{"id":172558,"date":"2017-01-11T00:00:19","date_gmt":"2017-01-10T18:30:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=172558"},"modified":"2017-05-30T17:27:00","modified_gmt":"2017-05-30T11:57:00","slug":"four-brothers-who-ran-the-countryavarice-personified","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/four-brothers-who-ran-the-countryavarice-personified\/","title":{"rendered":"Four Brothers Who Ran The Country\u2026Avarice Personified"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Vishwamithra1984<\/a><\/span> –<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThe lust of avarice has so totally seized upon mankind that their wealth seems rather to possess them than they possess their wealth.<\/em>\u201d\u00a0~Pliny the Elder<\/p>\n

The guns fell silent. Victory cries echoed in the skies while jubilant Sri Lankans celebrated the war victory with Kiribath (milk-rice), Lunu-Miris (chili-peppered onion-chutney) and plain tea. The country at large, those who lived south of Vavuniya, claimed, in all rightful sense, a historic military victory over the forces of Tamil extremists who brought unspeakable terror, anguish, pain and death to many a Sinhalese-Buddhist community. The celebrations were justifiable; the claims were authentic and lofty hopes for a dawn of a new era with peace, prosperity and stability reached beyond the frontiers of reality. That was May 19th 2009. Now it looks so far and distant and the victory\u2019s gleaming rays have paled into the dim-light of time.\"rajapaksa_brothers\"<\/a><\/p>\n

People\u2019s priorities changed; victors were rejected by the very people who hailed a modern Caesar who did not fire single bullet nor stopped one to shield the brother-soldier behind; the field commander who marshaled his men, the commander who planned and designed every single attack and counter-attack, the commander who led his brave soldiers in the trenches, the commander who nearly died from a suicide-bomber attack, became the first victim of the peace. While the siblings of the Commander-in-Chief claimed ownership of the victory, not of the war that consumed hundreds of the children of ordinary families of our nation, the Army Commander was found guilty of flimsy charges and put behind the unkind bars of Welikada prisons. Such were the great and cruel ironies of our times that followed the so-called victory.<\/p>\n

From 1994 to 2014, twenty long years, on the military side, were filled with stories of great bravery; yet they were filled with unspeakable grief for innocent masses of our land who lived on the south side of Vavuniya. They tell a story of a nation, at times meandering between what to do and what not to do, sometimes making advances on the battlefield and retreating other times, a story of utter disbelief when their children didn\u2019t come home on time; of tormented residents along border villages not knowing whether they would live or die the night they go to sleep, these were the years some would like to forget, yet they would be etched in their memories for a long time. The political leadership provided at that time switched from a Bandaranaike to a Rajapaksa.<\/p>\n

But the pattern of politics did not change. The SLFP carried on with their caravan of populist measures on the economy and ultra-nationalist on the socio-ethnic issues. The policies and postures so adopted portrayed a regime hell-bent on teaching a lesson, not only to a terrorist army, but also to a segment of our own people, Tamil civilians. These are the years in which an emotion against terrorism turned into a war against a whole people. The divide between the Sinhalese and Tamils took root and those who controlled the coffers of the country controlled the mass psyche.<\/p>\n

The tragic feature of this period is that no politician, no pundit, no NGO, no state institution, no civil organization, no media outlet, no segment of the clergy, took notice of the fact that the nation\u2019s character is receiving irrevocable alteration, its culture is being debased, its inner soul is being consumed by the marketplace, its education is being neglected beyond any chance of a \u2018correction\u2019 and its role- model politicians were wining dining and in five-star hotels in the company of that new class of crony-capitalists. It was indeed a spectacle of macabre consumerism.<\/p>\n

Those political leaders who used to pontificate about the purity of our cultural values have discarded those very values like early morning spit. And when the Rajapaksas assumed the mantle of power after Chandrika Kumaranatunga Bandaranaike, all focus was on the war in the North and thanks mainly to the incredible leadership of the commanders on the field and adequate political leadership at the center, the dreaded Prabhakaran and his Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam passed into history.<\/p>\n

What followed this historic war victory is what destroyed the political victors. This war victory, the ruling family assumed, was an open license to use their political power to use it to accumulate wealth, to suppress the media, allegedly eliminate political critics and generally run amok with unlimited power. The notorious 18th Amendment was a byproduct of this great avarice the \u2018Four Brothers\u2019; their vulgar pursuit of physical pleasures manifested themselves in midnight race car rallies; their crude indulgences were of the \u2018other worldly\u2019 sort . The first decade of the Twenty First Century represented some of the best and worst in our short history from Independence to present. The beginnings of the winds of victory are lost in the reeking mists of corruption, nepotism and cruelty. This land of ours has a long history, a history that is rich with magnificent kings and reasonably steadfast democratic rulers; her history could boast about being magnanimous in victory because her victorious kings decreed that her subjects adhered to noble rituals of respecting defeated enemy-kings, her history built colossal stupas upon the sacredness of the teachings of the Thathagatha, the Enlightened One. For the first time in her long and cherished history, she submitted herself to the rule of \u2018Four Brothers\u2019. The eldest<\/span><\/a> was the Speaker of the House of Parliament; next was<\/span><\/a> the President and the other two controlled the most vital sectors of the country, Defence<\/span><\/a> and the Economy<\/span><\/a>. Among themselves was disbursed nearly 70% of the country\u2019s budget.\"mahinda-family-1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When the President undertook overseas visits, his cavalcade of henchmen and court jesters were in hundreds. When the Minister in charge of the economy travelled outside Colombo, his super-luxury vehicle went ahead of him, not on road on its own wheels, but in a separate container. When the guy in charge of Defence was criticized, those who were suspected of the deed have allegedly disappeared suddenly, sometimes never to return. The \u2018self-righteousness syndrome\u2019 had infected all these individuals, from skin to the bone, to the marrow. They really thought that they could get away with anything. More often than not, they in fact did.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile the country was being buried in a stampede of propaganda. A leader elected by the people was being promoted as a Monarch. Some media-henchmen in fact addressed him as such- \u2018Your Royal Highness\u2019. The country\u2019s intelligentsia went to sleep; religious leaders, barring a handful, deified President Rajapaksa; his family, the \u2018First Family\u2019, and President\u2019s siblings were, not revered, but feared; the greatest irony of democracy had occurred in Sri Lanka. A democratically elected political leader ruled the country by decree; his siblings ran it for him and the subject people succumbed to a fantasy of deliverance, a fantasy that the \u2018king\u2019 and his \u2018royal family\u2019 would do no wrong because they \u2018liberated\u2019 the country from its ancient, traditional enemy- Tamils. The era of the rule of the \u2018Four Brothers\u2019 began in earnest. Those who willingly pandered to that gory fantasy today have ended up as the \u2018Joint Opposition\u2019 (JP).<\/p>\n

Bereft of any traditional values, these \u2018merchants of corruption and dishonesty\u2019 could no longer keep trading; the real value of their \u2018stocks in trade\u2019 began diminishing. Provincial council elections were held in Sri Lanka on 20 September 2014 to elect 34 members in the Uva Province. Sri Lanka Freedom Party, led by the Rajapaksas retained control; however, the UPFA recorded a loss of votes in the province, clearly providing the United National Party with a probable chance to make an unfamiliar comeback. Despite this unusual setback, President Rajapaksa decided to go for Presidential Elections in early January 2015. Such was the arrogance of power of the \u2018Four Brothers\u2019. Their cockiness knew no bounds.<\/p>\n

Who is responsible for the emergence of, perhaps, the most corrupt and avaricious ruling clan in our history? There is no answer pointing to one single cause. We mundane folks are merely looking for one single reason, one single phenomenon. But history has shown us that it is utterly futile to look for such single answers. For the Roman Empire to fall, for Hitler to lose the war, for the collapse of the Marxist-Communist world, for that matter, for occurrence of any significant event in history, a combination of multiple reasons and causes is imperative. While one single cause may not be indispensable for occurrence of the event, the absence of that particular cause also might be significant enough not to produce the ultimate effect in history. That is why history has proven to be a graveyard for amateurs. I do not want to dwell amongst them.<\/p>\n

It would be apt to end this the 1st part of the \u2018Four Brothers\u2019 with a quotation from Zeno of Elea, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, whom Aristotle called the inventor of the dialectic: \u201cThe avaricious man is like the barren sandy ground of the desert which sucks in all the rain and dew with greediness, but yields no fruitful herbs or plants for the benefit of others<\/em>\u201d. The \u2018Four Brothers\u2019 are such avaricious men.<\/p>\n

To be continued next Wednesday\u2026<\/p>\n

*The writer can be contacted on vishwamithra1984@gmail.com<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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