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In its editorial this week, The Sunday Leader urges Sri Lanka's Premier to oust the President by any means necesary
Two weeks short of the 18 months since she was deprived of real power, Chandrika Kumaratunga, like George Lucas's Empire, has struck back. The Sunday Leader predicted almost two months ago, that short of the June donor conference in Japan, she would do just that. She has, and how!
Kumaratunga's letter to Economic Reforms, Science and Technology Minister Milinda Moragoda last
Friday, indicating that she would be with immediate effect wresting control of the
Development Lotteries Board, might not have been exactly a coup d'etat, but it was in every sense a coup.By
peremptorily seeking to bite a sizeable chunk of turf from the very jaws of the [ruling] United National Front (UNF), Kumaratunga
offered the minimal possible provocation.
She could have gone a lot further and sacked Tilak Marapone, something she has repeatedly threatened to do. She could have taken an entire ministry under herself: again something she has often vowed to do.
But like Hitler annexing Austria, she clearly calculated that this affront by itself, was sufficient to assess the will of the UNF to fight back. And given that she has misinterpreted Prime
Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe's courtly manners for pusillanimity, she has probably made the boo-boo of her life.
In her missive to Moragoda, she was careful not to cause offense, couching the full import of her deed in the kindest of language. The change was no reflection on him, she said reassuringly, it was just necessary for her to act in the public interest.
The Development Lotteries Board was incorrectly assigned when the functions of government agencies were
being gazetted in December 2001, she said, purring that by this action she intended only to rectify this anomaly.
That Moragoda would kick like a startled mare simply did not enter into her reckoning. He lost no time in consulting Wickremesinghe, and wrote back post haste, informing Kumaratunga that her move lacked "elementary courtesy" and was a violation of the principles of cohabitation. He also mentioned pointedly that she should first have discussed the matter with the Prime Minister, something she had clearly failed to do. Indeed, according to the interpretation given to Article 44 of the Constitution by the Attorney General,
Kumaratunga is bound to consult Wickremesinghe in all such matters.
As it happened, the audacity of her gambit was not lost on Wickremesinghe, who quickly saw to it that the President's order was not printed in the Gazette by the government printer. With the Premier thus checkmating a move by the President, and with both parties believing that they had a right to act as they did, by Friday evening it had dawned on the UNF cabinet that they were in the midst of a constitutional crisis good and proper.
Doubtless she will explain to the people that her action was altogether reasonable: after all, she was acting within her powers as Executive President, and it isn't as if the Development Lottery is the Defence Ministry. She leaves the government no option however, but to come back with all its guns firing (which indeed it did), giving her ample room to paint the UNF's action as an overreaction to a simple administrative adjustment. A storm in a teacup.
Kumaratunga's timing is impeccable, and her style flawless. In one fell swoop she has succeeded in precipitating a crisis of enormous proportions, testing her will against that of the Prime Minister. Eyeball to eyeball, Wickremesinghe, to his
credit, did not blink. Nevertheless, the President's objective has been wholly
achieved. She has sent a signal to the donor community in particular and the world at large that Sri Lanka is on the brink of a constitutional crisis, and that the machinery of government is quivering like a jelly, liable to topple at any time.
Her move last Friday is the end of the beginning for the UNF: it is now a battle of wits, and the question is, does the UNF have the will to take her on? It is time now that the UNF's activists, so long kept under tight rein in the interests of cohabitation, be now unleashed. S. B. Dissanayake, Rajitha
Senaratne, Ravi Karunanayake and the other mouthpieces must be given the freedom now to speak out in the name of democracy, or forever hold their peace.
Kumaratunga remains in office not through the democratic will of the people but through a quirk of constitutional oversight. Well may she have the legal authority that goes with the presidency, but of moral authority she has none. And that fact needs to be
drummed into her with all the emphasis the government can command.
It is now up to the government to mobilise the people and demonstrate to her in no uncertain terms that no monkey business will be tolerated. Kumaratunga and her cohorts have girded their loins for the fight and are preparing for Armageddon. Unless the government
replies in kind, this will be the beginning of the slippery slide into anarchy. S. B.
Dissanayake has often threatened to bring the people on to the streets in the defence of democracy. Can he deliver? That is the question.
As for Wickremesinghe, the fat is now on the fire, and his finest hour may well be yet to come. No good will come from appeasement, and he must know that Kumaratunga is congenitally prone to interpret politeness for weakness. The time has come to fight for what is right, and the Prime Minister must not fail in that duty. Democracy is yet above the petty considerations of a disgraced woman whose only priority is herself.
It is time to take her on, and unless she withdraws unconditionally, turf her out by such means as may be necessary.
The Bush administration envisages a world run by the United States, writes William Pfaff for the International Herald Tribune.
The war now is past tense, the dead are gone, the wounded are paying the price for all the cheers and relief.
The controversy resumes in the present and future tenses, over Washington's planned - or, as it seems, largely unplanned - pacification and reconstruction of Iraq as an economic and political society, and over what may follow in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The oil ministry was secured early in the battle of Baghdad, even if the hospitals and museums were not; that told us about one Bush administration priority.
Jay Garner and his team of American officials and businessmen are already, in the political realm, up
against the factions, sects, and religious and tribal interests of Iraq, and the influence of interested foreign powers.
In the short term, American power will impose its choices. In the long run, Iraq will prevail. This,
Washington would say, is negative thinking, but it is true. However, positive thinking is the order of the day because the Bush administration's brave new world is already under construction.
The moment of victory has been seized to start reshaping the Middle East. Step One is the intimidation of Syria, a presumably weak regime with an ophthalmologist as dictator, enjoying office because his departed father put him there, with a weak and under-equipped army and a feeble economy.
The maximum goal in Syria is regime change. The minimum goal is an end to lodging and support for anti-Israeli militias, notably Hezbollah in Lebanon, a country that Syria now dominates.
Lebanon in the new order of things will become an autonomous state under U.S. and Israeli surveillance. The "road map" for the Middle East will lead nowhere, to Tel Aviv's satisfaction and Tony Blair's chagrin.
Washington would like to terminate the power of the ayatollahs in Iran. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Monday that "all the nations of the region" should now reconsider their positions. They undoubtedly are doing so, probably with a view to maximum dissimulation of maximum resistance to the new order.
President George W. Bush, pushed by the neoconservative activists who surround him, has a second and more imposing ambition. It is to strip from the United Nations its political functions, leaving it to go about its humanitarian activities, continuing to provide its other useful and noncontroversial international services, without interfering with the political decisions of nations, notably those of the United States.
Washington says the United Nations has "failed," as the League of Nations failed. The League failed because its creators, Wood-row Wilson chief among them, built failure into it. They required unanimous decisions in both assembly and the council of great powers. Even then, Poland defied it in 1920, France and Italy in 1923, Japan in 1931, etc. The United States, of course, never joined.
Those who defend the United Nations obviously do so because they don't want the United States to have unchecked power. That is why the forthcoming battle over the UN's role can be expected to become an embittered one. So long as the UN has universal membership and is generally recognized in international law as the sole authority that can legitimately authorize violence by one state against another, it presents a problem for the Bush government.
The Bush administration wants a new international regime of democratic coalitions, which it says would possess a legitimacy the UN lacks, and could deal expeditiously and effectively with threats to international order. Powell says that U.S. interventions would come only on international request, or when U.S. interests are directly involved. But
Powell is not a neoconservative.
NATO might be thought such a coalition, but Washington wants the problem to define the coalition, so that each would be different and none would give members a veto over what the coalition does, as in the case of NATO.
Put simply, the Bush administration envisages a world run by the United States, backed by as many states as will sign on to support it but not interfere.
Its stated intention is to maintain an overwhelming military advantage and do its level best to prevent other states from creating nuclear or other deterrent systems. It intends, where feasible, to disarm those already in possession of nuclear weapons. North Korea is a candidate for imminent preemptive disarmament.
It doesn't want any government in a position to check it through international institutions or legal opposition, which is why the United Nations has to go. Otherwise, the only obstacles to neoconservative Washington's freedom of action (other than Chinese and Russian nuclear forces) would be Europe's economic power and potential political unity, and even there the American advantage is large, although not decisive.
Washington says victory in Iraq was the first step in making a new Middle East and a new world order. There probably will be more resistance to both ambitions than it currently expects.
It is in the interests of the US to let the UN take lead in Iraq, writes George A. Lopez in the USA Today.
The Bush administration now faces one of its greatest foreign-policy challenges. How might the U.S. persuade the United Nations Security Council to end the economic sanctions against Iraq? The task involves tough choices of style and substance. Proclamations by Bush advisers such as Richard Perle that we have entered the ''post-U.N. era,'' or assertions that the U.S. might render U.N. sanctions irrelevant by ending its own, reflect a wrongheaded approach.
It is in the interests of the U.S. and the U.N. that the U.N. take the lead in a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. The U.N. has the best track record in post-conflict administrative management -- whether it be in Cambodia or Bosnia -- and can disabuse many of U.S. imperial intentions or overstaying our welcome.
Political paybacks aimed at making France and Russia ''toe the line'' via a bullying U.S. strategy are self-defeating. Rather, the U.S. needs a creative, collegial approach heavy on political acumen and short on bravado.
Such a strategy begins with recognizing that every nation and company anxious to do business with Iraq needs the legal end to sanctions. There are no other options. The majority of the council believes that sanctions cannot be legally ended until Iraq is certified as weapons-free.
These realities point to a practical interim approach made possible by a Security Council resolution in
December that permits the suspension of sanctions for 120 days if Iraq is undergoing weapons inspections. That can lift the sanctions and preserve the legal continuity and integrity of the U.N.'s role in Iraq.
The French already have indicated that such a plan is acceptable. This solution also creates the political space needed on all sides to mend fences and assess the next steps. Among these is integrating the U.N. into the weapons-assessment process and engaging the U.N. to help Iraq establish itself as a legitimate member of the international community. As in the past, an intelligent and magnanimous call to action by the U.S. will prompt council consensus.
With such diplomacy, Iraq sanctions can soon move from suspension to termination. To opt instead for power struggles in a winner-take-all approach will cost the U.S. the peace -- and Iraqis the prosperity -- that lies within our grasp.
George A. Lopez is a professor of government and international studies at the University of Notre Dame and co-author of five books on U.N. sanctions.
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