Covid Militarization This variant will have life-long complications for the country

It was quite a spectacle! Young women dressed in full military gear, a black coloured balaclava covering their face, probably a substitute for a facemask, probably a part of military paraphernalia, stood by a line of motorcycles, at attention to their commanding officer.  After a quick brief, they climbed on their motorcycles, Type-56 assault rifles dangling from their shoulders and cruised past the scenic beauty of the northern landscape, its paddy fields, a road tracking through a lagoon, the Fort, and ruins of the conflict that ended a decade ago,  to the populous part of the city of Jaffna.

1 June 2021

They are Sri Lanka Army’s newest addition to its Women’s Corps, an all-female Quick Reaction Rider Team. Their mission, according to the Security Forces Head Quarters, Jaffna is “to search for violators of health laws and to arrest those who do not comply with health laws and erecting emergency roadblocks. Their male peers are already cruising the busy Colombo streets as if flaunting military wear would scare away the Coronavirus.
What a baloney! Such energy and resources could have better utilized to purchase ambulances and train, medical staff in a country where the State Health Minister, a specialist doctor herself, is calling for public donations to hospitals that are overpouring with patients. This is another example of misplaced priorities of the Covid-19 prevention strategy of Sri Lanka.

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa who seems to think that the military knows better to respond to a medical contingency than the country’s health sector, which in its own right has a commendable track record in community health, appointed the army commander as the head of the country’s Covid task force. Unintended or otherwise, the result was the relegation of the medical practitioners and their expertise to second fiddle.

 A modest success in the earliest bout of Covid infection - a storm in a teacup - gave a sense of false confidence to the militarized approach of Covid prevention. Political and military leaders even boasted that Sri Lanka, along with Israel were the only countries to use the military for contact tracing as if its modus operandi might worth emulation by lesser industrious nations. A year since then, Israel has fully vaccinated a 56% of its population and almost beaten the virus. Probably, there is a lot more in a successful Covid 19 prevention strategy than military men tracing contacts. 

 A system bereft of medical intelligentsia failed to comprehend the complexity of the challenge it was confronted with.  The seemingly early success was also clouded in a short-sighted triumphalism. The government wanted applause for its modest early success. But, Sri Lanka’s Covid strategy made global headlines for a race-baiting policy of compulsory cremation of Covid-19 death bodies – a decision that has much to do with the Health bureaucracy, which itself operated in an intellectual vacuum, not open to the expertise of the country’s top medical practitioners.

Since then, Sri Lanka has been through two new waves, each took the country by surprise after a complacent bureaucracy had announced premature victory. The second wave was triggered by a cluster in an apparel factory  and was called Minuwangoda cluster for all its existence to avoid the acceptance of communal spread.  When it was winding down, the country threw caution to the wind and celebrated Avurudu.  The Avrudu cluster, barely within the month of May itself, has claimed for 70% of total deaths and over 50% fresh cases of infection. Sri Lanka has recorded a total number of 183,452 positive cases and 1441 deaths. In the meantime, the number of PCR tests has gone down, after the health ministry banned private hospitals from conducting tests. Correspondingly, the number of positive cases has declined, while the percentage of infected cases per total number of PCR tests have increased from 3% in the first week of April to 8% last week of April to 14% as of now. India at the height of the pandemic has only twice this rate.

 

A year since then, Israel has fully vaccinated a 56% of its population and almost beaten the virus. Probably, there is a lot more in a successful Covid 19 prevention strategy than military men tracing contacts

First and foremost, it is hard to fight a raging epidemic when the organizational structure of the prevention campaign is skewed. This is the primary problem of Sri Lanka’s Covid-19 prevention strategy. It is a hollow shell bereft of medical expertise and lacking the desire to listen to them. No wonder that the country introduced a lockdown, which is currently on- nearly a month after it was the logical thing to do and the country’s health experts had demanded. Until genuine medical experts are making decisions and the government implements them, Sri Lanka is bound to repeat costly blunders.

Second, this skewed status quo gives effect to fanciful ideas that either inflate the utility of some measures or simply blind to the reality as to how dumb they are.

Take, for instance, the much-hyped making of 10,000 beds, which in any comparison, is nothing to crow about (unless you have an extremely low ego as a nation). Any makeshift metalwork shop could do that.  Much publicized military-built Coronavirus treatment facilities are another example. They are indeed one area where the military could be utilized effectively in the national strategy, but they are only part of the solution. Without trained medical staff and specialized equipment, which are in short supply those facilities would be of little practical use.
Then you have the soldiers armed to teeth, cruising in motorcycles to enforce a curfew. In a civilized and democratic society, such display of men in armour in civilian affairs is both loathed and discouraged. That is why the countries with far superior military forces do not send their soldiers to the streets to enforce a covid curfew. In modern democracies, not only does the military function under the ultimate civilian–political control, there also exists a delineation between civil and military affairs. This delineation has become increasingly blurred under the Gotabaya Rajapaksa administration.

Third, such an oversize military role is counterproductive, more so for  Sri Lanka, which is already under the global spotlight for impunity for alleged past rights abuses, and perceived militarization of the bureaucracy. Those military patrols of covid prevention are effectively shooting the government on its own foot. They do not command respect, but are a magnet for criticism from the world. 

For instance, a strongly worded resolution currently before the US Congress observes, among others: “Whereas Sri Lanka’s COVID–19 response has been led and executed by the military, exacerbating longstanding concerns regarding state surveillance, harassment, and discrimination against Tamil and Muslim communities.”
Fourth, this is dangerous. Countries that subordinated their civilian bureaucracy to the military, such as Pakistan, took a one-way journey. Once military primacy is imprinted in the state structure, there is no coming back. A moderating factor in Sri Lanka though is the civilian control over the military of which inroads to civilian affairs happen with the full blessing of the Head of the State. ( However make no mistake, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan and Sukarno of Indonesia themselves promoted an oversized role for the military. Their fate is history). 
Finally though, even with current imperfections, Sri Lanka might come out of the Covid pandemic, not for the efficiency of its militarized approach,  but thanks to the Chinese and possibly Russian (if the Russian supplier honoured the timeline) vaccines.  However, the strains that the current government is inflicting on the very foundation of the State through its temptation for militarization would last a lot longer. Its complications could well be deadlier than Coronavirus.

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