Did we earn this?

We’ve spent decades watching organised crime outpace the State’s capacity to stop it.

Heroin trawlers landed on the south coast for years before anyone was caught. A drug lord was shot dead inside a courthouse by a gunman dressed as a lawyer, walking past the officers meant to guard him. Two sleeping children died in Dehiwala this month because a criminal network had access to a military-grade grenade and used it on the wrong house.

This is not a country debating whether to get tougher on crime in the abstract. It has already run the experiment of restraint and watched the body count grow.

The AML/CFT amendments, the FIU-IRD link-up, the asset forfeiture powers, none of these appeared from nowhere. They exist because ordinary criminal prosecution, built for individual crimes with individual evidence, has proven structurally unable to reach networks that launder proceeds through shell companies and insulate their principals behind layers of family members and intermediaries.

Nearly Rs. 226 billion worth of narcotics were seized in a sixteen-month period alone, a figure that reflects the scale of what enforcement is up against, not the scale of enforcement itself.

A State that keeps prosecuting couriers while the financiers behind them stay untouchable has not chosen fairness. It has chosen to let the people doing the least harm absorb the consequences meant for the people doing the most.

Reversing the burden of proof on unexplained wealth is not a break from international norm; it is the norm. The FATF has pushed it globally for exactly the reason Sri Lanka now needs it: proving the criminal origin of laundered money beyond reasonable doubt is often impossible under conventional evidentiary standards, by design, because defeating that standard is what laundering exists to do.

The United Kingdom uses unexplained wealth orders. The United States built its civil asset forfeiture regime on the same logic that convicted Al Capone. India has spent years attaching the Dawood Ibrahim syndicate’s property because it could never get Iqbal Mirchi into a courtroom. None of these countries considered themselves to be abandoning justice. They considered themselves to be finally matching the sophistication of the networks they were fighting.

Sri Lankans have watched a nightlife drug economy migrate from cannabis to crystal methamphetamine, watched affluent enclaves develop as much of a habit as poor ones, and watched underworld violence escalate from contract killings to indiscriminate weapons in residential streets.

A population living through that escalation has more than earned the right to ask its Government for tools equal to the threat, rather than tools calibrated for a gentler era that no longer exists. Demanding restraint from a State facing this is not caution. It is asking the State to keep losing politely.

But the case for these powers is not the only case that matters, and it does not settle the argument on its own. Laws written for an emergency rarely stay confined to it.

The powers being built now, penalties issued without recourse to a court, an entire sector classified as high-risk with no evidentiary basis behind it, will still exist long after the current crisis and the current Government have passed.

What Sri Lanka earns through crisis, it may not be able to un-earn once the crisis fades, and the next Government to hold these tools may not have earned them at all.

None of this, the FATF standard, the Capone precedent, the careful distinction between emergency and permanence, means anything standing beside two small coffins in Dehiwala. Arguments about safeguards are for Parliament, courtrooms or cocktail circles. They are never going to be enough for parents burying their children.