked Sri Lanka fourthbehind
Iraq, Somalia, and the Philippines, and just ahead of Syriaon its 2014 Impunity
Index, a list of countries where journalists are slain and the killers go free.
On occasion, the Rajapaksas have even indulged in straight tin-pot behavior. At one
point, the Presidents brother Gotabhaya, the defense minister, installed a tank of
sharks on his front lawn; another time, a source told me, he decided that he didnt like
the yellow of an awning above a restaurant on a road where he took his morning walks
and ordered it changed to white. When a fellow-student complained that the
Presidents son Namal had passed his law-school exams only because he had been
given his own room and a computer with Internet access, the student was allegedly
threatened by police and beaten bythugs.*
The aggregation of all of this misrule chipped away at Rajapaksas popularity,
prompting him to call this election two years ahead of schedule, apparently still
confident about his prospects. (The countrys economy has been growing at a rapid
rate.) But then he encountered an unexpected and sturdy rival: Maithripala Sirisena, a
minister who last month defected from Rajapaksas government and joined an alliance
of opposition parties, taking twenty-five parliamentarians with him. I came out
because I could not stay any more with a leader who had plundered the country,
government, and national wealth, Sirisena said. Like Rajapaksa, Sirisena ardently
courts the Buddhist right, and he has said that he wont diminish the strength or the
influence of the Army. But he has also promised to address corruption, to permit
investigations into war crimes, and to restore the judiciarys independenceto undo,
in other words, many of the effects of the past four years of Rajapaksas reign.
And yet, despite this challenge, Rajapaksa may still win. He became his countrys
youngest parliamentarian in 1970, at the age of twenty-four, and he is now a veteran of
many electionsan old fox who can do this in his sleep, as an Indian politician who
knows him well put it. Sirisena, who has never run for President, has had less than two
months to organize his campaign, and the coalition behind him is large but frangible.
If Rajapaksa triumphs, he will likely hunker down with even greater tenacity, pulling
his family closer still. He will bend the state and its machinery even more to the
contours of his power, in ways that will bode poorly for Sri Lankan democracy.
* This post has been altered to clarify allegations made about President Rajapaksas
son Namal.

Posted by Thavam