The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights’ (UNHCHR) report on Sri Lanka has come out at a time when the arrest of SLPP National Organiser and Opposition Parliamentarian Lakshman Namal Rajapaksa on corruption charges related to the massive Airbus purchase scandal of 2013 has captured the centre stage of public attention. He was arrested by the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption on 4 September and remanded until 18 September. The allegations concern an alleged payment of US $ 800,000 connected to the procurement of Airbus aircraft by the SriLankan Airlines. Opposition political parties working together with the SLPP have condemned the arrest as being politically motivated. They point to the mass Opposition public rally to be organised by the SLPP on 12 September as being the reason for the arrest.
The SLPP, together with other Opposition political parties, have been trying to get back to the public eye as being viable Opposition political parties after the drubbing that they received at the last Presidential and General Elections held in 2024. However, they face a daunting task. They face a Government with a two-third majority in Parliament and a President who currently enjoys a 75 per cent approval rating with the people as indicated in the recent Centre for Policy Alternatives survey. The main issue that led to the electoral watershed in 2024 was corruption and the abuse of power that was widely believed to have fed into the collapse of the national economy in 2022. The arrest of Rajapaksa and the charges against him bring back the issue of past corruption to the fore.
There is a strong public case for pursuing accountability for corruption, irrespective of the political status of those being investigated. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has claimed that if all alleged corruption and wrongdoing uncovered by the Government were fully investigated, hardly anyone among those responsible would be left untouched. The fact that an alleged wrongdoer in the Airbus scandal is the scion of one of the most formidable political dynasties in the country and is the leader of a major political Party is not deterring the Government.
Enormous scale
The Government is demonstrating a greater determination coupled with political will to push the accountability process forward compared to previous Governments. This is not the first occasion on which Rajapaksa has been arrested as part of Government investigations into corruption. In 2015, the Government headed by President Maithripala Yapa Sirisena and then Prime Minister, attorney Ranil Wickremesinghe launched a major investigation into the Airbus deal as the amounts at stake were enormous. In 2013, SriLankan Airlines had contracted six A330-300s and four A350-900s, with further A350 leases arranged for a fleet renewal programme valued at over $ 2.5 billion. That figure is comparable in size to the $ 3 billion International Monetary Fund bailout and shows the scale of exposure the loss-making State-owned carrier was taking on. The SriLankan Airlines decided to exit the leases starting in 2015–2016 following the change of Government. The penalties paid exceeded $ 100 million.
After the catastrophe, the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe Government appointed a high-powered investigation body. Despite the Board of Inquiry’s recommendation that former executives face criminal prosecution, no one named in the report was ever successfully prosecuted. The Airbus case is particularly important because what is at stake is not simply the size of the alleged bribe. What is more troubling is the deliberate commitment of scarce public resources to a loss-making enterprise, for a personal gain far smaller than the cost imposed on the national Budget. Corruption is not only about what an individual allegedly gets as a commission or bribe. It is also about the public resources committed, the institutions weakened, and opportunities lost when decisions serve private rather than public benefit.
Having completed two years in power, the National People’s Power Government is focused on identifying who was responsible for the current state of affairs in the country. They also need to focus their thinking on what institutions and systems must be changed so that past problems cannot easily recur. This means moving from anti-corruption politics to systems reform. This distinction is crucial. One can prosecute a set of corrupt individuals and still leave behind a system that produces another set. Conversely, if procurement, appointments, public finance, political financing, policing and judicial processes and reconciliation are redesigned properly, opportunities for corruption and political abuse will be reduced. For the Government therefore, the real measure of success should not simply be how many former politicians are investigated or prosecuted. It should be whether, by the end of its term, Sri Lanka has become a country in which it is substantially harder for any future Government to abuse public power.
Broader accountability
This broader understanding of accountability is particularly important because financial crimes and corruption, grievous though they may be, are not the only set of gross misdeeds that plunged the country to the bottom rungs of development in the world. There is another issue of accountability that needs to be pursued. This is to find out what happened to the tens of thousands of missing persons due to political violence in the past four to five decades which has put Sri Lanka in the second spot internationally for the number of missing persons. Amnesty International has estimated that at least 60,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 people have been subjected to enforced disappearance in Sri Lanka since the 1980s. The numbers are so large that they should shock the conscience of the country. It is telling that the disappearance of a person does not attract the same public attention as the disappearance of money.
A missing million $s matters because it belongs to the people. A missing person matters because that person belongs to a family, a community, a country. Both are failures of the same underlying obligation that the State apply accountability equally, to money and to people, regardless of who is harmed or who is implicated. While lost public money weakens the economy, disappeared people weaken the body politic itself. In the case of Sri Lanka, the disappeared are disproportionately Tamil, though people of all communities have vanished during the country’s cycles of violence. The question this raises is whether ethnic minority citizens believe that the State cares for them as it does the ethnic majority. A citizen should not have to ask whether the State cares about the disappearance of a person because that person was Tamil, Muslim or Sinhalese. Nor should a family have to wait for decades for an answer simply because the disappearance occurred during a period of political violence. This needs to be pursued with the same political will that is now being demonstrated in relation to corruption. The pursuit of accountability for corruption can therefore become an opportunity to demonstrate that accountability is not selective. It needs to apply to financial wrongdoing, the abuse of power, the violations of rights and the failure of institutions to protect citizens.
Therefore, the Government has a valuable opportunity to show that accountability is not about settling political scores with previous rulers. It is about establishing a standard of public responsibility that applies to everyone and every institution. This is also important for national unity, both in name and in spirit. If ethnic minority citizens are to feel a sense of belonging to the State, they need to know that their suffering matters as much as the loss of public money. Otherwise, unresolved grievances will remain a wound in the body politic and continue to weaken it. The missing people matter as much as the missing millions. In fact, people matter more than money in our society. The real test of accountability is whether Sri Lanka can build systems in which neither public money nor people can disappear without consequence and reverse the perception of the UN HCHR’s Office that "The promise of deeper legal institutional reforms appears to be stalling."
The writer is the Executive Director of the National Peace Council organization
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The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication