Covid Militarization

This variant will have life-long complications for the country

- Ranga Jayasuriya

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.

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.