by Izeth Hussain
A mob of citizens clamouring for injustice – Horace translated by James Michie.
The main focus of this article is on the external aspect of the Rama Mani case, more specifically on the damage that it can do to our foreign relations. But it is relevant for my purposes to begin with a brief observation on its internal aspect. Reportedly Ms Mani had received a letter dismissing her with immediate effect from the post of Director at the ICES.

 Apparently no opportunity was given to her to defend herself against any charges prior to the issue of that letter, which can therefore be taken as outraging the norms of natural justice. However, she was reinstated in her post by a further letter and asked to continue for the full term for which she had contracted. Worth emphasising is that she had received strong support from the ICES staff, who had given her a grand send-off even though it was known that she was being ordered out of the country by the Government.

There is in humanity a deep love of justice. There is also in humanity a deep love of injustice. Otherwise we cannot explain why injustices are committed all over the world practically all the time, and at the same time injustices are corrected. In order to maintain ourselves in a tolerably civilised condition we have to see somehow that injustices are quickly corrected, and that on the whole justice clearly prevails. This seems to be an uphill task in the world of Sri Lankan cricket. Exchanging notes with an exceptionally knowledgeable cricket aficionado I find that more cricketing careers have been blighted through injustice in Sri Lanka than in any other test-playing country. Our NGOs have not been famous for a deep love of injustice, so that it is not surprising that what looked like an aberrant case of monstrous injustice towards Rama Mani was quickly corrected. We must now see that what looks like monstrous injustice towards her at the level of the State is also corrected.

At this point I must make some observations about the State and injustice. The State concentrates far more power in its hands than any other institution, such as for instance in Sri Lanka the NGO network or Sri Lanka Cricket. We must bear in mind also the fact that the modern state concentrates far more power than the typical pre-modern state, and that that power is exercised ubiquitously. Consequently in the Western democracies, or in India, countervailing power is brought into play in the form of a separation of powers within the state structure, the opposition political parties, and above all a vibrant civil society. However, all those institutions can be in place and all of them can somehow come to be in a somnambulistic condition. That happened under the 1977 Government, which is why it became possible for Sri Lankans such as myself to say that far and away the most impressive feature of the 1977 Government was the depth of its dedication to injustice. Things have improved greatly of course, but we have to be wary.

The details that have been publicised about Ms Mani’s ejection from Sri Lanka are as follows. Though she was reinstalled in her post, her visa was cancelled and she was given notice of just a few days to leave Sri Lanka, apparently as a consequence of a CID inquiry. It is surmised that her involvement with Gareth Evans’ Responsibility to Protect project was the major reason for the visa cancellation. On an ICES appeal she was allowed a few additional days of grace, but it was thought prudent to pack her off straightaway as apparently there was a threat to her life and that of her son. According to one report her house was to have been searched by the security authorities, but that did not happen because of the influence wielded by the Indian High Commission. Finally she left for the airport in a French Embassy vehicle, she being a French citizen. In Parliament an assurance was given by the Prime Minister to a JVP member that her visa would not be renewed.

I cannot vouch for the veracity of the details given above. I have not sought to check on them because I am writing this article in the capacity of a concerned citizen with a background of foreign relations experience, and not as an investigative journalist. But I must say that those details ring true. Some readers may wonder whether there really were serious death threats against Ms Mani and her son. I must ask them to remember that some years ago the Bollywood idol Shah Rukh Khan and some other members of his troupe narrowly escaped being bomb-killed in Colombo. That showed the irrational murderousness of our ultra-nationalist super-patriots. The death threat in the present case had to be taken seriously.

I will now make a few observations on the Rama Mani case in relation to her status as a non-national, the image of our NGOs as hot-beds of subversion, and the Responsibility to Protect project. It may be that the Government cannot be faulted on technical or legal grounds for having cancelled Ms Mani’s visa and packing her off with just a few days notice as she is a foreign national. Most states, probably all, claim the absolute sovereign right to deny visas or cancel them without giving any reasons at all. However, it is generally acknowledged that law gets its sanctification or legitimation in terms of its moral underpinnings, which is why the notion of equity figures so prominently in jurisprudence. A foreign national does not have all the rights of a Sri Lanka national – and quite rightly so – but he/she has rights as a human being, the so-called human rights. I would go even further and say that all human beings have an absolute right to decent, fair, just treatment, irrespective of what may or may not be included in all the human rights declarations and covenants.

In Sri Lanka there seems to be a readiness to assume that foreign nationals have no business to be here in the first place – except to the extent that we are prepared to tolerate them – and therefore they have no rights. It is meet and proper to treat them like dirt, should it suit our interests to do so. Some years ago foreign spouses of local nationals who went to get their visas renewed found that the fees had been increased – without the slightest forewarning – by a colossal proportion. I wrote an article about it, more than one Minister to my knowledge was against that increase, and wiser counsels soon prevailed. I must recall also the Bracegirdle case of the 1930s, in which an Australian national regarded as a Marxist subversive by the then colonial government was to be deported, Our LSSP struck a mighty blow for justice by fighting a successful court case against that deportation.

According to the details available to the public Ms Mani seems to have been given very shabby treatment at the level of the state, part of the explanation for which might be found in the negative Sri Lankan mind-set about foreigners that I have outlined above. A more important part of the explanation is the fairly widespread notion that our NGOs are hot-beds of subversion. Unfortunately Ms Mani was the Director of the Colombo ICES which has somehow acquired notoriety for subversion more than any other NGO.

Since my retirement in 1989 I have interacted a great deal with our NGOs, including with the ICES, except during the last few years. I have been at a loss to understand how this notion of subversive NGOs has acquired such wide currency. The idea seems to be that anyone who holds certain views – most importantly the view that the ethnic problem can only be solved by a wide measure of devolution amounting to federalism – is covertly a subversive. The time has come to point out some hard facts. The LTTE has hated the idea of devolution to the extent of wanting to kill any influential person who has tried to promote it, such as Kumaratunga, Lakshman Kadirgamar, and Neelan Tiruchelvam. The Sinhalese hardliners, chauvinists, racists, also hate the idea of a peaceful solution through devolution. Therefore I am on one side of the barricades with other peaceniks in wanting devolution, while the Sinhalese racists are on the other side of the barricades together with the LTTE Tamil racists in preventing devolution. The LTTE I am sure would say that the Sinhalese racists are "objectively" – whatever may be their subjective intentions – serving the separatist purpose of the LTTE. We must stop this nonsense about certain ideas being inherently subversive.

Most readers probably have wrong notions about what goes on in NGOs like the ICES. It functions as an intellectual forum holding film shows, lectures, and seminars, most of which are meagerly attended and are quite dull. The intellectual stimulation provided by most of them is nil. That has surely to be expected because most of the people involved in such institutions, here and all over the world, have to consist of ordinary humanity, that is to say of decent and well-meaning people who above all are dull conformists with nothing subversive about them. Its major focus is on research projects, and doubtless some excellent work has been done, but the papers are not available on the internet and their circulation must be very limited. It is difficult to see how they can possibly constitute a significant subversive force. I am not in the least surprised that although charges about NGO subversion have been made for over fifteen years, not one iota of evidence has been unearthed to show it. Behind it all is enviousness, intolerance, and a rage for totalitarian control.

The above sets out the background to the ejection of Ms Mani from Sri Lanka. The ejection itself was reportedly precipitated by some injudicious action on the part of Ms Mani arising out of her close connection with the former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans and the R2P project. She had apparently proposed that the ICES be brought into some sort of association with the Global Centre of the R2P in New York, and that had been brought to the notice of the Government which for some time had already been suffering from convulsions over that project. The ejection by an alarmed Government quickly followed.

As everyone knows the Neelan Tiruchelvam lecture on the R2P has proved to be highly controversial. Notably there has been a negative critique by Minister G.L. Peiris and a counter-critique by Tisse Jayatileke, but I have the impression – perhaps mistakenly – that the core problem has not been properly addressed. Certainly a serious problem is that the R2P can be misused for neo-imperialist domination by the strong against weak countries such as Sri Lanka. But the core problem is that the idea that the international community has the responsibility of intervening to protect a people irrespective of the wishes of governments arises out of the revolutionary upsurge of the masses and their demand for protection and a better life. R2P has behind it far more than neo-imperialist strategy. The core problem therefore is how to protect state sovereignty while allowing for the international community’s responsibility to protect the people when that becomes necessary.

Not long after the Evans lecture I happened to visit the ICES. I asked an officer there to convey to the Director that it would be useful to hold a seminar on R2P. Had one of my late friends Neelan or Regi Siriwardene been there I believe that such a seminar would have been held because they would have recognized that a lecture sponsored by the ICES had set off a political storm and therefore the ICES had some measure of responsibility to try to quell that storm. Had that seminar been held the core problem could have been addressed, some useful clarifications since made by Ms Mani could have been ventilated, and some measure of balanced thinking about R2P might have been brought about.

The failure to hold such a seminar seems instructive. I have remarked above that the research products of the ICES have very small circulation, something that is certainly true of almost all the NGOs, which does not seem to bother them in the least. There seems to be something that is precious, elitist, hermetic, an ethos that spawns coteries, in NGOs like the ICES – which is not of course to deny that some useful work has been done by them. It is an ethos that is favorable to the ambitious go-getter, the intellectual mediocrity, who wants to secure places in academia, the UN system, and so on. It is not at all surprising therefore that the Rama Mani case has shown that the ICES had practically immured itself from the political currents swirling all around it. Otherwise it is not possible to explain her astounding political naivety in proposing some sort of affiliation of the ICES with the R2P Global Centre in New York.

The intemperate reaction of the Government in summarily packing off Ms Mani may be understandable, but it does not seem justifiable. Surely that affiliation she allegedly proposed could have been prevented through the intervention of people like Professor Kingsley de Silva and Bradman Weerakoon. That packing off has almost certainly worsened the already poor international image of the Government, which should therefore justify its action. Alternatively, it could offer to renew her visa. Whether she should actually return is another question. A mob of citizens could clamor for injustice.