The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

perspective

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
'I want the refugees to come back’

Mahinda Rajapaksa, President of Sri Lanka, tells Editor-in-Chief H K Dua

The following are the extracts from the interview H K Dua, Editor-in-Chief of The Tribune, had with Mr Mahinda Rajapaksa, President of Sri Lanka in Colombo:

Mr Mahinda Rajapaksa Dua: Your critics have been attacking you. There are two types of criticism I have come across in Colombo – one, I saw in Colombo papers only yesterday a statement saying that you have struck a secret deal with the LTTE….

Rajapaksa: Deal? (laughter) Where is the question of a deal? Where is it? Obviously, there are people behind this criticism—actually some former ministers.

Dua: The sacked ministers?

Rajapaksa: Yes, sacked Ministers.

Dua: But you have not cared to deny this. Only a spokesman has denied it.

Rajapaksa: Why should I take it so seriously? These people just say this. Essentially they are angry, because they are no longer in the government.

Editor-in-Chief H K Dua interviewing Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa in Colombo

Dua: The second point of criticism is that you are a hardliner and that you are looking for a military solution to the LTTE problem.

Rajapaksa: I am not a hardliner and there is no military solution…But what to do? I have to defend the country; defend the sovereignty of the country. We have to take a strong action against the terrorists who want to disrupt the country. They are terrorists. Any other country would have done this.

I need a political solution. We need a political solution. We can produce the document for a solution. But what if the South is not accepting it? I am now trying to take the South along so that a political solution becomes acceptable to the people.

Dua: Southern consensus, as it is being described lately? How long do you think it will take to evolve one?

Rajapaksa: I am trying to bring all political parties together to find a solution. I want to find a solution but it is indeed difficult. Maybe, it will take sometime, but it all depends on the people. It is a slow process.

I believe in a political solution. I have been trying to find a negotiated settlement. But what if the South and the East are not accepting it? We are indeed trying to reach a consensus first.

Also, we may have to change the constitution and the Supreme Court is there to ensure that we follow the constitution.

Dua: Recently you signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the opposition party, UNP. Where does it stand? Is it still alive and being respected?

Rajapaksa: I will say it is dead, because some of the founders and leaders of the UNP have shown little interest in it and some of them say they have already torn the document. But we accepted it. We have said we are ready to negotiate with them, discuss with them. I have told them to just forget about other things – funding problems, economic issues and other matters. But they must come, sit and attend an all-party meeting to work out the proposals for finding a solution. I have spoken to some of the most senior members of the UNP, but they have a different approach.

Dua: Mr President, don’t you believe in a military solution, if I may ask again for getting it a bit clear?

Rajapaksa: I do not believe in a military solution. I believe in a negotiated settlement, I must say.

Dua: What kind of a political and peaceful settlement you have in mind to resolve the LTTE question?

Rajapaksa: My personal view is that Prabhakaran should come forward to express readiness for a peaceful and negotiated settlement. But he does not want to come forward. You may look at some of his recent statements!

Dua: Can you go in for a peaceful, negotiated settlement with Prabhakaran?

Rajapaksa: I am a moderate and I believe in negotiations and people will also like this. And I am ready to talk to him. But earlier it was he who walked out of the talks.

Dua: There have been serious doubts about the effectiveness of the ceasefire. Yesterday, there was the fifth anniversary of the ceasefire.

Rajapaksa: I find nobody is celebrating the fifth anniversary. The ceasefire is just on paper.

Prabhakaran has violated it 8,000 times — as many as 8,000 times. The LTTE has assassinated our Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar and the LTTE’s men attacked the Army Commander, and recently there was an attack on the Defence Secretary who happens to be my brother.

Dua: Is there pressure on you from different countries in the West for a political settlement of the LTTE question?

Rajapaksa: All right-thinking people are saying that. Even I say it. There is nothing to hide. From the start, I feel that we need a political solution. And why not? Not only other countries want a political settlement, I myself want it. They are just stealing my language.

There is no pressure as such on us. They are only cautioning tourists against visiting Sri Lanka. Sending just travel advisories.

Dua: You have been voicing reservations about Norway’s role. Are you asking Norway to wind up its mission?

Rajapaksa: No. I am not. They have not achieved much, but I can see that they tried their best.

Dua: Your comment on today’s statement of Norway’s ambassador in Colombo that the Norwegian facilitator intends to carry on.

Rajapaksa: I cannot say that they should wind up their mission.

Dua: What about development aid which was coming from EU and some other countries? Is there threat that it will be stopped?

Rajapaksa: They have not stopped it.

Dua: Serious questions of human rights violations in Sri Lanka are being raised in Europe.

Rajapaksa: I too have heard about it.

Dua: Actually two voices are being heard from the western countries and some NGOs. One, Sri Lanka should go in for a political settlement, and the other is about human rights violations.

Rajapaksa: I ask them to give me concrete evidence of human rights violations to take a suitable action. In a country like this, where Prabhakaran is fighting a war, his men abduct people. We have managed to control the situation.

Our police, our army cannot go to these areas. It is difficult for the police to find out whether they are telling the truth. Some of the affected people may actually be fighting the Army.

Dua: Do the armed forces and the police have clear instructions from you that human rights should not be violated?

Rajapaksa: Very clear. Every Wednesday I meet army commanders to know the situation and impress upon them that they should respect human rights. When I was in London, Amnesty people came. I told them why don’t they appoint an international commission? Then I found out that nowhere in the world they have appointed a commission like this.

Dua: The Indian government is in touch with you; you are in touch with the government of India about the situation in Sri Lanka. There seems to be a lot of trust between you. What is the message you are getting from New Delhi lately?

Rajapaksa: India wants a political solution. The Indian government has always helped us and they are continuing to do so.

Dua: No government of India can be with the LTTE. India has suffered because of the LTTE. But the message is for a political settlement and not a military solution, I suppose.

Rajapaksa: Whether it is India, the United States or the West, they all want a political settlement. We also want a political solution.

Dua: Besides New Delhi favouring a political settlement, Mr President, India may have another worry in case the military situation gets escalated in Sri Lanka. Eruption of a military conflict can lead to influx of refugees from Sri Lanka into India and this, in turn, can cause extra complications for India.

Rajapaksa: I don’t know about it. We are good neighbours. Many Indians come here and some of the people go from Sri Lanka to India.

Dua: Besides, the earlier refugees, there are about 17,000 new refugees who have reached India. Are you prepared to take them back?

Rajapaksa: Oh, yes. I want them back here but Prabhkaran will not allow these people to come. Most of them have gone because of Prabhkaran and not because of our government.

Dua: But if they come back, where will you put them up?

Rajapaksa: They must come; they have no threat in the government area. They have actually fled from areas which are being controlled by the LTTE.

Dua: What exact steps are being taken to get these 17,000 people back?

Rajapaksa: The only way is that they must be allowed to go to their homes, but with Prabhakaran around I don’t think these people will come back.

Dua: But your assurance is there that you would like to have them back?

Rajapaksa: Yes.

Dua: What about the other IDP (Indigenous Displaced People) – nearly two lakh of them?

Rajapaksa: They can be between 1.5 to two lakh. The figures may not be exact.

Dua: Is there a plan to settle these two lakh people?

Rajapaksa: We will settle them soon. We have now necessary quarters, infrastructure and are busy clearing landmines for their safety. And after that we will send them back to their homes.

Dua: But clearing landmines is going to take a very long time, Mr President.

Rajapaksa: Yes, it would take some time.

Dua: I would also like to know about the economic position of your country. Inflation is high at 21.9 per cent.

Rajapaksa: No, it is 13 or 14 per cent.

Dua: What is the price situation? What is the solution to price rise?

Rajapaksa: We have to increase production. If production is high, prices will naturally come down. We will give subsidy for essential commodities to make them affordable for the common man.

Dua: Do you believe in a strong presidential system of government in Sri Lanka?

Rajapaksa: I would like an elected Prime Minister.

Dua: Would you like to bring constitutional amendments in this connection?

Rajapaksa: I will have to consult other parties.

Dua: But would you like two terms as President?

Rajapakse: I don’t mind that.

Dua: The Constitution provides for two terms of President — two consecutive terms of President. And after that?

Rajapaksa: Actually, I would like to be in Parliament because I have been in Parliament since the 1970s.

Dua: You are missing Parliament, it seems?

Rajapaksa: Yes, I am missing Parliament.

Dua: Thank you, Mr President. You have been very patient with my questions.

OPED

Don’t kill stray dogs
by Hiranmay Karlekar

The recent weeks have witnessed a controversy over the management of India’s stray or community dog population. Some have demanded that the Animal Birth Control (ABC) (Dog) Rules 2001 should be revoked as these have had no effect. Promulgated under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1960, these provide for picking up stray dogs, sterilising and vaccinating them against rabies, and returning them to the places from which they had been picked up. The demand is for the resumption of the pre-rules practice of municipal bodies killing stray or community dogs en masse.

The ABC rules are in conformity with the “Guidelines for Dog Population Management” published by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) in 1990. Dr K. Bogel, Chief Veterinarian, Public Health Unit, WHO in Switzerland, and John Hoyt, President WSPA (1986-92), said in the document: “All too often, authorities confronted with the problems caused by these (stray) dogs have turned to mass destruction in the hope of finding a quick solution, only to discover that the destruction had to continue, year after year with no end in sight”.

In its Eighth Report (WHO Technical Report Series 824), the WHO’s Expert Committee on Rabies, which met in Geneva in September 1991, referred to the projects the organisation had coordinated in “in Ecuador, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Tunisia, and other ecological studies conducted in South America and Asia”, and added, “there is no evidence that the removal of dogs has ever had a significant impact on dog population densities or the spread or rabies. The population turnover of dogs may be so high that even the highest recorded removal rates (about 15 per cent of the dog population) are easily compensated by survival rates.” The WHO’s Expert Consultation on Rabies, held in Geneva in October 2004, reiterated this view (Technical Report Series 931).

India’s experience endorses WHO’s findings. J.F. Reece writes in his contribution, “Dogs and Dog Control in Developing Countries”, in The State of the Animals 2005 edited by Deborah J. Salem and Andrew N. Rowan, “In Delhi, a concerted effort at dog removal killed a third of the straying dogs with no reduction in dog population”. The experience of the days when mass killing was in vogue, to which Dr Reece was referring, was the same everywhere in India.

In a recent paper, Dr Chinny Krishna, co-founder and currently the chairman of the Blue Cross Society of India, cites the instance of Madras Corporation’s catch-and-kill programme that began in 1860. He quotes Dr Theodore Bhaskaran, a former Post Master General of Madras, as stating in an article, “In the early 1970s, the number of stray dogs destroyed by the corporation was so high that the Central Leather Institute, Madras, designed products—such as neckties and wallets—from dog skins”. Dr Krishna has pointed out elsewhere that the number of dogs killed by the corporation had gone up to 30,000 per year by 1995. Yet the city’s stray dog population and the incidence of human rabies continued to rise. He has also stated that the Bangalore City Corporation’s strategy of electrocuting stray dogs to death and vaccinating pet dogs with neural issue vaccine, implemented from 1936 to 1999, led to the slaughter of 25 million stray dogs but the population of stray dogs, and the number of dog bites and human rabies cases, continued to increase..

It has been the same experience everywhere. Dr Reece writes in the paper mentioned above: “In Hong Kong, approximately 20,000 dogs were killed by the government and another 13,000 by welfare organisations every year…with little impact on the free-roaming dog population. In Ecuador, the elimination of 12-25 per cent of the dog population every year for five years did not reduce the dog population (WHO 1988). In rural Australia, a 76 per cent reduction in the free roaming dog population failed to drastically reduce their population, and the number of free-roaming dogs returned to pre-cull levels within a year (Beck 2000). In Kathmandu, street dogs have been poisoned for at least 50 years with little long-term effect on the population.”

On the other hand, the ABC programme has delivered wherever it has been seriously implemented. In Chennai, the incidence of rabies declined from 120 in1996, the year of the programme’s launching, to five in 2002. In Jaipur’s walled city, the number declined from 10 in 1999, the year of launching, to nil in 2001 and 2002. In Kalimpong, the decline was from 10 in 2000 to nil in 2002. Dog populations have also declined in numbers. Referring to the ABC programme’s implementation in Jaipur by the NGO Help in Suffering, J.F. Reece and S. K. Chawla write in Veterinary Record, the prestigious journal of British Veterinary Association (Volume 159, Issue 12), that during eight year’s of implementation the number of neighbourhood (read stray) dogs declined by 28 per cent between the peak period and the time of the last survey.

A report in the Bangalore edition of The Hindu (Online) of April 3, 2006, quotes animal rights activists in the city as claiming that the ABC programme has reduced the number of stray dogs in the city from two lakh five years ago to 47,000.

The ABC programme takes time to show full results as the sterilised and immunised dogs live for the rest of their lives. In their paper, “Rabies and Rabies-Related Viruses: A modern perspective on an ancient disease”, Florence Cliquet and E. Picard-Meyer, refer to the ABC programmes in India and observe that, regularly conducted, “they should lead to a stabilisation of stray dog population within five to seven years”.

The answer is compelling the authorities to implement the ABC programme effectively and nationally, and not in mass killing. G.W. Beran states in “Urban Rabies” in Natural History of Rabies (Ed. G.M. Baer) that in Ecuador, major stray dog removal campaigns were followed by increase in the fecundity of bitches and the survival of pups and an overall increase in the number of wild animals.

Profile
Shantha Sinha, children’s saviour
by Harihar Swarup

The government could not have found a better person to head the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights than Shantha Sinha, an anti-child labour activist of international repute. She takes over as the first Chairperson of the NCPCR even as Nithari killings continue to haunt the nation. She too, like millions of her country men, was moved by the gruesome killings and her pronouncement after taking over was loud and clear: “Nithari has pricked the conscience of the nation. We will try that such incidents are not repeated again. For me, all issues related to child rights are a priority”.

Shy and diffident, 57-year-old Shantha, born in Nillore, Andhra Pradesh, is a woman of grit, who never gives up when she takes up a cause. She has made her life one with bridging the great gap between poor children and mainstream education. That was the reason that the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay award, known as the Nobel Prize of Asia, was conferred on her three years back.

Shantha Sinha and the M.V. Foundation (MVF), bridged the great gap between poor children and mainstream education. What is MVF? Founded in memory of her grandfather, Mamidipudi Venkatarangaiah, the MV Foundation was launched as an institution for research on issues relating to social change and transformation. But in 1991, it began focusing on abolition of child labour with the objective of ensuring education to all children. The moving spirit behind MVF, Shantha was honoured with Padma Shri in 1999 and also with the Albert Shanker International Award in recognition of the foundation’s outstanding work in the field of eliminating child labour and spreading education.

Look at the frightening magnitude of the child labour in India. About 20 lakh children in the country work in hazardous industries. Nearly, 1.7 crore children are engaged in wage earning labour. And if you count every non-school going child as a labourer, then India has 100 million of them. This means that nothing less than one-third of the world’s working children are in India.

MVF has latched on to this fact with an amazing fierceness of purpose. In the year 2006, the MVF has taken almost 4,00,000 children out of work and placed them in schools. Community mobilisation, dialogue with teachers and lobbying were the keys to success.

Shantha and her team of dedicated workers in MVF faced two major problems while motivating parents of poor children to send their offspring to schools. The replies they invariable got were on these lines. One: “We are so poor that we need the child’s income” and secondly, “ Okay, we will send our children to school for 10 years, but can you guarantee them a job afterwards?” Understandably, children work because of poverty and the World Bank has too arrived at the same conclusion. MVF volunteers point to the parents, whose children work, that there were other children in the neighbourhood who, in spite of poverty, go to school. In the words of Shantha Sinha, “We also present them with young people who have gone to school and who, even if they don’t have a job, are better than their illiterate children, as they have dignity and respected by others. We show them that the benefit of education is not only to get a job but also dignity. They understand this type of reasoning”.

Also, she has explained in the interviews she gave from time to time the foundation’s experience and modus-operandi, “We tell them to look to other parents who are just as poor as them but still manage to send their children to school. We sometime see parents with two spare sacks of rice who do not send their children to school while the neighbouring family has no food reserves but do send their children to school. This argument convinces the most reticent. Then they see their children transform; they learn to sing, to read, and to write and they play. They are really different from how they were before, and their parents are proud of them. This encourages them to invest in their children’s education, even though it incurs money to purchase books, uniforms and other articles”.

Sometimes, the foundation sets up schools with the contribution made by the community. “Our local volunteers teach there, and we encourage the community to go to their local governments to demand teachers. At least, 600 schools set by the foundation have been officially recognized and teachers made available”, says Shantha Sinha.

Now as the first Chairperson of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, one hopes Shantha will ensure the basic right to childhood of poor children and change their lives for ever.

REFLECTIONS

The past history of commander should be known to the king. He must make every effort to get this information. Hidden in the commander's past may be a secret which can betray the King.

— The Mahabharata

Sweet words are like good medicine while harsh words are like arrows which enter through the doors of the ears and cause distress to the whole body.

— Kabir