The Switch of Trend in Fashion After the Pandemic 2022 – The Island

(A tribute to our PC Ralahamy)

by Lalin Fernando

We citizens are safe and secure in our homes day and night, at our work places and on the roads and when disasters strike or when people have to be rescued from fire and water. This is only because you are around 24 hours a day. Yet we have with no saving grace, abandoned, humiliated, berated, insulted and even physically attacked you when it suited us. All manner of accusations are thrown at you. Yet you never let us down come flood or fire, robbery or murder or even when old people need to cross the street. You are surprisingly polite at even the worst of times especially now during the unprecedented violent turmoil that is ongoing. You are also the best looking police anywhere.

The ungrateful public, misguided by western envoys, choose to overlook it all. They join hands to accuse you of brutality when possibly excessive force may have been used. Westerners who used and those that did not condemn the use of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki cannot ever be guardians of Asian liberty. They can never escape their guilt. They were ready to repeat their inhumanity in Korea (1950) and Vietnam (1972), and used napalm and defoliants too. It was always against Asians

However with whatever pride and high ideals you joined the police you had over the last 50 years to obey, among your superiors, those few gazette officers in high posts who were never meant to be leaders. You lost your innocence. They are afflicted by a common disease that affects most people in authority in both the public and private sectors in SL. They are all easily compromised by the incorrigibly corrupt politicians of all shades and sizes. A few of them even looked as though God was about to deliver a Gorilla but being in haste, dumped something indescribable at Diyawanna.

People from all walks of life, without exception, sought favours from you when they got into legal scrapes. These were not limited to traffic offences alone.

Law breakers including politicians, businessmen, professionals including lawyers, offered you bribes to look the other way. They then decried cursed and poured scorn at you when a few of you were tempted. Protesters now throw stones and attack you with clubs and rods and knives at barriers, knowing you were ordered not retaliate. But you go back to routine duties day after day without let, knowing the danger and the humiliation you and the inspectorate mostly, face.

You do not hesitate like in the USA when about 20 fully armed policemen for eight hours stood idle while a lone gunman went about shooting nursery children unhindered. Nor do you pump about 20 bullets into an innocent man (Brazilian) as did a Constable Locke at the underground station in England in 2005 after the bus bombings. You were the ‘kos ata’ (sacrifice) that your superiors and the politicians offered the public to hammer to cover up their multiple frailties in strategy, tactics , command and control and concern for the people.

In 1971, 1988-9 and for nearly 30 years from 1979, while being in the first line of defence of the country, over 2,000 of you were killed. It included one SDIG and four DIGs. You, together with the defence forces, secured the country from terrorists for over 30 years despite over 100, 000 citizens being killed.

In 1988 an abominable Foreign Minister, serving a treacherous President, asked a supine IGP to order you to surrender to appease the terrorists. Six hundred (600) of you in the East, ready to fight back, obeyed superior orders without question that unknown to you were illegitimate. Your comrades were butchered and buried within a few hours after capture in the shallow graves they were forced to dig. No one has yet admitted to their villainy or was punished.

Out of overwhelming sorrow and guilt a few in the police stood up for you, time and again. Not a single politician bothered. However the people have not forgotten the 600 even though there is no monument to them. They were sacrificed to the genocidal LTTE by abominable politicians who were willing to betray their countrymen to cut a deal with terrorists. That was the cost to you for having trusted your superiors and obeyed their flawed orders in carrying out your duty in the service of Sri Lanka.

Today you man barriers facing howling mobs that are described by the blind as exercising their right of ‘peaceful’ assembly, even as they throw bricks, stones and boulders with abandon. They threatened to storm the private residence of the President. They then tried to isolate the Prime Minister’s home. They made their ‘peaceful’ intentions absolutely clear when thousands threatened the guards manning the main entrance gate of the Navy at the Trincomalie Dock Yard. They were led by a woman screaming ‘kappapang, kappapang, (cut cut) and then ominously ‘kelli ‘kelli (into pieces, into pieces).You stood unbowed and firm. Preventing complete anarchy has become your daily duty for the last few months .You have succeeded so far. May you always.

The Police have been neutered by a spineless leadership of their own senior officers and a completely baffled and petrified political leadership. The bosses are only interested in themselves it would appear. The police were and are thrown virtually naked to man barriers with no plan, strategy or tactics with just tear gas and water canon to thwart violently hostile and threatening mobs. They use the original ‘peaceful’ protestors as bait. The leaders of the mobs are well hidden in the rear, reminiscent of the 1988-9 tactics of the JVP.

Today, driven to near insanity by shortages of essentials including food, fuel and cooking gas and despairing in queues but with exemplar discipline, the patience of the people has held. Their plight is compounded by the continuing cupidity of politicians. How deep the infiltration of society by anarchists and their paymasters as a consequence is the question.

Yet you Ralahamy and your immediate superiors in the field have done a magnificent job against overwhelming odds, in extraordinary times. We want you to. Few realize the police reflect society and not the other way round. You come from the same background as the rest of us. If you fail we are responsible too to varying degrees according to how we subverted you and not the other way round. When we criticize you, we must admit our own guilt in the example we set, interfering in your duties, selfishly using influence to achieve our often illegal ends for personal benefit and generally perverting both the nation’s law and order and the course of justice and abusing your patience, understanding and tolerance.

Despite enormous sacrifices you remain silent scapegoats for all the ills that vile politicians and their benefactors have bequeathed SL. The former have for nearly 75 years subverted, corrupted and abused public servants in general and the police in particular. Many of the higher ranks of the police in recent times and the Police Commission swam with the political tide for their own benefit compromising their status instead of standing up to protect the rule of law and the entire judicial system in SL and you. Who cared? Yet you stood firm knowing that facing violent crowds day and night without let was your unenviable duty. You had no time to look into the needs of your family. We know that, even if the politicians and media do not care.

Meanwhile the public, that include corrupt Ministers and MPs, prolific profiteering businessmen to citizens living in low cost housing, live safely and with few cares in their homes and work places simply because you Ralahamy are there. You endure, despite being abused, reviled, and unforgiven, day and night for the sins of your superiors and all politicians and other law breakers. This is not only in cities and towns and in the streets but in rural areas, in hills, jungles and farm land.

Unarmed, using water cannon and tear gas and heavily outnumbered, you thanklessly man barriers to prevent thousands of ‘peaceful’ rioters from storming public places including parliament .You then carry out your duties the next day, unarmed as usual, on the streets helping people and maintaining law and order. No one attacks you despite the hatred spread by extremists. The general public recognizes the debt they owe you .Yet who would want to be a policeman right now?

The police, if they do their duty properly, will never be popular even if many discerning citizens respect them. Difficult as it may be for its critics to understand or admit, the police simply wish to do what the public expects them to do while carrying out its duties. That is the ethos of the Police. Left to their own devices they are an excellent force as was seen very recently when a small child was murdered in Beruwala (July 2022). They found the murderer within hours. Older people may remember how a headless corpse of a German tourist was found in the peak wilderness on the route to Adams Peak in the 1960/70s.The police found the murderer. How did this happen? There was no political interference. There are many more of such astonishing actions. The fact is:

You are a better man than I am, Ralahamy’

(Apologies to Rudyard Kipling and Gunga Din)