The judges of the Nuremberg War Crimes tribunal who prosecuted Nazism-inspired German doctors surely anticipated the recurrence of such horrific abuse of medical knowledge to harm humans when they helped compile the historic Nuremberg Code on medical experimentation on humans. Who would have thought that over a half-century later, in little Sri Lanka, thousands of miles from the theatre Nazi atrocities, a leading doctor would publicly threaten the deliberate misuse of medical procedure against a group of humans?
The entire medical professional community is today in serious reflection on the recent threats made by Dr. Anuruddha Padeniya, President, Government Medical Officers’ Association, to reporters of the Sunday Observer when they asked him for comments on the GMOA-led doctors’ strike. The GMOA leader threatened to use psychiatric treatment measurements to identify targeted journalists as ‘traitors’ and publish their names in a ‘list of traitors to the motherland’.
In the first place, in the aftermath of decades-long war and social conflict, we still live in times of volatile community relations, ethnic and religious siege mentalities and, outbursts of extreme, deadly violence perpetrated by those social elements reacting to perceived ‘treachery’ against various ‘motherlands’ or ‘religions’. Some pseudo-religious fanatics target what they define as religious ‘apostasy’ or ‘blasphemy’ or violations of social behaviour codes. Other, bigger, groups of similar fanatics react to imagined or crudely fabricated genocidal attempts such as ‘vanda pethi’ and riot against the accused ‘perpetrator’ ethnic group.
After nearly a half-century of inter-ethnic rivalry, social conflict and all-out war, Sri Lanka’s public discourse contains a myriad different uses of terms such as ‘traitor’, ‘patriot’, ‘motherland’. Full-scale insurgencies have been fought for a separate ‘motherland’. The consequent counter-insurgency to likewise save ‘the motherland’ from partition resulted in a scale of warfare and human-caused devastation that this beautiful island had never previously experienced.
To those fanatical, paranoid social elements, anyone named ‘traitor’ is worse than the external ‘enemy’ and deserves a worse fate. How often in our life and times have ‘traitors’ been named and then maimed, abducted or killed by all kinds of forces claiming to ‘protect’ or ‘save’ the so-called ‘motherland’ or ‘race’ or ‘religion’? How often are we, ourselves, challenged to interpret and re-interpret these deadly labels in their variously shifting applications on this or that side of ethnic, religious and other community divides?
Most recently, governments have resorted to the convenience of such labelling and intimidating – if not murdering – of its critics and those sections who dissent from governmental policy or action.
Sri Lankans, therefore, are easily sensitive to such intense political labelling, knowing full well the possible deadly ramifications.
The threat by the GMOA President to make such a public list, serves as outright intimidation of those wishing to either report on the GMOA’s actions and concerns or, criticises or discusses them.
In that sense, Dr. Padeniya sounds eerily like those past warlords, state and non-state, who strutted our island less than a decade ago waging terrible aggression and devastation. There was a time when such ‘lists’ were made, both covertly and, often, brazenly publicly, for the deliberate purpose of intimidation, suppression and coercion. These are the tools of social and political terror.
In referring to a ‘motherland’, the doctor is taking what was originally a medical institutional controversy into the realm of high state politics – indeed, in the light of recent history, into the realm of war and violence. Bloodshed and tragedy may, or may not, follow, but the intention is to shock, overawe, coerce and, by these irregular, unjust or cruel means, enforce one’s will and one’s dominance.
This is the kind of ‘list’ Dr. Padeniya, head of the GMOA, no less, is talking about. If this kind of professional medical leadership is representative of the collective or majority will of the government doctors he represents, it is time that the larger medical community as a whole takes serious notice of the direction in which a section of their eminent profession is heading.
But Dr. Padeniya’s methods of terrorising people go far beyond threats of ‘lists’ and epithets of ‘traitor’. What is most alarming is his threat to use certain ‘psychiatric’ tools of behavioural measurement in identifying ‘traitors’ and creating these lists. The President of the GMOA has publicly declared that he intends to use actual medical procedures and tools of his profession for this purpose of political intimidation.
It is this aspect of the GMOA leader’s threat that needs far more serious attention by all sectors of the medical community – practitioners, researchers, teachers, regulators. Whether there is indeed such a psychiatric diagnostic method as claimed by Dr. Padeniya needs to be clarified by the country’s Psychiatry profession. If there is, then urgent steps must be taken to prevent such an abuse of medical technology for the purpose of deliberately harming or intimidating people. The fact that such medical methods are likely to be used for political purposes is even more alarming.
At the end of the Second World War, such misuse of medical methods were investigated and prosecuted by the Nuremberg Tribunal as ‘crimes against humanity’. When will the GMOA realise that its persistent strategy of confrontation and attempted coercion of a whole nation is taking the Association down a path that hints of a similar criminality and barbarity?