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Anyone who knows anything about political theory has heard of the doctrine of the Separation of Powers. This means that those who perform the active function of government, the executors or doers, should be distinct from those who lay down the framework on which action is taken, the legislators. That framework is created not only through laws, but also through the budget, the allocation of resources for the Executive. Because of this latter responsibility, the Legislature also acts as the monitor of Executive action, through oversight mechanisms.
Hardly anyone thinks that this doctrine of Separation is a bad thing. Obviously those who act should not also be the judges of their own actions. However we tend in this country to ignore the fact that the doctrine does not operate at all here. The simple fact is that all members of the Executive, apart from the President, are also members of the Legislature. The proportion of legislators who belong to the Executive, and see this as their primary function and responsibility, has grown and grown over the years. Since 1977 the proportion has been well over half of the majority faction in Parliament, indeed in the 1977 Parliament it was well over half Parliament as a whole.
The new restaurants in Colombo were quite expensive so visiting them could be only an occasional pastime on an Asst Lecturer’s salary. The nightclubs which the bright young things of Colombo had begun to frequent were of course even more expensive, and in any case I found them loud and distastefully smoky. The mainstay of my social life then, at least as far as going out went, was the Arts Centre Club, above the Lionel Wendt Theatre, where Richard invariably turned up each night.
Though he could get quite sentimental about the lackadaisical nature of the place, where old Tissera measured out arrack as and how he pleased, he decided with a few other habitués that the place had to be made more elegant and more efficient. They claimed indeed that the Wendt survived only because Peggy Pieris sold a George Keyt painting when creditors pressed. Peggy was Keyt’s sister, and the wife of Harold Pieris, who lived next door to us in Alfred House and had been the patron of several Sri Lankan artists. He had built the theatre in memory of his friend Lionel Wendt, and it had continued for years, despite splendidly amateur management, as the most sophisticated venue in town for English plays and concerts. The Club above had been immensely daring in its time, though for some years now it had attracted very few patrons.
Earlier this year I was asked by Parliamentary officials to contribute to a journal that the Research division of Parliament proposed to publish. It was to deal with Policy Issues in the Post-Conflict Era. Articles were supposed to be of around 2000 words in length, which made sense since I assume they wish to accommodate as many Members of Parliament as possible. I felt obliged then to try to put something down, though clearly one would not be able to cover as much ground as one would like to within such limits.
Being spurred to think about such matters, and to write, was however salutary, and it struck me then that perhaps this could be a topic for a series of articles to follow on the literature series I had contributed to the ‘Island’. I don’t know whether the role of Parliament in terms of seeking good governance would be a generally popular topic, but I thought it worth trying to put down some ideas in a comprehensive manner. For the next few weeks therefore, as an interlude before some other literary topics, I plan to discuss what a Parliament should be, and why we have not succeeded in getting from our legislature the service the country needs.
Cyril and Esme Wickremesinghe when he served in Puttlam
Cyril Wickremesinghe and Esme Goonewardene married in 1919, and were stationed in various places in the country over the next seventeen years, before finally settling down in Lakmahal at the beginning of 1937. Their eldest son, Cyril Esmond Lucien, was born in 1920. Interestingly, they moved thereafter to Ceylonese names, Tissa in 1923, Lakshman in 1927, and in between their only daughter Mukta, named in memory of the pearl fisheries Cyril had supervised when he was stationed in Puttalam.
He had risen rapidly in the service, becoming the first Ceylonese Government Agent in 1930. This was in Sabaragamuwa, and there is a wonderful portrait of him and his wife seated in state along with the Sabaragamuwa chiefs in their traditional costumes, headed by old Maduwanwala Dissawa with his flowing white beard. But even more evocative for me of that bygone age is a photograph of a much younger couple, stunningly attractive both of them, taken it seems in Puttalam, which would make it the early twenties. They are surrounded by young men in studiedly casual European sports clothes. The womenfolk are much more formal, staid almost, with my grandmother looking almost ethereal in the middle.
1.In the last few months you have raised many questions regarding the finances of NGOs. However you didn’t seem to get satisfactory answers to these questions. What is the recent behind this, specially since the UPFA government has been alleging about NGO activity for years?
The general slowness of our bureaucracy, and the absence of clear responsibility for what goes on. For instance, in one case I was told the question could not be answered since it related to four Ministries. Dr Sudharshani Fernandopulle got a similar answer for another very illuminating question. I would have thought that the principal Ministry involved could have looked for the answers, but I think our bureaucracy is not used to functioning like that, and takes the easy way out.
I had nowhere to stay at Peradeniya, and I did not do much to overcome this problem. At first I had stayed in the University Guesthouse, high on the hill above the Arts Faculty, with beautiful views westward, but little in the way of food or even coffee. Ashley Halpe then put me up once or twice, with his usual generosity, but he was in effect camping out himself, for his wife had stayed on in Colombo with the children, after he got himself sent back to Peradeniya with the re-establishment of several universities.
The SLFP led government of the early seventies had engaged in what they termed rationalization, setting up one university with several campuses, with high level English becoming the responsibility of Kelaniya alone. Ashley had had to move there, while his erstwhile rival for the Chair, Yasmine Gooneratne, had gone away to Australia. Peradeniya had been left then to those whose speciality was Linguistics, that esoteric discipline that bright youngsters had engaged in when, a decade previously, it had been realized that language teaching was the urgent need of the hour.
Ashley also introduced me to Tissa Jayatilaka, whose first love was teaching, though he was not on the staff but instead had the far more prestigious post of Director of the Kandy American Centre. He came to us for Visiting Lectures and, apart from in the end marrying one of the brightest of our third years, he also took me under his wing and let me stay at the delightful flat he ran in Kandy. He used to take me regularly to the Faculty Club, where the opposition to the government held court in a haze of alcohol, Shelton Kodikara the brightest and most articulate amongst them. The government supporters, I should note, also attended, and relations were friendly enough, the Vice-Chancellor Leslie Panditharatne being particularly good natured. It was held however that he did not really exercise power, since Kingsely de Silva, considered his eminence grise, suitably enough given his splendid head of white hair, sat in his office daily and was thought to give him instructions.
Things got worse with the General Strike of 1980, which was dealt with brutally by the government. There were efforts to discipline government supporters, most shamefully if I recollect aright Anuruddha Seneviratne, an utterly decent if somewhat emotional scholar, on the grounds that his doctorate was from an Eastern bloc university that was not in the league of better known names. The opposition then struck back with a vote of No Confidence against the Dean of Arts, C R de Silva, a very distinguished scholar who however had some personal problems that made him vulnerable to criticism.
He ended up leaving the country a few years later, though in between he contributed actively to the work of the Council for Liberal Democracy that Chanaka Amaratunga had set up. This rapidly became the main source of criticism of the government from a non-socialist perspective, and it is a tribute to scholars like CR as well as Ministers such as Gamini Dissanayake and Ronnie de Mel that they realized that things were going wrong and that reforms were needed.
I soon settled into a fairly easy routine, travelling up to lecture for two or three very full days, with one or two very convivial evenings arranged by Tissa. Occasionally there were special lectures at the American Centre or the British Council. One I gave was a comprehensive critique of Leonard Woolf’s ‘Village in the Jungle’, at which the other speaker was Ranjith Goonewardene from Kelaniya University, who thought the book a masterpiece. He thanked me after the discussion, in that I had not been personal. When I expressed surprise at this, he told me that academic disputes in Sri Lanka were always personal which, though an exaggeration, I found was not entirely off the mark. Ashley indeed, when thinking of his sabbatical, asked if I would act as Head of Department, because the second and third most senior members of the Department loathed each other and hardly spoke. I thought the idea excessive, and fortunately I was no longer there when he went. As it turned out Thiru Kandiah managed perfectly well, though sadly he went off to Singapore a few years later – though retiring from there in time to succeed Ashley as Professor around the turn of the century.
More than half the week then I usually spent in Colombo, which I think my parents liked, for the house was indeed empty after the fullness caused by two teenagers and their friends in the previous decade. The garden however continued to be made use of by the children of the neighbourhood, a whole host of unfamiliar youngsters, the most prominent sportsmen being the Gunasekara family which lived in the main part of the old Alfred House property, and which had a host of boys who all looked the same, a phenomenon repeated a decade later by the Muzammil boys from opposite. There was too Faris Uvais next door, the middle one of five brothers, and the two younger Pathmanathans from down the road, though they were now young executives in the burgeoning business life of Colombo. The Selvanathans opposite, two amiable boys who were not at all interested in school though they had provided me with a lift early on before their lateness proved impossible, were meanwhile turning into extraordinarily distinguished and successful businessmen in the new economic climate the UNP government had engendered.
My mainstay though of the old family connections was Sharya de Soysa, who like me had come back from a postgraduate degree, and was lecturing in the Colombo Law Faculty, where she now occupies the Chair. We were particularly struck by what was a new phenomenon then in Colombo, good restaurants, the species having been confined previously to expensive hotels. We took then to exploring these occasionally, beginning with the Eastern Palace, the first real Chinese restaurant in the country. Those we had been used to in our childhood, the Modern Chinese Café, the Great Wall, the Park View Restaurant, served Chinese food adapted to Sri Lankan taste, but the Eastern Palace purported to be the real thing, and seemed to justify the claim.
Later there came the Flower Drum, in the house where my dentist had practiced when I was a child, and many others, but I still remember vividly the Eastern Palace, as I do Chez Amano, the first proper Italian Restaurant, down Turret Road. Interestingly enough, it was not just Colombo that was suddenly filling with restaurants. The same thing had happened in Oxford, which when I went up had a couple of very expensive restaurants and then nothing but several cheap and cheerful Chinese and Indian eateries. By 1980 however the place was full of posh restaurants of all types, beginning with the Opium Den, which I was delighted to return to a few years back. The Eastern Palace however vanished long ago, as did Chez Amano.
Sunday Observer 20 March 2011 – Colombo Changes: Colombo was suddenly filling with restaurants …
Cyril Leonard Wickremesinghe was the fifth son in his family, the sixth child. The eldest was the only girl, Maud, who married a Wijesinghe in a practice that was to be repeated over three generations.
All the children survived into at least middle-age, though only one went on into the sixties so that I can actually remember seeing him. This was Basil, the Public Works Department Inspector, who had two wives and eight children. The Wickremesinghes were all prolific breeders, so that my mother had 33 cousins on her father’s side, in addition to her three brothers. On the other, the Goonewardene side, she had just one, Lakshmi, the daughter of Leo, the favourite uncle of my childhood. He had dutifully left the police when his father and his brother Hugh died, to look after for nearly half a century the estates and the Old Place in Kurunagala.
Sam Zarifi - Amnesty International
Response requested by the BBC
Thanks for your query about the recent Amnesty report, and also the press release. The latter shows Sam Zarifi, one of the new sensationalistic breed of Amnesty officials, exaggerating as usual. The report does raise issues that also concern government and, while I was Secretary of the Ministry of Human Rights, we worked on an Action Plan that tries to address these. This is near adoption now, and meanwhile we are also trying to address long standing problems such as too ready use of remand mechanisms by magistrates under archaic laws (such as the Vagrants Ordinance) which have lasted from British times.
The Prevention of Terrorism Act and the Emergency (though obviously overused by the Government that, without elections, ruled from 1977 to 1988, which perhaps led to an increase in terrorist activity) was essential in dealing with the type of terrorism from which we suffered appallingly for decades. As Western governments appreciate, though sometimes we feel you need to be less brutal about things like secret renditions, prophylactic regulations are essential in any society under threat from terror. We managed over the last five years first to ensure a reduction in terrorist attacks, and finally got rid of the Tiger leadership in Sri Lanka. Unfortunately we know there are efforts to revive the movement, and we need to be careful.
Bearing that in mind however, we have managed to release many of those taken into custody, including about half the former cadres who confessed, after basic rehabilitation. The number of those taken earlier into detention is much less now – not the thousands Zarifi claims, as indeed the release itself makes clear – but the numbers are reducing rapidly, as investigations are concluded.
It is kind of Mr Zarifi to recognise the right and duty of the Sri Lankan government to protect its citizens from violence by armed groups, but frankly those of us who are accountable to our people understand about all this better than hired hands. I am sorry that, as I pointed out recently, Amnesty seems to have changed from the days when Human Rights were not so fashionable and lucrative an exercise. I should end by saying the last resident head of the officer Amnesty Office in Sri Lanka rang me up yesterday to congratulate me on recent statements, and I wish Amnesty still had people like that instead of people with political agendas. Some of what they saw chimes in with what we have also been saying in Sri Lanka, and I wish they would stick to values rather than drama.
Ultimately, I suspect, the farrago about alleged Sri Lankan War Crimes will continue to reverberate or will fade away depending on whether the American government decides to encourage it or not. Unfortunately it is difficult to predict what will happen, precisely because American foreign policy is not just confusing, but also very confused. There are obviously realists in significant positions in Washington, but there are also vague idealists, who are susceptible to all sorts of pressures. Some of them indeed come from commercial advocacy backgrounds and, since they may well have to go back to them, will need to maintain and indeed strengthen their credentials amongst organizations committed to strident activism[1].
The pictures of my grandparents in the dining room downstairs
My grandparents moved into Lakmahal some seventeen years after they were married. Till then they had not had a house of their own. He was a member of the Ceylon Civil Service, and had served for quarter of a century in different areas of the country.
Having joined the CCS in 1912, when he was twenty two, Cyril Wickremesinghe had risen rapidly. By 1920 he was Asst Revenue Officer in Mannar, the first Ceylonese to be appointed to such a position of responsibility, The year before that he had married the eighteen year old Esme Goonewardene, in what she always indicated was a deeply romantic affair.
The origin of the marriage was in reality somewhat different. Cyril came from Galle, as did Esme’s father, E G Goonewardene, described in 20th Century Impressions of Ceylon as the first gentleman from the low country to marry into the Kandyan aristocracy. This is an extravagant claim, which I don’t think is true, except in a sense that is not quite so exalting. Rather, what the snooty editors of that book were suggesting was that he was the first low country gentleman, ie not of the aristocracy or squirearchy, to marry into the land owning classes.
