Lanka Citizen

Presidential campaign is accelerating full throttle, candidates of the two main parties dropping the others far behind. But the voters who are not the hardcore kind adhered to a certain party seem yet undecided. Floating vote will decide the winner.

Who can be the winner? Anybody can be. But who should be the winner? This �should be� factor depends upon the political stand of the individual.

Anything can happen except Siddhalepa Mudalali or Wije Dias Sahodaraya or one of the other nine similar candidates will win. Therefore there is no point arguing one of the left candidates should win although whatsoever leftists we are.

Tamils and Muslims can ignore this election on the basis that it is just to select the Sinhala ruler to govern the Sinhala dominant state that provides second level citizenship to the minorities.

But the people like us cannot come to that stand although we have leftist thinking as we are Sinhalese. The way the future president leads this country is very important to us.

Therefore we have to decide who should be the president although both contenders are equally hated by us.

Ethnic problem wise, Ranil�s slogans are more attractive because he promotes federalism vis-�-vis Mahinda�s unitary state. He looks like a non-racist while his attempts to adorn himself with nationalist costumes make him a laughing stock. Sinhala nationalist forces charge him that he will betray the country to tigers. Then why don�t the tigers support him to carry out a project that is so good for them?

in fact Ranil is the most feared figure to the tigers. During his rule he was consuming time without taking steps to solve the problem. He expected the Tamil Liberation Movement would liquidate during the period of no war � no peace. His strategy of containment proved successful as the LTTE split with Karuna�s rebellion. On the other hand he created a sharp security network with the help of western allies. LTTE doubts his plans what ultimately can impose a lesser devolution of power and force LTTE to accept it, threatening a possible military onslaught.

This project could be successful if JVP and JHU did not launch a do-or-die campaign to oust the UNP government. After all Ranil�s approach towards the ethnic problem is a dangerous one in the point of view of the Tamil Liberation Movement. Therefore although they do not support anybody, Ranil�s defeat can be warmly welcomed. It literally means Mahinda�s success.

On the other hand, nationalist extremists who have lined up with Mahinda actually make the Tamil cause easier. Their unbending stubbornness towards the devolution of power provides a space to the LTTE to rationalize its military strategies.

Therefore in every measure Mahinda will be the LTTE�s choice.

Ranil�s economic policy will no way be popular among the masses, although it is embraced by the upper echelon of the business community. �Regaining Sri Lanka� which Ranil put forward and will be reactivated after his victory was heavily criticized by the JVP and the civil society organizations. The economic philosophy behind it, the growth will trickle down and alleviate poverty, is a clich� questioned even by the president of the World Bank Mr. Paul Wolfenson. Huge borrowings he has intended are sure to increase the indebtedness of the nation. It is highly questionable whether these super infrastructure development projects are really to connect the poor to the growth or for the benefit of the foreign investment that come to the country just looking for hire and fire cheap labour. In common man�s perspective Ranil is a sales representative of western capital who is going to sell everything from CEB to village tank.

Comparatively Mahinda has a better appearance because he has no policy at all, except rhetoric. People can expect a presidency with no rapid changes. Yet who knows what is in this man�s mysterious coldness? Will he keep the JVP sahodarayas at hand or will he kick them out, nobody knows. If the sahodarayas will stay, there will be some kind of impediment to the structural reforms that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund will push through. In that perspective as well, Mahinda is the �people�s choice�. That can be the reason for Vasu sahodaraya�s latest summersault, if it is not to secure a seat in a future parliament.

Mahinda is the perfect choice for the middle class. He will be the creator of government employments, regardless any work is available for the new recruits. Salaries will be paid in five figure numbers from the coffers filled with the money hard earned by garment workers, Middle East housemaids and estate workers. He will not cut the public sector like Ranil. Pensions will be re-granted for government servants. Further, he has promised to safeguard all the other middle class fantacies.

Wow! What a match!

Will the farming community respond to the Amude or Denim jeans? Or Rs.350 bag of fertilizer or Rs.550 bag? Nobody knows yet. But both have plans to grant freehold titles to the colony settlers. Ranil had planned to increase urban population to 50% from the current level of below 25%, in his �Regaining SriLanka�. How is he going to do that? Will he make the farmers sell their lands to the growers of cash crops and make them migrate to towns as wage labourers. Who supports such life gambling? Mahinda has, at least, not articulated such plans.

What does the real working class think at this moment? Colombo city dwellers both rich and poor have turned to Ranil. They expect Ranil will create more jobs, the kind the private sector offers, and more earnings. Estate workers will have to obey their Kankanis and vote Ranil. They have never expected anything beyond their leaders expected from elections.

Now I am going to summarize my argument. For SLFP Mahinda was OK when he was selected as the presidential candidate regardless whatever the president and Anura utter now. Mahinda has set himself perfectly in the JVP propaganda machine that can paste a poster on each and every wall and for the JVP Mahinda is the sinking man�s bit of staw. For the good old left parties plus Vasu Sahodaraya have no other choice to cling to a seat or two in a future parliament. For the JHU and Bhumiputhra Party Mahinda will the person who saves the Sasane and Pandu Heliya (religion and the pot of saffron die). For the LTTE as well Mahinda will be the less fearful leader. For the middle class Mahinda is the saviour of their dreams. For the farming community he will be the person who at least will not modernize it too rapidly. He is a man who states that no privatization will occur under his presidency.

That is why I say Mahinda is everybody�s darling, if not most of them. Out of two rotten eggs, people have to select one that at appears less rotten.

www.lankaleft.com

Although responsible for 70 million deaths, Mao also succeeded in rebuilding a nation, and many retain a nagging suspicion that this could not have been achieved, by Mao or anyone else, without strong-arm tactics. For many Chinese, an intense pride in that achievement overshadows revulsion at Mao’s crimes.

Indeed, Chinese history and folklore are replete with tyrants. It is taken as a commonplace among many Chinese that their country, with its size and population, is somehow uniquely chaos-prone and difficult to rule. So the corollary notion that anyone hoping to bring order would need to twist a few arms is entrenched in Chinese minds, and even people with direct and painful knowledge of Mao’s cruelty grant him a degree of grudging respect.

By KENNETH MURPHY

A Book Review: Mao: The Unknown Story, By Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

‘Tyranny is a habit, wrote Dostoyevsky, it has a capacity for development, it develops finally into a disease.”

In 1919, a young essayist named Mao Zedong urged his fellow Chinese to cast off their oppression. Nothing extraordinary in that, as China’s last emperor had been dethroned almost a decade earlier. What was extraordinary is that Mao also asked his countrymen to have sympathy for their oppressors, who were, after all, human beings like ourselves. Their tendency toward oppression, he wrote, was merely “an infection or hereditary disease passed on to them from the old society and old thought.”

As ruler of the People’s Republic of China three decades later, such sympathy, if it ever really existed, had clearly been abandoned, for Mao had long since been afflicted with the disease of despotism.

Jung Chang’s and Jon Halliday’s biography Mao: The Unknown Story is the tale of the progress of that disease, tracing Mao’s rise from provincial pamphleteer to the Luciferian head of state of the world’s most populous nation. Co-writer Chang is the author of the best-selling Wild Swans; this is the first full-length biography of the Great Helmsmen by a Chinese writer.

Mao’s Confucian upbringing in a well-to-do peasant family in Hunan; early dabbling with radical politics; the cunning, ruthlessness and duplicity that allowed him to triumph both in the political infighting with his Communist comrades and as a military commander against the superior armies of Japan and Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists; a mythically large personality; remarkable charisma; the unrestrained flights of hubris that created a New China and then plunged it into chaos — all of this bears retelling and re-examining, because, unlike Hitler and Stalin, Mao retains a patina of respectability in the West.

Today, even China’s heavily doctored official accounts, while straining to gloss over the rough edges of Mao’s legacy, cover the basic outline, blaming Mao’s “errors” for the ensuing chaos. Jung Chang and British writer Jon Halliday bring us the full magnitude of the catastrophe Mao inflicted on China: China does not accept Western estimates of 20 million to 30 million deaths from famine caused in the early 1960s by the rash economic policies of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. In fact, the official histories shun the word “famine” altogether, and refer to the period instead as the “Three Difficult Years.” Also obscured by party historians, out of obvious self-interest, are the varied deeds of Mao’s colleagues, including his eventual successor Deng Xiaoping, who did some of Mao’s worst dirty work while he lived but began undoing his policies the moment Mao died.

Such crimes and drama make Mao an irresistible subject. But Jung and Halliday are primarily interested in the Great Helmsman as a form of political epidemiology: How did Mao contract “oppressor’s disease,” and how was it able to progress so far as to ravage him and China both?

Although responsible for 70 million deaths, Mao also succeeded in rebuilding a nation, and many retain a nagging suspicion that this could not have been achieved, by Mao or anyone else, without strong-arm tactics. For many Chinese, an intense pride in that achievement overshadows revulsion at Mao’s crimes.

Indeed, Chinese history and folklore are replete with tyrants. It is taken as a commonplace among many Chinese that their country, with its size and population, is somehow uniquely chaos-prone and difficult to rule. So the corollary notion that anyone hoping to bring order would need to twist a few arms is entrenched in Chinese minds, and even people with direct and painful knowledge of Mao’s cruelty grant him a degree of grudging respect.

Chang and Halliday have no truck with this. Chiang Kai-shek could, for instance, have restored the country’s unity, and perhaps held off the Japanese more effectively, they say, were it not for Mao’s betrayals and rebellion.

In Western minds, views of Mao have not so much blended the good parts with the bad as evolved according to how much and what kind of information was coming out of China at the time Mao was being analyzed. Much of what dribbled out during Mao’s earlier years was filtered through sympathetic chroniclers such as Edgar Snow and Agnes Smedley, and tended to show him as a romantic and heroic rebel. As it emerged that Mao’s victims numbered in the tens of millions, damning comparisons with Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot have become harder for supporters to fend off. Yet somehow that grudging admiration for creating New China never went away entirely.

It is, of course, China’s current leaders who ought to have the clearest view of Mao. Their judgment, tellingly, has been to reverse his most basic policies by putting China on the road to a market economy. So why, Chang and Halliday wonder, do they continue to give his portrait pride of place in Tiananmen Square?

No book has come as close to unravelling the mystery of Mao’s character as this one. The authors combine scholarship (their use of the Soviet archives to reveal Mao’s actions is groundbreaking) with the narrative drive Chang brought to her Wild Swans, sweeping the reader effortlessly back to the bizarre and deadly world created by Mao and his circle of disciple-accessories. There is no cheap psychohistory. This is a book about what is really knowable.

Inevitably, in a book that covers the most calamitous years in China’s long history in more than 800 pages of text, there are gaps. Sources are inadequately noted. Military history in general gets shorter shrift than it deserves for a leader so obsessed with playing the warlord. The argument raised here, that Mao became a victim of his self-imposed isolation, neglects the close watch Mao kept on technical and economic issues. The record shows a man much more in touch with what was happening in the economy than this book sometimes lets on.

Indeed, if Mao had left such details in the hands of competent managers and interfered less, catastrophes such as the Great Leap Forward, when peasants were encouraged to build mini steel mills in their villages, might have been abandoned sooner.

The Mao that emerges from this book was the overseer of state terror that left an indelible scar on the Chinese economic powerhouse that is now emerging. To understand Mao’s long march with the Devil, there can be no better starting point than Mao: The Unknown Story, for Chang and Halliday grapple with the fundamental questions of history. Do leaders shape great events and great evils? Or is it events that are in the saddle? To this old question, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday give a definitive answer where Mao is concerned.

Kenneth Murphy’s Unquiet Vietnam: A Journey to the Vanishing World of Indochina, was recently published in London. Currently a senior fellow at Smolny Collegium, Saint Petersburg State University, Russia, he is at work on a cultural and political history of postwar Italy.

Courtesy, The Globe and Mail, October 29, 2005

Addressing a ceremony organised by Uva Provincial Council Chief Minister Vijith Vijayamuni Soysa to felicitate her at Bibile, President Kumaratunga stressed that she had no intention of forming National Governments with those who tried to tarnish her image when they had the opportunity of working together with her.
She said that it was better if the people can extend their support to the SLFP candidate at the forthcoming election to take forward the good programmes of her Government without any interruption.

“It is better if people can extend their support to our candidate at the forthcoming election to take forward this programme successfully,” President Kumaratunga added.

She said she will support him to take forward the development process initiated by her. She recalled that the previous UNF Government was not keen to proceed with the many development programmes she initiated.

Courtesy Daily News 31.10.2005

By ‘Kathikā’ Study Circle

We interpret the Presidential election of 2005 in its essence as a crucial battle for hegemony, between the ideologies of neo-liberalism and Jathika Chinthanaya or the ‘national thought’ as its founders wish to call it, a battle against the modern liberal ethos with the expressed desire to revive a ‘national’ ethos.

We take the two candidates to be foremost the representatives of the respective ideologies, one a committed believer of neo-liberalism, while in the other case it is the unfolding of the recent events that made the movement of Jathika Chinthanaya select him as its leader, given that intuitively he seems to be closer to the tradition Jathika Chinthanaya represents than to the neo-liberal policies.

The two ideologies find themselves mutually exclusive. Neo-liberal agenda at this election proposes to enshrine liberal democracy and market economy in our society. The Jathika Chinthanaya proposes to free Sri Lanka from the grip of Western imperialism and establish a Jathika Arthikaya, a national economy based on Jathika Chinthanaya, which combines both the state and the private sector.

I Neo-Liberalism and Jathika Chinthanaya: Polar Opposites?

The neo-liberal agenda
The neo-liberal agenda strongly believes that its implementation will bring economic growth, and therefore freedom and prosperity to the people of the country; hence the agenda has to be implemented somehow ignoring its social consequences for the deprived sectors of society. What lies behind this belief is the modern faith in the discourse of modernity and therefore, in the belief that in progress, modernization and development will overcome all social ills. It follows that the freedom of the individual in the guaranteed through the human rights would generate economic growth the ripples of which will bring modernization and development. With the trickle down effect everyone will benefit at the end, and there will be freedom and prosperity all around. In this view, any resistance to the implementation of such an agenda has to be considered a politically misguided move that goes against the common interest and therefore warrants to be overcome at any cost. Hence, the authoritarianism of neo-liberalism, born out of the modern conviction of the possibility of knowing what is good for society and believing in one’s missionary role in implementing it against all resistance. In this version, politics is the vocation of the aristocracy brought up to rule the subjects. Hence the distance of political leaders from the ordinary public. The ruler depends on the technocrat and the bureaucrat to implement the political agenda conceived in the minds of the experts who being the students of the correct method that know the Truth of modernity, and therefore how to modernize and develop, ‘underdeveloped,’ ‘third world’ countries such as Sri Lanka.

Jathika Chinthanaya
Jathika Chinthanaya, as a discourse seeks to resist the impact of modernity on tradition in its present phase of globalization which (to borrow Marx’s famous metaphor) threatens to melt all solid identities based on tradition into thin air in its atomization of communities and homogenization of all cultures. Jathika Chinthanaya perceives the rejuvenation of a national polity and economy and a national culture based on a state driven, people oriented, agricultural and industrial development as the way out of the ill effects of the impact of the neo-liberal agenda backed by globalization on our society. Hence Jathika Chinthanaya’s portrayal of this election as a battle between the Jathika and Vijathika or the national and the alien forces identified as Western imperialism. The struggle then is a patriotic one to assert Sri Lanka’s national independence.

Jathika Chinthanaya theoretically understands Sinhala Buddhist culture as one based on Buddhist humanism whose chief characteristics are considered to be the middle path, rejection of hedonism, commitment to altruism in place of selfishness, non-acquisitive way of life, egalitarianism and placing humanity above riches.

In our view, this is in essence a notion of the good life for humans centered on our ability to cultivate a capacity for discerning judgment in the conduct of our lives. Contrary to attempts to equate liberalism with Buddhism, the ethos of liberal individualism which reduces the idea of judgment to making consumer choices in the marketplace, goes against the very essence of Buddhist ethos and seek to uproot it.

In our view, it is politically misleading to take the political base of Jathika Chinthanaya as formed merely by economically deprived sectors of society. It is neither simply a matter of chauvinism. What takes the form of a ‘nationalist’ sentiment is the sense of the loss of a strong identity previously provided by the tradition.

Individualism based on freedom in the marketplace breaks down all the traditional bonds of community that gives a strong sense of identity to people. The value of tradition lies in its ability to provide resources to cultivate a stable identity. In Sri Lanka this identity was traditionally given in the form of a combination of language and religion. Hence the natural inclination of people to express their loss of identity in the form of falling back on their traditional linguistic or religious sources of identity. From the perspective of Jathika Chinthanaya, if it seeks to build a national polity, economy and culture, it needs to preserve an integrated nation beyond existing linguistic and religious divisions. Hence, the Sinhala nationalism’s opposition to Tamil nationalism. It sees the rise of Sinhala nationalism as a result of an attempt to reassert the due place of the Sinhala community which was denied to them under the colonial rule, the community taken to be the repository of Sinhala Buddhist ethos.

The battle between neo-liberalism and Jathika Chinthanaya is not simply a battle between two discourses, but also between two ways of life and therefore belief systems based on the discourses, which make their own way of life true for the believers of each system making it possibly a battle between life and death for the strong believer. It seems to represent what appears to be the irreconcilable and intense conflictual nature of politics between modernity and tradition.

polarization leading to authoritarian tendencies
The danger of the political polarization between the forces of modernity and tradition in Sri Lanka is that it threatens to strengthen the authoritarian tendencies within society. In its resistance to the authoritarianism of neo-liberalism, sections within the Jathika Chinthanaya movement betray a tendency which is potentially authoritarian.

In our view, this is due to that the Jathika Chinthanaya as a political movement shares some of the modernist premises which it seeks to reject in its philosophical/theoretical attempts to revive a Buddhist humanist ethos. If neo-liberalism’s authoritarianism arises from its belief in having a blueprint to remedy the ills of modern society and therefore the urge to implement it at any cost in the face of all the resistance, Jathika Chinthanaya also seems to believe that it has a blueprint for nation building and feels the urgency to carry out its project of building a national polity, economy and culture in the face of any resistance to it. In this instrumentalist approach, politics, then is no more than a mere means to reaching for the end of nation building and, the end seems to be taken to justify the means. In its project of nation building through development, Jathika Chinthanaya also seems to share the belief that progress, modernization and development will enable us to remedy the ills of our society.

Jathika Chinthanaya has a strong point over the liberal notion of the freedom of the individual in the marketplace, in its idea that its only a strong sense of the community that can give a stable identity to human beings. It is this latter idea however, that brings Jathika Chinthanaya to the idea of giving priority to the notion of nation building on the basis of a national economy. The desire to build a strong sense of the community that resists the atomizing tendencies of modernity seems to bring us back to the fold of modernity itself in the form of the nation building. Ironically, the exercise of nation building under modernity on the basis of a ‘national economy’ undertaken by the state is fraught with the danger of becoming authoritarian so far as it may feel the need to suppress any political resistance to it in order to muster all the necessary resources to build the ‘national economy.’

In order to imagine a way out of this potential political impasse in the long term, it is necessary to begin by re-state the political conflict between modernity and tradition as essentially a one between the freedom of the individual in the marketplace, and the stable identity the community provides. Our challenge under modernity is to develop an idea of identity derived from a strong sense of community which nevertheless simultaneously assures us the freedom as individuals as well. It is our suggestion that herein lies the way forward for the Jathika Chinthanaya out of its present modernist dilemma.

II The Way Forward
We have already stated that the rise of the Jathika Chinthanaya itself is a sign of the negative impact of modernity on traditional identities. We live under the pervasive impact of modernity where the notion of the freedom of the individual in the marketplace has come to dominate as the basis of the liberal ethos adhered to by an increasingly considerable section of society, in urban centers in particular. On the other hand, due to the very atomization of the traditional society under neo-liberal notion of individualism a larger section of people in our society strongly feel that their very identity as individuals belonging to a community is severely threatened if not almost destroyed.

To revive a Jathika Chinthanaya then is to revive the ethos of Buddhist Humanism in the face of the competing ethos of liberal individualism. As we noted earlier, Buddhist humanism takes as the good life for humans a life that enables us to exercise discerning judgment in our conduct. Cultivating the capacity for discerning judgment among citizens as the good life, requires reviving the collective discourse on the good life, which in turn requires us to focus on the need to revive a vibrant public realm, the common space where citizens can actively participate in conversations on their understandings of what is the good life for humans, as the Jathika Chinthanaya, to its credit, has been doing so far, in general. Such a public realm can be revived only if we strive to keep our public life free of all authoritarian tendencies, whether they emanate from the Right or the Left, which requires citizens to sacrifice the freedom to seek an active public life, whether the sacrifice is for the sake of market economy or a state-centered national economy.

We cannot deny that there is a collective responsibility to help improve the living standards of the deprived sectors of society. However, bringing the economic issues to the foremost place in collective life pushes the discourse on the good life out of the public realm and together with that the possibility of reviving a truly national ethos, unless of course we believe that the good life is only the good economic life.

Hence our suggestion that if we are interested in reviving a truly a national ethos, our political focus ought to be on the discourse of the good life for humans rather than the economy.

III The challenge: to imagine a new citizens’ democracy
If we agree on the above premises, then, given that we live under a liberal democracy, the political challenge we Sri Lankans face today is to imagine a form of collective political organization that would assure the freedom of the individual derived from being an active member of the collective life, and not the freedom in the marketplace, thus restoring the possibility of a stable strong identity to people while making them free at the same time. It is such a political organization that could give us a common identity preserving the commonality of society above a plurality of fragmenting linguistic, religious or ethnic identities.

Historically, we know that imagining such a form of collective life was made possible in the West by the example of Athenians in the democracy of ancient Greece. The principle involved was that the state or the polity was the manifestation of the collective ethos and its public, political life, not taken to be the administrator or the management of the economic affairs of the citizens which truly belong in the private sphere. All those who qualified to be citizens (judging by the standards accepted then) had the opportunity to actively participate in the governance of the collective life and in acting as citizens they achieved their freedom and thereby a stable identity.

That we Sri Lankans are also heirs to our own traditions in this regard and that we have already begun to imagine the possibility of such an alternative form of political life to that of either aristocracy or the majoritarian representative democracy which is still based on a notion of ruler and subject, is evident from the political discourse associated with the current presidential elections, where concepts such as Jana Sabha or Grama Rajya are discussed as possibilities. It is encouraging to see that the ideas of developing a strong sense of citizen, of devolving power to the level of active citizen participation at the local level of the gama or the village have already entered our political discourse with the current Presidential election.

However, we need to go beyond treating such village level institutions merely as a means of devolving administrative powers to the level of gama. We need to begin to imagine them as the basis of a new form of genuine democracy where people become truly free individuals by actively participating in politically governing themselves and thereby having a stable strong identity as true citizens. Instead of a liberal democracy based on the freedom of the individual in the marketplace, however, while not denying that freedom to the individual, we could develop a stronger understanding of democracy and individual freedom achieved within the public realm of politics based on a collective sense found within our own traditions and the best in the Western tradition.

Promoting genuine citizen participation at the level of the gama and building an organization of self-government on that basis in the long run would require us to imagine the possibility of such a form of organization replacing a system based on political parties. Such a vision can emerge into success only from among a truly imaginative public. It is our belief that only by establishing a polity that would enable active participation of ordinary citizens in self-governance, among whom, if at all, a national ethos may have been preserved, that a truly national ethos nourished from the best in our traditions and courageous enough to look forward to build a long lasting common world and a stable future for the next generations, can be revived.

kathika@gmail.com
kathika.blogsome.com

Editorial, The Island, 31.10.2005

‘Comfort women’ of politicians

There is much hullabaloo over the abuse by the government of the state media. The Opposition is demanding that it be stopped forthwith and has sought the assistance of the Polls Chief for that purpose.

The state media has always been in the same predicament as a damsel trapped in a brothel run by thugs. Pimps and thugs may change or rotate from time to time but she is left with no alternative to forced prostitution. She has to do as she is asked to do, willy-nilly. The state media has always been the ‘comfort woman’ of the ruling party.

Fidelity for some people is said to be nothing but lack of opportunity. The same goes for honesty, integrity, justice and fair play etc., of most politicians. The are, irrespective of the parties they belong to, democratic and considerate and their love for the people and the media oozes from every pore of theirs, so long as they are in the political limbo. Put anyone behind a counter, Albert Camus has said, and he becomes all important in no time and develops contempt for others. Similarly, put any politician in power and see him or her for what he or she really is.

An interesting yarn spun by our local Castro (Vasu) while his bitter political enemy President Premadasa was reigning supreme, may be worth repetition as regards the abuse of the state media in the past. One of his (Vasu’s) friends, according to him, had a dog, which was known for a peculiar habit. Whenever the state television carried news, it would make at least hundred trips between the television set and the doorstep, where it used to lie in comfort. Puzzled, the bearded firebrand had inquired from his friend why the animal did so, only to be told that its name was Srimath. (To the uninitiated, President Premadasa was reverently called by his lackeys as ‘Srimath Ranasinghe Premadasa.’ And every time the word Srimath was mentioned, the poor animal responded, thinking that it was being summoned!)

All political leaders are notorious for their insatiable desire to hear their own voice like a donkey its braying and the state media has taken upon itself the task of harassing the public by relaying the shrill noises its masters make. This has happened in the past under the PA and the UNP, is happening under the UPFA and it will happen, whoever comes to power in the future.

Does this mean that the private media is perfect? Let’s not deceive ourselves! If it is truly independent, then how come some of those who work therein find El Dorado in the state media after an election? See how many free media tub-thumpers have ended up in politics and obtained tickets from the parties of their choice to contest elections. Those media pundits have in the process dropped their fig leaves and stand stark naked! Had they been independent and impartial during their ‘private media days’ would they have been rewarded in this manner by politicians? They have, just like their state media counterparts, reduced themselves to a set of ‘comfort women’ of their political masters.

Sri Lankan politicians are, on the other hand, no believers of free media. Free media to them are those which help them further their interests. They are true believers of Bushism–either you are with us or you are with them–and in their opinion a via media is not possible in the media.

Politicians are the same the world over. In the so-called advanced democracies, the only difference is that they have been put in the straitjacket of strong institutions and are therefore denied the freedom to act according to their whims and fancies. But they are making every effort to break themselves free. Look at Prime Minister Blair, who stands accused of trying to manipulate BBC. His government is said to be behind BBC’s decision to open an Arabic language television channel at the expense of several other language services, allegedly to counter Al Jazeera TV in view of the on going disastrous occupation of Iraq.

We are not short of politicians who advocate the divestiture of state media. But that promise doesn’t survive their forming a government. After being ensconced in power, they conveniently forget their pledges and do more of what their predecessors did.

Divestiture is no doubt salutary in that it is inimical to democracy for any government–especially the ones we are burdened with–to have, at its disposal, partisan media organisations maintained with public funds. But it is not the only condition that needs to be satisfied to ensure free media. It is a culture that cannot be evolved overnight through privatisation of the state media. The responsibility for enabling that culture to evolve lies with media owners and the journalistic community. For the media don’t necessarily have to be state owned for them to be controlled by governments or other interests, political or otherwise.

All what politicians should do to help achieve this goal is to leave the media alone! No amount of their crocodile tears is going to be of any help. They have for the media the same love that a fox has for pullets!

by Ajith Samaranayake

‘Compare and contrast’ is the favourite catch-line of the English literature teacher.

Mahinda Rajapakse offers the image of an emblem of reconciliation. Ranil Wickremesinghe seeks to suggest a sober managerial approach to the problems of governance.

So what points of comparison and contrast do the two main Presidential candidates offer the political essayist? The most obvious point of departure (the Old School Tie or the ‘Noose of Colonialism,’ as it was called by the late Prof. A. D. P. Jayatilleke nicknamed ‘Jacko’ by fellow old Royalists, being far from unloosened from the Sri Lankan male neck) would be school. Ranil Wickremesinghe, son of the former Managing Director of Lake House and the eminence grise of the Senanayake-Kotalawela UNP, went to Royal College while Mahinda Rajapakse attended the adjacent Thurstan College considered by snooty Royalists as the country cousin if not a poor relation.

This comparison itself offers a vast commentary on the sociology of Sri Lankan politics since independence and the differentiation within the political class triggered off by the two crucial years, 1948 and 1956 for Royal was the bastion of the old anglicised elite and Thurstan a symbol of the newly-resurgent and assertive middle-class rearing at the leash.

Both the contenders then come from political families but while Esmond Wickremesinghe was the power behind the UNP throne and given to a politics of manipulation D. A. Rajapakse was a grassroots politician battling in the open.

What is more, being at Thurstan Mahinda was in and out of ‘Sravasti’ the MPs’ hostel situated close by and came to know intimately the colourful figures of parliamentary politics. In contrast, Ranil was having genteel tea with the Bandaranaikes at Rosmead Place Anura being his class-mate even as the Esmond Wickremesinghe - run Lake House was attacking Prime Minister Bandaranaike ferociously.

That early apprenticeship among political giants stood Mahinda in good stead when he entered Parliament in 1970 as the youngest MP proposing the Vote of Thanks to the then Governor General William Gopallawa. He also learnt invaluable lessons in the school of hard knocks from his uncles the late George Rajapakse and Lakshman Rajapakse whose joint mantle he has inherited and carries with his self-effacing brother Chamal also a MP and Deputy Minister.

The rural-urban divide then is the major contrast in the political characters of the two contenders. Rajapakse comes from the deep south the land immortalised by Leonard Woolf in his ‘Village in the Jungle’, the land of poverty, pestilence and superstition on which the all-pervading jungle steadily encroaches. Wickremesinghe on the other hand is an urban politician groomed and reared within the UNP party machinery shaped by his uncle J. R. Jayewardene after he broke the stranglehold of the easy-going, patriarchal Dudley Senanayake on the UNP.

Mahinda Rajapakse is therefore the more senior in politics but ministerial office came to Wickremesinghe first in the Jayewardene dispensation of 1977. He was made in quick succession the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Minister of Youth Affairs and Employment and Minister of Education.

In the Premadasa administration he was Minister of Industries and Leader of the House and Prime Minister under President Wijetunge. By contrast the 17 long years which the SLFP led in the wilderness ensured that Rajapakse would only assume office in 1994 first as Minister of Labour and then as Fisheries Minister until he was elevated to Prime Minister last year.

But this was a blessing in disguise because it gave him invaluable experience in the art of street fighting. Not that Mahinda Rajapakse fought with his bare knuckles. But while the Old Left had mouthed the term ‘extra-parliamentary tactics’ more as a bogey to scare the Right one feels rather than a practical method of struggle Rajapakse gave flesh and blood to novel forms of extra-parliamentary agitation.

He was the live-wire behind the highly-successful Pada Yatra and Jana Ghosha campaigns against the Premadasa regime. The Pada Yatra which he led from Colombo to Kataragama instilled a new sense of elan to the anti-UNP forces. Although attempts were made to detain him at the Katunayake airport he was able to successfully carry with him dossiers pertaining to disappearances and human rights violations which he produced before the International Human Rights Commission in Geneva.

I remember the then Opposition Chief Whip Richard Pathirana hosting a dinner at ‘Sravasti’ for the conquering hero on his return. So while Wickremesinghe was busy with administration Rajapakse although his name denotes loyalty to the regime or the Raj was equally busy trying to toppled the UNP’s ancien regime.

In terms of personality too there are points of difference. Wickremesinghe suggests an urbane, laid-back personality, a technocrat rather than a mass leader, while Rajapakse’s is the more robust persona. Neither are very compelling speakers but here too Rajapakse scores with his baritone voice and delivery.

Wickremesinghe incidentally would have done better if he had continued to adhere to the matter-of-fact simple speaking style of J. R. Jayewardene which he had emulated for long and which one feels comes easily to him rather than go in for blood and thunder gesticulating outbursts as he is sometimes wont to do now.

By choice if not the logic of political circumstances Mahinda Rajapakse is now at the head of a bloc of heterogenous forces holding high the banners of patriotism and populist socialism while he himself offers the image of an emblem of reconciliation. Wickremesinghe on the other hand seeks to suggest a sober managerial approach to the problems of governance.

Whether it is the grassroots mass appeal of Rajapakse or the muted technocratic approach of Wickremesinghe which will tug at the electorate’s heartstrings, November will in many senses be Sri Lanka’s encounter with destiny.

Postscript: Thurstan Road has a further symbolic connotation since Mr. Wickremesinghe’s private residence is situated on a lane leading off this road now renamed after the great Sinhala scholar and grammarian Munidasa Cumaratunga.

courtesy Sunday Observer

The New York Times
October 25, 2005

By E. R. SHIPP

Rosa Parks, a black seamstress whose refusal to relinquish her seat to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery, Ala., almost 50 years ago grew into a mythic event that helped touch off the civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s, died yesterday at her home in Detroit. She was 92 years old.

Her death was confirmed by Dennis W. Archer, the former mayor of Detroit.

For her act of defiance, Mrs. Parks was arrested, convicted of violating the segregation laws and fined $10, plus $4 in court fees. In response, blacks in Montgomery boycotted the buses for nearly 13 months while mounting a successful Supreme Court challenge to the Jim Crow law that enforced their second-class status on the public bus system.

The events that began on that bus in the winter of 1955 captivated the nation and transformed a 26-year-old preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. into a major civil rights leader. It was Dr. King, the new pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, who was drafted to head the Montgomery Improvement Association, the organization formed to direct the nascent civil rights struggle.

“Mrs. Parks’s arrest was the precipitating factor rather than the cause of the protest,” Dr. King wrote in his 1958 book, “Stride Toward Freedom. “The cause lay deep in the record of similar injustices.”

Her act of civil disobedience, what seems a simple gesture of defiance so many years later, was in fact a dangerous, even reckless move in 1950’s Alabama. In refusing to move, she risked legal sanction and perhaps even physical harm, but she also set into motion something far beyond the control of the city authorities. Mrs. Parks clarified for people far beyond Montgomery the cruelty and humiliation inherent in the laws and customs of segregation.

That moment on the Cleveland Avenue bus also turned a very private woman into a reluctant symbol and torchbearer in the quest for racial equality and of a movement that became increasingly organized and sophisticated in making demands and getting results.

“She sat down in order that we might stand up,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson said yesterday in an interview from South Africa. “Paradoxically, her imprisonment opened the doors for our long journey to freedom.”

Even in the last years of her life, the frail Mrs. Parks made appearances at events and commemorations, saying little but lending the considerable strength of her presence. In recent years, she suffered from dementia, according to medical records released during a lawsuit over the use of her name by the hip-hop group OutKast.Over the years myth tended to obscure the truth about Mrs. Parks. One legend had it that she was a cleaning woman with bad feet who was too tired to drag herself to the rear of the bus. Another had it that she was a “plant” by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The truth, as she later explained, was that she was tired of being humiliated, of having to adapt to the byzantine rules, some codified as law and others passed on as tradition, that reinforced the position of blacks as something less than full human beings.

“She was fed up,” said Elaine Steele, a longtime friend and executive director of the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development. “She was in her 40’s. She was not a child. There comes a point where you say, ‘No, I’m a full citizen, too. This is not the way I should be treated.’ ”

In “Stride Toward Freedom,” Dr. King wrote, “Actually no one can understand the action of Mrs. Parks unless he realizes that eventually the cup of endurance runs over, and the human personality cries out, ‘I can take it no longer.’ ”

Mrs. Parks was very active in the Montgomery N.A.A.C.P. chapter, and she and her husband, Raymond, a barber, had taken part in voter registration drives.

At the urging of an employer, Virginia Durr, Mrs. Parks had attended an interracial leadership conference at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn., in the summer of 1955. There, she later said, she “gained strength to persevere in my work for freedom, not just for blacks but for all oppressed people.”

But as she rushed home from her job as a seamstress at a department store on Dec. 1, 1955, the last thing on her mind was becoming “the mother of the civil rights movement,” as many would later describe her. She had to send out notices of the N.A.A.C.P.’s coming election of officers. And she had to prepare for the workshop that she was running for teenagers that weekend.

“So it was not a time for me to be planning to get arrested,” she said in an interview in 1988.

On Montgomery buses, the first four rows were reserved for whites. The rear was for blacks, who made up more than 75 percent of the bus system’s riders. Blacks could sit in the middle rows until those seats were needed by whites. Then the blacks had to move to seats in the rear, stand or, if there was no room, leave the bus. Even getting on the bus presented hurdles: If whites were already sitting in the front, blacks could board to pay the fare but then they had to disembark and re-enter through the rear door.

For years blacks had complained, and Mrs. Parks was no exception. “My resisting being mistreated on the bus did not begin with that particular arrest,” she said. “I did a lot of walking in Montgomery.”

After a confrontation in 1943, a driver named James Blake ejected Mrs. Parks from his bus. As fate would have it, he was driving the Cleveland Avenue bus on Dec. 1, 1955. He demanded that four blacks give up their seats in the middle section so a lone white man could sit. Three of them complied.

Recalling the incident for “Eyes on the Prize,” a 1987 public television series on the civil rights movement, Mrs. Parks said: “When he saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up and I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ And he said, ‘Well, if you don’t stand up, I’m going to have to call the police and have you arrested.’ I said, ‘You may do that.’ ”

Her arrest was the answer to prayers for the Women’s Political Council, which was set up in 1946 in response to the mistreatment of black bus riders, and for E. D. Nixon, a leading advocate of equality for blacks in Montgomery.

Blacks had been arrested, and even killed, for disobeying bus drivers. They had begun to build a case around a 15-year-old girl’s arrest for refusing to give up her seat, and Mrs. Parks had been among those raising money for the girl’s defense. But when they learned that the girl was pregnant, they decided that she was an unsuitable symbol for their cause.

Mrs. Parks, on the other hand, was regarded as “one of the finest citizens of Montgomery - not one of the finest Negro citizens - but one of the finest citizens of Montgomery,” Dr. King said.

While Mr. Nixon met with lawyers and preachers to plan an assault on the Jim Crow laws, the women’s council distributed 35,000 copies of a handbill that urged blacks to boycott the buses on Monday, Dec. 5, the day of Mrs. Parks’s trial.

“Don’t ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday,” the leaflet said.

On Sunday, Dec. 4, the announcement was made from many black pulpits, and a front-page article in The Montgomery Advertiser, a black newspaper, further spread the word.

Some blacks rode in carpools that Monday. Others rode in black-owned taxis that charged only the bus fare, 10 cents. But most black commuters - 40,000 people - walked, some more than 20 miles.

At a church rally that night, blacks unanimously agreed to continue the boycott until these demands were met: that they be treated with courtesy, that black drivers be hired, and that seating in the middle of the bus go on a first-come basis.

The boycott lasted 381 days, and in that period many blacks were harassed and arrested on flimsy excuses. Churches and houses, including those of Dr. King and Mr. Nixon, were dynamited.

Finally, on Nov. 13, 1956, in Browder v. Gayle, the Supreme Court outlawed segregation on buses. The court order arrived in Montgomery on Dec. 20; the boycott ended the next day. But the violence escalated: snipers fired into buses as well as Dr. King’s home, and bombs were tossed into churches and into the homes of ministers.

Early the next year, the Parkses left Montgomery for Hampton, Va., largely because Mrs. Parks had been unable to find work, but also because of disagreements with Dr. King and other leaders of the city’s struggling civil rights movement.

Later that year, at the urging of her younger brother, Sylvester, Mrs. Parks, her husband and her mother, Leona McCauley, moved to Detroit. Mrs. Parks worked as a seamstress until 1965, when Representative John Conyers Jr. hired her as an aide for his Congressional office in Detroit. She retired in 1988.

“There are very few people who can say their actions and conduct changed the face of the nation,” Mr. Conyers said yesterday in a statement, “and Rosa Parks is one of those individuals.”

Mrs. Parks’s husband, Raymond, died in 1977. There are no immediate survivors.

In the last decade, Mrs. Parks was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. But even as she remained an icon of textbooks , her final years were troubled. She was hospitalized after a 28-year-old man beat her in her home and stole $53. She had problems paying her rent, relying on a local church for support until last December, when her landlord stopped charging her rent.

Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Ala., on Feb. 4, 1913, the elder of Leona and James McCauley’s two children. Although the McCauleys were farmers, Mr. McCauley also worked as a carpenter and Mrs. McCauley as a teacher.

Rosa McCauley attended rural schools until she was 11 years old, then Miss White’s School for Girls in Montgomery. She attended high school at the Alabama State Teachers College, but dropped out to care for her ailing grandmother. It was not until she was 21 that she earned a high school diploma.

Shy and soft-spoken, Mrs. Parks often appeared uncomfortable with the near-beatification bestowed upon her by blacks, who revered her as a symbol of their quest for dignity and equality. She would say that she hoped only to inspire others, especially young people, “to be dedicated enough to make useful lives for themselves and to help others.”

She also expressed fear that since the birthday of Dr. King became a national holiday, his image was being watered down and he was being depicted as merely a “dreamer.”

“As I remember him, he was more than a dreamer,” Mrs. Parks said. “He was an activist who believed in acting as well as speaking out against oppression.”

She would laugh in recalling some of her experiences with children whose curiosity often outstripped their grasp of history: “They want to know if I was alive during slavery times. They equate me along with Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth and ask if I knew them.”

Correction: Oct. 26, 2005, Wednesday:

Because of an editing error, a front-page obituary of Rosa Parks in late editions yesterday referred incorrectly to The Montgomery Advertiser, which printed a front-page article on Dec. 4, 1955, that publicized a boycott of Montgomery’s buses the next day. It is a general-interest newspaper, not a black one.

Presidential elections and the dilemma of the
northeastern Tamil

By: Professor Karthigesu Sivathamby

As the days draw nearer and nearer to 17 November, we can diagnose the fever becoming frenzy. The candidates, or to be more exact their supporters from the two major political combinations, are frantically attacking each other and making declarations about how they or their leaders would deal with matters ranging from
childcare to geriatrics and from agriculture and industry to peace.

One need not repeat the combination of forces the UNP has drawn to itself such as the SLMC and the CWC. On the other hand, Mahinda Rajapakse though a SLFPer, has abandoned the hand symbol and chosen to contest the election under the betel
leaf insignia – the symbol of the sandanaya of which the JVP is also part.

An important feature about a presidential election, unlike in the case of parliamentary ones, is that the whole country is a single electorate. Anybody who gets 50% of the votes plus one (50%+1) assumes office on the strength that he or she represents the
majority of voters.

In this situation, where do the Tamils of the northeast stand? While stating this, a line of distinction has to be drawn between the Tamils living within the northeast and those outside it, including the upcountry Tamils. Political exigencies demand that Tamils
residing outside the northeast respond to local and regional considerations and exercise their vote on the basis of their geographical location. In the case of the upcountry Tamils, their plantation-based location has problems specific to that
community, which only a trade union turned political party can address.

The northeast is not merely about the Tamils living in those areas but, more importantly, about a single territorial unit that demands special devolution of power. The Tamils and the Muslims would like to call this area their traditional homeland. Though not accepted and approved by the Sinhala parties, the northeast merger has
become a political reality that the Indian government itself is keen on (vide 13th amendment to the constitution flowing out of the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord).

Besides other problems that affect this country, the northeast issue is a major question at the election. The SLFP-JVP-JHU combination is very specific about the unitary nature of any constitutional solution. The sandanaya’s manifesto denies the
legality of a combined northeast, and though formal lip service is paid to negotiations for settling the ethnic problem, one is not sure who the Tamil participants in the negotiations would be, if the sandanaya is given a say on the matter. The manifesto is
also silent on the role of Norway, while it is keen on India playing a bigger part. Since the clout of the latter is on the ascendant its anti-LTTE position is the best safeguard for any pro-Sinhala policy for ‘peace.’

Parts of the northeast are also areas, which do not come under the political authority of the Sri Lanka government. A substantial portion of the Batticaloa District, west of the lagoon, and almost the entire Vanni (from Omanthai to Palai) are under LTTE
control. The CFA, as it stands today, implicitly accepts this position.

There is also the larger question of normalisation of war-affected areas. Rehabilitation efforts are funded by the World Bank, ADB and other international multilateral organisations. It should be known that ever since the CFA was signed there has never
been a coordinated or planned rehabilitation and normalisation programme for the war-affected northeastern areas. Only government agents are engaged in projects, which are not part of any plan of re-development.

What is also striking is whatever takes place politically in this region immediately becomes a concern of the European Union and the United States. In other words, relevant international opinion is watching very closely what is occurring in Sri Lanka – especially in the northeast. All these, create a sense of responsibility on the part of the voters of this region when casting their ballots at the presidential polls.

Given these socio-political pressures weighing heavily on Tamil voters of the northeast, one would agree that the choice of whom to vote for is not as simple for them as it is to others outside the region. Outside the northeast, there are basically, two categories of voters. Group A supports one of the candidates ideologically i.e.
they are either UNPers or sandanaya people. Group B would like to vote for the winning candidate simply because its members do not want their vote to be ineffective.

Now, if this criterion is applied to the Tamils of the northeast, one could hardly say that there is a group of people who identify ideologically with the UNP, or JVP-led sandanaya. Even the Tamil political groups that support the latter are very eloquent in
their declaration about the need for self-government in the province and power sharing at the centre. Thus, we are left only with Group B in the northeast – voters for the winning candidate.

At this point one has to look more closely into what is said by the two major party candidates. Rajapakse’s manifesto completely rules out the possibility of considering the northeast a specific problem, different from those in other regions. Rajapakse’s
thought (chinthanaya) speaks of renegotiating the CFA. This pronouncement has created very genuine fears in the minds of the northeast Tamils that the CFA could be repealed. And, needless to say, if the CFA is repealed, then, naturally, it is war. This
alone would prevent Rajapakse being the Tamils’ first choice.

What has Ranil Wickremesinghe promised? He has no doubt spoken of peace, the ceasefire and negotiations, but has not categorically stated the political nature of his solution. In fact, he has not used the term ‘federalism’ which President Chandrika
Kumaratunga has used (perhaps to create confusion in her own ranks!)

Wickremesinghe also says that he would first come to an agreement with the Sinhala parties and then negotiate with the Tigers. At a meeting in Polonnaruwa he declared
he would discuss a solution to the ethnic conflict with all parties before he starts talking with the Tigers. Nobody knows what these ‘all parties’ are because he has already specifically promised the Muslims their rightful place in a settlement relating to
the northeast. If therefore, it does not refer to the Muslims, whom does it refer to?

It is at this point one has to understand the situation in which Sri Lankan Tamils in general, and the northeast Tamils in particular, are placed. The LTTE has, over the years, emerged as the only militant group, which has relentlessly spearheaded the
Tamil struggle. Though there have been issues on which bulk of the Tamil population did not agree with the Tigers, right now there is the genuine fear that if efforts to displace them from the position of pre-eminence they have gained over the years are successful, Tamil demands would be undermined.

It should also be pointed out that Colombo treats all Tamil demands as “LTTE demands” and no mention whatsoever is made about such demands springing from Tamil grievances. In fact, neither manifesto mentions anything about the political
grievances of the Tamils as a constituent group of the Sri Lankan polity.

It is also quite clear that the Sinhala-owned media, including most of the English newspapers, have been adding up the number of LTTE violations of the CFA and not taken the trouble to report the violations perpetrated by the government in the Tamil
areas. In fact the Kumaratunga appointed a special presidential commission to go into the killings in the east – especially that of Kausaliyan, the LTTE’s political wing leader of the Batticaloa-Amparai area. The report is not yet out and one does not know whether within the few remaining days of office the president could take meaningful steps to publish the commission’s finding or act upon them.

The grievances mentioned so far are strictly political and have to be sorted out politically. But the 26 December tsunami brought in another dimension into this problem. Besides the southern districts, Batticaloa, Kalmunai and parts of Amparai, along with Mullaitivu and Vadmaratchi have been very seriously affected. The
government was virtually led to create the P-TOMS agreement to sort out the sufferings of Tamils in the LTTE held areas – especially in Mullaitivu. The sandanaya has come out against P-TOMS very strongly. It was fortunate that the Supreme Court
ruling prevented the JVP from gaining political capital by making it an election issue.

In this regard, it is worthwhile looking at what has happened in Aceh in Indonesia. The extent of the disaster and the suffering of the people compelled both the Indonesian government and the Aceh rebels to agree to terms. It is true that the Aceh rebels are
laying down arms but at the same time it is equally true there is a withdrawal of state forces from Aceh. But here in this land of Buddhism, no mercy was shown to those suffering from the effects of the tsunami in the LTTE-held areas.

It is in this background that the Tamils of the northeast are called upon to elect a president for this country. And if the choice for the northeastern Tamil is between Wickremesinghe and Rajapakse, is there a choice at all? The right to vote is a very precious democratic right. It does not mean that the ballot should be used to choose between two persons whose candidature raises so many
grave and negative feelings. This is all the more frightening because international opinion could tell the Tamils who vote either for Wickremesinghe or Rajapakse: “You voted for him, therefore you are duty-bound to accept all what he proposes.” This is the dilemma of the northeastern Tamil.

The northeastern Tamils are called upon to take a meaningful decision especially in the light of the fact that the war has dragged on for 30 years. The responsibility is all the more because a wrong result could nullify even the little that has been achieved
so far. The right to vote is no excuse to misuse that right. [Courtesy: NorthEastern Monthly]

Ignore the Elections -Jaffna Students

In an appeal issued Thursday evening, the Students’ Association of Higher Educational Institutions, Jaffna District asked Tamils to ignore the election promises the candidates are making from their election propaganda platforms.

“Encouraged by his extremist and nationalist supporters, Rajapakse has openly stated he would never compromise on the Unitary State, never acknowledge the existence of the traditional homeland of the Tamils and never execute the Tsunami rehabilitation plan, revealing his chauvinist stand,” the Students’ appeal explains.

On the other hand, the Tamil students’ body warns against the “slimy moves” of Ranil Wickremasinghe, who immediately after signing the Cease-fire Agreement three years ago, had exclaimed that with the Agreement he had prevented the LTTE from taking up arms, prevented deaths of “Sinhala soldiers” in battle field and laid an “international network to have the LTTE ostracised.”

Lankaleft.com

“Today both Ranil Wickremesinghe and Mahinda Rajapakse talk about the nation, about making sure that the nation will not be divided. Mahinda, more than Ranil, talks about the “national” interest, but even Ranil talks of election-time iconography. The weva, the dagoba, the ketha, the temple, the Dalada Maligawa, the Sri Maha Bodhiya, Parakramabahu and his palace, Sapumal Kumaraya and the need to eksesath the nation, we’ve heard it all, seen it all.”

Malinda Seneviratne, in his weekly column to the Daily Mirror, commenting on that both the Presidential candidates have remained conspicuously silent about the position that they would take, if elected, at the Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Hong Kong in December, had to say this:

This is perplexing because if Sri Lanka signs on to the GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services), none of the promises as found in manifestos and as articulated in campaign rallies, will have any meaning. Two conclusions are possible. One, both candidates (and their advisors) are absolutely ignorant of GATS. Two, they are not interested in protecting this country, its people, its culture, its history and heritage. I would err on the latter, given the track records of politicians in this country.
………………..
Today both Ranil Wickremesinghe and Mahinda Rajapakse talk about the nation, about making sure that the nation will not be divided. Mahinda, more than Ranil, talks about the “national” interest, but even Ranil talks of election-time iconography. The weva, the dagoba, the ketha, the temple, the Dalada Maligawa, the Sri Maha Bodhiya, Parakramabahu and his palace, Sapumal Kumaraya and the need to eksesath the nation, we’ve heard it all, seen it all.
After GATS, Sri Lanka will be unrecognisable from what it is now. The following is not a far-fetched dooms day scenario (how I wish it is!), but a most likely outcome: Eppawala: Gone. Water resources: Gone. Sinharaja: Gone. Sigiriya frescoes: obliterated. Clean air: Gone. You name it, it will not be what you remember it to be, what you expect it to be for your children. It will cease to be a republic, cease to be democratic in any meaningful sense, cease to be a nation with borders, with a culture, with a history and a civilisation. All that will remain is nostalgia. Are you ready?
Let us put it in crudely, for the sake of easy comprehension. A floating casino is set up on the Kandy Lake, in full view of the Dalada Maligawa. Can the Mayor of Kandy protest? Can the Diyawadana Nilame or the Chief Prelates of the Asgiriya and Malwatte Chapters? The answer is, “no”. Forget casinos. It could be a brothel. And if Catholics, Hindus and Muslims are wont to say, “none of our business”, let them consider brothels, taverns, casinos and other places where vice is peddled at the following locations: Madhu Church, St. Anne’s Church at Thalawila, St.Anthony’s Church at Kochchikade, St. Jude’s Church at Indigolla, Nallur Kovil, Munneswaram Kovil in Chilaw. Consider putting up a place to slaughter pigs just outside the Dewatagaha Mosque in Town Hall. Or let’s go multi-religious. How about a casino on top of Sri Pada? Or a brothel in Kataragama. Our Minister of Trade will decide in December in Hong Kong whether we reserve the right to oppose such things, or if we let these places and things that define who we are to be desecrated in front of our eyes.
The point is not that it will be done, the desecration I mean, but that we open ourselves to that violence against which we agree not to raise a finger in protest. And it is not just about places of worship or matters religious. It is about all life. Every little thing that contributes to the matter of living, if it is a tradeable service, will be subject to GATS. What we would be signing away, if in December we become party to this barbaric agreement, would be not just our sovereignty but our very lives.
Is all life contained or containable in the sterile and materialistic article called “free trade”? Surely not! Let us consider a cemetery that contains the remains of your dead grandfather. Let us suppose someone wants to replace it with a military academy that provides the service of education. GATS would require us to erase the word sacrosanct from our vocabulary, would require us to allow the graves of our ancestors to be vandalised. All in the interest of facilitating free trade. All that will remain is nostalgia and maybe not even that. Are you ready?
On November 17, 2005 the people of this country will vote for a President. In December, in Hong Kong, his Minister of Trade will decide whether his President is a puppet or worse a forsaken soft toy, or a leader worthy of a people who believe that freedom, history, nation, dignity and indeed their very lives are important. In December, that Minister of Trade will be subjected to all kinds of direct and indirect pressures. His moral integrity will be tested to the maximum. His human frailties will be found out and they will be preyed upon. He will be pitted against his counterparts in other developing countries. His President will be arm-twisted in much the same way. We all know what happened in the infamous Green Rooms as the Uruguay Round of the GATT was arm-twisted to a close in the early nineties.
This time the stakes are higher. This time, the forces of resource extraction, labour exploitation and cultural erasure are playing for an outright win. We can expect them to give it their all. Are we ready to give our all to resist them? Do our candidates have the intellect, the integrity and the patriotism that are absolutely necessary to fight this fight? These are questions we need to ask.
In December, our country and everything that the word “nation” connotes will fight what could well be the last fight. Mahinda Rajapakse and Ranil Wickremesinghe have not uttered one word about GATS. That is their prerogative.

As citizens of this country, as human beings who have lives, livelihoods, aspirations, memories, ancestry and progeny, as human beings who want to dream about futures, can you and I afford to remain silent, though? I think not.

excerpts, courtesy Daily Mirror, 30.10.2005