Lanka Citizen

By Mahen.P.Siriwardena

When Rasika’s hand phone rings she knows who the caller is. She has paid the extra bucks to get the CLI (caller line identification) facility which is important for her business.
” Hello, Oya koheda inne? Mama Dress Point ekey.’’
“Ohama inda, customer kenek innawa. Business ekkak thiyanawa.’’
“Ah oya methanata endako.”

Rasika is only twenty three years old. Tall, lithesome and attractive, she is intelligent and has her curves in the right places. Years of toiling in her father’s paddy fields in the Anuradhapura district had given her a figure which would be the envy of her affluent sisters sweating it out in the gym.

Rasika hails from near Kekirawa, from an impoverished village in the outback of Anuradhapura. Her father is a paddy farmer and vegetable grower. Season after season he’d been hit by either drought or too much rain. On top of that there were attacks by pests and the debts had mounted. Like that of his fellow-farmers, his produce never fetched the promised prices.

Mudiyanse had toiled hard to feed his family of three daughters and a son. Rasika was the second girl in the family and had rejected marriage proposals brought for her. She had a mind of her own.
Her brother, 21-years old with a GCE O level had joined the army and sent home money to pay for his sisters’ schooling and to support the family.

But money was still tight and he sent word that there were jobs in a garment factory at Galigamuwa. “Ara Galigamuwe garment ekey job thiyanawalu,’’ he said. “Balanda vacancy ekak purwannda puluwanda kiyala.’’

There are no direct buses to Galigamuwa, a small town on the Colombo-Kandy road a few kilometres from the Kegalla town. When Rasika got off the intercity bus at Kegalla town at 7 a.m. one morning three years ago, she needed help to find out where Galigamuwa is.

Jagath, aged 34-years is a hard boiled egg. He has tried many trades and failed in them all - except one. He rented a three wheeler agreeing to pay the owner Rs. 300 a day and given his skills cleared Rs. 4,000 on good days.

Five feet five inches tall and with the smile of a new born baby, Jagath is attractive to women. Playing club football had given him an athletic body. He made it a point to watch the disembarking passengers from every bus stopping at Kegalle.

Experience had taught him where to swoop. He wouldn’t waste his time taking a patient to hospital. His mates in the three-wheeler trade knew him to be a ladies man. Like a hungry eagle, he wants a prey. A real kill.

When Raskia got off the bus at Kegalle and looked around uncertainly, Jagath knew he had what he wanted. He revved his engine and drove up to her asking “Nangi koheda yanne?’’
“Aney aiye Galigamuwata yannda oney.’’
“Naginna, nangi, naginna.’’

Irrestible to most women he quoted a fare which he knew Rasika could not pay confident he had won the day. She was horrified that he wanted five hundred for the ride to Galigamuwa but the rest of the spiel came easily. She ended up in his abode and fell in love.
Jagath did not need love. What he needed was hard cash for his bad habits - alcohol, cigarettes and an occasional drug fix.

Rasika could neither go home nor leave Jagath. She had one option. The guest house. Rasika’s story is not new nor limited to a few village girls like her. Many thousands are now compelled to turn to a trade this is well patronized throughout the country.

Whether it is a massage parlours- herbal or otherwise- soft or hard the customer has a choice. The tsunami compounded the problem in the south.

Rooms available say the signboards from Bambalipitiya to Balapitiya. Every township and province have them. This business is now invading the village, a possibility unheard of in the years gone by - the only thriving Karmantaya in Sri-Lanka.

They are perfectly legitimate. They are not flouting the law by any means. There is neither touting nor soliciting. The police can do very little, despite knowing well what goes on in these places.
Jagath and Rasika know it even better. All she has to do even if the law catches her in flagrante in a guest house is to produce a faked marriage certificate. She would feign innocence pleading that she is only cheating on her husband. The cops know how to profit from these situations. Their demands can be met in cash or kind.

An air-conditioned room with attached bath can be had rupees seven hundred. Meals are optional and if there is no liquor licence, they would get you a bottle from the town. You just pay the extra buck. If the excise catches up, the guesthouse people insist they don’t sell liquor. There’s nothing we can do, Sir, when these people bring their bottle in their bags.

The business magnate who owns many guest houses in this town is a long haired punk who knows who must be cultivated. He is not slow in throwing money where it best works.

Rasika is torn between the devil and the deep blue sea. She collects her dues and goes home.“Thathey ara garment eka hondai- menna salli.’’

The brother is too preoccupied with his own affairs to know what the sister is up to. Or he just doesn’t care. Meanwhile the sex trade flourishes as do pharmacies doing a steady business in sex drugs. Some Indian pharmaceutical firms have found that ours is a growing market for drugs treating male impotence. The Pharmacist says that these tablets come at between Rs. 30/= to 900/=

The problem is that a whole new generation of school growing children are getting used to it. And with a young population now in the making, the market for erectile dysfunctional drugs is in the increase. What will the future be or do in the next generation?

Courtesy Sunday Island

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

(’Mahaweli Goddamn” refers to the multi-billion dollar ‘dam’
boondoggle pushed
on Lanka thru the JR UNP by the English and Canadian governments
in the 1980s, with the promise to export hydropower to India! –
To be sung to the tune of Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddamn!)

Batalanda’s got me so upset!
Suriyakanda made me lose my rest &
Yet everybody knows about:
Mahaweli Goddamn!

Can’t you see it? Can’t you feel it?
It’s all in the air! I can’t stand the pressure
Much longer! Somebody say a sutra!

Batalanda’s got me so upset
Suriyakanda made me lose my breath
& Everybody knows about:
Mahaweli Goddamn!

Green Tigers on my trail! School children sitting in jail!
Black cats crossed my path! I think everyday
Is gonna be my last!

Sakra have mercy on this land of mine –
We all gonna get it in due time, cos
I don’t belong here, I don’t belong there &
I’ve even stopped believing in pooja!

Don’t tell me, I’ll tell you
Me and my people are just about due!
I’ve been there and so I know:
You keep on saying, ‘Go slow’

But that’s just the trouble - too slow!
Washing your dishes - too slow!
Plucking your tea buds - too slow!
Yeah we’re just plain rotten! - too slow!
We too damn lazy! - too slow!
Think its crazy! - too slow!
Where are we going? What are we doing?
I dont know! I dont know!

We just try to do our very best
Stand up be counted with all the rest
‘Cos everybody knows about:
Mahaweli Goddamn!

Bet u think we kidding:

Picket lines! School boycotts!
They try to say its a communist plot!
But all we want is equality,
For my sister, my brother,
My people and me!

Yes, you lied to me all these years
you told me to wash and clean my ears
talk real fine just like a lady
and you’ll start calling me haminay!

Oh this country is full of lies
We all gonna die and die like flies
I don’t trust you anymore!
Cos you keep on saying - Go Slow! Go slow!

Well, that’s just the trouble - too slow!
Devolution! - too slow
Mass participation! - too slow
Unification! - too slow
Doing things gradually
will bring more tragedy:
Why don’t you see it, why don’t you feel it
I don’t know, I don’t know

We don’t have to go to Royal
Or even live in Colombo Three
Just give us our equality
Cos everybody knows about Suriyakanda!
Everybody knows about Embilipitiya
Everybody knows about Batalanda!
Everybody knows about Mahaweli Goddamn!

(*Batalanda, Suriyakanda and Embilipitiya
refers to the UNP massacres of innocent children)

point of view

By the Economist

The 2004 Annual Report of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka says the total number of employees in state institutions amount to 1,094,415. Since 1990 the number of public sector employees has increased almost by 50 per cent. Isn`t it strange that Sri Lanka was one of the first developing countries to implement economic liberalization policies yet it has the largest bureaucracy per capita in the region’ The Sri Lanka: Development Policy Review of the World Bank highlights this point and goes on to show that the government (including semi-government institutions) recruit close to 18 per cent of the labour force in the country.

Why is the government sector employment so large ‘

One reason why the government sector has become large is due to the North/East problem. First, as a solution to the problem the Indo-Sri Lanka Political Accord was signed and with it came the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. This led to the creation of the Provincial Council (PC) system for devolution of power. The PCs have generated an additional layer of a bureaucracy amounting to nearly 300,000 personnel and they serve little purpose in terms of enhancing productivity and efficiency in the economy. Needless to say, there is a large amount of duplication and overlapping of functions between the central government and the PCs. Second, there has been a substantial increase in the armed forces with the escalation of the North/East crisis during the 1983-2001 period ‘ the forces have almost doubled in size since the early 1980s. These two areas have substantially contributed to the large government sector employment and they account for between 500,000 ‘ 600,000 workers. The other factors that contributed to the growth of employment are: (1) ineffectiveness of the Voluntary Retrenchment Schemes introduced to trim down state sector employment; (2) regular large scale public sector employment made by politicians during election times.

Public sector is not very efficient not because it is inherently so as some people seem to think but due to political interference of public sector activities. Public enterprises/corporations become easy prey when politicians want to find jobs for their supporters. Many such recruits make the enterprises overstaffed and the new recruits most often prove to be redundant with the passage of time. In recent years with more and more computerization of the functions of public enterprises/corporations, the redundant workers have increased and one only needs to visit government institutions to observe the number of workers idling and just waiting for time to pass by.

When Sri Lanka has a bloated public sector who`s productivity is questionable why did the government decided to provide jobs for approximately 40,000 graduates in the public sector’ The answer to the question is not simple and straightforward. We have to examine the characteristics of the labour market and the type of unemployment to provide a meaningful answer.

Job Market and the Unemployment Problem

Although unemployment has declined during the 1990s, still it hovers around 8 per cent of the labour force. There are a number of characteristics in the Sri Lankan labour market that act as impediments for more employment creation. Among others, three hypotheses have been put forward to explain unemployment in Sri Lanka. First, the skill mismatch hypothesis which argues that the type of skills produced by the Sri Lankan education system is not suitable for the job market. Dudley Seers in his 1971 report for the ILO used this explanation to describe unemployment in Sri Lanka during that time. Second, is the job queuing hypothesis which argues that Sri Lanka`s unemployment is voluntary because youth wait for `good` jobs and in the meanwhile depend on family income. Third, it is argued that unemployment is due to the rigidities in the labour market resulting from outdated labour legislation. Such legislation prevents smooth labour exit. It is argued that due to this factor it is difficult for firms to expand in a labour intensive manner and thus create new employment.

All three explanations, among others, have some validity although the World Bank seems to think that most of the unemployment in Sri Lanka is voluntary. It is argued that most of the unemployed are waiting for `good` jobs openings but are not interested in the readily available `bad` jobs. There are many `bad` jobs available in the market ‘ about 15,000 vacancies in the garment industry, shortage of rubber tappers, and so on. The problem it is argued is not the shortage of jobs but the gap between `good` and `bad` jobs.

The World Bank goes on to argue that this gap is enhanced by the frequent waves of public sector employment by the governments in office. Public sector jobs have a traditional appeal and at the lower level it is argued that they are attractive (`good`) than similar jobs in the private sector and it is the key factor that contributes to queuing for `good` jobs. Accordingly, successive governments were advised by the World Bank to stop recruiting people to the public sector to halt voluntary unemployment and allow the market to determine the jobs. Thus, a universal freeze on public sector recruitment was put into effect in 2002 by Management Circular No. 16(1) of October. It was aimed at not only addressing the voluntary unemployment problem but also to improve the efficiency of the public enterprises/corporations.

The assumption underlying this policy was that the new entrants to the labour force will be absorbed by the growing private sector activities through the deregulation measures in the rest of the economy. This in turn will create a better balance between `good` and `bad` jobs and to a great extend solve the unemployment problem. Did this happen during the past’ The private sector as usual was on the `wait and see` mode and the graduates that the Universities were churning out were waiting at home for `good` jobs from the private sector. The call never came. The graduates took refuge in extreme political doctrines and became a disruptive force in the society.

Jobs for Graduates from the Private Sector ‘

Market liberalization and social culture needs examination in the context of jobs for graduates from the private sector. Social culture could be defined as patterns of behaviour in society at large or of selected groups in society. Sri Lankan private establishments exclusively employ the English language as a medium for conducting business regardless of the official status of Sinhalese/Tamil. The Sri Lankan business community promotes the idea of `indispensability of English for success in life` in the globalized world. A business culture centred around the English language has led to an exclusion of a large segment of society from the development process. Moreover, the recent privatization has also raised the question of language: namely the place of English in society. State run organizations, upon being privatized, have made redundant thousands already employed in the official languages.

With the private sector setting the field of employment at the expense of the Sinhala/Tamil employing state organs, the political system was under severe pressure from the frustrated masses ‘ educated for so long in Sinhalese/Tamil and awaiting employment, upon being shown the door on the grounds of non-eligibility. The Sinhalese youth insurgency of 1971 and 1988/89 and the Tamil separatist struggle of late 1970s and thereafter were responses to such frustrations. The irony here is the inconsistency of the policy of education with that of changing economics. They are not designed to meet at any point in harmony to integrate for producing desired results.

Clearly the need to refrain from creating more public sector jobs is obvious, but then for this to happen the private sector should not only immediately create jobs but should be willing to absorb the vernacular educated graduates. When the private sector is in its usual `wait and see` mode and keeps its distance from the non-English speaking graduates the problem of graduate unemployment will remain.

The Problem at Stake

It is not prudent to depend too much on the private sector to create the required jobs until certain conditions are fulfilled. First, until the North/East problem is fully settled the `wait and see` attitude of the private sector will prevail and most private investments will be short to medium term oriented which would not generate large scale jobs. Second, as long as stringent labour legislations are in operation the private sector will resort to less labour intensive techniques for more efficiency.

The government finds it difficult to tell the unemployed graduates to wait till the private sector expands and generate jobs in the long run. Keynes said that `in the long run we are all dead` thus something needs to be done soon. A two-pronged approach is thus required by the government to address this problem. Education reform should be expedited so that all graduates are trained either to be employable in whatever language or trained in the English language, and secondly labour market reforms should be expedited. Without engaging in addressing these two areas, the forces of deregulation/liberalization in other areas of the economy will find it difficult to create the required jobs in the market.

The solution to the problem is thus not straightforward. Attitude is a key problem ‘ most businesses think that Arts graduates are useless because they do not know English (few businesses have absorbed a small number of graduates under the `Taruna Aruna`programme). The private sector should realize that unemployment could be a disruptive force and shake business if they do not have jobs and idle for too long. No amount of criticism of the public sector recruitments will be taken notice by the politicians as long as the deep seated issues are not addressed when the unemployed graduates grow in number. While the government immediately takes steps for education and labour reform, the private sector should seriously consider absorbing a few graduates every year ‘ if not under the normal recruitment at least under their Corporate Social Responsibility ‘ as a first step towards addressing the problem. A deep-seated problem requires multidimensional solutions and the private sector should be a partner in this process.

Courtesy: Sunday Island, 2005/10/23

http://www.lankanewspapers.com/news/2005/10/4112.html

The rebirth of the Sri Lanka Transport Board, more popularly known by the acronym CTB, last week is an acknowledgement that the privatisation of the public bus service has not been as successful as desired.

So many years have passed since private buses were introduced on our roads (or re-introduced) but neither the authorities nor the private bus operators themselves have been able to ensure a good enough service to the commuting public.While the privatisation of the road passenger transport sector certainly did have some notable benefits for hapless commuters, the main one being more frequent buses, it failed to solve all the problems that plagued the transport sector and spawned a new set of problems.

Buses may now be available every few minutes on most routes but the service thins out once the rush hour is over and late night services and those on less populous routes are far from adequate. This is because private bus owners shun less profitable times and routes.It is here that a public bus service is required since private operators cannot be relied upon to provide a good enough service.

Successive administrations have also failed to organise an adequate system where bus operators are compelled to operate services on less profitable routes and times just like the incentives given to private telephone companies to roll out their service in rural areas. Nor have the authorities been able to arrange a system that seems common sense to most people - joint time tables for private and public bus services to ensure a smooth, uninterrupted service.
Instead what we have seems like absolute anarchy – a private bus service that has been allowed to run amok and become a law unto them selves.

The competition among private operators has led to speeding and reckless driving. Private buses now invoke fear in the public mind and are seen as killing machines given the frequency with which they run down and kill pedestrians and other road users. Also, the public has had enough of rude conductors and aggressive drivers. Despite repeated promises by the private bus operators association, most bus crew still do not issue tickets and still resort to overcrowding. The National Transport Commission has also proved ineffective in trying to ensure private bus operators adhere to the law and in improving the service.

We saw recently how the private bus mafia went on strike and disrupted the public transport as they opposed increases in fines for roads offences. No government can tolerate such blatant attempts at blackmail. This outrageous attitude is one of the reasons that prompted the government to revive the CTB.

The move not only has been able to win bipartisan support in parliament but also has beenhailed by no less an organisation than the J-Biz (Joint Business Forum) which issued a statement welcoming the revival of the CTB. It is very rare for the business community to support a state venture and say it is better than the privatised bus service.

The Sri Lanka Transport Board has degenerated over the years and now accounts for only around 15 per cent of the bus transport service. The importance of an efficient public transport system has been underscored by the fact that even with only around eight per cent of the population owning private vehicles, there is already severe congestion on our roads and that if this were to merely double, the roads would become impassable and we would be in permanent gridlock. The private bus mafia, as they are now called with some justification, cannot be allowed to bully the public and government and hold them to ransom.

courtesy Sunday Times, o2.10.2005

by A. Sivanandan

“But the greatest threat to Western values arises from globalisation and market fundamentalism, changes that affect personal morality. For the market reduces even personal relationships to a cash nexus. And the transition from welfare to market state has made corporations rather than people the priority of government, which, in turn, replaces moral values with commercial values, caring with indifference, altruism with selfishness, generosity with greed.”

Read the full article below:

Why Muslims reject British values

As ministers accuse Muslims of failing to integrate into mainstream
society, a leading black intellectual and anti-racist campaigner
calls on Tony Blair’s government to face up to the reality of
continued racism in Britain

A. Sivanandan (Sunday October 16 2005, The Observer)

No country in Europe could be prouder of its multicultural experiment than Britain. But in the wake of the bombings of 7 July,
multiculturalism has become the whipping boy. In a widely heralded speech, Margaret Hodge, the Work and Pensions Minister, blamed a surge in white, working-class racism on its black victims’ failure to ‘integrate’, adding that ‘promoting an understanding of other cultures should not involve abandoning British cultures and traditions’, such as, apparently, school Easter bonnet parades, which she claimed have been eclipsed by Diwali celebrations.

She was speaking to a debate which has moved so far to the right that the gains made by the black struggle are being jettisoned. Even the term ‘coloured’ instead of ‘black’ is up for rehabilitation. What’s next? The replacement of ‘racism’ by ‘colour bar’?

The road to assimilation, as opposed to integration, is already being
cleared by scrubbing out multiculturalism. It is unlikely that
Blair’s Commission on Integration would have arrived at any other
conclusion. But multiculturalism did not create segregation or ethnic enclaves. There is a failure to distinguish between the multicultural society as a fact of Britain’s national make-up, arrived at through the anti-racist struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, and
multiculturalism as a cure-all for racial injustice, promoted by
successive governments. The first envisages a culturally diverse
society. The second - not really multiculturalism, but what I term
‘culturalism’ - engenders a culturally divisive society.

‘Culturalism’ or ‘ethnicism’ was Margaret Thatcher and Lord Scarman’s answer to the racism that ignited Britain in 1981. In his
investigations into the Brixton riots, Scarman located the cause of
the riots in ‘racial disadvantage’, the cure being to pour money into
ethnic projects and strengthening ethnic cultures.

As the institute of Race Relations pointed out at the time, the fight
against racism cannot be reduced to a fight for culture; nor does
learning about other people’s cultures make racists less racist.
Besides, the racism that needs to be contested is not personal
prejudice, which has no authority behind it, but institutionalised
racism, woven over centuries of colonialism and slavery into the
structures of society and government. Scarman, however, denied its existence.

For 20 years, our analysis was largely ignored, until Sir William
Macpherson unexpectedly gave it official currency with his 1999
report on the murder of Stephen Lawrence, finding institutional
racism throughout the police force. But the notion was soon killed
off again by the tabloids and the right.

Now Tony Blair’s government seems determined to undermine the
functioning diverse society that exists in large parts of Britain, on
the basis of a segregation theory conjured up to explain the
alienation of Muslim youth. This theory is not borne out by the facts.

First, in as far as the idea of segregation has validity, it applies
not to the 7 July bombers, but to the generation of their parents,
when it arose from racial segregation in public housing combined with the closure of the factories and foundries where they worked.

Second, all of the bombers were well integrated. Abdullah Jamal,
formerly Germaine Lindsay, was married to a white, English woman; Mohammad Sidique Khan was a graduate who helped children of all religions; Shehzad Tanweer, also a graduate, often helped in his father’s fish-and-chip shop; Hasib Hussain’s parents sent him to Pakistan because they felt he had fallen into the English drinking- and-swearing culture.

Yet these young men were prepared to take their lives and the lives of their fellow citizens in the name of Islam. One reason, therefore, must be as Mohammad Sidique Khan stated it: the invasion and destruction of Iraq.

The more Blair denies his complicity in the destruction of Iraq and
its part in the terrorist cause, the more he has to find other
reasons for 7 July, and the more he engages in the politics of fear
to erode democratic rights and civil liberties. Conversely, the
sooner he owns up to the Iraq debacle, the sooner he will be able to
address the most important element in apprehending terrorists:
intelligence, intelligence, intelligence.

Instead, his government substitutes authoritarian measures. The
September 2005 anti-terrorist bill was the fourth counterterrorist
measure in five years, expanding the definition of terrorism and
creating new terrorist offences. The Anti-terrorism Crime and
Security Act 2001, hurried through parliament after 11 September,
effectively abolished habeas corpus for foreign nationals. When the
law lords ruled against this, the government merely replaced
detention without trial with control orders. Now it has signalled it
will extend them to British nationals, while the proposal to hold
suspects for three months without trial is internment by another name.

Blair argues that ‘the rules of the game have changed’. But the game is democracy, and one part of it cannot be changed without starting a chain reaction that damages the whole and debases British values.

And yet Blair exhorts ethnic minorities to live up to these British
values. When our rulers ask us old colonials, new refugees, desperate asylum seekers - the sub-homines - to live up to British values, they are not referring to the values that they themselves exhibit, but those of the Enlightenment which they have betrayed. We, the sub- homines, in our struggle for basic human rights, not only uphold basic human values, but challenge Britain to return to them.

But the greatest threat to Western values arises from globalisation
and market fundamentalism, changes that affect personal morality. For the market reduces even personal relationships to a cash nexus. And the transition from welfare to market state has made corporations rather than people the priority of government, which, in turn, replaces moral values with commercial values, caring with
indifference, altruism with selfishness, generosity with greed.

Once there were great movements, within countries and
internationally, against poverty and exploitation and all kinds of
injustice - against capitalism and imperialism. Today, there are no
great working-class movements, no Third World revolutions. Hence, struggles against poverty, against dictatorships and against foreign occupation grow up around religion, ‘the sigh of the oppressed’, and take on the characteristics of millenarian movements. At the same time, they give rise to distortions such as fundamentalism.

Yet I am not without hope. I see Islamic fundamentalism as a passing phase, certainly in its intensity, because 7 July has also rebounded on the Muslim leadership and clergy in this country, demanding that they consider what is being done in the name of the Koran. And in the soul-searching that must follow, I see the first stirrings of the Islamic Reformation.

From that may follow a profound and desirable shift in the anti-
imperialist struggles waged by the Muslim world: away from individual acts of terror, to mass, collective action that finds common cause with the anti-globalisation, anti-imperialist movement beyond it.

A Sivanandan is Director of the Institute of Race Relations, London

courtesy The Observer

from Toronto

Don’t worry, we also will ‘develop’ one day to get our own achievements of child obesity, but right now our kids are malnourished! And junk food is a luxury to us!!

“…..The British government recently decided to ban all junk food, [in schools - ed.] pressured by a high-profile campaign by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver. In Canada, a handful of provinces are pondering similar moves.
………..

Calling it a growing public health crisis, the Ontario Medical Association warned this week that an epidemic of childhood obesity may lead to the first generation of children who will not live as long as their parents. ( emphasis ours. -ed)

Indeed, the growing waistlines of youngsters is troubling policy-makers, many of whom are taking steps — considered meagre by some — to control the problem.

The Ontario government has banned the sale of chocolate bars, other candy and pop in elementary-school vending machines. Students are also now required to do at least 20 minutes of daily physical activity in school.

In a bid to become the healthiest jurisdiction to play host to the Olympics, British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell has promised to ban junk food within four years from all public schools.
Other provinces, such as Quebec and Nova Scotia, are looking at ways to join the crusade to eliminate junk food high in fat, salt or sugar from schools.

“Finally, people are getting the message,” said Andy Anderson, an associate professor of physical and health education at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
“We have parents more conscious of this, grocery-store owners are more conscious of this, and we’ve even got fast-food people more conscious of this. We’ve got a much larger army now.”

from The Globe and Mail, The clash of the cafs, by Caroline Alphonso, October 8, 2005

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