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| Police personnel at a commemorative event held to remember war dead in East last year. Pix: Northeastern Monitor |
By N. Sathiya Moorthy
Kudos to President Anura Kumara Dissanayake for becoming bold to take the nation into confidence on whispered rumours of ‘missing weapons’ from some Army camp(s). This should at once also end lowly-whispered speculation about threats to his government from within, to the nation’s security and the nation as a whole.
“I will tell you the terrible situation this country is in,” Dissanayake said at a public event recently. “Weapons from military camps have come outside. Seventy-three T-56 weapons (automatic rifles) have reached the underground from one camp. We have arrested (recovered?) 38 already. We are searching for another 35. This is how it has gone on,” the President was blunt and to the point. It is the kind of forthrightness not expected of other politicians in his place.
In the same vein, Dissanayake disclosed how only the previous day, a member of the Civil Defence Force had been “arrested with a T-56.” He spoke highly of the “vast amount (number?) of people who safeguard the dignity of the military,” but added that “there is such a crowd… weapons belonging to the military have reached the underground.”
The President said a total of 13 persons had been apprehended thus far and said the investigations were continuing. In Parliament earlier this week, Public Security Minister Ananda Wijepala took Parliament into confidence by saying that six Army personnel, including an officer in the rank of a major, one Police official and another from the CDF, together numbering eight, have been arrested in connection with incidents of hired killing.
So far, so good. The way the President, who is also the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, phrased some of his subsequent observations was discomforting and disconcerting, so to speak.
“We are faced with such a criminal State…If weapons in camps reach the underground with political patronage… It is a kind of State where nothing can be trusted at any time. We are sitting on (in?) such a State,” are not the kind of one-liners that you hear from an incumbent President, especially after he had been around in office for four months.
To be fair to Dissanayake, he did say, “We will clear this, one by one,” implying that the “missing weapons” were only indicative of the multiple legacies that his government had inherited and how all of them needed to be cured, eradicated. Sincere and serious as the President may be, it still does not behove of the highest office that he has come to hold, to call the very nation he guides and is sworn to guard and protect a “criminal State.”
If nothing else, Dissanayake cannot expect his constituents nearer home and external interlocutors to heap faith in the nation and its leadership as they have been even in the midst of the crippling economic and accompanying political crises just the other year, 2022. That is assuming that the President had discussed the issues and concerns within his Cabinet and the all-important National Security Council (NSC) before going public ex tempore, without a text.
Any misplaced word here or a phrase there, is all that he and his ruling JVP-NPP combine needs for a huge uproar, from which quarters within the country, they may not be able to predict. If the low and slow Opposition now picks up the thread, isolates issues from one of the missing weapons and threats to national security, and targets them so that the Government leadership behaves as if they were still in the Opposition, they all would be left defenceless.
‘Criminal State’
After the President had had his say in the matter, Army Chief, Lt. Gen. Lasantha Rodrigo, as if in tandem yet without spelling out any specifics, lost no time in promising / warning of appropriate action against all (Army/uniformed) personnel (of stringent action) if their actions compromised the fair name of the Armed Forces – or, words to that effect. Their ranks within the Forces would not help, he declared.
It is yet another welcome announcement. Yet, neither the President nor the Army Chief indicated the timing of the unravelling of the “mystery of the missing guns,” if it could be titled the way a fiction writer would have done. It also remains to be known what action, if any, the Army brass and/or the Government has taken or intends to take, not just against the culprits caught stealing those weapons but the camp commander(s), under whose watch it all had happened. That is if such theft of weapons were/are restricted only to one stray Army camp.
Truth be acknowledged, it’s one more instance where during the predecessor government of President Ranil Wickremesinghe, the Police had begun initiating action. Newspaper reports, quoting unnamed Police sources, had detailed how some of their own men and their counterparts from the Army were leaving even gun-toting sentry duty, to go on a ‘killing assignment’ not commanded or authorised by their superiors.
The reports clearly also spoke about automatic rifles being smuggled out of Army camps and sold to the underground (gangs). Thankfully, no one, including President Dissanayake has said that the stolen weapons might have gone to political groups plotting to target the Sri Lankan State.
Responsibility, accountability
The reasons are not far to seek. More than once during the career of the Wickremesinghe Government, his junior minister for defence, Premitha Bandara Tennakoon, went on record about an (armed) plot to topple the Government that the security agencies had uncovered. He even gave a timeline for such a toppling game, which it was assumed would have become more bloodied than the Aragalaya protests only months earlier.
The President, then and now, is his own Defence Minister, hence, neither Ranil, nor Dissanayake can escape the burden of responsibility and accountability. In a country that lazily continues discussing the failed/aborted coup attempt of 1962, any ‘panicky reaction’ should be avoided. Rather, statements that could provoke a panicky reaction should be avoided, to begin with.
It is sad that Wickremesinghe’s UNP, which jumped the gun, to ‘correct’ facts surrounding the USD 3.7 million China-funded refinery, signed when President Dissanayake visited that country earlier this month, has been silent thus far about perceived failure in the matter of ‘stolen weapons’. Yes, neither the President, nor any of his ministers, who have begun talking out-of-turn after the ‘long silence’ of the past weeks in power, has named it as yet another failure of the Wickremesinghe dispensation.
Harmful, shameful
In the process, it will do well for the government leaders to look into the mirror and ask themselves if the Aragalaya protests that they led had contributed to a permissive atmosphere that had made such theft of weapons possible, if not condonable. Yes, the argument, then and now, would also centre on the fiscal crisis that hit individual homes and the nation’s economy, and blame them for such rank indiscipline in the uniformed services.
Beyond all these, the incumbent Government should be more sensitive to the security requirements of former Presidents and other dignitaries, and better not play politics in the matter. The same applies to secure homes for those ex-‘s. This is more so in the context of the ‘missing weapons’, not that a prospective assassin would have to wait for a ‘stolen weapon’ of the kind to target a political leader.
But the use of a weapon stolen from the armoury of the Armed Forces would make it more harmful and shameful than otherwise. Already, the President has given the impression that all 73 missing weapons were stolen from a single Army camp. If not, someone in authority should clarify the position, even if not they come out with the details, for understandable security reasons, even at this late hour.
Time was when in the closing months of the LTTE war, Western academics and veteran diplomats who landed in Colombo on assignment, started talking about LTTE cadres let loose at the end of a conclusive war could escape to their nations, where they have a ready refuge in Diaspora Tamils. Their immediate fear was about those failed cadres taking to gun-running and of course drug smuggling. Not one of them ruled out the possibility of ‘LTTE sharpshooters’ becoming guns for hire. As a ready reckoner, they had the example of the ‘Lakshman Kadirgamar assassination’. In this case, as may be recalled, the LTTE sharpshooter waited patiently in a neighbouring building terrace and waited for that moment when the Foreign Minister, after yet another long day’s work, decided to relax his limbs in the swimming pool in his otherwise well-guarded house.
That way, a judicial commission in neighbouring India that probed the LTTE assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi concluded that the reduction of the leader’s security was among the reasons that facilitated the determined, patient killer team. If the idea was/is by going slow on their security, the incumbent leaders thought that they could be forced to sit at home, fearing for their lives, it’s still a double-edged weapon, a risk that’s not worth anything, anyway.
The present-day rulers, who may have read Frederick Forsyth’s ‘Day of the Jackal’, need always to remember that it was not just a thriller fiction but a real plot(s) to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle, made into a fiction first, a film later, and a British spy thriller TV serial! Coursetsy- Ceylon Today (The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)
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