Last September, the Asia Society held a talk by Ratnasiri Wickremanayake, who was then Prime Minister of Sri Lanka. It was around the time of the United States General Assembly session – you know, the one during which all talk was about Gaddafi setting up a tent on Donald Trump’s property.
Although he had attended and addressed the General Assembly at its three previous sessions, Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse ducked this one – the first after the military defeat of the LTTE in May 2009 – and sent his Prime Minister instead.
Anyway, back to the Asia Society. Sitting front and center in the audience were members of the Sri Lankan delegation, including Secretary of Defence Gotabaya Rajapakse, and Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama.
During the question and answer session, the moderator pushed Wickremanayake on the issue of foreign aid organizations’ restricted access to hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people (specifically the Red Cross). After evading the questions as much as he could, the Prime Minister eventually referred aid organizations to “the Ministry of Defence, which is in charge of maintaining law and order” (40:50 in the video linked above), glancing frequently at and gesturing toward Gotabaya Rajapakse.
Friends, when I heard him say that, my ears nearly jumped off my head. In every democratic state with which I’m familiar, law and order is the domain of law enforcement and civil judiciary, not the military. If the Ministry of Defence is in charge of maintaining law and order in Sri Lanka, I thought, what exactly is the role of the police? Well fear not, for that question has been answered!
Sri Lankan police have rounded up hundreds of young lovers for kissing in public following complaints that the overt displays of affection caused embarrassment to others, an official said Thursday.
Nearly 200 couples have been briefly detained in the districts of Matara and Kurunegala over the past two weeks, police spokesman Prashantha Jayakody told AFP.
“We have taken them into custody for indecent behaviour at a public place,” Jayakody said. “Usually we free them after informing their parents. Charges are not pressed” (AFP).
BBC, however, reports that 22 couples from Matara were ordered to appear in court after their horrendous crimes of affection. Kurunegala and Matara are pretty far apart. Was this some coordinated crackdown on kissing? If so, it’s good to know that the police and judiciary are being put to good use.
Does anyone know how mutaween translates to in Sinhala or Tamil? I’d expect that siege mentality to persist for a generation or 2.
Perhaps the Sri Lankan government should worry a little less about a little pda, and a little more about entering the 21st century. Next, Bollywood movies will be banned in the country.
Some years back when we were tourists in SL, our driver took us to a park in Colombo and it was filled with couples in tight embraces, this was a weekday mid morning. What was shocking to me was that the girls and boys were in serious makeout sessions out in the open. I have seen couples in parks in India but it is usually the more benign and discrete, holding hands kind of behavior and trees or bushes offer some screens at least.
Sri Lankans, at least the Sinhalese population, always seemed a bit more liberal than Indians to me. Is all this moral policing the result of the JVP/JHU’s greater influence in government?
After your failed attempt at using Pass the Roti to push your Tamil agenda, you’re now using sepia mutiny Vivek? I guess you’re moving up in the world though. Keep up the good work.
To the writer of this post: Good point. Increasingly, the government down here seems to be missing out on whose responsibility is it to do what. Policemen are becoming rapidly redundant over here. That’s probably how a whole bunch of convicted criminals escaped right under their noses just this week. They are out there apprehending teenagers making out, and drug leaders and thieves just take them for a ride.
Last year, a couple of weeks into May, I saw a couple of soldiers punishing a pickpocket, in Ratmalana. They made him kneel down in the middle of the road, and balance an empty Sprite bottle on the top of his head. They were pointing guns and all of that. I was like “Whaaaat???” People surrounding the scene were cheering.
About making out, it’s sad that Sri Lankans don’t really put much by personal liberties (or democracy, fot that matter). I just read the BBC report out loud in my office, and everybody around me were like “Ergh serves those kids right. PDA is disgusting.” Don’t be surprised if next week you get a report about 12 nose-pickers being arrested in the heart of Colombo for “public indecency.”
apologies for deviating from topic, but, vivek, in the previous post, you seemed surprised by my statement that tamils in tn have no greater animosity to muslims than the norm. why do you think that?
Threatened much?
respect, I don’t know what the norm is, but the relative statement you just wrote makes much more sense to me than the absolute “there is no cultural anti-muslim bigotry among tamils in tn,” which is what you wrote in the other post.
Michael, I’ve been reading the story you posted on your blog in bits and pieces this morning when I’m able to take a few minutes from work. It’s very moving, thank you for sharing!
i hate to say it like this but if you read blogs written by actual sri-lankans (try those aggregated in kottu.org as a start), you’d see that distaste for the police and disregard for whatever ‘proper’ role they might have in SL is widespread. You don’t have to sit in an a/c’d room at the asia society with Ratna to know that all the police and STF exist to do is extract bribes from people without enough influence to know the highest necessary phone number in the police hierarchy. When elderly relatives were kidnapped for bribes by the STF a few years back, we had to call a vacationing superior to get them out. I think that has to be addressed before the faux puritanism.
this is why the police in SL have the conceit that they do:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Task_Force
and for the lazy butts:
http://indi.ca/2010/06/public-displays-of-abuse/
vivek,
i’m not sure if it was your intent but the tone in this post comes off as the not-ironic Dave Chapelle portrayal of the stereotypical white suburban homeowner finding out about police brutality in Newsweek, “honey they’re beating up negroes like hot cakes!”
the military as backstop to the organs of state that normally guarantee law and order is a phenomena of long duration in south asia and SL is no exception.