Just over six months after the deadly Easter terror attacks, the Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) that investigated the incidents released their report this week. The report makes interesting reading but the parliamentary opposition insists on rejecting it - and this raises even more intriguing questions.
It will be recalled that when the PSC was set up, the Joint Opposition (JO) which now comprises mostly of members of the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) agreed to the proposal to have a PSC investigate the attacks. However, they later pulled out of the committee claiming that, by having intelligence officers testify before the committee, it could pose a threat to national security.
Days prior to the PSC report being released, the SLPP also made a hue and cry about Minister Rauff Hakeem being a member of the committee. That was because a video where Minister Hakeem is seen talking to Zaharan Hashim, thought to be the mastermind behind the attacks, had emerged.
Hakeem has strenuously defended himself, noting that the video related to the 2015 general election campaign, when Hashim was not known to the authorities to be a person of interest. In any event, it can be clearly seen that Hashim is one of a crowd who raises a question during the discussion.
In its presidential election campaign for Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the SLPP has made a mountain of a molehill of this video, claiming that Hakeem is in cahoots with Islamic terrorists. Its nominal chairman G.L. Peiris even went to the extent of suggesting that Hakeem should opt out of the PSC.
Peiris perhaps forgets that there are plenty of videos and photographs of himself having discussions with Anton Balasingham, ideologue of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and that too when the entire world knew that Balasingham was part and parcel of a terrorist organisation.
If one uses Peiris’s own logic about Hakeem, that makes Peiris also a terrorist by association but perhaps this is beyond the grasp of the failing faculties of the ageing law professor who is now well past the biblical lifespan of three score years and ten!
Even before the PSC report was released, the JO ands its political proxy, the SLPP, had dismissed the committee’s deliberations. However, the report sheds considerable light on how the country’s security apparatus operated and spares no one - not even the President or the Prime Minister.
Considering that the PSC comprised of not just government members but also members from the Tamil National Alliance and the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, it is a testament to the integrity of our system of parliamentary democracy and its findings must be given its due importance.
The PSC finds fault with Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe for not raising issue at being kept away from the National Security Council and chastises him, saying that the “Prime Minister should have raised this in Cabinet and Parliament but remained silent for over six months”, noting that the “Prime Minister opting to rely on a third party for information is no substitute and is unacceptable.’’
However, that is a slap on the wrist compared to what the PSC says about the conduct of President Maithripala Sirisena. The PSC notes that the President was “not fully upfront” regarding his conduct before and after the attacks and found his claim that all flights returning from Singapore (where he was at the time of the attacks) were booked to be palpably false.
The committee has said that it “is deeply disappointed that the President had deliberately misled the PSC”, and “in this light also questions the veracity of his other statements” - food for thought indeed!
Even more damning is the PSC’s observations as to why the attacks occurred. It asks whether those with vested interests did not act on intelligence so as to create chaos and instil fear in the lead up to the presidential election which it notes “would then lead to the call for a change of regime to contain such acts of terrorism.”
Looking at the presidential election campaign now, that is precisely what has happened. While the ruling party candidate is campaigning on a platform of development, more efficient governance and poverty alleviation, the opposition has resorted to generating a fear psychosis, portraying its candidate as a potential ‘saviour from terrorism’.
In hindsight, there is no doubt that the Easter attacks benefited only one party politically. In fact, days after the attack, the main opposition candidate who until then was quite coy about contesting the presidential election despite intense speculation to that effect, publicly offered his willingness to be the candidate.
Little wonder then that the Opposition did not favour the prospect of a PSC regarding the Easter attacks, did not participate in it and are now trying to discredit its findings on the flimsy grounds of one member meeting a suicide bomber in a crowd four years ago.
The question now is, is the opposition afraid of the truth because the truth hurts, especially in the middle of an election campaign?