City Life

Eric Ellis

21 July 2007

Peace would be a better business planfor the island of a hundred ministers

The term ‘backbencher’ is virtually unknown here. There is a 52-strong cabinet, plus 33 ‘non-cabinet’ ministers and 20 ‘deputy ministers’. With a million-plus of the 21 million population employed by the state, Sri Lanka has one of the world’s biggest public payrolls. Official posts mean perks: cars, drivers, houses, air-conditioning. But what precisely does the Minister of Plan Implementation do? The five Ministers of Nation Building? The politicians that matter to businessmen aren’t in the cabinet, but the president’s family — two of his brothers have been appointed ‘presidential advisers’ and have become the hardline locus of power to confront the appalling Tiger leader, Prabhakaran, bunkered in his de facto state in the island’s north-east. One brother used to run a 7-Eleven convenience store. Now he runs the military, which is rounding up and roughing up Colombo Tamils as the capital is ethnically cleansed. In the island’s east last week, the army wrested a strategic base from the Tigers for the first time in 13 years. Prabhakaran still controls a quarter of the island and vows to further cripple its economy, but a win is a win and the Rajapakses decreed, perhaps prematurely, a massive victory parade in the capital. A bookshop makes its own commentary, placing Mein Kampf and The Godfather on display in its window. This is, says my businessmen friend, ‘an amazing country being manhandled on both sides by some very stupid people’.