Can Sri Lanka's Constitutional Reforms Help the Tamil Minority?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Sri Lanka’s institutional reform project has gathered momentum with the enactment of the 19th amendment to its constitution in 2015. The amendment restored the Constitutional Council, which is mandated to recommend and approve appointments to key independent institutions and offices.

It also restructured the presidency by empowering the prime minister within the political executive, empowering parliament against the executive, and enabling a limited but significant avenue of judicial review over official presidential acts.

The 19^th amendment also reintroduced the two-term limit on the presidency and shortened the term of both the President and Parliament from six to five years.

In these ways, the hyper-presidential model has been substantially pruned back to a much more democratic model of semi-presidentialism.

All this is to the good. As well, there is now further debate on whether the executive presidential system, which was introduced to Sri Lanka in 1978, should be retained, reformed or abolished altogether, perhaps replaced by a Westminster prime ministerial system.

But this won’t suffice, because meaningful constitutional transformation requires the transformation of the majoritarian socio-political and cultural norms that underpin Sri Lanka’s constitutional order.

For instance, right now Sri Lanka’s constitution obligates the state to protect and foster Buddhism, the religion of the majority Sinhala population, while assuring the rights and freedoms of other faiths. 

By explicitly creating a special status for Buddhism, the constitution retains the potential to discriminate against the Hindu Tamil and Muslim minorities and so undermine the fundamental principle of equality. 

Sri Lanka is deemed a Sinhala Buddhist country and those of different faith or ethnicity, it is claimed, migrated from elsewhere and are not part of the native population of the island.

This is all the more dangerous in the aftermath of the ruinous three-decades of war against the Tamil Tigers, with its destruction of much of the country.

An upsurge of Buddhist nationalism has been spearheaded by radical Buddhist monks. Several new organisations – most importantly Bodu Bala Sena – appeared a few years after the end of the civil war.

The election of Gotabhaya Rajapaksa as president in November clearly reinforces this and doesn’t bode well. One of the country’s Sinhala hard-liners, his past record as well as his prominently nationalistic security-based campaign suggests that his presidency will be one of executive aggrandisement rather moderation.

He served as defence secretary between 2005 and 2015 and stands accused of war crimes committed during Sri Lanka’s civil war.

In his inaugural speech he pledged to lead the government based on “Buddhist philosophy” and to support the Sinhalese culture and Buddhist heritage.

To make his point, the ceremony was held at a Buddhist temple in the northern city of Anuradhapura built by Sinhala ruler Dutugamunu, who defeated the Tamil Chola King Ellalan in the Battle of Vijithapura and united the island under Sinhala rule almost 2,200 years ago.

If there is ever to be true power-sharing, Sri Lanka must move from a unitary state to a federal division of powers, allowing the Tamils in the northern and eastern areas their own subsidiary jurisdictions. As well, a bill of rights for all its citizens must be given “teeth.”

But none of this is likely in a Rajapaksa regime.

Can Federalism Save South Sudan?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

On Christmas Day Pope Francis I, Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, and John Chalmers, former moderator of the Church of Scotland, sent a message to the leaders of war-torn South Sudan, asking them to keep their promise to form a transitional government early in 2020.

Last November President Salva Kiir and former Vice President Riek Machar delayed forming a unity government.

The country is mostly Christian, and a stable peace would enable the pope to visit this coming February.

South Sudan is gripped by a civil war along ethnic lines that broke out in 2013, following Kiir’s accusations that Machar was plotting a coup d’état.

South Sudan’s 11 million people are divided into at least 64 ethnic groups, the largest being the Dinkas, who constitute about 35 per cent of the population and predominate in government. The second largest are the Nuers, at more than 15 per cent.

Machar’s removal, along with other cabinet members from the ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, sent shock waves across South Sudan.

The reason things turned from a political crisis to a war was because the army was a collection of ethnically based armed units, organized around personal loyalty to their commanders.

There were already in place ethnically based grievances and narratives of fear, which meant that when fighting broke out, people fled to their fellow ethnics for security.

Machar, not having Kiir’s resources, fell back upon ethnic mobilization. He called upon his Nuer militia to mobilize against Kiir, who in turn sought the loyalty of his Dinka followers.

The issue of ethnic conflicts in South Sudan is far from new. When it was part of Sudan, ideologues from northern Sudan had often, and quite successfully, used ethnic fault lines as a wedge to divide and frustrate the people of southern Sudan’s quest for justice, equality and freedom.

The result was a series of vicious inter-ethnic struggles for power and political control in southern Sudan, especially among the Dinkas, Nuers, and, most recently, the Chollos.  So even with independence, communities continue to engage in ethnic violence.

Prior to 2015, South Sudan was divided into 10 states which it inherited from Khartoum at independence in 2011, but since then the number has grown to 32, mostly formed along ethnic lines.

The creation of the new states by Kiir are only the latest events in a long history of debate and practice on how to divide South Sudan administratively.

Federalism has once again become a central issue in political debate in South Sudan. It can put an end to conflicts resulting from unequal distribution of power and resources, by preventing a few ethnic groups from dominating political life in South Sudan.

A federal structure, as political scientist Daniel Elazar asserted in his 1994 text Federal Systems Around the World, “allows a minority within large domains to be considered a majority within a smaller territorial subunit.”

Within the subunit, that minority turned majority can exercise a range of powers to protect its special needs, and the entities themselves are entitled to various forms of representation in, or influence over, federal institutions at the centre.

Where possible, each ethnic group is granted some form of political autonomy. Ethnic federalism has been viewed as an important consideration in multi-ethnic federal states around the world.

South Sudan needs to quickly come up with a constitutional solution to its current situation. Aside from oil, the country relies heavily on the export of natural resources such as timber, a number of metals, diamonds and limestone. Agriculture is the other cornerstone of the economy. Other than oil, none of these bring in much revenue.

South Sudan’s infrastructure is severely underdeveloped, with no electricity or running water in numerous villages, and a lack of decent road networks and support for the internet.

The civil war has been a human catastrophe which has resulted in hunger and malnutrition. Some seven million people face acute food shortages, while more than 20,000 are close to famine, the World Food Programme warned last year.

Perhaps ethnic antipathy could have been mitigated had South Sudan’s leaders from the start created a more accommodating political system. Not having done so, they are now enmeshed in a horrific civil war.

The Great Treks

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer 

Great treks often become the foundational myths of ethnic, religious or political nationalism. The Israelites fleeing slavery in Egypt to enter the Promised Land is the prototype of this type of saga. 

But think also of Puritans crossing the Atlantic to found their theocracy in the New World in the 17^th century, or the Mormons, some two hundred years later, escaping persecution in the United States by moving to then-remote Utah.

Then there is the story of the Afrikaners leaving the Cape Colony in the mid-19^th century to found republics in the interior of South Africa. And, a more recent example, there is the Long March of the Chinese Communists in the 1930s to regroup and eventually take power in that country.

The exodus from slavery in Egypt is the formative event in creating a sense of Jewish nationhood. After 40 years wandering in the desert, the Israelites conquered Canaan, beginning in the late 2nd millennium BCE, and the Bible justified such an occupation by identifying Canaan with the Promised Land, promised to the Israelites by God.

The Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth in Massachusetts were a group of English people who came to America seeking religious freedom during the reign of King James I. At first they moved to Leiden, Holland, where they remained for about ten years.

In September 1620 the group sailed to the New World where they hoped to make a new life in America. In time their colony flourished and lead the way to establishing religious freedom and creating the foundations of the democracy Americans enjoy today.

In 1844, reeling from the murder of their founder and prophet, Joseph Smith, and facing continued mob violence, thousands of Latter-Day Saints (better known as Mormons) threw their support behind a new leader, Brigham Young.

Two years later, Young led the Mormons on their great trek westward to the Rocky Mountains, a rite of passage they saw as necessary in order to find their promised land.

They crossed into the Great Salt Lake Valley in July 1848. For the next two decades, wagon trains bearing thousands of Mormon immigrants followed Young’s westward trail. By 1896, when Utah was granted statehood, the church had more than 250,000 members.

The Great Trek was a movement of Dutch-speaking colonists into the interior of southern Africa in search of land where they could establish their own homeland, independent of British rule. 

Their determination became the single most important element in the folk memory of Afrikaner nationalism.

The Voortrekkers, with their strong Calvinist faith, hoped to restore their economic, cultural and political unity. The only way open to them was to leave the Cape Colony. 

In the decade following 1835, thousands migrated into the interior, organised in a number of trek parties under various leaders, eventually forming the Orange Free State and South African Republic.

The Long March of 1934-35 was the 10,000-kilometre trek of the Chinese communists, which resulted in the relocation of their revolutionary base from southeastern to northwestern China and in the emergence of Mao Zedong as the undisputed party leader. 

The heroism attributed to them inspired many young Chinese to join the Communist Party during the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Somehow, Bosnia Manages to Hold it Together

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

Lawmakers in Bosnia-Herzegovina on Dec. 23 approved the formation of a new central government after 14 months of deadlock, raising hopes it will tackle reforms needed to become a European Union candidate country.

The EU sees this as opening the way “for renewed commitment of the political parties to allow for progress on the EU path of the country.”

Brussels currently considers the ethnically divided Balkan country as a potential candidate to one day enter the bloc, though French President Emmanuel Macron is opposed to further EU enlargement, maintaining that the bloc will need 20 years to deal with the continued fallout of the financial crisis in 2008.

Disagreements among Bosnia’s tripartite presidency of an Orthodox Serb, Catholic Croat and Muslim Bosniak over NATO integration had held up the formation of a government ever since election held in October 2018.

The parliament finally agreed upon Bosnian Serb economist Zoran Tegeltija as prime minister. The 58-year-old had previously served as finance minister in Bosnia’s autonomous Republika Srpska.

Despite that, the multi-ethnic polity remains dominated by nationalist rhetoric instead of moving toward rebuilding a country ravaged by three years of war that left at least 100,000 dead following the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

The Washington and Dayton Peace Accords of 1994-1995 that ended the Bosnian War created a consociational, or power-sharing, political system at the national level in the state, regulating relations between the Muslim Bosniaks, Orthodox Christian Serbs and Roman Catholic Croats, the three “constituent peoples.”

They politically organised a three-segmental society in which none of the segments has an absolute majority. Within this entity, the Serbs have their own unit, the Republika Srpska.

The remaining two groups were then joined in an entity known, confusingly, as the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This part of the country is further subdivided into cantons with either Bosniak or Croat majorities. 

Some cantons are ethnically mixed and have special laws to ensure the equality of all constituent people. However, Bosniaks predominate in the overall entity, to the displeasure of the Croats.

At the national level, the arrangements require proportional and parity representation of the three ethnic segments in the central legislative body.

All important decisions in the state parliament are made by consensus and by qualified or special majorities.

The presidency, as a three-person collective head of state, is formed by the principle of ethnic parity of the three groups; they are elected on separate ethnic lists.

Since most ethnic Croats and Serbs would prefer that their regions be joined to Croatia and Serbia, respectively, this complex agreement is overseen by a High Representative, an international civilian with authority to dismiss elected and non-elected officials and enact legislation.

Since this highly unstable state is organized on an ethno-nationalist ideological hegemony that recognizes mainly the three main ethnic groups, other forms of identity such as class and gender go unrecognized. This is also the case with other minority groups, such as Jews and Roma.

There is no civil society that transcends ethnic identity and even social unrest is redefined in these terms.

Ethnic tensions remain constant. Bosniaks who returned to the Srebrenica, Visegrad and Bratunac areas of Republika Srpska after fleeing during the 1990s war claim they were intimidated by noisy celebrations by Serbs on Orthodox Christmas Eve Jan. 6.

The Bosnian Serbs also celebrated “Statehood Day” on Jan. 9, the anniversary of the founding of their breakaway entity in 1992, even though the country’s Supreme Court has declared this illegal.

The ruling class consists of ethno-political power-entrepreneurs who operate mainly in their own interest, resulting in deep corruption, with those in power appropriating most of its wealth, while government services are often neglected.

Some 23 per cent of Bosnians are living at or below the poverty line. The country’s unemployment rate stands at more than 20 percent and young people are emigrating in search of the opportunities that politicians have failed to generate at home. 

Since 2013, more than 200,000 people have left Bosnia-Herzegovina. On the other hand, last Nov. 7 French President Emmanuel Macron described Bosnia and Herzegovina as a “ticking time-bomb” due to its “problem of returning jihadists” from the Middle East. Not a pretty picture.