The heart of the matter

“From eight-thirty in the morning until eleven he dealt with a case of petty larceny; there were six witnesses to examine, and he didn’t believe a word that any of them said. In European cases there are words one believes and words one distrusts: it is possible to draw a speculative line between the truth and the lies; at least cui bono principle to some extent operates, and it is usually safe to assume, if the accusation is theft and there is no question of insurance, that something has at least been stolen.

But here one could make no such assumption: one could draw no lines. He had known police officers whose nerves broke down in the effort to separate a single grain of incontestable truth; they ended, some of them, by striking a witness, they were pilloried in the local Creole papers and were invalided home or transferred. It woke in some men a virulent hatred of a black skin, but Scobie had long ago, during his fifteen years, passed through the dangerous stages; now lost in the tangle of lies he felt an extraordinary affection for these people who paralysed an alien form of justice by so simple a method”

– The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene

An outside observer can be forgiven for thinking that we have difficulties in telling the truth, leave alone arriving at the truth. A straightforward question will rarely elicit a simple answer here. Who killed Cock Robin? “I,” said the Sparrow “with my bow and arrow”. But what will the Crow say? “I don’t know Sir, maybe he committed suicide!”

The so-called investigations into the much-controversial Avant-Garde operations are a case in point. With the multitude of characters involved and several versions doing the rounds we may never know the complete truth of the matter. There is an army of investigators (mostly informal, apparently compiling personal “files” on the saga!) and even a larger number of self-appointed prosecutors as well as defenders of Avant-Garde. Some of these busybodies appear to play dual or even multiple roles in the saga. However, the truth is that except for a few “known facts” the rest of what is commonly being said is speculative.

Avant-Garde, we gather, is a private security company involved in offshore anti-pirate operations, a high risk and dangerous activity which could result in loss of life as well as taking of life. If a person is taken in the high seas as a suspected pirate, under international laws there is a due process to follow. Those taking that man into custody may have to explain at a court of law the process by which they concluded the man to be a pirate and the circumstances of his detention. That man could belong to any nationality. He could well be a fisherman set adrift by the tides. You cannot just shoot him and throw him overboard.

To meet the various allegations being thrown at them Avant-Garde thus far has had only one spokesman and that is the Chairman (so we are told) of the company, a person by the name of Senadipathi. While defending his company, Senadipathi has pointed out that there is a strong involvement of the State in the company operations and that the country earns substantial foreign exchange from it. Their scope of work may include undertakings made to foreign governments. It is notable that the other partner, the State, has not spoken about its involvement publicly.

As Marlon Brando playing Godfather in the famous mafia movie quipped ‘how a man makes a living is not our concern’. There will be any number of such companies in the world bidding for these contentious but lucrative assignments in the high seas. What makes Avant-Garde situation different seems to be the role of the State of Sri Lanka in its operations. Ideally, the role of a State is that of a regulator and direction provider. From our own experience, when the State becomes a business, whether it is the Sri Lankan airlines or the estates where the vital tea, rubber and coconut are grown, the results have been less than satisfactory, to put it mildly.

In the case of Avant-Garde, the State of Sri Lanka seems to have become an enthusiastic facilitator of the company’s operations, providing weapons and other facilities. We cannot comment about the detailed arrangements between the State and this security company without free access to them.

A normal requirement of good governance is transparency and of course legality in the usual business of the State. In a few limited areas such as security, criminal investigations and so on an exception may be made to the transparency rule. But a State cannot act with the flexibility of a private business because the interests of 20 million inhabitants should be considered at all times. Making money by any means, Mafia like, is not a feature of a recognised legitimate State.

Then there was the case of a young girl murdered in cold blood in a rural area recently. The public were outraged by the taking of the life of this innocent child. Under public pressure the Police made a huge effort to find the culprit. Later a man was arrested who apparently confessed to the offence while in Police custody. But his DNA did not match with the evidence obtained from the scene of the crime. Later another person was arrested and he too confessed to the crime!

Only a few days ago certain widely-circulated newspapers carried a sensational news item about the son of a prominent politician who we were told had more than $ 1 billion in a bank account in a Gulf country. We have read about mega rich persons, particularly American billionaires such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg. Their extravagant lifestyles are regularly featured in glitzy magazines. Anyone who follows such things will tell you that it is extremely unusual for even such genuine billionaires to have a mindboggling $ 1 billion parked in one bank account.

We are not suggesting that the story of the bank account is false. Given the level of corruption that prevails in our society, it is most likely that there is in fact a bank account in the name of that person or of an associate in the country concerned. But the figure given or rather speculated about only points to a certain mindset. The accuracy of the figure does not matter, larger the figure thrown about, greater the effect, seems to be how these things are viewed.

Where the truth is not important or downgraded, falsehoods, half-truths and sheer nonsense will come to the fore. Unlike the hard truths, often unglamorous and boring, untruths can be made more thrilling and satisfying. Scobie, the main character in Graham Greens’ acclaimed ‘Heart of the Matter,’ thought that the colonials were artfully paralysing an alien judicial system with their untruths and falsities. Perhaps, that is only a part of their falsity.

In Scobie’s world, arriving at the truth is an aspect of the competencies of the culture. He believes that the truth is important and could be arrived at. But there are other ways of looking at the world, as Scobie confronted in his colonial posting, ways of “seeing” without noting the “truth”, or even ignoring it.

In that view, the effect of a story, what it conveys and evokes, is of greater importance than the truth of it. Thus the same event is spoken about in vastly different ways, sometimes making the listener wonder whether it is the same thing they speak of. However, there is one truth that none can deny. Getting to the heart of the matter, could be more painful than one imagines…