Riot DECONSTRUCTED

Last week, the much awaited budget speech by President Mahinda Rajapaksa was driven from the main news spot by the story of the riot by assault rifle toting inmates of the Welikada Prison and its suppression with loss of life.

Agency press reports of the armed uprising were picked up by the World’s media and repeated extensively. Internet video websites such as You Tube and Vimeo reproduced news footage of the incident, including the evocative image of prisoners on the roof, some of them brandishing their T-56 assault rifles.

In its aftermath, the world media highlighted calls from the opposition United National Party (UNP) and from human rights groups for an impartial inquiry into the matter.

The fact that Minister of Rehabilitation and Prison Reforms Chandrasiri Gajadeera appointed a three member committee of inquiry, which is to submit a comprehensive report to Parliament, has not received similar coverage.

Mobile phones and drugs

The damage the incident did to the country is immense, although the absence of an ethnic element did mitigate adverse coverage. For example, BBC correspondent Charles de Havilland testified that ‘Friday's violence does not seem to have been ethnic in nature. There are Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim inmates.’

Even the media in allied countries have been cautious. Cuba’s Prensa Latina news agency quoted Minister Chandrasiri Gajadeera, a member of the Communist Party, as saying that the clashes began when commandos raided in search of mobile phones and drugs.

However, it also pointed out that the Welikada prison, built in the mid-nineteenth century by British Imperialists, keeps in its cells hundreds of inmates, in crowded conditions. Along with other media organisations, it called attention to another riot in the prison earlier this year.

There are many probable causes for the riot, apart from overcrowding. The fact that the government has been setting up a programme of prison reform, including more ‘open prisons’, shows that there is much room for improvement.

However, there is another factor that must be dealt with, explaining why the prisoners were so ready to take up weapons and (according to press reports) fire indiscriminately at the public road, endangering innocent passers-by.

There has been a diminution in the respect accorded to human life in this country, as witness the growing rate of crime in this country, particularly of crimes of violence such as murder and rape.

In Kahawatte, sixteen women over 50 years of age have been murdered, many of them raped, in the past four years.

In Galle, a gang war which has caused twelve deaths in the past four years culminated the other day in a man’s arms being hacked-off in broad daylight, as crowds looked on.

‘Crime and bad lives,’ said H.G. Wells in ‘A Modern Utopia’, ‘are the measure of a State’s failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.’

Violence and crime

Our society has been degraded as much by the callous attitude of the general public as by the horrifying circumstances of the crimes themselves. Some victims are said to ‘deserve to die’, as if that lessens the criminal nature of the circumstances of their demise. Even worse is when women (especially foreigners) are said to have ‘deserved’ to be raped.

The extent of our society’s degeneration is shown by the willingness of people to break the law in order to get ahead. A misdeed is a crime only if one gets caught.

This degeneration of what is supposed to be a majority Buddhist country is accompanied by the erection of more and more the Buddha statues. Everywhere, brand new images of the Tathagatha look down upon acts of violence and crime.

The political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in ‘On revolution’ that ‘Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.’

This hypocrisy began with JR Jayawardene’s declaration after his landslide electoral victory in 1977 of a ‘dharmista’ (just) society, coincident with the inauguration of a wholesale assault on the homes and persons of leftists by UNP goons, which morphed within a couple of weeks into an anti-Tamil pogrom.

The ‘dharmista society’ was responsible for violent assaults on striking workers, for more pogroms against Tamil people, for double promotions for policemen harassing opposition women and attacks on members of the judiciary.

‘Dharmista society’

When the BBC’ de Havilland reports that ‘in the past there have been racist killings, most notoriously in July 1983 when 53 Tamil prisoners were massacred during broader anti-Tamil pogroms’, he does not mention that it was the ‘dharmista’ rulers who were responsible.

When the UNP’s Mangala Samaraweera calls the suppression of the riot a ‘massacre’, he forgets that when he and our President led the ‘Padha Yathra’ march against disappearances, it was against the regime of the party from whose ranks he now speaks.

The ‘dharmista society’ also coincided with the growth of mafias, criminal elements taking over all aspects of society. For the first time, heroin became a problem. Even such seemingly innocuous areas as the trade in food commodities were expropriated by mafiosi.

It was in this era that patronage by politicians grew to be a means to impunity: the garage number plate was transformed into a symbol of exemption from the law. Even ‘VIP’ labels, used to allocate parking places to vehicles during government-organised events, were converted into notices of immune eminence.

Today, ministry staffs are eternally importuned by armies of hangers on for these markers of rank. This writer recently saw a BMW bearing a ‘VIP’ parking sticker dating back eight months to International Women’s’ Day!

The government must act against the criminalisation of our society, against the attitude that transgression is permissible if one is not apprehended. It could start by removing the element of impunity.

The state could do worse than begin by eliminating those representative emblems of immunity, the garage number plate and the ‘VIP’ sticker displayed by all and sundry.