FREE US FROM 'FREEDOM'

One of those Freedom House campaigners of a sort that wears his heart on his sleeve has written about Sri Lanka, and his content is so predictable, his article could just as well have been written for him by anybody in one of our policymaking think-tanks. His lament is that Sri Lanka is not doing well in the good governance and freedom and democracy department, and that there are 'serious concerns.'

When international NGO people say 'serious concerns', everybody has learnt to decipher the code. It generally means that these people are desperate to find something to carp about to stay relevant and keep their funding sources happy. In Sri Lanka they have found a convenient punching bag, because there is a regime that does not toady up to Western governments and their fellow travelers in INGOs such as Freedom House.

The Freedom House writer however, curiously lets slip out a sensational observation during the course of his diatribe, and no doubt he does so unwittingly, and it will be as far as he is concerned, probably the last article that he would write for Freedom House. He states somewhere in the middle of his saccharine-dripping contribution that because of the governance issues that have sprung up in Sri Lanka in the past few months, there is a danger to the robust economy of this country, that has been thriving and generating a great deal of investment!

Now, does this Freedom House freewheeler think that this robust economy materialized from thin air, and that it had nothing to do with the same people that he is accusing now of errors and missteps in the good governance department?

Though he does not state the fact in his fairly hysterical opinion piece, the reality is that none of these economic gains that he admits to would have materialized if the Sri Lankan government did not stop the war, and put an end to the long period of instability through a sustained onslaught on the Tamil Tigers for which the Sri Lankan defence establishment is now being targeted for alleged human rights violations, by the same types of INGOs such as Freedom House.

However, if Freedom House can applaud Sri Lanka's economic gains now, and say that these may be 'reversed' due to rights violations that are talking place in the present, it is in fact a backhanded compliment to the defence establishment and of course the current dispensation, that the defence establishment functions under.

It is in sum, a telling compliment as it acknowledges that Sri Lanka is on the right path due to the performance in the last few years, and if this performance came out of policies that Freedom House and other holier than thou NGO establishments do not generally endorse, it proves that even by the admission of these screechy bleeding-heart types, it's not their kind of policies that we as a country should follow, if we are to make progress and achieve something on behalf of our long suffering citizens.

The Freedom House commentator may not have had the largeness of spirit to compliment the authors of the economic progress that he is so ecstatic about, but that does not mean that his slip does not show.

Eventually, when the current no nonsense governance creed makes for more gains of the type the Freedom House writer unwittingly admits to, he and his ilk will probably write more screeds saying that there are still more things that the policymakers are guilty of, that will cause still more calamities in the future. Good. It means that the more this people write this kind of nonsense, the more we in this country have to be assured that we are on the right path.

The wrong path will be to take anything and everything these people say about 'rights' and 'governance' as gospel. The right path is to take all of this with a pinch of salt, because there can be no perfect conditions when a country is on a firm trajectory of gainful economic development.