Thin Line Between Politics and ‘Treason’ in Sri Lanka

By Robert Mackey - On Friday, Sri Lanka’s supreme court ruled that Sarath Fonseka, the retired general who was arrested Monday night after his defeat in the country’s presidential election, will be allowed to challenge his detention in court. After the ruling the Web site Lanka Truth posted a video of one of General Fonseka’s representative’s telling reporters that the court had scheduled a hearing for Feb. 23.

After General Fonseka’s arrest on Monday by the Sri Lankan military he had led until just a few months ago, a government spokesman, Keheliya Rabukwalla, told reporters that the general’s crime was to have engaged in opposition politics before his retirement.

At a news conference, Mr. Rabukwalla said that while General Fonseka was till a member of the country’s security council last year, “he had many connections and many dealings with various other political parties’ leaders who had been working against the government — and this amounts to treason, to some extent.”

Sri Lanka’s defense minister, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, who is also the President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s younger brother, made the same charge in an interview with The Straits Times, a Singapore newspaper, published on Thursday, saying:

The episode has nothing to do with our political differences. [...]

It was clear that while he was holding the Chief of Defense Staff assignment he was working with politicians and held discussions with them and tried to win them over. That was completely wrong because he was sitting in Security Council meetings. It amounts to treason.

In the interview, Mr. Rajapaksa also blamed General Fonseka for a host of charges made against Sri Lanka’s government, including possible war crimes committed during the military’s final offensive against the separatist Tamil Tigers last year, the long detention of Tamil civilians in camps after that battle ended and even the killing of Sri Lankan journalists like Lasantha Wickrematunge, a prominent editor who was killed in early 2009. On the resettlement of Tamil civilians displaced by fighting, Mr. Rajapaksa claimed General Fonseka was “the only person who disagreed that the people should be resettled promptly. He completely opposed it. In fact, he said there should be no resettlement for three years.” On the disappearance or murder of journalists, Mr. Rajapaksa said:

Some of the media people harmed had never criticized any other person except him, or people close to him. Nothing happened to those who had been criticizing me or the president.

In the same interview, Mr. Rajapaksa, an American citizen who lived in the United States before his brother became president, accused the Amercan government of financing General Fonseka’s campaign for the presidency, saying:

We are 100 percent convinced that Western countries with vested interests were backing him. Even the U.S. and countries like Norway spent lots of money on his campaign.

The Associated Press reported on Friday that the United States Embassy in Sri Lanka denied that charge in a statement released on Thursday night that said, “The United States backed no candidate but strongly supported a free, fair, and credible democratic process.”

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