In the aftermath of one of the deadliest prison tragedies in Sri Lanka’s recent history, many Sri Lankans have been left asking a simple question: where is the President’s public statement?
Twenty-six lives have been lost, including seven prison officers. Families are grieving, investigations are under way and the country is debating the future of its prison system. In such circumstances, it has become almost customary for the Head of State to speak—not necessarily to assign blame, but to express condolences, reassure the nation and outline the Government’s determination to establish the truth.
Leadership is often measured as much by words as by actions. Moments of national tragedy call for both.
Perhaps a presidential statement is still to come. If not, many will wonder why the country’s highest elected office has remained publicly silent at a time when the nation is looking for reassurance. Be that as it may we have had the subject Minister, Harshana Nanayakkara very visibly dealing with the matter and several comments reaching our editorial commented on the very humane nature of his statements and care and importantly his body language.
Be that as it may, leadership is never more visible than in moments of crisis and sometimes, silence speaks just as loudly.
OPINION
My father: Upali Thennakoon, was a jailor at the Welikada prison. In 1997, a month after my 2nd birthday he was killed on his way home from work. In a bus, by a drug cartel, a few hours away from home. His watch still has the precise time he was killed.
His crime was ensuring that rule of law and humanity prevailed in what was probably the ugliest, dirtiest and most gruesome place in the country: the prison. He would be the first to say that ‘prisoners are first human beings’ and that many of those who end up behind bars are rarely those who call the shots or profit off the drug trade.
I am 31 years old now. What an ugly twist of faith it is to sit here and realize that after almost 3 decades – that nothing has changed. That we live in a country and system that is so rotten, broken and starved of reform.
To those from previous governments who are now wearing a black band in protest – look at your dirty faces in the mirror and maybe put that band over your guilty eyes. You thrived off this exact system that has now left 26 dead.
To friends in the social justice sector – sometimes the systems we want to reform are so far away from our lived realities, that we simplify them too much so that our solutions become more palatable. Many of us drawing up idealistic plans for prison reform, severely underestimate the realities inside them – the brutal everyday realities faced by inmates and officers and the kind of resources that true rehabilitation takes.
Thathi was the funniest man in the room, loved theatre, always made my mother laugh, was a celebrated boxer and above all had a strong sense of duty, justice and an expansive heart.
Today there are dozens like me who will watch over their father’s still body and wonder if they might wake up. Children of officers and inmates alike.
Many years later, I became a community teacher in one of the areas where the drug cartel that killed my father operated out of.
For those who are quick to dehumanize prisoners, I wish you would see the kind of family situations, poverty, violence and painful abuse that provide the most ideal pathway for a young boy to make it to prison.
As a daughter of a man who was killed by the gruesome underworld of drugs – I will be the first to say that prison officers need protection, they are sent to the lion’s mouth with absolutely nothing to protect them.
And in the same breath I will say that it is pointless to talk about idealistic ideas of prison reform, if we still continue to allow the breeding grounds for organized crimes to persist: poverty, broken schools, crippling youth mental health and a political system that nurtures the cartels and vice versa.
May this be the last.
