Defending the constitution

I had the opportunity of watching the entire second inauguration of Barack Obama on Sunday and Monday on television. On Sunday it was a private ceremony and on Monday which happened to be the Martin Luther King day it was a public ceremony with all pomp and pageant attended by nearly a million of people. On Sunday, Obama placed his hand on a Bible used for years by Michelle Obama's family. On Monday, he took the oath using two Bibles, one owned by Martin Luther King and one by Abraham Lincoln. On both occasions he said “I Barack Hussein Obama do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States. And will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God,” his hand on Bibles. I did not see any African culture during the ceremony and whatever the origin of Obama may be it was a hundred percent Anglo Saxon Protestant Christian affair with Obama asking the help of the God (definitely not Allah) to defend the Christian constitution of the USA with hand on Bibles. No civic rights movement people were there to ask Obama to speak in Spanish or to respect the other religions by at least inviting the clergy of those religions. The Sarva Agamika concept is not in the vocabulary of the Americans and I propose that we send some Sarva agamika Clergy to USA to teach a lesson or two on that concept to the white house people. I could not see Navanitham Pillai or even Ban Ki Moon among the distinguished gathering inside, perhaps they were mingling with the people, whom Obama referred to as We the People more than ten times during his brief speech. The public ceremony came to an end with a rendering of the National Anthem of USA sung in English only. Though there are a substantial number of Spanish speaking people even if we go by the nomenclature of Sambandhan, no Spanish was spoken and no translations of the speeches into Spanish were given during the entire ceremony. I thought there would be at least a sprinkle of Aboriginal culture but during the entire ceremony no mention was made of the aboriginals. Barack Obama is only dark in colour but in all the other aspects he is a white Anglo Saxon Protestant upholding the Christian constitution of the USA. This is something that a former envoy of Sri Lanka in a western Christian country could not understand by claiming that the Americans had elected a black American as the President. If any Tamil leader is prepared to respect the Sinhala culture and consider it as the significant culture I am sure that he would be considered for the President of Sri Lanka.

I do not mention these facts in order for our civil rights Gandhians and Lutherians to take the next plane to Washington to begin a civil rights movement so that at least by the next inauguration the ceremony would be conducted in Spanish as well and that the National Anthem would be sung in Spanish and an aboriginal language in addition to English. Anglo Saxon white Protestant Christian culture is the dominant culture not only in USA but in the whole world. All that I want to emphasize is that due recognition should be given to the Sinhala Buddhist culture without demeaning that culture by invalid arguments brought out by a hatred that the westerners and the Tamil racists have for the same. In the meantime I am worried by Obama’s statement to the effect that the Americans are committed to defend democracy in Asia and Africa. The problem with that concept is that the democracy is of the American people, by the American people for the American people. It is this democracy that Obama wants to defend in Asia and Africa and not the democracy that the Asian and African people would like to protect. Just as much Obama has taken an oath to defend the American constitution Mahinda Rajapakse has taken an oath to defend the constitution of Sri Lanka whether it is bahubutha or not. The other countries including USA should recognize the sovereignty of Sri Lanka by allowing Mahinda Rajapakse to defend the constitution.

The impeachment of the CJ is purely an internal matter of Sri Lanka and no foreigner however powerful he or she may be, should interfere with the procedure or the judgment given by the President. When the Appeal Court granted leave to proceed with the petitions filed praying for a writ to issue on the Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) the Appeals court was in error to say the least. I have argued that the Appeals Court has no jurisdiction on this aspect in these columns and elsewhere and I do not want to repeat those arguments. I am not a lawyer by training but I am confident of my reasoning and arguments. The Appeals Court, meaning the three judges who sat on the bench referred a certain question to the Supreme Court on the grounds that they were requesting an interpretation of the constitution. The way the question was drafted and also the answer that the three judges who sat on the Supreme Court leave doubts on the minds of the average people such as me as to the genuineness. It is true that the Supreme Court is the sole authority on interpretation of the constitution but there are few questions that have to be asked with respect to this matter. It is a case involving the punishment of a judge and not an ordinary case. The disciplinary actions of judges are no ordinary matters and the constitution lays down a separate procedure when it comes to disciplinary matters of the judges. There is no provision in the constitution or elsewhere for an accused judge to appeal against the judgments of the President in such cases and the President cannot give arbitrary judgments as he is guided by the Article 107 (2) of the constitution. The Appeals court in their hurry quashed a decision of the PSC, which was only a finding and not a sentence or a judgment, depending on a so called interpretation of the constitution the Supreme Court. The appeals court is not empowered by Article 139 or 140 or any other article to quash a judgment that had not been given and also to interfere with deliberations of the parliament according to Article 80. There was no judgment to be quashed as at that stage the President had not removed the CJ. The Appeals Court had only a finding by the PSC which was an instrument of the Parliament that had judiciary powers together with the President in the case of disciplinary actions against the judges.

The Supreme Court amended the Article 107 (3) in the guise of an interpretation thus encroaching on the powers of the Parliament. In any event under 107(3) the Parliament could either by law or by standing orders provide the forum with the procedures etc., to “impeach” a judge. The standing orders are no law in the sense that they are not acts of Parliament but 107 (3) is law and abiding by that Article is not against the law nor illegal. The Supreme Court amended 107(3) and removed the words “or by standing orders” in that Article. In any event the parliament had acted in accordance with 107 (3) which is law in appointing the PSC as provided by standing orders 78 (A). Does the Supreme Court say that acting according to 107 (3) is illegal? The Supreme Court and the Appeals Court appear to have given unlawful judgments and have failed to uphold the constitution. The parliament on the other hand upheld the constitution and acted within the powers that have been invested in it by the constitution. The President has defended the constitution and not acted violating the constitution. However, the President and the Parliament are accused by the Brahmins and Navaneetham Pillais, the Canadian Prime Minister, commonwealth stalwarts and others for not upholding the constitution. They on the other hand praise the Appeals Court and the Supreme Court that have failed to uphold the constitution encroaching on the powers of the Parliament, and quashing judgments that had not been given.

President Obama is supposed to defend the American constitution in USA and not in other countries. Unfortunately it is the American democracy that is being defended everywhere in the world and when our courts act in a way so as to defend the American democracy they are praised condemning the President and the Parliament that have defended our constitution even if it is a bahubhutha constitution. The government that could not be influenced by the western powers, India and Brahmins during the humanitarian operations would not bow down to these powers and would only laugh at the claim by the impeached lady who still claims to be the CJ. On the other hand though the government should consider the possibility of impeaching the judges who have not upheld and defended the constitution it is unlikely that the government would do so and pardon them.

Copyright Prof. Nalin De Silva

Don’t be fooled by human rights it’s colonialism

Colonel Gaddafi was killed by NATO as a consequence of western Christian colonialism. There may be pundits in Sri Lanka who pontificate on neocolonialism as if colonialism ended in the sixties of the last century. However, these are concepts constructed by western colonialist intellectuals in order to hide the fact that western Christian colonialism is still living and kicking in spite of the financial crisis spreading in USA and the other western countries. In fact one could argue that if NATO did not bomb a few important areas in Libya Colonel Gaddafi would be still living. NATO was not a passive observer, only helping the so called Martyrs from Benghazi. It, at least the western countries organized the “rebellion” and in the final analysis it was not the Benghazis who killed Gaddafi but NATO.

What would have happened if NATO and the western countries were not behind the Benghazi “rebels”? I know that an experiment cannot be carried out in order to answer that question and we have to depend on speculation and argument of course based on certain assumptions, however empiricist we may like to be. (In fact no experiment can be repeated with or without the “same” conditions though the western “scientists” assume that it can be done so. I will come back to this problem in my series “On so called scientific knowledge”.) My assumption is that there would not have been a Benghazi “uprising” without NATO. It was NATO and the west right from the very beginning just as much the English and the other westerners have been there behind Tamil racism in this country from the nineteenth century.

I am not talking of so called human rights of Gaddafi as there was no need for human rights for him in the western sense. Human rights is a concept formulated by the western Christian society that emerged in the sixteenth century in Europe as a challenge to the then existing Catholic society with its western feudalism, and not in an Islamic society. In the western Christian society, the individual acquired importance more than the society. This was the essence of Martin Luther’s campaign against the Pope and the last five hundred years have seen how, in spite of triumph of Christianity over Catholicism, the individual has failed to stand up to the state (and the Church) that originally represented the society. The human rights of individuals have been formulated to protect the individual against the state but in the west up to date the state remains more powerful than the individual.

The poor and helpless individuals have no human rights whatsoever as they cannot afford to go to courts seeking any protection from the state. The rich may be able to go to a court of law and challenge the state but the state still have the powers even to overrule the courts if necessary. In the west the vast majority of people do not have any human rights not only because they cannot afford to go to a court of law but also since they have been brainwashed successfully by the western education given to them through schools, media, arts and universities to obey the state without questioning it. How many people in USA are against the killing of Gaddafi? Chomsky may come out with one of his usual customary statements to the non western world but he is hardly known among the ordinary people in the west and is not influential at all in the USA.

Obama has already claimed that it was USA that gave leadership to NATO in Libya and there must be millions of ordinary Americans, who are amongst the worst educated people in the world, who would be rejoicing that USA has been able to get rid of another monster. They must be happy that their country is ruling the world and in spite of the economic crisis the political leadership is with Obama as far as the so called global village is concerned. In fact Obama remains the village headman or “ralahamy” of the global village.

What the west has emphasized in the recent past to the leaders of the other countries is that they can rule their countries the way they like it even suppressing so called human rights but they should not expect to challenge the west. Gaddafi may have flirted with the west intermittently but in general he followed a path that was hostile to the west. The west is in a process of Christianizing the whole world culturally for the last five hundred years or so and they would tolerate only those leaders in the non west who do not challenge their mega schemes of Christianization. The west that goes through a financial crisis is more interested in the process of elimination of anti west leaders also in order to satisfy the masses and to instill in their minds that the west is strong in spite of the crisis. During the last few years they have been successful in eliminating bin Laden, Sadam Hussein and Gaddafi and they are now turning their eyes to Syria and Iran. The latter is their ultimate aim and they would tolerate only those rulers such as the kings of Saudi Arabia who are not opposed to the Christianization process carried out by the west.

This is nothing but colonialism and Obama is behaving as the modern version of the Anglo Saxon kings of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The west would interfere directly as they did in Libya only when necessary, and in what could be called normal times they are happy to allow the schools, media, arts and the universities to run the helpless countries in Asia and Africa through the western knowledge that is being bombarded day and night in those countries. Western science is the biggest culprit in this exercise and it is presented to us “wrapped” in a non existing objective realism and empiricism.

Gaddafi was the head of a state and in the western sense of human rights he had nothing to defend against the state. It is not different from discussing the human rights of Ms. Elizabeth Windsor also called the Queen of England and the head of the so called Commonwealth against the state of what they call UK. If one were to talk of human rights of Gaddafi then it is in that so called global village whose head is Obama. That kind of human rights against the “world order” is nothing but “human rights” vis –a- vis a “world government” which is another name for the “empire in which the sun did not set”. Neither the empire nor the sun has changed in a conventional sense though they are all subject to “anicca”.

It is clear that Obama is not different from George III during whose time Sri Lanka was annexed to the empire and it is not a question of human rights in a western sense that is involved but the rights of nations and peoples against colonialism. Obama is an invader and all that he says is that he did not like Gaddafi’s policies and he (Obama) wants Libyans under his control. He and the other leaders of the west in the present as in the past have committed crimes against the humankind in general and all that has to done is to take him and his anti humankind friend to custody for not allowing other nations to select their leaders and way of life. However, the question is who has the power to take these thugs, in the words of Gaddafi, into custody. The thugs have the political power, even if they do not have the economic power and all that we can do at present is to wait for the downfall of the anti human western system, an event which does not belong to the distant future.

Copyright Prof. Nalin De Silva