දේශපාලුවා- Sri Lanka politics

නලින් ගුරුතුමන් හා නලින් ගෝලයින්

2011-08-07T09:24:00.000-07:00

“Guardian” වෙබ් අඩවියේ පළවූ ගේ “A former student of Dr. De Silva” ගේ ලිපියත් “සමනලයා” ගේ ඊට පිළිතුරත් කියවූ පසු මෙසේ ලිවීමට මට සිත් වූයේ මමත් නලින් ද සිල්වා මහතාගේ දර්ශනය ගැන උනන්දුවක් දක්වන නිසාවෙනි.

පැහැදිලිවම ලංකාගාඩියන් වෙබ් අඩවියට අවශ්‍ය නලින් ද සිල්වා මහතාට මඩ ගැසීමට ය. නමුත් අපි එහි පළවූ ලිපිය මදක් විමසා බලමු. පළමුවෙන්ම කිව යුත්තේ නලින් ද සිල්වා මහතාගේ හිටපු ගෝලයෙකු ලෙස තමා හඳුන්වාගන්වා මෙම පුද්ගලයා (අපි මොහුට පළමු ලියුම්කරු යැයි කියමු.) එසේ ගෝලයෙකු වී ඇත්තේ නලින් ද සිල්වා මහතාගේ අදහස් පිළිබඳව නිසි අවබෝධයකින් තොරව බවය. සංක්ෂිප්තව පවසන්නේ නම් නලින් ද සිල්වා මහතා විසින් ඉදිරිපත් කරන ලද දැනුමේ හරය වන්නේ සියළු දැනුම නිර්මාණබවත් එය මනසට ඉංද්‍රිය පද්ධතියට හා සංස්කෘතියට සාපේක්ෂ බවත් (බටහිර, පෙරදිග සියළු දැනුම්වලට මෙය වලංගු වේ. ) එහෙයින් වාස්තවික යථාර්ථයක් කියා දෙයක් නොමැතිබවත් ය. තව දුරටත් එතුමන් පෙන්වා දී තිබෙන්නේ බටහිරයින් තම දේශපාලන බලය යොදාගනිමින් බටහිර විද්‍යාව පරම සත්‍ය ලෙස ඒත්තු ගන්වමින් එය සෙසු ලෝකය වෙත බලහත්කාරයෙන් පටවනු ලබන බවත්ය. බටහිර දැනුමින් මිදෙන තාක් කල් අපට නිදහසක් නොමැති අතර ඉන් මිදීම සඳහා විය යුතු අනිවාර්ය හා ප්‍රමාණවත් අවශ්‍යතාවයක් වන්නේ සිංහල බෞද්ධ චින්තනය මත පදනම්වූ අපේ දැනුමක් නිර්මාණය කිරීමයි.

කෙසේ හෝ පළමු ලියුම්කරුට මේවා වැටහී නොමැති නමුත් නලින් ද සිල්වා මහතාගේ ගෝලයෙකු වීමට ඔහු එවකට තීරණය කොට තිබේ. බුදු හමුදුරුවන්ටද මෙවනි ගෝලයෝ සිටියහ. අදටත් සිටිති. බුදු දහමේ නාමයෙන් විවිධ අකටයුතුකම් වල යෙදෙන්නෝ මොවුහුය. සමනලයා ද කියන අයුරින් පළමු ලියුම්කරු විශ්වවිද්‍යාලයේදී කර ඇති කුණු වතුර බකට් කිරීම වැනි ක්‍රියාකාරකම්වලින් අපට සිහි වන්නේ ජවිපෙ සිසුන් ය. ජවිපෙ හි පොදු ලක්ෂණය වන්නේ සමාජය කෙරෙහි වන්නාවූ වෛරයයි. පළමු ලියුම්කරු නලින් ද සිල්වා මහතාට ආකර්ෂණය වී ඇත්තේ “බටහිර විරෝධය” නිසාය. එය ද්වේශය පදනම්වූ ආකර්ෂණයක් පමණක් වේ. කුණු බිත්තර ප්‍රහාර, කැළෑපත්තර, අතින් පයින් කළ සාකච්ඡා යන මේවායේ පදනම ද්වේශයයි.

ඉංග්‍රීසි ඉගෙන නොගන්නා ලෙසට නලින් ද සිල්වා මහතා කොහේදීවත් ප්‍රකාශ කර නොමැත. ඒ මහතාගේ මෙන්ම මගේද මතය වන්නේ ඉංග්‍රීසි ද බටහිර විද්‍යාව ද ඉතා ඉහළින් අප උගත යුතු බවය. ඉගෙනීම එකකි. ඉංග්‍රීසියට හෝ බටහිර විද්‍යාවට වැඳ වැටීම තවෙකකි.

පළමු ලියුම්කරු මොන අර්ථයකින්වත් නලින් මහතාගේ දාර්ශනික ගෝලයෙකු නොවන බව ඔහුගේ ලිපිය කියවීමෙන් අපට පසක් වන්නේ ඔහු එතුමන්ගේ දැක්මේ මූලික කරුණුවත් හරිහැටි අවබෝධ කරගෙන නොමැති නිසාය.

මගේ ගුරුවරයා බුදුන් වහන්සේ වන අතර මම උන් වහන්සේගේ ගෝලයෙක් හෙවත් බෞද්ධයෙක් වෙමි. එමෙන්ම මම ගුරුකොට සළකන තවත් කීප දෙනෙකුම සිටින අතර නලින් ද සිල්වා ඇදුරුතුමන් ද ඉන් කෙනෙකි. මා නලින් ද සිල්වා මහතා ගුරුවරයෙකු ලෙස සලකන්නේ පාසැල් යන සමයේ සිට ය. එතුමන්ගේ විදුසර ලිපිත්, මගේ ලෝකය කෘතියත් කියවූ මම ප්‍රධාන වශයෙන්ම එහි තිබූ වාස්තවික යථාර්ථයක් නැතිය යන්නත්, අනිත්‍ය යනු නිත්‍ය නොවීමට වඩා ගැඹුරු අර්ථයක් ඇති වර්තමානයේ සිදුවන්නක්ය යන්නත් බටහිර විද්‍යාව යනු තවත් එක් දැනුම් පද්ධතියක් පමණක්ය යන්නත් ආදී කරුණු කෙරෙහි අතිශයින්ම පැහැදුනෙමි. එසේම එතුමන් තුළ වූ ස්වාධීන බව, එඩිතර හා නිර්භීත බව, අධිෂ්ඨානය, වීර්යය, ප්‍රඥාව, අල්පේච්ඡබව වැනි ගුණාංග එම පැහැදීම තීව්‍ර කරන්නක් විය. පළමු ලියුම්කරු මෙන් නොව මා බටහිර විද්‍යාව ද ඉංග්‍රීසි ද හොඳින් උගත්තේ ජාතික චින්තනය මෙන්ම බෞද්ධ දර්ශනය ද මැනවින් හදාරන අතරදී ය. සමථ හා විදර්ශනා භාවනාව ද මෙහිදී වැදගත් විණි. නලින් ද සිල්වා මහතා ඇතුළු අපි සැම නිවන ප්‍රාර්ථනා කරන්නෝ වෙමු.

ලංකාවේදී ඉංජිනේරු විද්‍යාව හදාළ මා ආචාර්ය උපාධිය හැදෑරීමට ඇමරිකාවට පැමිණියේ මීට වසර කීපයකට පෙර ය. නමුත් ඒ පළමු ලියුම්කරු මෙන් පදිංචියට නොව අධ්‍යාපන කටයුතු නිමවූ විගස ආපසු යන අටියෙනි. එතෙක් නලින් ද සිල්වා මහතාගේ මත වෙනුවෙන් පෙනී සිටිමින් වාද විවාද කිරීමට මා පුරුදුව සිටි අතර සමාන අදහස් දරණ අය සොයා ගොස් ඔවුන් සමඟ දැන හැඳුනුම්කම් ඇති කර ගැනීමටත් ජාතික චින්තනය හා දර්ශනය පිළිබඳව සාකච්ඡා කිරීමටත් මම කටයුතු කළෙමි.

ඇමරිකාවට පැමිණි මට දැක ගත හැකි වූයේ අප රූපවාහිනියෙන් දැක තිබූ පුවත්පත් වලින් කියවා තිබූ ඇමරිකාවට වඩා හාත්පසින්ම වෙනස් තත්වයකි. ඔවුන් සතුව මනා සංවිධානාත්මකබවක් මෙන්ම බොහෝ කරුණු අතින් ලංකාවේ අද පවතින සංස්කෘතියට වඩා හොඳ සංස්කෘතියක් ද තිබේ. (ලංකාවේ අද ඇත්තේ සිංහල බෞද්ධ සංස්කෘතිය නොවේ.) බටහිර යටත්විජිතවාදයේ ප්‍රතිඵලයක් ලෙස පිස්සු කෙලින්නේ ඔවුන් නොව අප ය. පළමු ලියුම්කරු ද සඳහන් කර ඇති ආකාරයට ඇමරිකාවේ කාන්තාවකට තනියෙම පාරක, බස් රථයක කිසිදු කරදරයකින් තොරව ගමන් කළ හැකිය. තනියෙම නිවසක වාසය කළ හැකිය. එමෙන්ම ඊර්ෂ්‍යාව, අනුන්ගේ අනවශ්‍ය ඕපාදූප සෙවීම වැනි දුර්ගුණ ඔවුන් කෙරේ විද්‍යාමාන වන්නේ ඉතා අඩුවෙනි. ඇමරිකාව ජාතියක් ලෙස අනෙක් ජාතීන්ගේ ස්වාධීනත්වයට ගරු නොකළද ඇමරිකානුවෝ පුද්ගලයින් ලෙස අනෙකාගේ ස්වාධීනත්වයට ඉහලින්ම ගරු කරති. අන්ධානුකාරණය ඔවුන් තුළ නැති තරම් ය. මින් අදහස් වන්නේ ඇමරිකානු සංස්කෘතිය පරමාදර්ශී එකක් බව නම් නොවේ. එහි සතුන් මැරීම ජයටම සිදුවේ. Fishing, dove hunting වැනි තිරිසන් විනෝදාංශ ඔවුන් අතර වේ. ඔවුන් කාන්තාවට දී ඇති තැන ලාස් වේගාස් නගරයට ගිය විට දැක ගත හැකි වේ. මා මෙසේ බටහිර සංස්කෘතියේ හොඳ නරක ඉතා සංක්ෂිප්තව සඳහන් කළේ අප ප්‍රශ්නය දෙස අගතිගාමී නොවී මැදිහත්ව බැලිය යුතු බව අවධාරණය කිරීමටයි.

පළමු ලියුම්කරුට හමුවූ සේන අයියා වැන්නෙකු නොවුනද මගේ චින්තනයට ද ඉමහත් බලපෑමක් කළ පුද්ගලයෙකු මට ඇමරිකාවේ විශ්වවිද්‍යාලයේදී මුණ ගැසිණි. අපි ඔහුට ජයේ අයියායි කියමු. ජයේ අයියා අග්‍රගණ්‍ය බුද්ධිමතෙකු බව මම එකහෙළා ප්‍රකාශ කරමි. ඔහු තුළවූ නිර්මාණශීලීත්වය, විශ්ලේෂණයේ (analysis) හා පොදුකරණයේ (generalization) දක්ෂබව මා මීට පෙර කිසිවෙකු තුළින් දැක නොතිබුණි. (ඔහුගෙන් අනාගතයේ අප රටට විශාල සේවයක් වෙතැයි අපේක්ෂා කරමි. ) ජයේ අයියා හා මා අතර වූ සාකච්ඡාවල ප්‍රතිඵලයක් වූයේ මා වඩාත් උපේක්ෂා සහගතව ප්‍රශ්නයක් දෙස බැලීමට පුරුදු වීමයි. වරෙක නලින් ද සිල්වා මහතා විදුසර පුවත්පත මඟින් අභියෝග කර තිබුනේ එකම සෛලය බෙදී බිහිවන නිවුන් දරුවන් වෙනස් ගතිගුණවලින් යුක්තවීම කර්ම විපාකය යොද ගැනීමෙන් තොරව පැහැදිලි කරන ලෙසය. එවිට ජයේ අයියා මගෙන් විමසා සිටියේ ගසක එකම සෛලය දෙකට බෙදී සෑදෙන ගෙඩි දෙකක් එක හා සමාන ද යන්නය. එමෙන්ම එකම ඉලෙක්ට්‍රෝනය දෙකට බෙදුනොත් එම කොටස් දෙක එක හා සමාන ද යන්නයි.

නිර්මාණාත්මක සාපෙක්ෂතාවාදය යනු තවත් එක් දැනුමක් පමණි. එහි ඕනෑ තරම් අඩු පාඩු තිබේ. නලින් ද සිල්වාගේ මත පුනුරුච්ඡාරණය කරන ගෝලයින්ගෙන් නලින් ද සිල්වා මහතාටවත් රටටවත් ඵලක් නොමැත. නලින් ද සිල්වා මහතාගේ මත වුවද එක හෙළා විමසීමකින් තොරව පිළිගැනීම අනුවණකමක් බව ඒ මහතාම වරක් ප්‍රකාශ කළා මට මතකය. රටට අවශ්‍ය නලින් ද සිල්වා මහතාගේ මත වලද අඩුපාඩු පෙන්වා දෙන හරි දේ හරි ලෙසත් වැරදි දේ වැරදි ලෙසත් දකින විචාර බුද්ධිය ඇති පිරිසක් මිස ඒ මහතාගේ අන්ධානුකාරකයින් පිරිසක් නොවේ. ත්‍රිපිටකයේ පවා පිළිගත නොහැකි කරුණු ප්‍රශ්න කිරීමට අප පුරුදු විය යුතුය. (මේවා බුද්ධිමය සංවාද මිස මඩ ගැසීම් නොවිය යුතු බවද අවධාරණය කරනු කැමැත්තෙමි.) බුදු සසුන පවා අද ව්‍යාජ බෞද්ධයින්, එනම් පිළිමයට වන්දනාමාන කරන එහෙත් ප්‍රතිපත්තිමය වශයෙන් බෞද්ධයින් නොවන අය නිසා අනතුරට පත්ව තිබේ. අවාසනාවකට අද දැක ගත හකිව ඇත්තේ ද්වේශ සහගතව නලින් මහතාට මඩ ගසන පිරිසක් හා මහත් භක්තියකින් එතුමන්ගේ මත පුනුරුච්ඡාරණය කරන දෙපිරිසක් අතර සටනකි. මීට විකල්පයක් ලෙස නලින් ද සිල්වා මහතාගෙ මත වර්ධනය කළ හැකි නිර්මාණශීලී ගෝලයන් පිරිසක් බිහි නොවුනහොත් එතුමන්ගෙන් පසුව එතුමන්ගේ ජාතික කර්තව්‍ය ද අභාවයට යෑම නොවැලැක්විය හැකි වනු ඇත.

Lewis Black Explains Why He Doesn't Do Sarah Palin Jokes

2011-08-07T09:23:00.001-07:00

නාථ දෙවියන් සමගින් අනාථ වූ මහාචාර්ය නලින් ද සිල්වා

2011-08-05T19:17:00.000-07:00

Sri Lanka News-Adadearana-Truth First- Nuwan Udaya Wikkramasinghe

ලොව මහා බලවතා ලෙස තමන්ගේ හයිකාරකම් පෙන්වීම සඳහා දියත් කරන ලද වැඩසටහන් අතරින් ඇමෙරිකාවට දවල් තරු පෙනුණ එක වූයේ වියට්නාම් යුද්ධයයි. කීර්තිමත් ඇමෙරිකානුවන් ලෙස ආරම්භ කළ එය අවසන් වූයේ ඇමෙරිකා එක්සත් ජනපදයට අමතක නොවන බාහිර හා අභ්‍යන්තර තුවාල ගණනාවක් ඉතිරි කරමිනි. එක්සත් ජනපදය වියට්නාම් යුද්ධය සාධාරණීකරණය කරද්දී ඊට එරෙහිව කලාකරුවන් ඇතුළු සම්භාවනීය පුරවැසියන් පිරිවරා ඇමෙරිකානු ජනතාවද ඉදිරියට එද්දී තමන් ලද පරාජයේ මානසික වියවුල මකා ගැනීමට හා ඇමෙරිකානුවන්ගේ බිඳවැටුණ චිත්ත ධෛර්යය ගොඩනැඟීමට හොලිවුඞ් සිනමාව හරහා නිපදවුණු යුද සිනමා පට සංඛ්‍යාව සුළුපටු නොවේ. අපට රම්බෝ නම් දැවැන්තයා හමුවනුයේ ඒ අයුරිනි. මුළු සරුවාංගය පුරාම විවිධාකාරයේ ආයුධ එල්ලාගෙන, මස්පිඬු කරකවමින් සිල්වෙස්ටර් ස්ටැලෝන් කළ රංගනයට වියට්නාම් යුද්ධයේ දී ඇමෙරිකාව ලද තුවාල සුව කිරීමට හැකිවූයේ නැත. සිදු වූ එකම දෙය පේ‍්‍රක්ෂකයාට ස්වප්න මෝචනය බඳු තාවකාලික චූන් එකක් ලැබීම පමණි.

සිනමාවේ නොවුණ ද අපේ ලංකාවේ දේශපාලන භූමිය තුළ අපට පසුගිය කාලය පුරාම හමුවු මෙවන් රම්බෝලාගේ සංඛ්‍යාව සුළුපටු නොවේ. ඇතැම් රම්බෝලා පැටලූණේ බන්කි මූන් සමඟ ය. එහෙත් සෙල්ලම අහවර වෙද්දී මූන් වෙනුවට ඔවුන් ගහගනිමින් උන්නේ දරුස්මාන්ගේ හොල්මන සමඟ ය. තවත් රම්බෝලා පිරිසක් දිගින් දිගටම සටන් වැදුණේ අධිරාජ්‍යවාදීන් සමඟ ය. එහෙත් එම අධිරාජ්‍ය විරෝධී සටන ද පෙම්වතකු සමඟ නෝක්කාඩු වූ පෙම්වතියක ඔහු කෙරේ දක්වන අඟර දඟර මුසු කෙඳිරිගෑමකට වැඩි දෙයක් නොවූ බව දැන් පැහැදිලිව හමාර ය. මේ බොහෝ රම්බෝලා ඉතා ඉක්මනින් ජනතාවට එළිදරවු කළේ තමන් වනාහි මැදමුලන රූකඩ මඩුවේ රූකඩ චරිතවලට එහා යාමට බලයක් නැති පුද්ගලයන් බව ය.

කෙසේ වෙතත් මේ සියලූ රම්බෝලා අතර දශක ගණනාවක් පුරා සතුරකු හා සටන් වැද සිටින තවත් ලාංකීය රම්බෝ කෙනෙක් ද අපට සිටියි. ඔහුගේ මහා සටන හැමදාම කෙරුණේ බටහිරයන්ට එරෙහිව ය. මේ සටන කෙතරම් තීව‍්‍ර ද යත් ඔහුගේ තීරු ලිපිවල වැඩියෙන්ම භාවිතාවන වචනය වී ඇත්තේ බටහිරයන් යන්නයි. ඔහු අන් කවරකුවත් නොව මහාචාර්ය නලින් ද සිල්වා මහතා ය. මේ වන විට ලංකාවේ වැඩිම පේ‍්‍රක්ෂක අවධානය දිනගෙන ඇති මෙගා නාට්‍ය බවට පත්ව ඇති ආසනික් පුවතේ මහා වීරයා ද ඔහුම ය. ගණිතය වැනි තාර්කික පදනමක් මත පවතින විෂයක ප‍්‍රමාණික උගතෙක් වන හෙතෙම මෙවර බටහිරයන්ට එරෙහිව සොයාගෙන ඇති නවතම අවිය වනුයේ "නාථායුධයයි".ලංකාවේ නාථ දෙවියන් පිළිබඳ පේටන්ට් අයිතිය දරනා සිය ගෝලබාල රංචුව ද සමඟ මහාචාර්යවරයා අරඹා ඇති සටන මේ දිනවල නැඟලා යන කොමඩියකට දෙවැනි නැති.

සිය දීර්ඝකාලීන පරිණාමය තුළ මිනිසා සැම විටම උත්සාහ දැරුවේ අවිද්‍යාව පරයා ඉදිරියට පැමිණීමට ය. එය ඉතා වේදනාබර අරගලයක් වූ සේ ම එම අරගලය තුළ ලත් කටුක අත්දැකීම් සංඛ්‍යාව ද සුළුපටු නොවේ. එහෙත් එය කෙතරම් දුෂ්කර අරගලයක් වුව ද අවිද්‍යාව වෙනුවට විද්‍යාව සොයා යන ගමනෙන් මිනිසා මඳකට හෝ ඉවත් වූවේ නැති. ඔහු වර්තමානය වන විට මෙතරම් ඉදිරියට පැමිණ සිටින්නේ විද්‍යාව සොයායාම සඳහා දරන ලද ප‍්‍රයත්නය හේතුවෙනි. එහිදී ලොව පවත්නා සියලූම දේවල් විසඳීමට විද්‍යාවට හැකියාව ලැබී නොමැති බව සත්‍යයකි."නාථ මගඩියේ"දී නලින් මහාචාර්යතුමා හා සිහිබුද්ධිය සහිත අයට එකඟවිය හැකි එකම කරුණ එයයි. සැබෑවකි. විද්‍යාවට සියලූ ගැටලූවලට විසඳුම් දීමට හැකිව නොමැත. එසේම එහි ගවේෂණයට ලක්විය යුතු කලාපයන් ද තව බොහෝ ය. එහෙත් එය සත්‍යයක් වූ පමණින් නලින් මහාචාර්යතුමා හා ගෝල පිරිසේ නාථ ප‍්‍රාදුර්භූතය සත්‍යයක් වන්නේ නැත.

ලංකාව මේ වන විට ඉතා සීඝ‍්‍රයෙන් අන්ධ භක්තියේ හා අවිද්‍යාවේ කෙළිමඬල බවට පත්වෙමින් තිබෙන අවාසනාවන්ත බිම්කඩකි. මෙහි වසන මිනිස්සු අතරින් බොහොමයක් කුඩා අවධියේ සිටම දෙවියන් ඇදහීමට හුරුකරුනු ලබන පසුබිමක හැදෙන වැඩෙන පිරිස් ය. ඉහළම තාක්ෂණයෙන් යුත් මෝටර් රථය ආනයනය කරන පුද්ගලයා එය අතට ගත් සැණින් කතරගම දේවාලය බලා දුවන්නේ එහි ප‍්‍රතිඵලයක් ලෙසට ය. අධි තාක්ෂණික මෙවලම්වලින් සමන්විත සිය මෝටර් රථයේ ආරක්ෂාව කෙරේ ඔහු විශ්වාසය රඳවනුයේ මොණරා පිට යතැයි කියනා කතරගම දෙවියන් මත ය. ලංකාවේ ධාවනය කෙරෙනා බොහෝ වාහනවල පඬුරු ගැට ගසා තිබෙන අයුර කෙසේවත් අරුමයක් නොවේ. එසේම පොදු ගමනාගමනයද ඉහළින්ම පිළිගන්නේ දේව සභාව ය. බස් රථවල රියදුරුගේ හිසට ඉහළින් තොරන් සේ බැබලෙන දේව මණ්ඩල කියා පාන්නේ මේ සත්‍යයයි.

"රියදුරු දෑතට දෙවි සරණයි, හැමටම දෙවි පිහිටයි"ආදී වශයෙන් අනේකවිධ වැකිවලින් පිරුණ බස් රියක වගකීම මුළුමනින්ම මේ අනුව රැඳෙනුයේ අප ජීවිතේටවත් දැක නැති දෙවියකුට ය. ඉදින් දැන් බටහිරයන්ට එරෙහිව සටන්වැදී ඉන්නා බවට කැට තියනා අපේ මහාචාර්යවරයාත් මෙහිදී තම සටහන කැඳවා ඇත්තේ නාථ දෙවි කෙනකු ය. ඔහු එසේ කරන්නේ එක් අතකින් ලංකාවේ මිනිසුන්ගේ අන්ධ භක්තික හැඟුම් උගසට තබමිනි. සමස්ත පාලනයම සිය අකාර්යක්ෂමතාව හා නොහැකියාව වසා ගැනීම සඳහා විශාල ව්‍යාපෘතියක් ලෙස ආගම ඉදිරියට ගනිද්දී, රටේ අධ්‍යාපන ඇමතිවරයා පෙරහැරවල් සංවිධානය කරද්දී. නාථ දෙවියන් යනු තමන්ට ඇදිය හැකි හොඳම තුරුම්පු කොළයක් සේ නලින් මහාචාර්යතුමාට වැටහීම අපට පුදුමයක් නොවේ.

අද අප ඉන්නේ මිහිබට දෙවියන් ලෙස අප ඉදිරියේ ඉන්නා එමෙන්ම යස අපූරුවට ඇහැට පෙනෙනා මිනිස්-යක්ෂයින් පිරිසක් සමඟ අපේ හෙට දවස උදෙසා ගනුදෙනු බේරා ගතයුතුව ඇති තත්ත්වයක ය. මේ යක්කු අපේ මූලික මානව හිමිකම්වල සිට අපේ යටඇඳුම දක්වා කොල්ලකෑමේ නිරතව සිටිති. දේශපේ‍්‍රමයට මුවාවී, නලින්ලා එරෙහි වෙන අධිරාජ්‍ය්‍යවාදීන්ට, බටහිරයන්ට කර නවා යටත් වන්නේ ඔවුන්ම ය. ඔවුහු අප ඉදිරියේ දේශපේ‍්‍රමය වගුරුවමින් අධිරාජ්‍යවාදය ඉදිරියේ, ධනවාදය ඉදිරියේ දණ නවා වැඳ වැටෙති. බහු ජාතික සමාගම්, ඇතුළු අන් සියලූ ධනේශ්වර සූරාකෑමේ යාන්ත‍්‍රණ මෙහිදී ක‍්‍රියාත්මක වනුයේ වත්මන් පාලනය ද ඇතුළුව සකලවිධ ධනේශ්වර නියෝජිතයන් අතිනි.එහෙත් බටහිරයන්ට එරෙහි වන, අධිරාජ්‍යවාදයට මාරාන්තික ප‍්‍රහාර එල්ල කරන මහාචාර්යවරයා ආරක්ෂා කරන්නේ ද එම පෙරමුණම හැර අනෙකක් නොවේ. අනෙක් අතින් නාථ ඇතුළු සම්‍යක් දෘෂ්ටික දේව සභාවට ද ඒ ගැන කිසිම විරෝධයක් නැත. එහෙයින්ම නාථ දෙවියන් වෙනුවෙන් කොන්දේසි විරහිතව පෙනී ඉන්නා නලින් මහාචාර්යවරයා ඇතුළු ඔහුගේ අනුගාමික පිරිස ආසනික් ප‍්‍රශ්නයට පළමුව මේ ප‍්‍රශ්න කිහිපයකට නාථ පිළිතුරු ලබා දෙන්නේ නම් ඉතා හොඳ ය.

1. සරසවි පනත ද උල්ලංඝනය වන අයුරින් පීඨාධිපතිවරයයකු පත් කිරීම නාථ දෙවියන්ගේ අනුමැතියට එකඟද?

2. මේ රටේම හිමිකරුවන් වන දෙමළ ජනයා දිගින් දිගටම පාගා දැමීම දේව සභාව අනුමත කරන්නේද?

3. ජලයේ ආසනික් දකිනා නාථ දෙවියන්ට හොර පෙට‍්‍රල් නොපෙනෙනුයේ දේව කන්‍යාවියන් සමඟ අනාථව සිටි නිසාද?

4. රටේ ජාතික ධනය කොල්ලකන ඊනියා ප‍්‍රජාතන්ත‍්‍රවාදීන්ගේ ලැයිස්තුවක් ලබාදීමට නාථදෙවියන්ට නොහැකිද?

5. අතුරුදන් වූ, මරාදමනු ලැබූ, මාධ්‍යවේදීන් ඇතුළු අනෙක් පුරවැසියන්ගේ ජීවිත පිළිබඳව වගකිවයුතු අය හෙළි කිරීමට නාථ දෙවියන්ට හැකිද?

6. ආසනික් සොයා ගත්තා සේ, අඩුම ගණනේ මාරාන්තික රෝගවලට ගොදුරු වීමට නියමිත අසරණ නරපණුවන් කල්තියා ඉන් ගලවා ගැනීමට නාථ දෙවියන්ට නොහැකිද?

7. අධිරාජ්‍ය වී ඇත්තේ මහාචාර්යතුමාට වහකදුරු වී තිබෙන බටහිර පමණක්ද? පාලකයන් ඇතුළු මහාචාර්යතුමාගේ ද අභිනන්දනයට පාත‍්‍රවන නැගෙනහිර පෙරමුණ කුරා කුහුඹුවකුට වත් හිංසා නොකරන මානවවාදී පෙරමුණක්ද?

කෙසේ හෝ වේවා ආසනික් හා නාථාගමනය යන ප‍්‍රශ්නයේ දී නලින් මහාචාර්යවරයාට පාළු ගෙයි වළං බිඳීමේ ක‍්‍රීඩාව කරගෙන යාමට ඉඩ නොදී බුද්ධිමත් ප‍්‍රජාව ඊට විචාරාත්මකව මැදිහත් වන අයුරක් දැන් පෙනෙයි. මහාචාර්යවරයාගේ අනුගාමිකයෝ ද එම මැදිහත්වීම් නොඉවසා ඊට චණ්ඩිකමින් පිළිතුරු දීමට තැත් දැරූ අවස්ථා දෙකක් පසුගියදා පුස්තකාල සේවා මණ්ඩල ශ‍්‍රවණාගාරයේ දී හා එන්.එම්. පෙරේරා කේන්ද්‍රයේ දී දක්නට ලැබුණි. ඔවුන්ගේ එම ලක්ෂණ පෙන්නුම්කරන්නේ නාථ අනුගාමිකයන් දේවත්වය කරා ළංව ඇති තරමයි.

ඉඳින් මෙහිදී අපට ද නාථ බළකායට කීමට යම් දෙයක් තිබේ. කැමති භක්තියකුට දේවාල තුළ තනිතනිව හෝ සාමූහිකව නිරුවත් වීමට ඇති අයිතිය පිළිබඳව අපට ප‍්‍රශ්නයක් නැත. එහෙත් ඔවුන් එළියේ නිරුවතින් රඟන්නේ නම් හා අන් අයගේ ද ඇඳුම් ඉරා දමන්නට ද තැත් දරන්නේ නම් ඔවුන් උන්මත්තකයන් ලෙස හැඳින්වීමට අන් අයට ද අයිතියක් තිබේ.

‛ආසනික්’ පිටිපස්සෙ තියෙන්නේ දේශපාලනයක් – ගාමිණී වියන්ගොඩ

2011-08-04T19:19:00.001-07:00

Vikalpa

නලීන් ද සිල්වා ඇතුළු පිරිසක් උතුරු මැද පළාතේ ජලයේ ආසනික් තියෙනවා කියලා ගෙනාපු ප්‍රවාදය විද්‍යාත්මකව ඉක්මණින්ම විසඳෙන්න පුළුවන්. නමුත් මේක මම දකින්නෙ ආසනික් ප්‍රශ්නයක් විදිහට විතරක් නෙමෙයි. මේක පිටිපස්සෙ තියෙනවා වෙන දේශපාලනයක්. ඒ දේශපාලනේ කරලියට එන්නෙ නාථ දෙවියො හරහා. දැන් නලීන් ද සිල්වා ඇතුළු පිරිස කියන විදිහට මේක විද්‍යාත්මක පර්යේෂණයකට වඩා නාථ දෙවියන්ගේ මග පෙන්වීම යටතේ කරපු පර්යේෂණයක්. මොකක්ද මේ ඇතුළෙ තියෙන දේශපාලනය? ඇයි මේ අය නාථ දෙවියො සම්බන්ධ කරගන්නෙ? මේක අපේ රටේ කාලයක් තිස්සෙ තිබුණු දෙයක්. මේ රට සිංහල බෞද්ධ රටක් කියලා පසු ගිය අවුරුදු 20ක 30ක කාලය තුළ මේ අය ‛ජාතික චින්තය’ තුළින් ගොඩනැඟුවා. එමගින් මේ රටේ අයිතිය තියෙන්නෙ සිංහල බෞද්ධයින්ට පමණක් බවත් අනිත් ජාතීන් ජීවත් විය යුත්තේ ඒ සිංහල බෞද්ධයින්ගෙ කැමැත්ත පරිදි බවටත් මතයක් මේ පිරිස ගෙනාවා. මෙහිදි තමන්ගෙ මතය තහවුරු කරන්න බුද්ධාගම පාවිච්චි කළා. උදාහරණයක් විදිහට බුදුරජාණන් වහන්සේ පිරිනිවන් මංචකයේ ඉන්න අවස්ථාවේ දී දේශනා කළාය කියන එක්තරා කාරණයක් පෙන්වා දිය හැකියි. එය තමයි අවුරුදු 5000ක් යනතෙක් බුද්ධාගම පවතින එකම රට ලංකාවයි කියන එක. දැන් අවුරුදු 2600 ක් ගෙවිලා තියෙනවා, තව අවුරුදු 2400 ක් තියෙනවා. බෞද්ධයින් වෙනුවෙන් එම අවුරුදු 2400 තුළ ලංකාව ආරක්ෂා කළ යුතුයි යන්න තමයි මොවුන් ගෙන එන තර්කය.

මේ අය කියන විදිහට නාථ දෙවියො කියලා කියන්නෙ අනාගතයේ බුදු වීමට නියමිත මෛත්‍රී බුදු හාමුදුරුවො. නාථ දෙවියන්ව අපේ කර ගැනීම පිටුපස අනාගතයේ මෛත්‍රී බුදු හාමුදුරුවොත් සිංහල කර ගැනීමේ වෑයමක් පේනවා. ‛ජාතික චින්තකයින්’ විස්තර කළ අන්දමට බුදු හාමුදුරුවො ශ්‍රී ලාංකික නොවී ඉන්දියානුවෙකු වීම අපිට තිබුණ ලොකු අඩුවක්. එක පැත්තකින් ඉන්දීය විරෝධයක්, ඒ අතරම අනික් අතට බුද්ධාගම ලෝකයේ උතුම්ම දහම විදිහට අදහනවා. යම් කිසි දවසක මෛත්‍රී බුදුහාමුදුරුවන්ව වත් ලංකාවේ උත්පාදනය කරගන්න අපට පුළුවන් වෙනවා නම් මේ පරස්පරයත් ලිහාගන්න පුළුවන් වෙනවා. අනාගතයේ බුදු හාමුදුරුවො මේ නාථ දෙවියන් නම්, මෙලෙස නාථ දෙවියන්ගෙන් විද්‍යාත්මක දේවල් ලබා ගත්තට පස්සෙ බුද්ධ ධර්මය අපේ සන්තකයට යටත් වෙනවා. එතකොට ඒක ටිබෙට් රටේවත්, නේපාලයේවත්, ඉන්දියාවේවත් තියෙන බුදු දහම නෙමෙයි ඒක සිංහලයන්ගෙ බුදු දහම. ඒ බුදු දහම රැක ගැනීම සඳහා ලංකාව කියන දේශ සීමාව රැකගත යුතුයි. බෞද්ධ නොවන සිංහලයන් නොවන අයගෙන් මේ දේශ සීමාව රැක ගත යුතුයි. මේ පිටුපස තියෙන ‛ජාතික චින්තන’ ප්‍රවාදය මෙයයි. මිනිස්සුන්ව නොමග යවමින්, මිනිස්සුන්ව අනාගතයේ දී ඇති විය හැකි විනාශකාරී යුද්ධ කරා දැන්ම ඉඳන් සකස් කරන සැලැස්මවල් විදිහට මේ දේවල් පේනවා. මේ පිටුපස තියෙන කුමන්ත්‍රණය පිළිබඳව ජනතාව දැනුවත් කළ යුතුයි.

ආසනික් වලට එහා ගිය, ඊට වඩා පුළුල් රාමුවක කටයුතු කරන පිරිසක් විසින් ගෙන යන ප්‍රවාදයක් විදිහට ඇත්තටම මිනිසුන්ට පැහැදිලි කළ යුතුයි. මේ රටේ විද්‍යාඥයො පෙරමුණ අරගෙන මේ මිථ්‍යාවන්ගෙ තියෙන බොරුව, නිසරුභාවය විද්‍යාත්මක ක්‍රම මගින් පෙන්වා දිය යුතුයි. අනිත් අතට මේ රටේ දේශපාලඥයො සවිංඥාණික වෙන්න ඕනේ මේ රට යන්න හදන්නෙ කොහාටද කියන එක පිළිබඳව.

අනික් අතට විද්‍යාව කියන එක බටහිරට පෙර තිබ්බෙ පෙරදිග තමයි. චීනයේ, ඊජිප්තුවෙ, ඉන්දියාවෙ විද්‍යාව තිබුණා. ඒක විද්‍යාවෙ ළදරු අවදිය. නමුත් අද විද්‍යාව තියෙන්නෙ බටහිර තමයි. බටහිර විද්‍යාවෙන් තමයි අද අපි පරිහරණය කරන සියළුම දේවල්, නලීන් ද සිල්වා යන වාහනේ පවා, එයා භාවිතා කරන ටෙලිවිෂන් එක, රේඩියෝ එක හදලා තියෙන්නෙ. ජපානයේ, කොරියාවෙ, ඉන්දියාවෙ ඒවා නිෂ්පාදනය කරනවා වෙන්න පුළුවන්. නමුත් ඒ තාක්ෂණය එන්නෙ බටහිරෙන්. බටහිරෙන් වේවා, නැගෙනහිරෙන් වේවා තාක්ෂණය හරිනම්, ඒක මිනිසුන්ට පහසුවක් නම් ප්‍රශ්නය මොකක්ද? වැදගත් වෙන්නෙ මේක සත්‍යක්ද ? අසත්‍යක් ද ? කියන එක පමණයි. බටහිරෙන් පැමිණි විද්‍යාව සත්‍ය නම් එය අපි පිළිගත යුතුයි. අපි කළ යුත්තේ ඒක බටහිරෙන් ආවා කියලා ප්‍රතික්ෂේප කිරීම නෙමෙයි. මේ අය කියන විදිහට බටහිර වෛද්‍ය විද්‍යාව බොරුවක්, දේශීය ක්‍රමය තමයි හරි. නමුත් මේවා ප්‍රායෝගික කාරණා නෙමෙයි. තමන් වුණත් පිළිපදින්නෙ නැතුව මිනිසුන්ව අන්දන්න කියන දේවල්. මේවා තර්ක කරන්න දේවල් නෙමෙයි. නමුත් බටහිර විද්‍යාව කියන්නෙ කුමන්ත්‍රණයක් කියලා මේවා ඇතුළෙන් මේ අය ගොඩ නගනවා. විද්‍යාව කියන එක මිනිසාට යහතින් ඉන්න පසුබිම සකස් කරලා දෙනවා නම් ඒ විද්‍යාව බටහිර ද නැගෙනහිර ද කියන එක අදාල නැහැ.

Lies Agreed Upon

2011-08-01T09:57:00.000-07:00

Jon Stewart LIVE On Fox News

2011-06-19T14:27:00.000-07:00

Lasantha, The President And Sarath Fonseka

2011-05-17T12:50:00.001-07:00

By
Frederica Jansz

President Mahinda Rajapaksa has on numerous occasions with editors at closed door meetings said, “Everybody knows who killed Lasantha – yet, those very people who suffered as a result of his (Fonseka’s actions) later went and backed him.”

Lasantha Wickrematunge, Namal Perera, Upali Tennakoon, Keith Noyahr, Mahinda Rajapaksa and Sarath Fonseka

He added for good measure, “the two at the Nation and Lal.” Referring to the incident in which The Nation’s defence correspondent Keith Noyahr was abducted and brutally attacked, Rajapaksa’s comments referred to former CEO of The Nation newspaper Krishantha Prasad Cooray and its former Editor-in-Chief Lalith Alahakoon.
Cooray, despite having publicly accused Sarath Fonseka of ordering the assault on Keith Noyahr nevertheless at the last presidential election was an active member of Fonseka’s media contingent. The President’s reference also included Chairman of this newspaper Lal Wickrematunge and the latter’s decision to also support Sarath Fonseka at the last presidential election. This despite the fact, according to the President, that it was Sarath Fonseka who murdered Wickrematunge’s brother and Founder Editor of this newspaper, Lasantha Wickrematunge.
A serious investigation into the attacks on journalists began only after General Fonseka contested the presidential election as the common opposition candidate. In the immediate aftermath of Wickrematunge’s murder, opposition leaders accused General Fonseka of responsibility. The government initially simply stymied any investigation into the killing while the police remained impotent.
Following the presidential election in January 2010, I was told that investigators were inquiring into the possible involvement of General Fonseka into the murder of Lasantha after a very senior official at the Defence Ministry revealed that the former Army Commander told him, “I did not intend to kill Lasantha – I only wanted him hurt – but they killed him”. This is according to senior police officers conducting the investigation.
If the government is convinced that it was Sarath Fonseka who was behind the murder of Lasantha, why is it that he has not been charged with murder? Why has the government waited for so long to name him? It is also reported that the President had said that Sarath Fonseka was behind Lasantha’s killing to a senior editor of a Sinhala weekly, over a year ago. He had said that he was the army commander who was prosecuting the war and so nothing could be done. This places the government in a pretty tight corner.
Is justice based on time or circumstances depending on who sits favourably with the powers? Do the investigating arms of the nation respond positively only when the politician gives the nod as and when it is politically opportune? Lasantha was murdered on January 8, 2009. Sarath Fonseka was taken into custody on February 8, last year on a vague charge of planning a military coup and later tried before a military court marshal for indulging in politics whilst being in the army and sentenced. The cries for the release of Sarath Fonseka being a political prisoner would not have been even a whimper, if he was charged with the more serious offences of the murder of Lasantha, and assaults on senior journalists.
This then is the question President Mahinda Rajapaksa must grapple with and answer before he pontificates and accuses his former army chief of carrying out a murder most foul.
On Thursday last week, May 12, a former army intelligence officer told the Mount Lavinia Magistrate Court that he was told by the Officer in Charge (OIC) of the Terrorist Investigations Department (TID) to claim that a top army official was involved in the killing of former Sunday Leader Editor Lasantha Wickrematunge.
The intelligence officer, Kandegedera Priyawansa, who is now in remand told open court that he was told to say that a top army official, whose name he did not mention in court, was involved in the killing of Wickrematunge, as well as in the assault of two senior journalists, in return for a chance to go overseas and security for his house in Sri Lanka. Why Priyawansa chose not take the offer is not clear since he was not asked the question before being hurriedly led away. Will this revelation be investigated thoroughly or not, would be watched carefully.
Police have also arrested and remanded one Jesudason from Nuwara Eliya who apparently owns a garage.
All of the five telephones which according to sleuths were used in the attack on Lasantha were registered in the name of Jesudason. When quizzed by detectives Jesudason claimed he lost his Identity Card – which would have been required to purchase the SIM cards for the five mobile phones. Jesudason however never made a formal complaint to the police regarding the loss of his ID. He has however confessed to sharing a drink now and then with a soldier who he says identified himself as being a member of the Sinha Regiment of the Army. This soldier, Kandegedera Priyawansa at the time of his arrest was a member of the army’s Military Intelligence Directorate headed at the time by Major General Amal Karunasekera.
Last year, both Lal Wickrematunge and I met with SSP Chandra Wakishta, Director of the TID, when 17 army officers had been taken in and remanded for the killing of Lasantha Wickrematunge. Seventeen army soldiers attached to the Army Military Intelligence Unit and also identified as having worked ‘closely’ with former Army Commander Sarath Fonseka were remanded and held by the TID/CID.
At this meeting Wakishta was confident they had narrowed the suspects down to six soldiers who he told us had carried out the chilling murder on Wickrematunge.
Showing us pictures of the 17 army men, he asked us if we could identify any. He did this on the hunch that one or more of the killers may have been present at a candle lit ceremony held at Lasantha’s graveside one month after the killing on February 8, 2009. But none of the 17 images were even vaguely familiar to either Lal or me. They have all since been released.
At this discussion, Lal told Wakishta of a strange meeting that took place in his office at Ratmalana. “It was mid February 2009 and barely over a month since Lasantha was killed, a small-made, dishevelled man turned up in office and said he wished to speak with me. He went on to relate an amazing story explaining how Lasantha was killed and who was behind it.”
“Mr. X as I would call him had been released from Welikada Prison on an amnesty granted to prisoners on Independence Day in 2009. He was sentenced for embezzlement of state funds. Whilst in prison he was sharing a cell with a few others. Amongst those incarcerated with him were convicted murderers. He heard an inmate convicted for murder talking to another about a contract undertaken by him to kill someone and that the job was done on that day and had bragged as to how the operation was conducted. He said that this murderer had organised a ‘hit’ on someone called Lasantha and a sharp instrument was used to carry out the task. At that point he did not know who this ‘Lasantha’ was, but learnt later when he was watching Sirasa news on TV that night. He said that he had met Lasantha together with Frederica once when he had a problem with higher authorities at the Buddha Sasana Ministry when he gave an interview to The Leader.”
Lal went on to recount that this man had said a politician had given the contract to underworld figures in the prison to carry out the murder of Lasantha.
A similar sentiment echoed by Sarath Fonseka when in an initial telephone interview I asked him who had killed Lasantha he replied, “kudu karayas working for a politician cum drug lord.” Pressed to identify the politician he said it was a politician from Kelaniya.
He once more articulated similar words when Lal and I met with Fonseka at his former Reid Avenue office on December 8, 2009, and Lal asked him the same question.
Lal brought Mr. ‘X’ to my office too since he had said he had met me together with Lasantha but I could not recall such a meeting nor having ever seen the man before. I cautioned Lal against having any further dialogue or contact with the man, advising him to hand the man over to police officers investigating Lasantha’s murder. Which Lal did do, informing a police officer handling the murder investigation, but the man disappeared as a result.
Even as Wickrematunge related this story to Wakishta, the top cop was dismissive, displaying no enthusiasm to consider that this could be another possible lead, instead indicating that this was merely a red herring. Wickrematunge even handed over to Wakishta a letter written by this man to him together with a stamped envelope and gave him a mobile telephone number from which the man had subsequently made more than one telephone call to Lal.
Wakishta went through the motions and a statement was duly recorded from Lal. And there the matter ended. He now no longer takes our calls.
At The Sunday Leader, both myself and other senior staff including Lasantha’s wife and co-editor at the newspaper Sonali Samarasinghe were more than convinced that similarly as in the case of Keith Noyahr of The Nation newspaper, Namal Perera from the Sri Lanka Press Institute and Upali Tennakoon, former Editor of the Rivira Newspaper (all three senior journalists were attacked by goons believed to be soldiers working closely with Sarath Fonseka) Lasantha too, had been murdered by this same hit squad. Which is why when asked by the management to lend editorial support to Sarath Fonseka and his political campaign senior staff and editors loudly and vehemently protested finally falling in line only because we were compelled to accept that the government too had pushed us against the wall by bringing one debilitating court case after another in an attempt to cripple the The Sunday Leader, despite the newspaper having paid the ultimate price of Lasantha’s murder.
The issue is this — if President Mahinda Rajapaksa himself is so certain that it was indeed Sarath Fonseka that murdered Lasantha Wickrematunge as well as ordered the attacks on journalists Keith Noyahr, Upali Tennakoon and Namal Perera, why does he then not use his executive powers and literally kick butt to ensure investigators do their job. Over to you Mr. President.

Guernica / Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death

2011-05-17T12:47:00.000-07:00

Guernica / Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death

It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.”

Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden’s “confession,” but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.

There is also much media discussion of Washington’s anger that Pakistan didn’t turn over bin Laden, though surely elements of the military and security forces were aware of his presence in Abbottabad. Less is said about Pakistani anger that the U.S. invaded their territory to carry out a political assassination. Anti-American fervor is already very high in Pakistan, and these events are likely to exacerbate it. The decision to dump the body at sea is already, predictably, provoking both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim world.

It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

There’s more to say about [Cuban airline bomber Orlando] Bosch, who just died peacefully in Florida, including reference to the “Bush doctrine” that societies that harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves and should be treated accordingly. No one seemed to notice that Bush was calling for invasion and destruction of the U.S. and murder of its criminal president.

Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

There is much more to say, but even the most obvious and elementary facts should provide us with a good deal to think about.

Senator Johnson’s odd dislike of the PPACA

2011-03-26T15:34:00.000-07:00

Senator Johnson’s odd dislike of the PPACA

It’s the one year anniversary of the PPACA, and there have been a number of op-eds praising and cursing it. The WSJ took the opportunity to print a piece by Senator Ron Johnson, on the health care his daughter Carey received at birth, and how he is so thankful that the US system was not under the PPACA at the time.

Let me start by saying I’m thrilled Carey received top-notch care and that she’s doing well. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I wish the same for all children who need it. But let’s be clear. She received that care in part because she had insurance, and getting more people insurance is the whole point of the PPACA.

The arguments Senator Johnson makes are numerous. So I want to take them one at a time.

The CPA’s millions!

2011-03-25T15:14:00.000-07:00

By C.A. Chandraprema

The local government elections are over and we know who lost and who won. But there are others who win all the time. We all have heard of the ubiquitous elections monitoring organisations that hold press conferences during elections. The operators of these Non-Governmental Organisations are the real winners in this game. To just take one such organisation the Center for Policy Alternatives as an example, the money that flows in at election time is enough to make the mouth of the most corrupt politician water. The Center for Policy Alternatives (CPA) has its election monitoring arm styled the ‘Center for Monitoring Election Violence’ (CMEV) and when the government calls an election, they go around to the western embassies in Colombo collecting money to monitor the polls. This is done by all the foreign funded elections monitoring organisations in Colombo. The money that flows in is mind boggling. To just take the CPA for example, the funding that came in for just the presidential election last year was as follows.

This is not an exhaustive list, and could be only the tip of the iceberg. We have no idea of how much they got in total and we mention here only the transactions about which we have received information.

Presidential Elections January 2010 -

Netherlands Ministry for Development Cooperation - Rs. 20.6 million (Project duration -1/12/2009 to 31/3/2010)

The German Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs – Rs. 22.4 million (project duration 1/1/2010 – 31/3/2010)

British High Commission, Colombo - Rs 3 million for the Eastern province only (Project duration 15/12/2009 to 31 January 2010)

US Department of State – 90,000 US$ (Over Rs. 10 million) for publicity campaign against election violence for both the presidential and parliamentary elections of 2010.

If we go by the above, and we divide the American grant into two, the CPA has got something like Rs. 51 million for the presidential election alone.. They could have got much more and only they can come clean on how much they received. They received Rs 51 million to spend in a matter of eight weeks during the presidential elections. This in a situation where the same kind of work was being done by other foreign funded NGOs like PAFFREL and CAFÉ as well. The hardworking taxpayers of America, Britain, Germany and the Netherlands have to foot the bill - for what purpose?

Isn’t there a more efficient way to get elections monitored than to duplicate and reduplicate the same work by a multiplicity of foreign funded monitoring organisations? Why not tell each of these many organisations to take care of just one or two provinces so that the work is not duplicated by other organisations receiving funding for the same purpose from the same sources? And in any case, we would like to hear from the CPA, how they spent Rs. 51 million in a matter of eight weeks and on what. Except the British, none of the other donors have asked for a detailed breakdown of the projected expenditure before the money was released. The project to monitor just the Eastern province funded by the British has an item called ‘Rent’ which is Rs 1.12 million. But the duration of the project is only six weeks. How can rent in the eastern province be over Rs 1.1 million for six weeks? Then there is an item called ‘media monitoring’ in this eastern province costing Rs. 500,000. What is the ‘media’ in the eastern province? Does the CPA mean to say that the media was not monitored on a national level when they had so much money coming in from the Netherlands, America and Germany for the same purpose? So work is not only being duplicated among the NGOs, it is also duplicated within each NGO so that money can be received from various sources for the same activity.

In the British funded project for the east, there are other items like payment for field monitors (Rs. 240,000) and for stationary monitors in the polling booths (Rs.310,000) How many of these monitors were really employed and how much were they paid per day? The same questions can be raised about how the rest of the colossal amount of Rs 48 million from the Dutch, Germans and Americans was spent.

We do not know how much the CPA received for the parliamentary elections of 2010. But we know that they got a grant of Rs. 13 million from the Dutch Minister for development Cooperation to monitor the parliamentary election during the period 1st March to 31 July 2010. To this has to be added the other half of the American grant of $ 90,000 which was for both elections and hence the CPA had something in excess of Rs.18 million for the parliamentary election according to the available information. How much they got from other sources not revealed to anyone, is a matter of speculation. Would it be far-fetched to assume that they may have got the same amount as during the presidential election? The CPA should come clean in the interests of transparency by publishing on their websites detailed summaries of how the money coming into their organisation was spent on these projects. Details such as to whom rent was paid and the names of those who have received payment as employees have to be revealed together with the exact amounts that was spent per meal etc. The people have to know how the millions coming in for their benefit is being spent by the self appointed guardians of good governance in this country. Publishing these details on their websites costs next to nothing, and will go a long way towards addressing the suspicions in many people’s minds that this NGO business is one colossal scam.

2011-03-14T19:21:00.001-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Naomi Klein on Rachel Maddow

2011-03-10T13:02:00.000-08:00

Noam Chomsky on American Foreign Policy and US Politics

2010-12-05T19:20:00.001-08:00

What's the Matter with Kansas?

2010-12-04T17:22:00.001-08:00

"What's the Matter with Kansas?" movie - theatrical trailer from WMKMovie on Vimeo.

Obama's Imperialist Policies

2010-12-03T16:11:00.001-08:00

Noam Chomsky: WikiLeaks Cables Reveal "Profound Hatred for Democracy on the Part of Our Political Leadership"

2010-12-03T16:09:00.001-08:00

Channel 4 video exposed- Prabakaran or Isaippiriya?

2010-12-01T18:10:00.001-08:00

Channel 4 network has released another alleged "Sri Lanka war crimes video" This new video is an extended version of the infamous first video. The LTTE lobby has identified one female"victim" in the video as "journalist Isaippiriya". A still photo of this video footage showing the exact same "victim" was identified in Lankanewsweb and many other web sites as LTTE supremo's daughter, Miss Dwarka Prabakaran, in the December of 2009. It is apparent that two images show exactly the same person, at one particular time, no description is even necessary. The dresses wounds and even the environment matches faultlessly.

This image first appeared in Lankanewsweb, an anonymous site supposedly maintained by a Sri Lankan opposition supporter with alleged LTTE ties. When it first appeared it gained a wide publicity, as the web site alleged that the photo might be of Prabakarans daughter.
Tamilnet.com reports the current image was identified as Miss Isaippiriya by a Tamilnet "Vanni correspondant" now living in a western country. If the photos are indeed of LTTE "journalist" Miss Isaippiriya it is puzzling why the first and much clearer photo, was not identified correctly, given the wide publicity the photos attracted and Miss Isaippiriya being a widely known "media" personnel.

Therefor it is clear that the channel 4 video is a fabrication, formulated to tarnish the image of Sri Lanka and generate an undue agitation around the Sri Lankan presidents recent visit to the Oxford University.

It was reported the LTTE lobby in Britain was inquiring about the possibility of arresting the Sri Lankan President during his current visit. Infuriated by their own failure, it is plausible that they would have manufactured a new war crimes video to disrupt the visit. In their haste they might have forgotten that they already released some of the "new" content of the video in 2009 December.

It is the responsibility of the channel 4 networks journalists to assure the authenticity of the material, they present as evidence of a serious crime. As professional journalists, reporting on Sri Lankan conflict, they are sure to have encountered the first photographs of this alleged victim, and would have questioned the authenticity of the video. Therefor it is clear that the "journalists" in channel 4 network are aiding the LTTE lobby in their dishonest agenda ,and have a deep rooted hatred towards Sri Lanka and its people

American Radical: the trials of Norman Finkelstein

2010-11-28T10:04:00.000-08:00

A Lying Racist

2010-11-19T12:42:00.000-08:00

"A lying racist", is what African American politicians call Mr. Bobby DeLaughter, the Mississippi prosecutor who prosecuted Mr. Byron De La Beckwith a former Klan member for the murder of civili rights activist Medgar Evers. But Mr DeLaughter was not lying nor was he a racist, he managed to secure a conviction of a white man for the murder of a black leader, which the state of Missipii failed to do for several decades.

J. S. Tissainayagam the "journalist" who was sentence for inciting communal violence , has provided an interview for "Reporters Without Borders" (RSF), and the term used to initially describe Mr DeLaughter came to my mind.

In December of 2006 Mr. Tissainayagam writes in his "North Eastern Monthly" " Such offensives against the civilians are accompanied by attempts to starve the population by refusing them food as well as medicines and fuel, with the hope of driving out the people of Vaharai and depopulating it."

When the army secured Vakarai in January of 2007 they found stock piles of medicines in the Vaharai hospital and sacks of rice being used to reinforce LTTE bunkers.

The deputy chairman of the Human Rights Council called as a witness by the defense lawyers of Mr. Tissainayagam in his defense stated that " he had been visiting the Vakarai area and meeting the divisional secretary for the area and that the World Food Programmer had been distributing food through this divisional secretary and that there were government hospitals and governments doctors even though it was an LTTE controlled area in 2006". So the defense attorneys themselves have proven that Mr. Tissainayagam has lied. When shown what Tissanayagam had written about Vakarai, this defense witness had agreed that the statements were indeed incendiary.

Incarcerating journalist for not abiding by the law is not unheard of. In 2005 New York Times journalist Judith Miller was sentence to Jail for refusing to testify in a grad jury investigation. Many other examples can be provided.

Journalists should use their privileges responsibly and above all truthfully, it has been several years since it was revealed that Mr. Tissainayagam lied about the situation in Vakarai , but he is yet to issue an apology to the public. Mr. Tissainayagam's writing, as his own defense witness accepted, clearly and indubitably, had the tendency to stir racial tension and violence. It is the responsibility of the governmnet to secure peace and harmony in the country, where possible when a war was raging.

Mr. Tissainayagam received the Peter Mackler Award for journalistic courage and integrity in October 2009. The hypocrisy and hidden agenda of these awards have been reviews elsewhere.
Many Sri Lankans are distrustful of NGOs and INGOs, and with good reason. It is clear to any laymen that Mr. Tissainayagam was factually incorrect in his reporting and would have incited racial violence. Yet in this interview with RSF, the interviewer fails to question Mr. Tissainayagam about the factuality of his writings.
The NGOs and INGOs failure to acknowledge the true facts and their rewarding of irresponsible behavior adds to the public mistrust of those organizations.

Poddala Jayantha and The Transparency International Award

2010-11-13T18:35:00.001-08:00

Poddala Jayantha a journalist for the Associated Newspapers (Lake House) was abducted and brutally assaulted by an unidentified gang in June of 2009. Later he was given asylum in USA and now lives in USA.

Poddala has been awarded the integrity award by Transparency international. Its befitting.

A similar award was given to Mr. Mano Ganeshan by US ambassador to Sri Lanka. Ganeshan was a front line speaker at the LTTE rallies, a group classified as one of the most dangerous terrorist organizations in the world by FBI along with HAMAS Hezbollah and al Qaeda. What kind of an award will USA send to a speaker in rallies of the latter three groups? Supposedly nothing short of a visit by a predator drone. Such is the hypocrisy of such international awards.

Poddala had an ideology and he used his journalistic privileges to steer governments towards his ideology.

A letter he co-authored titled "Mahinda" published during the 2005 election is a good example, it is everything that Mahinda Rajapaksha is not, it defines Rajapaksha as a liberal progressive and attempts to steer Rajapaksha towards that viewpoint.

When he failed he used his journalistic privileges to the political disadvantage of Mahinda Rajapaksha administration.

All governments are corrupt, and its the same government officials who continue even when the ruling political party changes.

How many exposes has he done on the previous governments, which aligned with is ideological view point?

Why did his exposes on government corruption rapidly increase with surge of war and when the LTTE seems to be vulnerable?

Is it heresy to ask those questions?

It is clear that Poddala used his journalism for his ideological interests but not for the benefit of the people.

It becomes glaringly clear by him aligning with Lankanewsweb.com, a political hack job run with complete secrecy of the owners, believed to be assisted by an opposition politician in Sri Lanka. Lankanewsweb is famous for its utterly false, wild accusations of Gotabaya Rajapaksha buying Apollo Hospital and Basil Rajapaksha buying Swarnawahini TV station, and carried out vile attacks with false accusations against journalists like Manoj Abedeera of Divaina news paper and Iqbal Athas of Sunday Times.

What is the integrity of a man , who writes to a political hack job of a web site, run by a group in secrecy, supposedly controlled by an opposition party politician, openly supports the United National Party, publishes utter lies about government officials and carries out vile attacks against fellow journalists?

Poddala was an office barer of the Sri Lanka Working Journalists association, and NGO funded by other NGOs and foreign governments NGOs. SLWJA does not want to reveal their donor to the SL public instead want to keep it in secrecy.

SLWJA is in the cabal of Sri Lankan NGOs who try to steer Sri Lanka towards a liberal ideology. A small group of people control all these NGOs, many are officials of many NGOs, and draw salaries from them.

NGOs are the most corrupt institutes in Sri Lanka, C.A. Chandraprema of the Island exposed how money is being used for personal benefit of NGO officials in transparency international Sri Lanka, the watch dog agency that is supposed to watch over corruption in Sri Lanka. The Editor of Ravaya Victor Ivan exposed how this tightly bound group of NGO officials misuse their funds and prevelages as NGO officials to achive their personal goals.

The head of Transparency International Sri Lanka J.C. Weliamuna is not a neutral man, he is the attorney for the Editor of Lanka Irida Chandana Sirimalwatta, the unofficial newspaper of Marxist political party JVP.

And what is the response by the amnesty international head office on those allegations? They promote Mr. Weliamuna. Reminiscent of Mr. J.R Jayawardana promoting IP Udugampola after the Gatambe Temple Fiasco.

Such is the hypocrisy in NGOs and INGOs

It is natural for Poddala's friends in Transparency International Sri Lanka to nominate him to this award, so he can write a favorable review on them, or help them with their "liberal cause", or with their personal ambitions.

Poddala's integrity is not towards truth, but towards his ideology, he has proven that however vile the path that he would have to take to achieve his ideological ambitions he will take it.

And the NGOs and INGOs operating in Sri Lanka and their funding governments have repeatedly shown that however naked and ugly the path they would have to take to steer Sri Lanka to a liberal , pro separatist government, they would take it.

The Island newspaper reported that US government attempted to evacuate Prabakaran during the final phases of the war, they didn't get to him, but they got to Poddala.

False hood echo chambers

2010-11-05T08:27:00.000-07:00

wall street

2010-10-01T07:26:00.001-07:00

GOP tax policy

2010-09-30T21:49:00.000-07:00

Sarath Fonseka politics

2010-09-27T15:43:00.001-07:00

Check out this great MSN Video: Big Stars

2010-09-02T17:03:00.000-07:00

Check out this great MSN Video: Big Stars

9/11: Press for Truth

2010-08-11T15:38:00.000-07:00

Complete 911 Timeline

In Their Own Words

Poll: 70% believe Saddam, 9-11 link

2010-08-11T15:04:00.000-07:00

Posted 9/6/2003 8:10 AM

WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly seven in 10 Americans believe it is likely that ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, says a poll out almost two years after the terrorists' strike against this country.

Sixty-nine percent in a Washington Post poll published Saturday said they believe it is likely the Iraqi leader was personally involved in the attacks carried out by al-Qaeda. A majority of Democrats, Republicans and independents believe it's likely Saddam was involved.

The belief in the connection persists even though there has been no proof of a link between the two.

President Bush and members of his administration suggested a link between the two in the months before the war in Iraq. Claims of possible links have never been proven, however.

Veteran pollsters say the persistent belief of a link between the attacks and Saddam could help explain why public support for the decision to go to war in Iraq has been so resilient despite problems establishing a peaceful country.

The president frequently has called the Iraq war an important centerpiece in the United States' war on terror. But some members of the administration have said recently they don't believe there is a direct link.

The Post poll of 1,003 adults was taken Aug. 7-11 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

A Time magazine/CNN poll released Saturday said most Americans — 71% — believe the United States has done a good job in Iraq since the end of major fighting, while 26% said it has done a poor job.

Sixty-three percent said the nation was right in going to war in Iraq and 32% said it was wrong. But the Time/CNN poll found Americans more closely split on whether the military action was worth the price in America lives, taxpayer dollars and other costs — 49% said yes, 43% no and 8% were unsure.

The poll also found Bush's approval down to 52%, from 63% in May.

The Time/CNN survey of 1,003 adults was taken Sept. 3-4 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

Some Americans Still Link Hussein to 9/11

September 09, 2006

- Some adults in the United States remain convinced that the former Iraqi president played a role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to three recent public opinion polls. In a survey by Zogby International, 46 per cent of respondents think there is a link between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda plot.

In studies by Opinion Research Corporation released by CNN and CBS News, 43 per cent and 31 per cent of respondents respectively believe Hussein was personally involved in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Al-Qaeda operatives hijacked and crashed four airplanes on Sept. 11, 2001, killing nearly 3,000 people. In June 2004, the federal commission that investigated the events of 9/11 stated that there had been "no collaborative relationship" between the deposed Iraqi regime and the terrorist network in the planning and carrying out of the attacks.

On Aug. 21, U.S. president George W. Bush referred to the situation, saying, "Nobody has ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq. I have suggested, however, that resentment and the lack of hope create the breeding grounds for terrorists who are willing to use suiciders to kill to achieve an objective. I have made that case."

Yesterday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report which concludes that, although the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had evidence of "instances of contacts" between Iraqi authorities and al-Qaeda throughout the 1990s, these did not amount to a "formal relationship." Democratic Michigan senator Carl Levin said the document was a "devastating indictment" of the Bush administration's attempts to link Hussein and al-Qaeda.

Hussein was captured by coalition soldiers in Adwar—near his hometown of Tikrit—in December 2003. The deposed leader is currently being tried for assassinating Shiite men and expelling women and children from the northeastern Iraqi town of Dujail in 1982. The actions were regarded as retaliation for an attempt on Hussein's life organized by members of the Dawa Party. If convicted, Hussein could be executed.

Polling Data

a) Do you think there is a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terrorist attacks?

Yes	46%
No	50%
Not sure	4%

Source: Zogby International
Methodology: Telephone interviews with 1,014 likely American voters, conducted from Sept. 1 to Sept. 5, 2006. Margin of error is 3.2 per cent.

b) Do you think former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks?

Yes	43%
No	52%
Not sure	3%

Source: Opinion Research Corporation / CNN
Methodology: Telephone interviews with 1,004 American adults, conducted from Aug. 30 to Sept. 2, 2006. Margin of error is 5 per cent.

c) Do you think Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?

	Aug. 2006	Feb. 2006
Yes	31%	29%
No	60%	57%
Not sure	9%	14%

Source: CBS News
Methodology: Telephone interviews with 1,206 American adults, conducted from Aug. 17 to Aug. 21, 2006. Margin of error is 4 per cent.

PLUNDER: THE CRIME OF OUR TIME

2010-07-30T19:13:00.001-07:00

The Real Failed-State Risk

2010-07-30T07:44:00.000-07:00

Fareed Zakaria

“What happened in Kampala is just the beginning!” So warned Abu Zubayr, the leader of Al-Shabab, which claimed responsibility for the bombings in the Ugandan capital that killed more than 70 people who had gathered to watch the World Cup soccer final. In the bombings’ wake, Al-Shabab has drawn renewed attention for its murky links to Al Qaeda, and analysts once again are warning that failed states are a mortal threat to American national security. In fact, though, the case of Somalia and Al-Shabab proves precisely the opposite.

That Somalia is a failed state is beyond dispute. Foreign Policy just published its annual Failed States Index, and for the third year running, Somalia ranks No. 1. Somalia has had no functioning government since 1992, longer than probably any other present-day state. This is a tragic situation, but U.S. policy-makers seem convinced it’s also one that poses a grave danger to American national interests. “Dealing with such fractured or failing states is, in many ways, the main security challenge of our time,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said. Hillary Clinton has voiced strong support for this view and has taken steps to help tackle the problem. It’s not a new concern. Condoleezza Rice, when she was secretary of state, used to call failed states the worst threat to American security, as did a host of scholars, U.N. officials, and pundits.

The chief exhibit for this far-reaching claim was, of course, Afghanistan, which descended into chaos in the 1990s and became a staging ground for Al Qaeda as it prepared to attack America. But Afghanistan’s story is actually a bit more complicated. The Taliban came to power there with support from the Pakistani military, which had long supported radical Islamists. The group also received private and public support from Saudi Arabia, which viewed it as a convenient dumping ground, far from home, for its own radicals. Today there are very few Qaeda members in Afghanistan—between 60 and 100, says CIA head Leon Panetta—and Al Qaeda operates out of Pakistan. As the scholar Ken Menkhaus has pointed out, global terrorism seems to profit less from failed states and more from weak ones, like Pakistan, where some element of the regime is actively assisting the terrorists. After all, there are many drastically failed states (Burma, Congo, Haiti) that pose no global terrorist threat.

The trouble with trying to fix failed states is that it implicates the United States in a vast nation-building effort in countries where—by definition—the odds of success are low and the risk of unintended consequences is very high. Consider Somalia. In 1992, after the government’s collapse, U.S. troops were sent into the country as part of a U.N. mission to avert famine, but they soon became entangled in local power struggles, ending in a humiliating withdrawal. About a decade later, worried by the rising strength of a radical movement called the Islamic Courts Union, Washington began funding rival Somali factions, and finally gave tacit backing to an Ethiopian intervention. The Islamic Courts Union was destroyed but regrouped under its far more radical, violent arm, Al-Shabab, which is now on the rise.

Somalia highlights the complexity of almost every approach to failed states. If Washington goes after the militants aggressively, it polarizes the political landscape and energizes the radicals, who can then claim to be nationalists fighting American imperialism. If it talks to them, it is accused of empowering jihadis. The real answer, argue many, is to strengthen the state’s capacity so that the government has greater legitimacy and the opposition gets discredited. But how easy is it to fast-forward political modernization, compressing into a few years what has taken decades, if not centuries, in the West? All these dilemmas are on full display in Afghanistan right now.

What to do in Somalia? In a thoughtful report, Bronwyn Bruton of the Council on Foreign Relations makes the case for “constructive disengagement.” The idea is to watch the situation carefully for signs of real global terrorism—which so far are limited. Al-Shabab’s “links” with Al Qaeda seem to be mostly rhetoric on both sides. But if they become real and deadly, be willing to strike. This would not be so difficult. Somalia has no mountains or jungles, making it relatively hospitable for counterterrorism operations. Just be careful not to become a player in the country’s internal political dynamics. “We have a limited capacity to influence events in Somalia, to influence them positively,” says Bruton. “But we have an almost unlimited capacity to make a mess of things.”

Waving hand not ‘white flag’

2010-07-27T14:49:00.001-07:00

ජවිපේ අවස්ථාවාදය සහ එජා සංවිධානයේ පැනල් එක

2010-07-13T16:13:00.000-07:00

ඉංග්‍රීසි පත්තර වලට ලියන කට්ටියක් විමල් ට බැනපු එක ගැන අපේ ජේවීපී මල්ලිලාට පුදුම චූන් එකක් ගිහිල්ලා වගේ. මැතිවරන ගනනාවක් එක දිගට පැරදිලා ජනතාවගෙන් ප්‍රතික්ෂේප වෙලා කුජීත වෙලා හිටපු මේගොල්ලන්ට මෙකට සිහි නැතිවෙන ගානට ආතල්, අන්තිමට තමන්ට ජොලි මොකක් නිසාද කියලාවත් මේගොල්ලන්ට තේරුමක් නැහැ.

එජා මහලෙකම් කියනේ ජවිපේ මහලේකම් කම වගේ හිටගෙන බොරු කියන්න පුළුවන් වගකීමකින් තොර තනතුරක් නෙමෙයි. විමල් ගේ වැඩේට ප්‍රතිචාර දක්වන්න ගිහිල්ලා මහ ලේකම් ඇදගෙන නාගත්තා, තමන් කිසිම වගකීමක් නැති, කිසිම විශ්වාසයක් තැබිය නොහැකි රූකඩයක් බව ලෝකෙටම පෙන්නුවා.

විමල් ගේ උපවාසය යනකොට මහලේකම් මාධ්‍ය සාකච්චාවක් පවත්වලා තමන් වහාම ලංකාවේ UNDP කාර්යාලය ඉවත් කරගන්නා බව පැවසුවා. නමුත් මෙක අලි බොරුවක් බව ලකාවේ UN කට්ටිය කිව්වා මේ කෙහෙම්මල් කාර්යාලය ඉවත් කරන්න තීරනය කලේ 2009දී බව ඒ අය කියනවා. මහ ලේකම බොරු කිය කිය හෙලුවෙන් දගලන බව ලෝකෙටම පෙනුනා, මේක කොච්චර සීරියස්ද කියනවානම් නිව් යෝර්ක් UN කට්ටියම තවත් මාධ්‍ය සාකච්චාවක් කැදවලා මහලේකම් ගෙ ප්‍රකාශයෙන් සිදුවුනු අවමානය වහන්න තැත් කලා.

මේ සේරම විමල් ගේ වැඩ මිසක් විජිත හේරත් ගේ වැඩ නෙමෙයි.

මීට අමතරව විමල් උපවාසය නවත්වපු දා ඊට ටිකකට කලින් ආයෙත් මහලේකම් ප්‍රකාශයක් කලා මේ පැනල් එක පරීක්ෂන පවත්වනේ නැහැ නිකම් මට ඇඩ්වයිස් දෙනවා විතරයි කියලා. විමල් උපවාසය නැවත්වුවේ මෙ කතාවට පස්සෙයි.

නමුත් මේකෙන් මහ ලෙකම් ආයෙත් ලෝකෙට පෙන්නුවා තමන් කරන්නේ මොකක්ද කියලා තමන්ටත් හරි තෙරුමක් නැතිබව.

ඔය පැනල් එක පත් කලාට පසුදා ඒකෙ ලොක්කා , සරම උස්ස ගෙන කෑගැහුවා, " අඩෝ සේරම ඉන්වෙස්ටිගේට් කරනවා, බෙලි කපනවා කොටනවා කියලා". එතකොට මේ පැනල් එකේ ලොක්කා පාලනය කරන්න මහ ලේකම්ට බැරිද? ඌ කරන්නේ ඌට ඕන දේද මහ ලේකම්ට ඕන දේද? පැනල් එකේ ලොක්කා කියනවා ඉන්වෙස්ටිගේට් කරනවා කියලා, මහලේකම් කියනවා මොන බලු ඉන්වෙස්ටිගේසන් එකක්වත් කරන්නෑ කියලා. මෙතන් ඇත්ත කියන්නේ කවුද? එහෙනම් ඇත්තටම මෙ පැනල් එක කරන්නේ මොකක්ද? මේකෙන් කරන වැඩේ මහ ලේකම්වත් දන්නේ නැද්ද?

විමල් ගේ වැඩ නිසා ලොකෙටම හෙලිවුනා, මහලේකම් මේ ප්‍රශ්නයෙදී පුදුම විදිහට කලබල වෙන, පරස්පර විරෝධී, සමහරවිට අමූලික බොරු කියන, අවිශ්වාසවන්ත පුද්ගලයෙක් බව.

මේ නිසා මේ පැනල් එක ගැනත් මහලේකම් ගැනත් ලෝක ප්‍රජාවට (අධිරාජ්‍යවාදීන් හැරුනුකොට ) අබමල් රේනුවක හරි විශ්වාසයක් තිබ්බානම් ඒකත් නැතිවුනා.

විමල් ගේ මූලික අරමුන ඉටු නොවුනත්, පැනල් එකයි, මහලේකම් පිලිබදවයි ලෝක ප්‍රජාවගේ තිබුනු විශ්වාසය බිදීමෙන්, පැනල් එක අවලගු කාසියක් ගානට වැටුනා.

දැන් මට තවත් ප්‍රශ්නයක් තියෙනවා, විමල් UN එක ගාව බිම බුදිය ගත්තාම ජේවීපී කට්ටියටයි, ටයිකෝට් තානාපති ප්‍රජාවයි පොරකකා ඉස්සරහට ආවා ඒක වැරදියි කියන්න. නමුත් ඒකට ප්‍රතිචාර දක්වන්න ගිහිල්ලා මහ ලේකම් ගල් පැලෙන බොරු කිව්වාම, පරස්පර විරෝධී ප්‍රකාශ කලාම මේ කිසි කෙනෙක් නෙමෙයි හ්ම් කිව්වේ, ඇයි මහ ලේකම්ට විරුද්ධව මොනවත් කියන්න බයද? මේ අය්යලා හිතාගෙන ඉන්නේ මහලේකම් රහත් වෙලා කියලද? ටයිකොට් තානාපති ගොල්ලොනම් බය බව අපිට තෙරෙනවා උන්ට ඕන උන්ගේ බඩ ගෝස්තරේ, ඒත් ඇයි මේ ජේවීපී කට්ටිට්ය මහ ලේකම් වන්දනාවේ? මීට වඩා අසික්කිත තුප්පහි අවස්ථාවාදයක් තවත් තියනවාද?

ජේවීපී මල්ලිලා දැන් චූන් වේලා දැගලුවාට, මෙකේ දීර්ඝ කාලීන දේශපාලන වාසියත් විමල්ටයි ජනිපෙටයි, ඒක තෙරුම් ගන්න අමාරු නැහැ.

ජේවීපී මල්ලිලා කොළඹ කැම්පස් එකේ දොඹ ගහ යට වාඩිවෙලා සයන්ස් ෆැකල්ටි එකේ කොළඹ හයි ෆයි බඩුවල පස්ස පැති දිහා බල බල හූල්ලන වෙලාවේ ඕක හිතලා බැලුවානම් තේරුම්යයි.

In defence of Wimal

2010-07-13T14:02:00.000-07:00

The powers concerned would have got the message, and more importantly the issue has been taken to the streets from the living rooms and bedrooms of the diplomats and the rustic Sinhala nation, and not the sophisticated alien nation will back the "uneducated" Wimal to the hilt. ............................
by Nalin de Silva

(July 14, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) I would not have written this article if not for the comments made in the Sunday English language newspapers and by some political opponents of Sinhala nation and Sinhala nationalism. For some of these "celebrated" authors who have made a name among the English newspaper readers Wimal Weerawansa was at best a joke. They claimed that the fast had a script written by Wimal himself or somebody close to the government and it was not a fast but a farce. One learned person went on to say that Wimal was uneducated and by that she probably meant that Wimal Weerawansa had not proceeded beyond the GCE Advanced Level class. These commentators were telling us that everybody knew that Wimal was not going to die and was waiting for the President to come with orange juice or thambili water. I am not sure whether the act of the daughter of Wimal Weerawansa was also in the script as I have not been able to get a copy of it. There were other pundits who were reminding us that UN could not be moved by street demonstrations and only civilised diplomacy could change the attitude of the United Nations secretary Ban Ki-moon. (We now know how to spell this Korean name in English and thank God for it). The JVP went on to announce at a press conference that the appointment of the so-called advisory panel by Ki-moon had been mentioned in a joint statement made by the General, I mean the secretary general and not the other general, and the government of Sri Lanka.

Wimal Weerawansa is not one of my favourite personalities and I do not rate him as a good politician, and I suppose the feelings are mutual. Like most of the others in the nationalist movement or the Jathika Vyaparaya he has not acknowledged my contribution to the movement and he never invites me to his various activities. However, I have known him for nearly twenty years since he wrote to Lakmina newspaper I edited unofficially, though Sunil Madhava who had JVP inclinations at that time was the official editor. Wimal was known as Wimalasiri Gamlath those days and if I remember correct he used to draw cartoons for the weekly tabloid. Ironically three cabinet ministers in the present government contributed to that paper, Dallas Alahapperuma and Champika Ranawaka being the other two. Even twenty years ago I with a few others associated with the newspaper were for the military operations against the LTTE and at that time the JVP of which Wimal Weerawansa was a member, and Champika were opposed to the so-called war. The opposition was so much intense that members of the JVP and others questioned why I, a war monger, wrote the editorials when Sunil Madhava was the official editor. Finally, I was unceremoniously relieved of my duties as the unofficial editor (I did not ask even for an allowance for my editorials and other editorial work) and I had to leave the paper which unfortunately did not last long. Soon afterwards, I was relieved of my duties at the University of Colombo and thus I was reduced to the sole unemployed Ph.D. holder in the country for ten years!

However, over the years most of those who opposed me at Lakmina have came to the position I held in the early nineties and I am glad about it though they may claim that they took up the present position on their own. I am not bothered about these recognitions as I am now old enough to realise that they do not matter much, and not at all once one has gone over to the other world. In any event, the national movement now has a good middle order, meaning those who have reached the middle age, though we may not have a corresponding increase among the young people. I am sure that Wimal Weerawansa by his fast attracted many young people to the national movement, and we in the movement should be thankful to him at least for that. The present younger generation being the children of JRJ open economy without nationalism cannot be given nationalistic feelings through newspaper articles or lectures as they are immune to those media. I have experienced this in the university and the students whom I met after my long sojourn were different from the previous generations. However, they can be politically motivated but unfortunately only the JVP has been successful even in a limited way in this regard. Wimal Weerawansa’s fast is not a farce and whether he has realised it or not many a young people would have been politically motivated by his mediation. Already somebody, I am not sure of his age, has staged a one day fast in protest of the appointment of the notorious panel. This is something that the above mentioned educated people would not understand and I would be happy if they continue to enjoy their blissful educated ignorance.

We do not need these educated people to tell us that Wimal Weerawansa was not going to die as a result of the fast. With or without his daughter telephoning Mahinda Mama it was only a matter of time before the President would intervene to stop the fast. In any event this was not the first fast in the world to end without a death and we have seen so many fasts in this country and abroad where the "hero did not die". Fasts have different purposes other than winning the demands involved with the fast which could be understood by uneducated people like me. (I do not believe in certificates and I am prepared to accept that I am not educated). When Mahatma Gandhi staged number of fasts it is very unlikely that the Indian independence movement would have allowed him to die as a result of the fasts. The fasts staged by the Federal Party (Ilankai Thamil Arasu Kadchchi or the Lanka Tamil State Party) in the fifties and the sixties would not have ended with the death of the leaders of the party as its present leader Sambandan could testify. Those fasts had the objective of inciting the ordinary Tamil people against the Sinhalas, and in spite of the so-called non violence tag, they were intended to invite violence. I am not comparing Wimal Weerawansa to the leaders of the violent Tamil politics who engaged in such politics in the guise of non violence or to Mahatma Gandhi but fasts have different objectives.

The educated, especially the English educated people who think that they are eloquent and good at delicate diplomacy, whatever it means, could convince Ban Ki-moon to withdraw the panel that has been appointed. However they are mistaken. The power does not come from the mouths of a few sophisticated people that the English education has produced but from the people. Yes the power is with the uneducated people led by politicians like Wimal who themselves may be uneducated. In any event, what is the education that these so-called educated people talk of? It is simply a training that they have got from their masters and the mistresses in London, New York and Paris and such other places. I went to a school where the motto was "learn or depart" but I neither learnt nor departed and I have not "succeeded" in life. At the university I did not learn anything that was not found in the books written by the westerners and the university was only able to find a wife for me and give me a certificate though I did not obtain that "grand" certificate given by the Chancellor at the convocation either in presence or in absentia. The convocation procession is not even a fancy dress parade as far as I am concerned, as it is a parade of young and old people who have been given cloaks of Judaic Christian culture to imprison their spiritual heritage under the cloaks. The academics in Sri Lanka are in general sales representatives, who distribute knowledge created in the west, and they are no better than those who sell "pitikiri" produced in New Zealand to the public in Sri Lanka.

This story on education has another side. How many private sector bosses could not proceed beyond the GCE (Ordinary Level) class? Of course, these people are not considered to be uneducated and no cartoonist would portray any one of them as an ignoramus. They are supposed to have leadership qualities having played for the school. Wimal has played cricket for the Kalutara Vidyalaya and opened batting for the school. It is ironical for the private sector bosses to claim that the PRESENT DAY graduates are not fit to be employed by them. The lack of "quality" between the present day graduates and the older graduates is not to be found in the area of the knowledge in their respective fields. In fact I know that the present day students in Mathematics and Physics have a better knowledge, of course, of that created in the west than I had when I was a student. The difference is that they are in general not posh as their predecessors in general and they may not know to wear the tie and hold a glass of champagne properly. All these are summarised nicely by Kumar David (we hold diametrically opposite views these days though we were members of the same parties not so long ago) in his column to the Lakbimanews last Sunday. ‘In 1970 Mrs. B made HAdeS (Gunasekera) permanent secretary planning, and my uncle (one Mr. Andrew Joseph) claims he approached the urbane Gamini (Corea), his predecessor in the post, and gently inquired: "I say Gamini, what is the most important quality to succeed at this level?" The answer came pat but broke his heart; poor HAdeS could manage neither. "Oh HAde S, you’ve got to learn to hold a glass of champagne, and how to lay the French Ambassador’s wife!"

I do not know of Wimal’s capabilities but he is certainly not acceptable to the class of the commentators and they talk of decent diplomacy instead of taking the issues to the streets.

The JVP is only propagating untruth true to their policies and the appointment of the panel is not the result of any agreement between the government and the UN. The critics want to know whether Ban Ki-moon would withdraw the panel of advisers, which is not worth a window panel. How can he withdraw it when he did not appoint the panel? Ban Ki-moon is only a paid loyal servant of US and UK and we know that he will not be ordered to withdraw the panel by these powers as an immediate response to the fast. However, the powers concerned would have got the message, and more importantly the issue has been taken to the streets from the living rooms and bedrooms of the diplomats and the rustic Sinhala nation, and not the sophisticated alien nation will back the "uneducated" Wimal to the hilt.

IT IS TIME TO “IMPEACH” BAN KI MOON FOR DESTROYING UNITED NATIONS

2010-07-12T14:18:00.000-07:00

By Hasaka Ratnamalala on HR blog Sri Lanka

United States and some countries at European Union, collaboration with Secretary General’s office are trying to find new ways to interfere the sovereignty of member nations. This time UNSG Ban Ki moon is directly acting as a puppet of some western Nations; further more he and his backers are demanding the Sri Lankan government to violate the freedom of expression of Sri Lankans by banning protests against Ban Ki Moon.
A protest which started by Wimal Weerawansa a Sri Lankan patriot few days ago is a peaceful “Satyagraha” against Ban Ki Moon for appointing a panel of three to advise him on alleged war crimes in Sri Lanka. But some pro western political pundits claim, that these types of things have to be resolve diplomatically. Yes, but the question is did Mr. Ban Ki Moon has left any room for diplomacy?
Sri Lanka’s top diplomat at UN Dr. Kohana who happened to be the former chief protocol officer of United Nations and claims that Ban Ki Moon is trying to create a “precedent” to create an alternate way to interfere sovereignty of member nations. Dr. Kohana who is an authority on UN laws is in the view that Ban Ki Moon is acting unlawfully, what other evidence we need that the doors are closed for diplomacy.
At UN, if Security Council, General Assembly or Human Rights Council reject to issue any order against a member nation on an issue, there was no other way of influencing a member nation other than diplomacy. Those actions would only be taken after drying out local solutions. This check and balance system helped United Nations to function without any effective division within the organization. Even though, in time to time there were different camps at UN body, VETO power at the main bodies did the balancing act but Ban Ki Moon’s new advisory panel method on the other hand will override all these bodies and check and balance system.
If Ban Ki Moon really wanted to fix the troubles in the world there are enough conflicts which needs his immediate attention. Sri Lanka is a peaceful country now; there are no more killings, suicide bombers, or shelling. Sri Lankans throughout the country again and again with highest majorities approved the methods used by present Rajapaksha Government to stop Tamil Tigers killing craze. Government itself has taken steps to reconcile communities. A political solution is in the process with the involvement of all parties. Infrastructures are rebuilding. “Lessons Learned and Reconciliation”, commission is in progress. There is no mandate for United Nations to involve in Sri Lanka at the moment unless Sri Lankan government request that. As Sri Lanka’s economic development Minister Basil Rajapaksha correctly said “what Sri Lanka now need is partners not monitors”.
If Ban Ki Moon’s action would be successful it will create a new method for powerful nations to interfere into local matters of small nations, under the cover of United Nations name board. If such thing happened, its actions will only be accountable to the Secretary General who presently acting as a puppet of western countries and eventually will jeopardise the function of United Nations as place, where equality for every nation is the motto.
Even though a small nation, Sri Lanka done its part to protect United Nations; by refusing to issue visas to three member panel appointed by UN Secretary General to advise him on Sri Lanka’s already ended conflict. So far Russia and China placed their protests; None Aligned Movement is considering protesting. It is time for other member nations to pitch in, not only for Sri Lanka but also for the future protection and sovereignty of their own nations. Also it is time for the world body to consider impeaching Ban Ki Moon for violating UN rules and trying to destroy United Nations

විමල් උඹ දිනුම්, නැගිටපං

2010-07-09T21:25:00.000-07:00

විමල් මේ වැඩේ පටන් ගන්නකොට, අපේ ටයි කෝට අදින තානාපති අශ වල කටිටිය (දයාන් ජයතිලකත් එක්ක) කිවෙවේ "විමල් ගම කනවා, පාරේ සටන් කරලා විදේශ රාජ්‍යතාන්ත්‍රික ප්‍රශන විසදන්න බැහැ" වගේ හැමදාම අහපු ගොං කතා.

නමුත් මේ පිංගුත්තරයෝ මේ බලු පැනල් එකේ නීති විරෝධී භාවය ගැනවත් ඒක පත් කරනන්, මූන් කාරයා බලය අයුතු ලෙස පාවිච්චි කරපු එක ගැනවත් වචනයක් කිව්වේ නැහැ. ඒ විතරක් නෙමෙයි සාකච්චාවෙන් මෙක විසද ගන්නේ කොහොමද කියලවත් මේ පිංගුත්තරයෝ කියන්නැහැ.

මුං මොන බයිලා කිව්වත්, විමල් තමගේ ක්‍රමයෙන් මූන් ගේ උද්ධච්ච, තක්කඩිකම ලෝකෙට හෙලි කරලා පෙන්නුවා.
විමල් ගේ උපවාසයට බය වෙචච බලු මූනා මාධ්‍ය සාකච්චාවක් පවත්වලා කිව්වා මේ උපවාසය නිසා කොළඹ UNDP එකෙ ලොක්කා ආපසු කැදවනවා කියලා. නමුත් ලකාවේ UN කාරයොයි UN New York ඔෆිස් එකේ අනිත් නරියි කියනවා කොලඹ ඔෆිස් එක වහන්න තීරයකලේ 2009, ඒ තීරනෙයි මේ උපවාසෙයි සමබන්ධයක් නැහැ කියලා.

අනික විමල් ගේ සත්‍යග්‍රහය තියෙනෙන බෞද්ධාලෝක මාවතේ UNDP ඔෆිස් එක තියෙන්නේ හැතැප්මක් විතර එහා නිදහස් මාවතේ එතන බල්ලෙක් වත් නැහැ.

බලූ මූනා ගේ මේ කතාවෙන් පේනවා අපේ ටයි කොට තානාපති මහත්තුරු මොනවා කිව්වත් බලු මූනා දෙලෝ රත්වෙලා දගන බව, ඒ විතරක් නෙමෙයි, එකේ පරිපාලනම්ය වැඩත් දේශපාලනී කරනය කරලා , ඒ ගැන අතේ පත්තු වෙන බොරු කියලා බලු මූනා හත්පොලේ ගාගත්තා.

බලු මූනාගේ මේ ගල් පැලෙන බොරු කිවිලෙන්ම පෙනවා, මූ ලකාවට මඩ ගන්න කාගේ හරි කොන්තරත්තුවක් කරන බව, ඒ එක්කම හොදින්ම පැහැදිලිවෙනවා මේ බලු පැනල් එක ලංකාව වැරදිකරු කරන්න පූර්ව නිගමනයකින පත්කරපු එක්ක බව.

විමල් උඹ දිනුම්, නැගිටපං

මේ බලු පැනල් එක වහා විසුරුවා, එජා සවිධානය බලගතු රටවලට වේස කමේ යවන බලු මූනාට වහා දෝශාභියෝගයක් ගෙනෙව්.

Ban statement misleading

2010-07-09T15:43:00.000-07:00

UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has misled the media and the public by giving the impression that the UNDP Regional Center situated in Sri Lanka had been closed as a result of the protest being carried out by Minister Wimal Weerawansa outside the UN country office in Colombo.

When contacted by Daily Mirror online today, a UN Colombo official clarified that preparations were underway for several months now to close down the UNDP Regional Center in Sri Lanka and it was not linked with Weerawansa’s protest.

However in a misleading short statement released by the Secretary General at the UN Headquarters in New York yesterday, Ban Ki Moon had said he had decided to close down the UNDP Regional Centre in Colombo and was recalling the United Nations Resident Coordinator, Neil Buhne to New York for consultations.

However the UN Chief had failed to mention that the closing down of the UNDP Regional office had no connection what so ever to Weerawansa’s protest resulting in major news organizations and international wire services reporting that the UNDP office had been closed as a result of the tensions outside the UN Country office in Colombo.

When asked to clarify the connection between the UNDP Regional Center being closed, Neil Buhne being recalled and Weerawansa’s protest, a UN Colombo official said that all UN offices were continuing to function as normal and the shutting down of the UNDP Regional office had nothing to do with the ongoing issue outside the UN Country office in Colombo.

“To my knowledge it (closing the UNDP Regional Center) has nothing to do with this current issue because it has been on the cards for several months. It is not a new move. This UNDP Regional Center was located earlier in Kathmandu but because of the worsening security situation their during that time, the decision was taken to shift the Center to Colombo somewhere in 2006 or 2007. However within the last year a decision was taken, taking into consideration some administrative and financial concerns to downsize the regional center and to shift the main functions to the Bangkok office. This is not a new move as it has been on the card for several months,” a UN Colombo official explained.

The UN Secretary General by releasing a single statement regarding the UNDP office, Weerawansa’s protest and recalling Neil Buhne for consultations seems to have attempted to give the impression that he was giving a firm response not just by word but by action to show his anger towards the government’s failure to prevent the heated protests outside the UN Country Office in Colombo. (Daily Mirror online)

Ban Ki Moon’s statement released yesterday is as follows.

The Secretary-General finds it unacceptable that the Sri Lankan authorities have failed to prevent the disruption of the normal functioning of the United Nations offices in Colombo as a result of unruly protests organized and led by a cabinet minister of the Government.

In light of the evolving situation, he is recalling the United Nations Resident Coordinator, Mr. Neil Buhne, to New York for consultations. He has also decided that the UNDP Regional Centre in Colombo will be closed.

The Secretary-General calls upon the Government of Sri Lanka to live up to its responsibilities towards the United Nations as host country, so as to ensure continuation of the vital work of the Organization to assist the people of Sri Lanka without any further hindrance.

UN එකේ බලු පැනල්

2010-06-24T12:56:00.000-07:00

මේ පැනල් එක ලංකාවත් එක්ක වෛරයෙන් පලිගන්න , ලංකාව හපාකන්න උසිගන්නපු බලු පැනල් එකක්.

මුලින්ම මෙහෙම පැනල් පත් කරන්න එ.ජා. මහලේකම්ට එ.ජාතීන්ගේ ව්‍යවස්ථාවෙන් කිසිම බලයක් නැහැ. පැනල් පත් කරන්නන්ම, එ.ජා. ආරක්ෂක මන්ඩලයෙන් හරි, එ.ජා. මානව හිමිකම් මන්ඩලයෙන් හරි, වෙනත් මොන බලු මන්ඩලයකින් හරි මහලේකම්ගෙන ඉල්ලීමක් කරන්න ඕන. තමන්ට තනිතීරන ගන්න එ.ජා. මහලේකම් ලෝක ජනාධිපති නෙමෙයි.

මීට අමතරව, ගිය අවුරුද්දේ, එ.ජා. මානව හිමිකම් මන්ඩලයේ සාමාජික රටවල්, ලංකාව පිලිබදව කිසි විමර්ශනයක් අවශ්‍ය නැහැයි කියලා වැඩි චන්දයෙන් පනතකුත් සම්මත කරා.
මේ සේරම මැද මහලේකම් පැනල් පත්කරපු එකෙන් පේනවා, මේක ලංකාව වැරදිකරු කරන්න පූර්ව නිගමනයකින් පත්කරපු බලු පැනල් එකක් බව.

මහලේකම් එ.ජා ව්‍යවස්ථාව උල්ලගනය කරගෙන, එ.ජ. සංගම්යේ මන්ඩල වල නිර්දේශ නොතකා මේ පැනල් පත් කිරීමෙන පෙනවා මෙක කරන්න මහලේකම්ට වෙන සුපිරි බලවතෙක් ගෙන් ප්‍රබල බලකිරීමක් තිබුනු බව.

වෙනත් අදිසි හස්තයක බල පෑම් මත්, එ.ජා සගම්යේ නීති උල්ලගනය කරගෙන පත්කරන නීතිවිරෝධී, අවජාතක බලු පැනල් වලින් අපට අපක්ෂපාතී පරීක්ෂනයක් බලාපොරොත්තුවෙන්න බැහැ.

මීටත් අමතරව මේ බලු පැනල් එකේ ලොක්කා, මීට කලින් ලකාවට ඇවිත් ලකාවේ පරිපාලනයත් එක්ක ගැටුම ඇතිකරගත්ත කෙනෙක්. එ.ජා මහලෙකම්ට ලංකාවට හානියක් කරන්න, මඩ ගහන්න, මීට වඩා හොද ගොය්යෙක් හොයාගන්න බැහැ.

දැන් ලංකාව මේ බලු පැනල් එකට ප්‍රබලව විරුද්ධ වීම නිසා මුං බයවෙලා කියනවා ,හා හා අපි LTTE එකේ මානව හිමිකම් උල්ලගනය කිරීම ගැනත් හොයනවා කියලා.
මේක බලු පැනල් එකක් කියනන තවත් හොද සාක්ෂියක්, LTTE එකේ මානව හිමිකම් උල්ලගනය කිරීම් හොයන්න මුන්ට අවුරුදු 30 කට පස්සෙද ඇස් ඇරුනේ? හොදයි ඕකෙන් ඔප්පුවුනොත් LTTE මානව හිමිකම් උල්ලගනය කලා කියල (මටනම් සැකයි) නඩු දාන්නේ ප්‍රභාකරන්ගේ අම්මටද?

පසුගිය යුද්ද කාලේ එ.ජා සංගමයට අනුබද්ධිත UNICEF වගේ ආයතන වලින් එකට විවිධාකාරයෙන් උදව් කලා කියලා අපි දැක්කා. විමල් වීරවස මන්ත්‍රීතුමා මේවා ගැන පාර්ලිමෙන්තුවේ සතිපතාම පාහේ විශේෂ ප්‍රකාෂ වලින් හෙලි කලා.
මෙවා හෙලිවෙනකොට එකේ ලකා නියෝජිත ජෙනිෆර් ටේලර් (Jennifer Taylor) ලංකාව හැරලා පැනලා ගියා. එ.ජා මහලේකම් මෙවා ගැන හොයන්න පැනල් පත්කරාද?
යුද්ධකාලේ LTTE එකට උදව්කරපු, දැන් තමන්ගෙම ව්‍යවස්ථාව උල්ලගනය කරගෙන නීතිවිරොධීව වැඩකරන එ.ජ. මහලෙකම් බන්කී මූන ගැනවත් මිනිහගේ කිසිම බලු පැනල් එකක් ගැනවත් අපිට කිසි විශ්වාසයක් නැහැ, අපි ඔය බලු පැනල් වල තීරන තඹෙකට ගනන් ගන්නේවත් නැහැ.

2010-05-31T22:29:00.001-07:00

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Noam Chomsky: "The Center Cannot Hold: Rekindling the Radical Imagination"

2010-05-31T09:40:00.000-07:00

Rekindling the Radical Imagination - Piven, Jones, Roy & Chomsky, March 21, 2010 from pdxjustice Media Productions on Vimeo.

Is the Tea Party movement racist?

2010-05-20T12:16:00.000-07:00

The Rage Is Not About Health Care

March 28, 2010

Op-Ed Columnist

By FRANK RICH

THERE were times when last Sunday’s great G.O.P. health care implosion threatened to bring the thrill back to reality television. On ABC’s “This Week,” a frothing and filibustering Karl Rove all but lost it in a debate with the Obama strategist David Plouffe. A few hours later, the perennially copper-faced Republican leader John Boehner revved up his “Hell no, you can’t!” incantation in the House chamber — instant fodder for a new viral video remixing his rap with will.i.am’s “Yes, we can!” classic from the campaign. Boehner, having previously likened the health care bill to Armageddon, was now so apoplectic you had to wonder if he had just discovered one of its more obscure revenue-generating provisions, a tax on indoor tanning salons.

But the laughs evaporated soon enough. There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. And as the week dragged on, and reports of death threats and vandalism stretched from Arizona to Kansas to upstate New York, the F.B.I. and the local police had to get into the act to protect members of Congress and their families.

How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht. The weapon of choice for vigilante violence at Congressional offices has been a brick hurled through a window. So far.

No less curious is how disproportionate this red-hot anger is to its proximate cause. The historic Obama-Pelosi health care victory is a big deal, all right, so much so it doesn’t need Joe Biden’s adjective to hype it. But the bill does not erect a huge New Deal-Great Society-style government program. In lieu of a public option, it delivers 32 million newly insured Americans to private insurers. As no less a conservative authority than The Wall Street Journal editorial page observed last week, the bill’s prototype is the health care legislation Mitt Romney signed into law in Massachusetts. It contains what used to be considered Republican ideas.

Yet it’s this bill that inspired G.O.P. congressmen on the House floor to egg on disruptive protesters even as they were being evicted from the gallery by the Capitol Police last Sunday. It’s this bill that prompted a congressman to shout “baby killer” at Bart Stupak, a staunch anti-abortion Democrat. It’s this bill that drove a demonstrator to spit on Emanuel Cleaver, a black representative from Missouri. And it’s this “middle-of-the-road” bill, as Obama accurately calls it, that has incited an unglued firestorm of homicidal rhetoric, from “Kill the bill!” to Sarah Palin’s cry for her followers to “reload.” At least four of the House members hit with death threats or vandalism are among the 20 political targets Palin marks with rifle crosshairs on a map on her Facebook page.

When Social Security was passed by Congress in 1935 and Medicare in 1965, there was indeed heated opposition. As Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post, Alf Landon built his catastrophic 1936 presidential campaign on a call for repealing Social Security. (Democrats can only pray that the G.O.P. will “go for it” again in 2010, as Obama goaded them on Thursday, and keep demanding repeal of a bill that by September will shower benefits on the elderly and children alike.) When L.B.J. scored his Medicare coup, there were the inevitable cries of “socialism” along with ultimately empty rumblings of a boycott from the American Medical Association.

But there was nothing like this. To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both laws passed by similar majorities in Congress; the Civil Rights Act received even more votes in the Senate (73) than Medicare (70). But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance.

The apocalyptic predictions then, like those about health care now, were all framed in constitutional pieties, of course. Barry Goldwater, running for president in ’64, drew on the counsel of two young legal allies, William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, to characterize the bill as a “threat to the very essence of our basic system” and a “usurpation” of states’ rights that “would force you to admit drunks, a known murderer or an insane person into your place of business.” Richard Russell, the segregationist Democratic senator from Georgia, said the bill “would destroy the free enterprise system.” David Lawrence, a widely syndicated conservative columnist, bemoaned the establishment of “a federal dictatorship.” Meanwhile, three civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.

That a tsunami of anger is gathering today is illogical, given that what the right calls “Obamacare” is less provocative than either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Medicare, an epic entitlement that actually did precipitate a government takeover of a sizable chunk of American health care. But the explanation is plain: the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964.

In fact, the current surge of anger — and the accompanying rise in right-wing extremism — predates the entire health care debate. The first signs were the shrieks of “traitor” and “off with his head” at Palin rallies as Obama’s election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since — from Gov. Rick Perry’s kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer to “You lie!” piercing the president’s address to Congress last fall like an ominous shot.

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

If Congressional Republicans want to maintain a politburo-like homogeneity in opposition to the Democrats, that’s their right. If they want to replay the petulant Gingrich government shutdown of 1995 by boycotting hearings and, as John McCain has vowed, refusing to cooperate on any legislation, that’s their right too (and a political gift to the Democrats). But they can’t emulate the 1995 G.O.P. by remaining silent as mass hysteria, some of it encompassing armed militias, runs amok in their own precincts. We know the end of that story. And they can’t pretend that we’re talking about “isolated incidents” or a “fringe” utterly divorced from the G.O.P. A Quinnipiac poll last week found that 74 percent of Tea Party members identify themselves as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, while only 16 percent are aligned with Democrats.

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, some responsible leaders in both parties spoke out to try to put a lid on the resistance and violence. The arch-segregationist Russell of Georgia, concerned about what might happen in his own backyard, declared flatly that the law is “now on the books.” Yet no Republican or conservative leader of stature has taken on Palin, Perry, Boehner or any of the others who have been stoking these fires for a good 17 months now. Last week McCain even endorsed Palin’s “reload” rhetoric.

Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.

•

Correction: Timothy Geithner’s title at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York was president and chief executive officer, not chairman, as I wrote here last week.

Rand Paul on Civil rights act

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The Prageeth Ekneligoda Abduction

2010-05-08T17:30:00.000-07:00

By C.A.Chandraprema
Political Correspondent-The Island

Over the past few months, there has been quite an issue created over the disappearance of a ‘journalist’ by the name of Prageeth Ekneligoda. I have remained silent on this disappearance up to now, for a purpose. Now however, irrespective of the purpose I had in mind, I have been compelled to break my silence on this issue because Sunanda Deshapriya writing to the Ravaya last week, said quoting Prageeth’s wife Sandya, that the first time Ekneligoda is said to have been ‘abducted’ around August 2009, it was I who had got him released. Of course Deshapriya has not mentioned me by name, but referred to a mediaman attached to an English language newspaper. This is a reference to me. I was not very surprised at seeing this because a few weeks back, I got a call from Sandya telling me that she had got to know from one Gunadasa Jayalath, a close friend of Prageeth’s who works as a coordinating secretary to deputy minister Salinda Dissanayake, that the first time Prageeth disappeared, in August last year, I who had saved him.

What is strange is that I know both Prageeth and Sandya. If I had saved Prageeth from abductors last year, why would Sandya have had to hear it from a third party? Prageeth should have told Sandya himself, and they should have prepared a good meal for me at home and introduced me to their sons as the uncle who saved their father’s life. In addition to that, a photograph of me should have been placed below the Buddha statue in their home, and I should have been worshipped day and night. But none of this happened. To Sandya Ekneligoda, it does not seem strange that her husband never told her that it was I who had rescued him the first time he had been abducted. This incongruity is a pointer to the nature of the campaign that has been drummed up over the disappearance of Ekneligoda.

Political activist

I have known Prageeth Ekneligoda for well over twenty years. It was Prageeth who designed the cover of my book ‘Kolapata Samajaya’ in 1997. It was some people known to Prageeth who computer typeset the book as well. The reason why I said not a word about his disappearance is so as to be in a position to make an intervention on his behalf if it became necessary. Making known my views on his disappearance publicly would not have helped Prageeth in any way. However, I believe it would not be in my best interests to keep quiet any longer. The first thing to get cleared is who Prageeth is. I am probably the only employee of Upali Newspapers who had even heard of someone called Prageeth Ekneligoda even though he is supposed to be a journalist. C.J.Amaratunga a staff columnist to the Lankadeepa would be the only person at Wijaya Newspapers who would have known him in that media institution. I doubt whether anybody at Sirasa TV, Swarnavahini or Derana had ever heard of him. Even Amaratunga and I knew him only as a left wing political activist and not as a journalist.

Very few journalists in the newspapers and TV and radio stations that abound in this country had ever heard of Prageeth until his disappearance. The reason for that is that Prageeth was never a journalist. He made a living as a freelance graphics artist. He had various small businesses dealing with printing, typesetting or graphics at various times in his life. He was also a freewheeling intellectual and a left wing political activist. I got to know him in the 1980s as a left wing political activist. I believe he had worked with Dr Newton Goonesinghe and helped him with his research projects. Prageeth had an intellectual bent. He had plenty of ideas on politics and how things should be. However he was never even a freelance journalist. He has published a few articles in various publications. If an occasional contributor can be called a journalist or a mediaman, then quite a few of those who write to our letters to the editor page are also journalists. Long time regular contributors will have to be designated ‘senior journalists’.

First disappearance

Even if he had wanted to, Prageeth could never have become a journalist or media man because he had a stilted left wing intellectual style of writing that nobody, not even intellectuals, could understand. When he spoke he did not make things seem so complicated, but his writing was incomprehensible even to those familiar with his line of thinking. This claim that he was a journalist was due to his association with the website lanka e-news. But there too, according to Bennet Rupasinghe its editor, he had been only an occasional contributor and not even a regular freelance contributor. Had lanka e-news regularly published the analyses that Prageeth wrote, they would have had to close down the website because nobody would have understood what he was writing. So Prageeth was never a journalist, but a graphics artist and a freewheeling intellectual. This will answer the question why so few journalists or media men in this country had ever heard of a media personality called Prageeth Ekneligoda until he disappeared.

Now we come to the question of Prageeth’s disappearance. This apparently, was not the first time that Prageeth had disappeared. Around August last year, Prageeth had told his friends that he had been abducted and released by an unidentified gang. Nelson Edirisinghe is a veteran left wing activist and long time buddy of Prageeth’s. Nelson now works for minister Douglas Devananda as a coordinating secretary. Last year, Prageeth told Nelson that he had been abducted and released and he had described the incident as follows - he had been returning to Colombo from Dambulla and at the Pettah bus stand, he had got into a bus bound for Homagama to go home. At that stage Prageeth had sensed that there was a man following him. When he reached his bus stop, he had got off and the suspicious man had got off with him. There was a white van parked along the road that led to his house and he had been bundled into the van and handcuffed and blindfolded. He could not see where they took him because of the blindfold, but he had been taken to a house and with the blindfold still on, he had been chained to a bolt driven into the floor. He had spent the entire night on the floor. He had not been asked any questions, but some recorded ‘noises’ had apparently been played, (probably to deprive him of sleep). In the morning, they had removed the blindfold, told him to wash his face and said that they had made a mistake and that he was not the man they wanted. At around 10.00am they had dropped him off at a quarry somewhere in the Malabe-Athurugiriya area from where he had made his way back home.

Mistaken identity

Naturally, Nelson did not believe a word of it. Neither would anyone else who heard the story. A man may be arrested by mistake in a cordon and search operation where mass arrests are made. But there could be no case of mistaken identity when a man was under surveillance and had been followed in Dambulla and there was another man to follow him from the Pettah bus stand, with a white van waiting for him on the road to his house. This would suggest that he had been watched for days, if not weeks or even months, before the abductors made their move. There can be no question of mistaken identity in such an operation and only very wanted men would be followed in that manner. There were instances that we heard of in the past, where uninvolved people had been abducted to get information about third parties and had been released after obtaining the necessary information. In such instances, the abductions were obviously carried out deliberately and were not ‘mistakes’. Prageeth’s was the only instance that anybody has ever heard of a man being abducted by mistake. Such things are not within the realm of possibility. Besides almost all abductions reported in the recent past were those of Tamils. Prageeth is a Sinhalese. Could it ever be possible that some security agency had followed a rare Sinhala suspect and nabbed the wrong man by mistake?

Naturally, not even the most sympathetic listener would have believed a word of what Prageeth said. Later he went to see yet another close friend of his, the afore mentioned Gunadasa Jayalath also a veteran left wing activist now working as coordinating secretary to deputy minister Salinda Dissanayake. Jayalath used to be a left wing activist monk under the name of Karambe Gunananda. He has since given up robes. When Prageeth told Jayalath about his first abduction. Jayalath asked him why the government would want to abduct him. To this, Prageeth had replied that he had once stated that both the LTTE and the government had used chemical weapons during the last stages of the war and that the government may have been unhappy about that. Jayalath then asked him, if he had been taken in for something like that, how he had managed to get out. To this Prageeth replied that some influential person like Chandraprema (Yes myself!) would have brought pressure on the government to release him. He had not stated this as a certainty but as what probably would have happened. Prageeth had all along been stressing the need to go into hiding as there were people after him. He asked Jayalath for some money. Jayalath gave Prageeth Rs. 300.

Hearsay

Jayalath obviously told Prageeth’s wife Sandya about what they had discussed the last time they met, and it was on the basis of this that Sandya phoned me saying that Jayalath had told her that I had saved Prageeth the first time he had been abducted. The information flow seems to be going in a circle here. Prageeth tells Jayalath that I may have saved him, and Jayalath tells his wife Sandya that Prageeth told him that Chandraprema may have been his saviour and Sandya phones me probably in the expectation that I could save him a second time and she also tells Sunanda Deshapriya that according to Edirisinghe and Jayalath it was Chandraprema who had saved Prageeth the first time. But the fact is that I never knew of Prageeth’s first ‘abduction’ until Prageethfriend Nelson Edirisinghe told me about it much later. Indeed had I at the time of his first abduction known that he had been abducted and had I known that some state agency was involved, I would have got a shed constructed in front of the Fort Railway station and gone on a hunger strike, not to get Prageeth released, but to protest against the fact that this most powerful of post independence governments led by the most popular political leader that this country has seen in recent times, had fallen to the level of considering it necessary to abduct a harmless, penniless, insignificant non-entity like Prageeth Ekneligoda.

Prageeth was against the Rajapaksa regime no doubt, but that meant nothing. He was always anti-establishment. When the UNP was in power before 1994, he was against the UNP. When Chandrika was in power, he was against Chandrika. When Mahinda is in power he is against Mahinda. There was no harm that he could ever do to any government. Even if he had written anti-government articles every day, nobody would have read them. Even though many left wing activists that Prageeth associated with, have become well known personalities, Prageeth was always a non-entity until his ‘second abduction’ made his name widely known. Prageeth’s anti-government activities counted for nothing. In the 1980s when we were young men, there used to be a Marxist-Trotskyist organization called ‘Kamkaru Mawatha’ the leaders of which who used to openly say that an armed struggle should be launched against the government. Despite the fact that the J.R. Jayewardene government was allergic to Marxists, even they took not the slightest notice of ‘Kamkaru Mawatha’. Prageeth’s anti-government activities were also in the same league.

Nonentity

In any case, even if he was involved with a group of like-minded people, Prageeth would never play a central role in anything. He was always on the periphery of things. Nobody really believed he had ever really been abducted in August 2009 and I don’t either. What Sunanda Deshapriya had written in last week’s Ravaya is what had been told to him by Sandya Ekneligoda. She had apparently told him that both Gunadasa Jayalath the co-ordinating secretary to deputy minister Salinda Dissanayake and Nelson Edirisinghe the coordinating secretary to minister Douglas Devananda had told her that I had been instrumental in getting Prageeth released the first time he had been abducted. I am in contact with Nelson Edirisinghe and he had most certainly not said anything of the sort to Sandya. When I asked Jayalath over the phone last week about this, he too denied that he had said that I had been instrumental in getting Prageeth released and that it was Prageeth himself who had told him that it was ‘probably’ I who may have saved him the first time.

Sandya Ekneligoda is involved in deliberately spreading falsehoods around. I see this whole episode as a massive scam and my name is being used in an attempt to establish that Prageeth was indeed abducted the first time. If I had rescued him, then he had to have been abducted. Well, I resent my name being used for such a purpose and this is what compels me to say publicly, what I told Sandya privately when she turned up at The Island office asking me for help.

Prageeth Ekneligoda disappeared without a trace about 48 hours before the presidential election in Jaunary this year. I first heard about the disappearance over the Sirasa TV. His wife Sandya lost no time in blaming the government for the disappearance. Later, when she phoned me, she told me that Prageeth had gone to see his long time associate Gunadasa Jayalath coordinating secretary to deputy minister Salinda Dissanayake and that he had been told by the latter that his name was on the government’s hit list and that after this, Prageeth had been living in fear. Now I knew this Gunadasa Jayalath but I had had no contact with him for nearly twenty years. So I phoned another one of Prageeth’s long term associates Nelson Edirisinghe the co-ordinating secretary to minister Douglas Devananda and asked him whether he had heard anything about Jayalath telling Sandya that Prageeth had been on the government’s hit list.

Nelson just laughed it off and said that when Jayalath and Prageeth met, they would have been drinking and that neither of them would know what the other said. When Sandya came to The Island office and repeated this story that Jayalath had told Prageeth that he was on the government’s hit list, I told her that they had been drinking the last time those two met, and let the matter rest at that. However after Sunanda Deshapriya mentioned my name last week, I got the impression that various people’s names were being used to establish that Prageeth has actually been abducted. I am supposed to be the friend who saved Prageeth the first time he had been abducted, then Jayalath was supposedly the friend who passed inside information to Prageeth and warned him that he was on the government’s hit list. I decided to make some further inquiries and I phoned Jayalath and asked him whether he had told Prageeth that he was on the government’s hit list. Jayalath flatly denied saying any such thing.

I believe Jayalath. He’s just a co-ordinating secretary to a deputy minister and in no position to know who was in, or not in a government hit list. Even his employer deputy minister Salinda Dissanayake would not be privy to such information. If a government prepares a hit list, copies of it are not circulated to the personal staff of government MPs and deputy ministers. What I find suspicious about this whole thing is this pretence of naivety. Prageeth is an intelligent man and quite capable of understanding that a minor functionary like Gunadasa Jayalath would not be privy to top secret decisions made by the government. Yet Prageeth’s wife tells me with a straight face that her husband had been living in fear after Jayalath told him that he was on the government’s hit list. In doing so, she was insulting my intelligence. What is even more galling is that this lady told me once again with a straight face that this same Jayalath had told her that it was I who had saved Prageeth the first time he had been abducted. She should have asked herself why it was that Prageeth himself had not told her that without leaving it to third parties to tell her who saved her husband? And wouldn’t she have been feeling guilty at not having invited me home for a meal after such a favour? This show of extreme naivety is just a pretense to use various people’s names to give credence to the fact that Prageeth has been abducted for the second time.

When I got a call from Sandya telling me that Jayalath had told her that it was I who had got Prageeth released the first time he had been abducted. I told her that Prageeth has had no dealings with me for more than three years. The last time I saw him face to face was perhaps nine years ago. For some years I was overseas and Prageeth did telephone me after I got back, but then he suddenly cut off connections with me for no apparent reason and since it was always he who contacted me and not the other way about, all contact between us ceased. I told Sandya at that stage, that I was sorry to disappoint her but that I had nothing to do with his ‘release’. At that time, out of politeness, I did not tell Sandya what my theory was regarding Prageeth’s ‘disappearance’.

Sandya Ekneligoda seems to be engaged in creating a picture using various people’s names including mine. First she says that Jayalath had said that Prageeth is on the government’s hit list. Then she says that it was I who got Prageeth released the first time he had been abducted. By propagating such nonsense she is trying to establish that he was in fact abducted the first time. I do not believe for one moment that Prageeth was ever abducted, the first time or even the second time. Prageeth may have made some money in fits and starts, but he was never really well off, and life was always a struggle. He has never asked me for money, but people who were closer to him like Nelson and Jayalath had been giving him small amounts of money from time to time. My theory is that he staged his abduction the first time with the hope of being able to obtain political asylum overseas with his family. However since not even his closest friends believed his story, the plan ended up as a flop.

When it came to the second attempt, Prageeth was better prepared with a coterie of friends associated with General Fonseka’s election campaign to support him to stage a better disappearance as an election gimmick. At the last presidential election, Prageeth supported General Fonseka along with quite a few former left wing political activists. Prageeth was always an anti-establishment type. His disappearance took place in the last 48 hours before the election. The plan I believe was to come out after Fonseka won claiming he had been released by his captors after the government lost the election, and to claim political asylum on the grounds that his life was in danger. However, Fonseka lost the election and the plan went awry with Prageeth unable to come out of hiding. Now the stage managers of this play have been trying to take it in a different direction by using this ‘disappearance’ as an ongoing issue to keep ‘media freedom’ under discussion and Sri Lanka in the international spotlight. The reason why I never said a word about this abduction was so as to be in a position to bail out a friend for old time’s sake. But I have been compelled to make my theories public because my name is being used to give credence to these cock and bull stories about Prageeth’s multiple abductions. When Sandya met me at the Island office, I told her point blank that this was a scam and that Prageeth should come out of hiding and I will intercede with whoever I can to ‘shape things up’ so that he will not have to be behind bars for misleading the police and disturbing the public peace. I told Sandya that at the last stages Prageeth had been associating with ‘gamekarayas’ who were quite capable of staging something like this, especially when it meshed with Prageeth’s own desire to stage an abduction and get political asylum.

In fact at the 2001 parliamentary election Prageeth and I were involved in just such a little game. In 2001, the UNP was up against two enemies the PA and the JVP. Prageeth came up with a brilliant idea to discredit the JVP. He knew of a young man who had participated in the JVP’s attack on the Dalada Maligawa in the late 1980s. This young man was now unable to go back to his village because he was a noted JVP activist and the JVP had no programme to help people like him who were no longer with the party and wanted to lead normal lives but could not do so because they had criminal cases pending against them for deeds done during the JVP insurrection. What Prageeth suggested was that the public should be reminded that it was not just the LTTE that attacked the Dalada Maligawa and that the JVP also had done so earlier. I thought it was a good idea and told him to bring the young man. After meeting this young man, I took them both to see Lasantha Wickrematunga.

Lasantha got his former wife Raine to interview him on the spot for the Sunday Leader. Later Chamudita Samarawickrema interviewed him for TNL. Prageeth told me that this young man will need to go underground for a while after he makes these revelations and that he would need some money. I told this to Lasantha, and he spoke to Malik Samarawickrema and got something like Rs. 200,000 for the young man so that he could go underground. So a gimmick like staging his own disappearance on the eve of an election, in order to bring the government into disrepute, is well within Prageeth’s capacity. The little game that Prageeth and I pulled off was a case of revealing the truth. But what is happening now is nothing but fraud!

Some may wonder whether anybody can remain in hiding for so long. Prageeth is an old left wing activist. In the 1980s, he helped some left wing activists including those belonging to Dayan Jayatilleke’s group, to hide from the J.R.Jayawardene government. UG’ (underground) we called it at that time and when somebody goes underground, it will be for months and years not just weeks. Rohana Wijeweera was underground for over six years from 1983 until he was killed. Prageeth comes from a left wing subculture for whom hiding for months even years is nothing. Besides Prageeth had contacts in various remote parts of the country, people whom he had met probably when he was helping Newton Goonesinghe with his research work. If anyone can hide for an extended period of time, it’s Prageeth.

There seems to be a well orchestrated attempt to establish that has been abducted and that it has been done by the government. Some weeks back, I was surprised to see in an article by Victor Ivan where he had said that according to what some of Prageeth’s close associates had told him, Prageeth had been instrumental in penning a scurrilous article on the sex life of a certain minister of the government, which was published in a certain website. Even though I was surprised to see this comment, I did not pursue the matter or talk to Ivan about it because my policy at that stage was to ignore the matter until Prageeth sent me a message asking for my help. Last week however, after Sunanda Deshapriya mentioned me name as Prageeth’s saviour the first time he was abducted, I decided to pursue the matter. I told Ivan that the Prageeth I knew, never discussed sex, did not appear to have a sexual imagination, and he never uttered even an obscenity in his day to day speech. My firm conviction is that Prageeth could not have written a scurrilous article about anybody’s sex life. Even if he had tried to write something like that, it would have been a treatise on human sexuality and Marxist theory which nobody could have read or understood. Moreover, if that website wanted a scurrilous article about somebody’s sex life, they didn’t need Prageeth for that. They had past masters at that game. While Prageeth may engage in revolutionary activity like hiding political fugitives and organizing little political games to discredit an opponent, writing scurrilous articles about somebody’s sex life is completely out of character for him.

As readers of the Ravaya will know, Ivan had over the past couple of months, declared war on the culture of passing off unsubstantiated, scurrilous stories as news. Ivan’s view was that if a journalist publishes unsubstantiated stories and slander as news and some physical violence is done to him by the aggrieved parties, that cannot be construed a suppression of media freedom. When someone who is trusted tells Victor Ivan that Prageeth had been in the business of writing unsubstantiated scurrilous articles for websites, that is basically the end of the road as far as Ivan is concerned. Naturally, Ivan made public what had been told to him by Prageeth’s friends. That is exactly what these people wanted. The moment Ivan says that Prageeth was in the business of writing scurrilous articles, the implication would be that what happens to him after that is his own lookout, and that he was indeed under threat.

I spoke to one of the individuals who had convinced Ivan that Prageeth had authored a scurrilous website article about a certain minister. This individual knows that I know Prageeth very well whereas he knew that Ivan did not. So the stories he told Ivan and myself were different. What he told me was that Prageeth could not have authored any such scurrilous article. I phoned Ivan and told him that this story of a scurrilous article had been planted on him. Those involved in this scam, have been hard put to find some motive that the government may have to cause the disappearance of Prageeth. Nobody believes that a government would want to make an unknown non-entity like Prageeth disappear. So a motive had to be created, and one way to do it was to create the suspicion that somebody in the government may have had a motive to do away with Prageeth because of something he had written - even a scurrilous article would be better than nothing for this purpose. The best part of it was that the very person who had planted that story of a scurrilous article written by Prageeth on Victor Ivan had later told Nelson Edirisinghe (mentioned earlier in this article) that he will never speak to Ivan again because of what the latter had written about Prageeth in the Ravaya!

What is noteworthy is that this individual who had been feeding wrong information to Ivan is not one of Prageeth’s enemies but a friend, and one who worked with Prageeth in General Fonseka’s campaign. Why would an old friend plant stories about Prageeth writing scurrilous articles unless this was for some purpose? I see this as nothing but a desperate attempt to create a motive for the government to abduct Prageeth. What is now plain is that this was a gimmick of the Fonseka election campaign gone wrong. By staging the disappearance of Prageeth in the last 48 hours before the day of the election, the objective was to bring the government into disrepute by making them go into an election with the abduction of a ‘journalist’ in the headlines. By the time the public would get to know that Prageeth was no journalist, the election would be over and Fonseka would be in power. Now things have gone wrong and Prageeth cannot come out. So there are attempts to build up a false case to the effect that he was wanted by the government.

I regret having to make public my theories on the alleged abduction of Prageeth Ekneligoda. If given a chance, my choice would have been to make a discreet intervention if Prageeth asked for my help to come out of hiding. However the use of my name, in an attempt to turn a falsehood into a fact leaves me no choice but to make my views known. This whole disappearance or abduction of Prageeth Ekneligoda is in my view a fraud and his wife and some others in the Fonseka election campaign are involved in this. When he met Jayalath the last time, (which was after his supposed first abduction) Prageeth had been talking about the need to go into hiding because of the threat against him. When he met Nelson Edirisinghe, once again he had been talking about the threats he had to face. After his second disappearance, Prageeth’s friends have been comparing notes. A veteran left wing activist by the name of Kalyana Karunaratne had told Nelson Edirisinghe that he had met Prageeth about a month before his second disappearance and he had been talking about the need to go into hiding and asked him for help. In closing what I have to say in public is what I told Prageeth’s wife in private – there is no point in continuing with this pantomime any longer. Prageeth should come out now and give his friends a chance to ‘shape’ things up so that he could get back to normal life.

However I am aware that this may not happen. There is now a campaign calling for the ‘release’ of Prageeth Ekneligoda. Demonstrations are being held, books are being published, exhibitions are being held, press conferences called, statements issued by international media organizations, the Mahanayakes are being met, meetings with the president are being sought, money is obviously coming in from overseas, and for the first time in his life Prageeth’s name has become widely known. A whole new cottage industry has come up. One may ask whether Prageeth would want to be away from his family in order to keep this fraud going. The fact is that in normal life, he was in dire financial straits and had taken the Rs. 300 given to him by Gunadasa Jayalath. He had even been asking Nelson Edirisinghe for reloads for his mobile phone. These are the unvarnished facts of this case. Prageeth was penniless and his sons were growing up - the typical profile of a man who would want political asylum overseas, where he will get a dole and will not have to struggle for day to day survival, and there will be subsidized housing, health care and free ‘overseas education’ for his sons. The scams that various people may be involved in do not interest me, so long as my name is not used to perpetrate a fraud.

Failure Is A Failed Strategy

2010-04-12T20:53:00.000-07:00

By Paul Krugman

One thing that keeps coming up in comments, both here and on my column, is the widespread belief that all we need to do on the banking front is (a) break up the big banks, so that none of them are too big to fail (b) promise not to bail out any banks in the future. That way, the claim goes, bankers will know that they will face dire consequences if they misbehave, and market discipline will do the rest.

Dream on.

There are at least three things crucially wrong with this argument.

First, even when banks can fail, bank managers and/or owners have an incentive to make risky bets; after all, their downside is limited — at worst, the bank goes under — while their upside isn’t: if they can earn high profits for a few years, they can walk away with a lot. Remember that in the S&L crisis of the 1980s, quite a few people made out like bandits while running their banks into the ground.

Second, a wave of bank runs that brings down many small banks can do as much damage as the failure of a few big banks. The biggest banks didn’t fail in 1930-1931, when a generalized run on the system began with the failure of the 28th largest bank in America; nonetheless, the results were catastrophic. The idea that we can cheerfully let banks fail as long as none of them is big is just wrong.

In fact, we know what a system in which banks are allowed to fail looks like: that’s how the US banking system worked before the creation of the Fed. And you know what? It wasn’t a smoothly functioning system, with sound banking enforced by market discipline; it was a system periodically wracked by “panics” that destroyed peoples’ savings and plunged the economy into recession.

Finally, because that’s what really happens when banks are allowed to fail freely, promises not to bail out banks in the future aren’t credible. Fail to reform finance now, and there will be two, three, many TARPs in our future.

What is true is that there are bailouts and then there are bailouts. What has to be protected in a crisis are bank deposits and things like bank deposits — basically, bank-created money. Money market accounts and “repo” — very short-term loans in which businesses often park their funds — have to be protected to avoid 1930-31-type collapses. On the other hand, bank shareholders and long-term bondholders can be made to pay a price without collapsing the system.

Now, in 2008-2009 the shareholders were not cleaned out, and the bondholders left untouched; in part this was a policy decision, but it was also influenced by the lack of “resolution authority”: there was no clean, well-established route for seizing complex financial institutions. We can fix that, and deal with future Citigroups (one of which, given history, is likely to be … Citigroup) the way the FDIC deals with smaller banks: protect the depositors, clean out the shareholders.

But just letting banks fail isn’t going to happen — nor should it. In practice, talking about doing so is just an excuse to avoid real reform.

The Colomboans and the 2010 General Election

2010-04-10T21:14:00.000-07:00

by Malinda Seneviratne

A friend of mine alerted me to and interesting phenomenon in the results of the General Election in an email:

‘A quick glance at the Colombo GE 2010 results displays a complete disparity in the mindset of the people who live within the Colombo City Limits, Colombo 1 to 15 plus Dehiwela, and the rest of the suburbs.’

It was a foregone conclusion as far as I was concerned; the Colomboans would vote for the United National Party (UNP). A breakdown of the Colombo District results shows a stark divide. The most urban electorates (i.e. those within the jurisdiction of the Colombo Municipal Council plus Dehiwala) went to the UNP. The UNP got large chunks of the vote, ranging from 48.07% in Borella to 64.28% in Colombo West. Dehiwala was won narrowly, 44.14% to the 43.14% that the United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA) polled. In the other electorates the UNP polled between 22.83% (Kesbewa) and 38.21% (Ratmalana).

[It’s the UNF, i.e. the ‘United National Front’ we are talking about, but let’s not fool ourselves by giving too much credit to the several non-UNP three-wheel parties in that coalition].

People have a right to vote for the party/candidate of their choice. They have the right to stay at home on Election Day. We have a phenomenon, though. Those in Colombo prefer the UNP and here we have to consider the fact that in these electorates the Sinhalese are a minority. Today the electorates within Colombo municipal limits are the only ones that could be described as ‘UNP Strongholds’.

It is no secret that this is the preferred residence of the UNP’s traditional power-base, i.e. the business community, the rich, the English-speaking, the Anglicised. It is no secret that they are for the most part kepuwath kola types. This is not to say that there are no UNPers anywhere else of course. The UNP polled a total of 339,750 votes in the Colombo District and 2.13 million island-wide (not counting the Kandy and Trincomalee Districts). The 146,795 polled in the Colomboan-dominate electorates do not necessarily tell anything close to what could be called ‘a whole story’.

What is significant however is that these are the electorates that are dominated by the UNP and the ones which contain the addresses of the party leaders. We need to get some perspective, so let’s play with the related numbers.

The numbers that the UNP polled in the Colomboan electorates constitute just 14.83% of the total votes cast in the District and just 9.65% of the total number of electors. It is just 6.1% of the total number of votes that went the UNP way (excluding Kandy and Trincomalee; once these results are in, the proportion will shrink further, marginally of course).

Would any UNPer be bold enough to say that those who belong to this 6.1% of what can be termed the new UNP vote-base (I am being generous and throwing the floaters into the Elephant’s traditional vote basket) do not determine what is best for the party, does not set party agenda, deliberate on the nuts and bolts of party strategy in an election campaign and outside such exercises? I doubt it. These are the decision-makers.

Some years ago I read an observation about the Republican Party of the United States of America. ‘It began with Abraham Lincoln and ended with Dubya Bush!’ That says it all, the observer said. The United National Party has a corresponding tale: began with D.S. Senanayake and ended with Ranil Wickremesinghe. ‘Ended’ in both instances pointing to the present of course; parties don’t die that easily.

The UNP has essentially dropped the ‘N’ in the party name; there is no ‘nationalism’ to warrant the ‘National’ N in the acronym. The Colomboans, as many have pointed out, are nationalists only to the extent that they arrogantly believe that they not only comprise the ‘nation’, but believe that nationalism is coterminous with profit-making. To a large extent or a large number of these Colomboans assume that ‘West’ is ‘Best’, that we would have been better off had the British remained, that those who do not know English cannot think, are uncultured and in these and other ways deficient and uncivilized. That’s caricature I agree, but I am lampooning just to make a point.

The only reason I worry about the UNP’s dismal performance is that we have got a very weak opposition. I pointed out in a recent discussion that this by itself is not worrisome because we have the example of Sarath Muttetuwegama who in the eighties was a one-man opposition that was quite effective. The problem here is that the UNP leadership doesn’t have the kind of integrity, sense of responsibility and the nationalism that Muttetuwegama was endowed with. He might not have liked the term ‘nationalist’ given his ideological persuasions, but he was of and for the nation in ways that the Colomboan-cultured UNP leadership of the present day is certainly not.

My friend ended his email with this witty projection: ‘Someday, the City of Colombo may even seek a separate state under the Queen of England, who knows?’

I don’t think that Ranil Wickremesinghe would say this openly and I am pretty sure that most Colomboans wouldn’t have thought this was the ideal ‘way out’ although a lot of what would come to pass if this were to take place would probably make the majority of them quite happy. Still, it tells a story.

And it tells where the UNP has gone wrong and why. The breakdown deserves serious analysis by the UNP think-tanks (do they have any, one wonders) if they are interested in returning to power this side of being local puppets of some kind of invasion (a proposition which they would not say ‘no’ to, considering track record).

Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer who can be reached at malinsene@gmail.com

මිල්ලෙ සොයා අපි යනවා

2010-04-09T10:28:00.000-07:00

Hambantota to become Magampura

2010-04-06T19:06:00.000-07:00

The Island

The Hambantota District is to undergo a name change. The government has decided to rename it the Magampura District, Minister of Ports and Civil Aviation Chamal Rajapaksa said.

He said Hambantota had earlier been known as Magampura and the government had decided to revert to the old name.

"අපි සිංහල, රටත් සිංහල, අ‍හගෙන ඉන්නවා දෙමළා" - මහින්ද යාපනයේදී යකා නටයි

2010-04-05T15:16:00.000-07:00

Lanka Truth
"අපි සිංහල, රටත් සිංහල, අ‍හගෙන ඉන්නවා දෙමළා" - මහින්ද යාපනයේදී යකා නටයි

මහින්ද රාජපක්ෂ මහතා ඊයේ යාපනයේ පැවැති එක්සත් ජනතා නිදහස් සන්ධාන රැළියකදී දෙමළ ජනතාවට පහත් වචනයෙන් බැණ වැදී තිබේ. ඔහු එම රැලියේදී ඔහුගේ ටෙලිපොම්ටර් දෙක යොදාගෙන දෙමළ භාෂාවෙන් රැලිය අමතා ඇතත් ඔහු සිංහල භාෂාවෙන් ලියාගත් පිටපතටද වරද්දා උච්ඡාරණය කර තිබේ. එහිදී රැස්ව සිටි ජනතාව "හූ" තබා ඊට බාධා කර ඇත. ඊට කෝපවූ ජනාධිපතිවරයා " ඔව් අපි සිංහල, රටත් සිංහල, ඒක හින්ද අහගෙන ඉන්නවා දෙමළා. පණ්ඩිත කම් දොඩන් නැතිව. අහගෙන ඉන්න බැරි නම් යන්න" යැයි පවසා තිබේ. (අදාල හඩ පටය play.jpg)

එහිද ජනතාවගේ හූ හඩ තවත් වැඩිවූ අතර රාජපක්ෂ මහතා "නවතන්නේ නෑ මම, දැන් තමුසෙලා කෑගහපු හින්දා තවත් කතා කරනවා දෙමළෙන්" යැයි පවසා නැවතත් කතාව සිදුකිරීමට පටන් ගත් අතර ජනතාවගේ හූ හඩ වඩවඩාත් වැඩිවීම හේතුවෙන් අවසානයේ ඔහුට කතාව අතර මග නැවතීමට සිදුව ඇත. (අදාල හඩ පටයplay.jpg)

එම ස්ථානයේ සිටි මාධ්‍යවේදීන් පැවසුවේ රැලිය සදහා දෙමළ ජනතාව බලහත්කාරයෙන් සහභාගී කර ගෙන තිබූ බවත් රාජපක්ෂ මහතාගේ බැණ වැදීමෙන් අනතුරුව ඔවුන් එම ස්ථානයෙන් ඉවත්වීමට උත්සාහ කළද ආරක්ෂක නිලධාරීන් ඊට ඉඩ නොදුන් බවයි.

මෙම අවස්ථාව ආවරණය කළ නම හෙළි කිරීමට අකමැතිවූ මාධ්‍යවේදියකු පැවසුවේ යුද ජයග්‍රහණයෙන් පසු පාර්ලිමේන්තුවේදී මීට පසු සුළු ජාතීන් කියා කිසිවෙක් නොමැති බවත්, ඇත්තේ එකම ශ්‍රී ලාංකික ජනතාවක් බවත් පැවසුවේ මෙම ජනාධිපතිවරයාද යන ප්‍රශ්නය ඔහුට එහිදී නැගුණු බවයි.

From Lanka e news

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zzwms isxy,' rg;a isxy,' wyf.k bkakjd fou' mKaä;lï l;d lrkafk ke;=j' wyf.k bkak neß kï hkak'ZZ

Lanka news web

zzTõ wms isxy,' rg;a isxy,
ta yskaod wyf.k bkakjdZZ
ckdêm;sjrhd hdmkfha§ fou<>

Tõ wms isxy,' rg;a isxy,' tal yskaod wyf.k bkakjd" fou' mkaä;lï fodvkafka ke;sj wyf.k bkak neßkï hkjdZZ lshñka ckdêm;sjrhd wfm%a,a 01jk od hdmkfha meje;s ck/,sfha§ fou<>

Bfha ^01& hdmkfha fodf¾wmamd l%Svdx.kfha meje;s ue;sjrK m%pdrhl /,sfha§ ckdêm;sjrhd fg,sfm%dïgrh n,ñka fou<>

ckdêm;sjrhd tfia isxyf,ka nekjÈoa§ th f;areï .; fkdyelsj ;jÿrg;a lE .eiQ ck;dj yuqfõ ckdêm;sjrhd" zzkj;ajkafka keye uu' ±ka ;uqfia,d lE .ymq ksid uu ;j;a l;dlrkjd fouf

fuu ckyuqjg iyNd.S ùug fmr ckdêm;sjrhd hdmkfha kd.úydrg f.dia tys bÈlsÍug kshñ; ix>djdihg uq,a .,a ;enQ w;r bka miqj k,akQ¾ fldaú, jeomqod .ekSug f.dia ;sfí'

Sunday Times
Angry President tells jeering crowd to leave

President Mahinda Rajapaksa was jeered by a section of the multi-ethnic crowd while speaking in Tamil at a political rally in support of UPFA candidates in Vavuniya on Thursday.

The President reading from a teleprompter was addressing the crowd in Tamil when a section of the Sinhala crowd jeered. “I am also a Sinhalese just like you, but I will speak only in Tamil, and if you cannot understand, then leave the venue,” the President told those who were continuing to jeer and hoot.

Undeterred President Rajapaksa continued in Tamil and said “since you have tried to interrupt me I will continue to speak in Tamil.”

Later the President had summoned Vavuniya district UPFA candidate P. Sumathipala and warned him to restrain his supporters. This was after investigators found that supporters of Mr. Sumathipala were involved in the jeering.

Mr. Sumathipala told the Sunday Times his supporters were only cheering the President. This was the third occasion that there were disturbances when the President had been at a public rally, speaking in support of candidates contesting the upcoming general elections. Earlier in Kandy a section of the crowd booed when the President referred to Sarath Amunugama as the group leader for the Kandy district.

This was followed by a similar incident of jeering at a Galle meeting when the President referred to Sachin Vaas Gunawardene.

DBS Jeyaraj on twitter

There are a lot of malicious rumours spreading on the web that MR foul mouthed Tamils while addressing a political rally in Jaffna. Any sane person who reads such garbage can fathom that if MR really did that, that was politically suicidal for him and very inhumane in nature. No president with MR`s political standing will do that to himself. Well, Mervin Silva would do it, but not MR. Simply, He has no wish or reason to cause communal disharmony at this rally. He was there trying to patch up things. So, all these rumour mongering is the desperate effort of LTTE sympathisers and antinational forces to set the Tamil Sri Lankans against the Sinhalese. It is a pathetic effort and a very feeble one at that.

`News` about President Rajapaksa shouting at Tamils in Jaffna not true

from the twitter pages of D.B.S. Jeyaraj

`News` about President Rajapaksa shouting at Tamils who hooted at him for speaking in Tamil in Jaffna is not true. What really happened?

Mahinda was speaking at UPFA rally in Vavuniya and Wanni district candidate Sumathipala had transported large numbers of Sinhala supporters

When Mahinda spoke in Tamil some of these Sinhalese started hooting and shouted this is a Sinhala country, We are Sinhalese, Speak in Sinhala.

But Mahinda refused and replied-This is Sinhala country and you and I are Sinhalese but there are Tamil people here who want to hear me talk.

Mahinda advised the hecklers not to be smart `Pandithayas`&asked them to leave the venue if they did not want to listen to his Tamil speech.

When these elements continued jeering Mahinda said - since you are trying to stop me speaking in Tamil I will continue to talk in Tamil.

When the jeering went on Mahinda said in Tamil the more you make noise the more I will speak in Tamil& continued with his speech in Tamil.

Realising what was happening at that time the Tamils in the audience shouted and cheered Mahinda for his stand & drowned out the Sinhala hoots.

Some reports about the incident said that Mahinda had shouted in Jaffna at Tamils who were hooting him for mispronouncing some Tamil words.

These `controversial` reports led to news spreading that Mahinda had uttered racist remarks at Tamils jeering him for speaking`faulty`Tamil.

This was false& Mahinda deserves praise for chiding the Sinhala hecklers & for trying to speak in some Tamil at least when addressing Tamils.

Reports say that Mahinda reprimanded Wanni UPFA candidate Sumathipala for not preventing his `Sinhala`supporters from heckling the president.

The troubling fact is that some Sinhala UPFA supporters in Vavuniya could erupt into jeers&hoots against the President for talking in Tamil.

Sri Lankan Economy Accelerates at Fastest Pace in Five Quarters Sri Lankan Economy Accelerates at Fastest Pace in Five Quarters

2010-04-01T10:34:00.000-07:00

By Anusha Ondaatjie-Bloomb News

March 30 (Bloomberg) -- Sri Lanka’s economy expanded at the fastest pace in five quarters as the government stepped up spending on new roads and ports after the end of a quarter- century of civil war in the country.

Gross domestic product rose 6.2 percent in the three months ended Dec. 31 from a year earlier after gaining 4.2 percent in the previous quarter, the statistics department said in a statement in Colombo today.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was reelected for a six- year term in January after defeating the Tamil Tiger rebels in May, has pledged to spend $1 billion on ports, roads and power plants in 2010. Reconstruction in the $41 billion South Asian economy is boosting profit in companies including Tokyo Cement Co. Lanka Plc and Central Industries Plc.

“The infrastructure investments will have a spillover effect in the economy,” Saminda Weerasinghe, research manager at Acuity Stockbrokers Pvt. in Colombo, said before the report. “It will help even faster growth in the second half of 2010.”

Central Bank of Sri Lanka Governor Nivard Cabraal on March 18 maintained benchmark interest rates at a five-year low to boost consumer demand and drive growth to as much as 7 percent in 2010. Sri Lanka’s reverse repurchase rate is 9.75 percent and the repurchase rate is 7.5 percent.

Low Inflation

Cabraal can afford to keep borrowing costs low because of tame inflation in the country. Consumer prices in the capital, Colombo, rose 6.9 percent in February from a year earlier, almost half the average inflation rate between 2004 and 2009.

Commercial bank loans rose to 1.196 trillion rupees ($10.5 billion) in January from 1.195 trillion in December, the fourth gain in five months, according to the central bank, an indicator of growing consumer spending.

Low interest rates are also critical to support domestic demand as Sri Lanka’s exports may slow in the coming months after the European Union on Feb. 15 said it will suspend preferential trade benefits to the island nation because of human rights “shortcomings” during the war.

Sri Lankan exports rose 6.4 percent in December to $723.4 million after a yearlong decline.

Peace has prompted foreign companies, including HSBC Holdings Plc and Emirates Telecommunications Corp., to start operations in the island’s northern and eastern areas that were earlier under the control of the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

HSBC Holdings, Europe’s biggest bank, in February opened the first branch by any foreign bank in Sri Lanka’s northern Jaffna peninsula.

Start Operations

Etisalat, the United Arab Emirates’ biggest phone company, started services in Jaffna on Feb. 26 after acquiring Tigo Pvt., the Sri Lankan unit of Millicom International Cellular SA, for $155 million in October.

Demand for building roads and ports after the end of the war helped lift sales at Tokyo Cement by 79 percent in the three months ended Dec. 31.

Sri Lanka plans to invite overseas and local companies this month to set up business in a new $550 million tax-free port zone in the island’s south. The country is also seeking foreign investments to help build a new terminal in Colombo port, Sri Lanka Ports Authority Chairman Priyath Wickrarma said March 5.

To contact the reporter on this story: Anusha Ondaatjie in Colombo at anushao@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: March 30, 2010 07:35 EDT

How UNP is fighting corruption

2010-03-29T09:04:00.000-07:00

UNP admits millions of rupees in donations un-audited

By Nirmala Kannangara

The main opposition UNP has admitted that hundreds of millions of rupees worth of donations received by the party have never been recorded or audited.

Speaking to the Sunday Leader UNP General Secretary Tissa Attanayake revealed that the money the party receives during election campaigns is not audited, and admitted that the party does not even keep records of the funds its receives during election campaigns.

He insisted however that the money the party received for ordinary(non election) party work was audited.

“The UNP has received funds from its well-wishers on previous occasions but we never keep records of what we get during elections but obviously we keep records on all the other monies that are received for party work,” Attanayake said.

“Our transactions are transparent and there is nothing dubious in terms of the UNP’s transactions. However we are not accountable for the money said to have been received for the presidential campaign as neither the UNP nor its affiliated parties handled the finances. That was done by the NDF fund raising committee.”

According to Attanayake the funds that were received by the New Democratic Front (NDF) for its presidential election campaign were handled by the NDF fund raising committee headed by Mahinda Haradasa, a close associate of the defeated candidate Gen. Sarath Fonseka.

Ludlow Massacre

2010-03-25T20:27:00.000-07:00

Who are we?

2010-03-22T13:11:00.000-07:00

Brother Konnappu has intrigued my enthusiasm by starting a discussion about our roots. I can see from most responses to his article, most of us still believe that we are of Aryan decent and our nation is descending from Prince Vijaya and other Aryan migrations.

I cannot buy this story. I believe that Sinhala nation stared as a result of several tribes of Aryan and non-Aryan origins coalescing.

When the word non-aryan is mentioned many think its Dravidian, this is not ture, humans originated on earth more than 50 000 years ago, and there had been many civilizations that are not Aryan nor Dravidian.

This genetic study shows the human migration that occured on earth. There were many migrations prior to the Aryans migrated to India and there were people living in India when Aryans came there.

Surely these non-aryans would have migrated to SL prior to the Aryan migration led by prince Vijaya.

Is there any proof? This genetic study on on the human population in India shows that Sinhalese and Bengalis are closely related and Sinhalse seperate from the other races quite early in the evolutionalry time scale.

It is true that Prince Vijaya and the other Aryans migrated from north eastern India (Vanga dehshaya). There were a substantial population of Yaksh and Naga people living in Sri Lanka when Prince Vijya came here, even lord Buddha visited here to resolve a conflict that was at the brink of war. It would have been quite a bloodbath that triggered a long distance visit from Lord Buddha.
There for the eastern indian Aryan migrations would not have been sufficient enough to shift our genetic affinity towards the Bengalis, without a total anihilation of the native population. Which is highly unlikely.
This leaves us to beleive that Yaksha and Naga people also migrated from north eastern India much prior to the Aryan migation.
This is further supported by the fact that Sinhalse and Bengalis separating from other races at a much earlier time.

On those botched relations with foreign friends...

2010-03-21T15:46:00.000-07:00

By Rajpak Abenayake
Some people have been recommending latterly that we subscribe to western liberal values because there is a lot to learn from them, and because good governance and the Rule of Law began because of the Magna Carta, and such. Personally I have not heard such a great deal of gobbledygook in a very long time. The western liberal values that I know have all been values of coercion, never mind what the Magna Carta envisaged for Englishmen in the 13th century. At least that’s how I see western liberal values operate vis-a-vis us Sri Lankans, living in our country. For instance, they tell us “you accept our western liberal terms for getting rid of the Tamil Tigers, or else.’’ What is positive about embracing such a value system, claiming ownership to it, and calling it our own? They say that we should embrace western liberal value systems by ensuring human rights and the Rule of Law in our country. Why should we not ensure human rights and the Rule of Law in our country in the first place?

Western liberal

Ensuring human rights in our country is about ensuring our own freedoms and making sure that our social contract remains intact. But it has absolutely nothing to do with western liberal values.
A social contract is not a western liberal concept. One can find a solid social contract in China. The Chinese governing hierarchy may create some dissidents who are imprisoned. But, the countries that are governed by so called western liberal values are known to send young people to war, sometimes implementing a mandatory provision of a draft, to fight needless wars in other countries. I’d like to know what the difference is? A western liberal ideologue might tell me that going to war in another country, even if it’s mandated by law, is different from being an imprisoned dissident. Personally I’d rather that this question is put to and answered by such a person who has been sent to die —- by legal stipulation —- in such a ‘noble war.’ The other thing about the rubric of western liberal value systems, is that we are told that we have little choice except to embrace them. This is curious to me. To me what is compulsory or mandated cannot be a value system, but has to come by way of dictatorial fiat. Of course in the typical western liberal way, we are told that certainly western liberal values are not imposed on us, as that would be coercion. It is just that we had better embrace these values as else there would be negative repercussions to us...
This sounds suspiciously as if somebody is telling me “we are not going to assault you, but if you do not listen to us, when you walk out of this room, somebody else might.’’ In other words, in my value system, there is not much difference between a direct physical assault and an ever present threat of it. Personally I see that those who say we should not openly identify with countries such as China, Cuba and Venezuela have chickened out. I would even go so far as to advocate some Cuban values, such as excellent health care for the entire population, while taking care also to expressly, pointedly, reject the kind of value system that has foisted a “health care system’’ on the people of the United States of America last week. This is not a health care system at all, but a regime of unjust enrichment of the insurance companies. What is special about the Magna Carta we do not know, when it is clear that the Licchavis in India practiced a very advanced form of democracy over two thousand years ago, whose residual influences such as a panchayat system had been prevalent in our country, and would have doubtless characterized our systems of governance even today, had not there been any liberal democratic influence due to our colonizers —— colonizers who would of course have hardly been exemplars of good governance and democracy, when they were by habit rapacious and armed-to-the-teeth invaders. This whole issue about Sri Lanka having to imbibe a healthy dose of western liberalism of course has its wellsprings in the tangential issue of Sri Lanka having apparently botched her copybook, by eschewing liberal values and prosecuting a war on the LTTE, in which human rights are said it have been rather blatantly violated. It is true that the current regime has shown certain authoritarian tendencies and some level of disregard for certain human rights aspects in general governance, but this is no more than what regularly obtains in regulation democracies not just in the west but other countries such as liberal and democratic India as well....( refer Nagaland.) Nandita Haksar, a respected Indian rights activist, wrote in ‘Outlook India’ recently, of how she visited “Ukhrul, in Manipur, and saw that the India of Nehru’s dream was a nightmare for the Naga people there.’’ She then proceeded to detail the travails of the Nagaland people fighting for a homeland. She wrote further: “Several years later (that’s after her first visit) the entire country woke up to find a shocking, dramatic photograph plastered on front pages of newspapers: some 40 naked Manipuri women with a massive banner screaming: “Indian Army Rape Us”.

Indian dream

They were protesting the rape and murder of a 32-year-old Meitei woman, Thangjam Manorama, by the Assam Rifles.’’ Haktar then goes onto detail how the Communal Violence Suppression Bill, 2005, of India, could now effectively place “the entire country under Martial Law.’’ “The Indian dream is turning into an Indian nightmare’’, she concludes. However, my intention here is not to demonize India or the Indian system, but to state that nations suffused with Western liberal values as India is today —- not the India of Licchavi times (!) - could also experience egregious human rights violations. Maybe India should have stuck to the Licchavii form of democracy that had nothing to do with the Magna Carta, and maybe we in Sri Lanka should have too. Yes, there are many human rights and Rule of Law problems that have to be addressed in this country today - but we have to do that incrementally, in our way, by ourselves.
There seems to be an epidemic of strife discord and lack of democratic values in the so called liberal democracies infused with western liberal values, ranging from USA to England, to India, in this present day. So much then for us having to imbibe from the western liberal value system to entrench the Rule of Law in Sri Lanka!

SF, JVP, C-4 gang up to ruin Lanka’s image, says govt.

2010-03-19T10:57:00.000-07:00

by Vipul Sivakumaran.

The government said yesterday it suspected the JVP’s involvement in the latest attempt by Britain’s Channel 4 Television to malign Sri Lanka.

Government spokesman and Transport Minister Dulles Alahapperuma accused the JVP of exploiting former Army Commander Sarath Fonseka and his wife Anoma Fonseka to gain political mileage.

The Minister said, at the weekly Press briefing, that the government suspected that Fonseka was the 'unofficial director' of the earlier Channel 4 video which tried to tarnish the image of Sri Lankan security forces.

He said the JVP was now very desperate and ready to ‘sell or distribute anything’ to capture political power.

Referring to Fonseka's so-called secret letter to Channel 4, Alahapperuma said the ex-commander had made history by becoming the first civil or military prisoner in the world to seek facilities such as air-conditioning and hot water in detention.

The Minister asked how Fonseka, praised by the JVP as a hero who had won the war against 'Tamil Eelam', could now collude with a television channel that always acted as the mouthpiece of the LTTE.

Highlighting several instances where Channel 4 had telecast the separatists' propaganda to tarnish Sri Lanka's image, Minister Alahapperuma said the people would like to know the link between Fonseka's media and Prabhakaran's media.

The people would also recall that Channel 4 had almost acted as the 'Voice of Tigers' in the past, the Minister said.

Alahapperuma said that although he did not wish to discuss how Fonseka's hand-written document was smuggled out, the former army commander had misused the privileges offered to him in detention to assist the enemies of Sri Lanka.

That also raises serious doubts about the General's commitment to military discipline, the Minister said.

Ban Ki-moons Panel; Can there be any Good in this?

2010-03-17T06:11:00.000-07:00

Its seems that Ban Ki-Moon is adamant in appointing a panel to investigate Sri Lanka.

During the 88-89 era, when there were bodies around every corner of street, when there were half burnt bodies tied to telephone pole , when bodies could be seen floating down the river behind the residence of the parliamentary majority leader. When parent didn't want their adolescent kids to walk out of the house after dusk, and even when parliamentarians revealed the dire situation at the UN. The UN didn't wink.

But just after Sri Lanka concluded a democratic election. When Sri Lanka is having the best performing stock market in the world. When the per capita income doubled withing a few years, when investors are pouring in. Just when Sri Lanka is poised to a economic boom, Ban-Ki Moon wants to investigate Sri Lanka.

But UPFA can easily turn this situation in to their political advantage. The ruling party can easily sell that this is due to the opposition parties, and they are attempting to deny the development and stability of this country for their political advantage. As a result of this "international opposition" Sri Lankan people are going to be deprived of their peacetime economic growth.

Already many analysts have tied the opposition to the international efforts to interfere in Sri Lanka. Sarath Fonseka has said in numerous times he appeals to international community and he will give witness in international courts against Sri Lanka.

Therefore it is easily sellable. The ruling party should beat this matter at public rallies, TV and news paper ads and point to the people the current opposition is behind these international interference.

When the UNP and JVP members see their voter base being eroded by this, they will go begging to the UN, pleading not to appoint any panels.

Rogue NGOs with Western agendas

2010-03-14T20:16:00.000-07:00

Minister Prof G. L. Peiris has spoken of the need for the Government to set up a surveillance mechanism to monitor programs and funding sources of NGOs. Addressing the Cabinet Media briefing on Wednesday he was quoted as saying that the Government has information to the effect that many local NGOs and INGOs have been involved in domestic politics and other unscrupulous activities violating the country's law. Therefore he argued a monitoring system for NGOs is essential.

Many would agree with the Minister's views. Today NGOs have become a burgeoning industry. While a majority of these NGOs perform a commendable service to uplift the social and economic conditions of the poor and assist in many projects beneficial to the public, there are also rogue NGOs whose main agenda it is to undermine the unity and stability of the country. They have also inveigled certain local politicians to implement their vile schemes. Hence it is not without reason that the likes of Wimal Weerawansa and other vociferous politicians of the Government rant and rave against these NGOs whose agenda is all too clear to the independent observer.

The Minister's concerns are certainly not unfounded considering the subterfuge practised by many NGOs in this country particularly during the war period. It is readily accepted that some of these NGOs became the mouthpieces of the LTTE and their activities smacked of open hostility towards the Government. The discovery of several NGO vehicles and sophisticated communication equipment in the abandoned camps of the LTTE certainly tells a tale.

There were many local heads of NGOs who masqueraded as peaceniks but their real agenda was all plain to see to the enlightened observer. These NGOs brazenly sided with the terrorists while taking pains to highlight the alleged human rights violation of the Government Forces. There were even LTTE apologists among the NGO circuit who functioned as journalists to put Sri Lanka in poor light before the world. All these cumulatively affected the war against terror with Western pressure mounting against the Government. It is to the eternal credit of President Mahinda Rajapaksa that he ignored these threats to bring the war to a successful conclusion.

There is no doubt these NGOs had the full blessings and the patronage of certain Western powers who kept pouring funds into their already overflowing coffers. These funds were being used to undermine the Sri Lankan State by circulating false propaganda to vilify and demonize the country.

It is these very same NGOs who provided false information regarding casualty figures which were pounced upon by the likes of the Milibands to bring war crimes charges against Sri Lanka.

Hence the views aired by Prof Peiris no doubt will be shared by all dispassionate observers. The conduct of some of the NGOs in Sri Lanka had been a recurring theme and even a Special Commission was appointed by President Premadasa to probe the NGOs and their funding sources. But they continue in their merry way despite the same complaints and issues against these NGOs still being raised. These have today surfaced in many forms. There is not so subtle a move to debase the cultural values of this country too under the patronage of some of the NGOs. Some of them have been accused of carrying out religious conversions using money as inducements.

Today there is no scrutiny on the massive funds received by these NGOs which are being used for questionable purposes. Some NGOs are virtually functioning as adjuncts to political parties who carry out the agenda of the benefactors of these NGOs.

Prof Peiris noted that the NGOs continue to receive huge amounts of funds from various foreign sources. But whether these NGOs use those funds for their declared work program is the question.

It is no secret that the NGOs found Sri Lanka a haven during the three decades long civil war which provided the ideal ground situation to thrive. Demonstrations organised by well heeled NGO fat cats in Colombo denouncing the war was the order of the day with the constant refrain for a political solution. The well organised demos, the large crowds all pointed to well organised NGO network flush with funds. The ubiquitous presence of the local leaders of these NGOs in the diplomatic cocktail circuit was a clear pointer to the agenda at work.

It is time that Government makes a serious effort to flush out all rogue NGOs from the country. Now that the three decades long conflict has ended every step should be taken to ensure no NGO stirs the pot again.

Why Rajapaksas see attack as the best form of defenceWhy Rajapaksas see attack as the best form of defence

2010-03-14T19:20:00.000-07:00

By Rajpal Abeynayake
They say that Mahinda Rajapaksa does not know the meaning of the word compromise. In that context I’m reminded of what somebody said about that.
‘Compromise’, it was said, is an arrangement by which it is assured that no party involved in a deal is happy.
Maybe that is why these days Mahinda Rajapaksa is happy. He does not believe in any kind of compromise with Ban Ki- moon or Navinatham Pillai or David Milliband or Gordon Brown. The manthra is —— “I go my way ..., you go yours’’.
By now it is also abundantly clear that he does not believe in any kind of compromise with Sarath Fonseka or any of his wildly aggrieved backers. It’s again “you go your way I go my way’’, with a passion.
In this situation of no compromise, a rapid and severe political polarization vis-a-vis Sri Lanka both locally and globally is inevitable.
But Mahinda Rajapaksa does not care that much about it, because locally speaking, he is enjoying wild rural based popularity at the moment, while the opposition is seen flapping about flailing for some sort of political direction and viability.
However almost on a daily basis the polarization between the Rajapaksa administration and its local and global haters, particularly its global haters, is increasing.

Standoff

It appears sometimes that he is headed for a dangerous Venezuela or Iran type standoff with the international community, where international haters of a regime either overtly or by implication keep baying for regime change.
Even if it may not be regime change they are asking for, it is clear that Navinatham Pillai and some of that ilk are baying for some sort of punishment of the Rajapaksa regime.
The considerable diaspora backed Rajapaksa hate-lobby is buoyed by this kind of international persecution of the Rajapaksa regime, but then, Mahinda Rajapaksa seems to know where to start the counter attack.
It is clear that he is going after the NGOs even though it was hilarious last week to see Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu the head of the CPA, announce, based on some obscure NGO news report, that he is at the top of a state intelligence list of identified saboteurs possibly up for arrest.
The positive aspect of it all for Mahinda Rajapaksa is the fact that in Sri Lanka, even the street protestors and the agitators and all the agents of dissent, are lotus-eaters too.
They can talk about hunger strikes and street protests, but it is clear for instance from the general’s hunger strike last week demanding for his wife’s phone to call his daughters, that the local street protestors and hunger strikers are not of a variety that can inspire hundreds of thousands to get onto the streets, for a cause.
The upshot of all this seems to be that Mahinda Rajapaksa is doing a rather incredibly successful David versus Goliath act that seems poised to remain intact for quite some time into the future.
As stated last week, any election prediction is a no-brainier with the UPFA guaranteed to win, though the breath of the margin may be less perhaps than widely expected.
Sarath Fonseka is to be brought before a three member court martial panel this week and it’s the strongest signal if any is needed, that the government is knee deep in a project for maintaining the Sinhala nationalist status quo.
The president is even in this election, warming up to the Sinhala nationalists and sidelining those on his nomination list who are not seen as being Sinhala nationalist enough.
The rise and rise of Wimal Weerawansa is as good an indication of this trend, as any.
The opposition against this continuing Sinhala nationalist project of the Rajapaksas is not only from the diaspora and the diaspora manipulated Tamils, but also from a considerable Colombo based group of majority Sinhala businessmen and ideologues who feel that all opportunities afforded to countries such as South Korea Thailand etc., are passing this country by, due to the very simple fact that the Rajapaksas are not willing to play ball with the West.
The contradiction is that if the Rajapaksas play ball with the international community, they are going to fast lose the rural Sinhala nationalist vote base that brought them to power in the first place.
If on the other hand the Rajapaksas don’t play ball with the international community, the global big boys are going to extract their vengeance, the Ban Ki-moons the Pillais and all.
This is a no-win therefore for the Rajapaksas, a situation that the president needs to learn to handle with the best of tenacity.
It’s a condition he cannot overcome but one that he has to cope with, such as diabetes with a chronic sufferer —- a condition not necessarily fatal, but something that extracts its price nevertheless.

Wildly popular

Sri Lanka would not fall into Burma’s or Zimbabwe’s or Iran’s level of pariah status for two or three very good reasons, one of which is that as if on cue, there is a massive infusion of publicized Indian and Chinese assistance recently including this week for railway projects and what-not in this country.
The other reason that Sri Lanka is protected, is the fact that even the international community cannot foist illegitimacy and pariah status on the Sri Lankan government, when whatever rights violations were incurred fighting what was seen as a just war against a group of solicitously violent internationally black-marked terrorists.
Besides, there is nothing that could be done, it seems, however hated the Sri Lankan government is for its defiance, when it is hardly arguable that Sri Lanka’s incumbent Rajapaksa regime is “wildly popular’’ with the masses, the rural masses in particular. The international community can say an election was rigged if there is clear and present evidence of such, but all they have are allegations of computer jillmart by some disaffected political parties, and therefore the Sri Lankan government appears unshakeable no matter the aspirations of the international elite.
The new trick among the group of unrelenting Sri Lanka haters among the international community is to whittle away at the domestically favoured Sri Lankan government, by undermining its credibility little by little, on several separate fronts.
It is in the context of this particular backcloth of events that the Fonseka fiasco appears to have more important and more plausible aspects to it that would place the episode perhaps in the category of real intrigue against the state —- rather than fiasco.
Fonseka increasingly made himself look, especially after the election, as an agent who was put in place to bring down the government one way or the other.
His campaign to go through with war crimes allegations and then to ferment street protests by repeating an implausible robbed election allegation, seems to indicate, along with the sequentially numbered money found with his son-in-law’s mother, that he is a man who has been planted by interested parties to bring down the Sri Lankan government no matter what ——-and no matter the legitimacy of his challenge.
Considering all of this, even international Rajapaksa haters can’t always with conviction say that the Rajapaksa government is haphazardly cracking down on dissent. At home, when even some of the moves by the Rajapaksas against the general are seen as not being motivated by revenge even by certain neutral people, it appears that the Rajapaksas therefore are unshakeable, at least in the foreseeable future ——- despite all national and international efforts against it.

Costly transparency

2010-03-12T09:56:00.000-08:00

by C. A Chandraprema

For the past couple of weeks the government has been making noises to the effect that they would introduce measures to investigate and control foreign funded NGOs. Every government for the past thirty years has been threatening to do so, but nothing has really come of it although President Premadasa did make a start with an investigation on a couple of respected NGOs for reasons we will not explore. In this country, there is deep rooted mistrust of NGOs even among the general public. The general impression is that these NGOs are up to no good, promoting foreign agendas on local soil and engaged in various anti- national activities. One foreign funded NGO that is acutely aware of the distrust of some NGOs is Transparency International. Its annual report for 2008 said "The anti-NGO sentiment prevalent in the country unfortunately affected our work. The general tendency is to look at all non-government organizations with suspicion and mistrust." The question on most people’s minds is, why are foreign countries pumping so much money into these NGOs and what are they doing with that money?

Tranparency International (TI) for example, has been getting a lot of money from overseas. In 2007, they received over Rs. 37 million. In 2008, it was nearly 40 million. In 2009, the amount received was nearly 67 million. The principal donors are the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Swedish International Development Agency. What has been happening to all this money? This can be explained by means of a few examples. In 2006, TI did a study titled "In pursuit of absolute integrity: Identifying causes for police corruption." The total amount received for this project was over Rs 8.2 million. According to the audit report for this project, something like Rs 2.6 million had been paid to the Centre for Policy Alternatives to carry out two surveys, one among police officers and another among the general public.

The connection obviously is that Pakiasothy Saravanamuttu, the senior most director of Transparency International is also the Executive Director of the Centre for Policy Alternatives. In these surveys, 770 serving police officers and 1,000 members of the public were interviewed over a period of about seven weeks in total. The cost of getting each questionnaire filled in, thus works out to over Rs 1,500. The number of interviews carried out per day would work out to 36 and the daily expenditure for interviews would thus be around Rs 55,000. In this country, the cost of filling in a simple questionnaire can’t possible be as high as Rs 1,500 each.

The director of this project was paid Rs. 1.2 million. The principal researcher was paid Rs.400,000. In this manner, the total cost of the project was Rs. 8.2 million. The final result of this whole exercise was a report of 106 pages on police corruption. The cost thus works out to more than Rs. 80,000 per page. The question, is was this research worth that much? In the estimation of this columnist, any reasonably able post graduate diploma student (the research is not even up to a Master’s standard) would have been able to do this research by himself and he would have been overjoyed to do it (including the surveys and the traveling it entails) for a santhosam of about Rs. 100,000. There was no rocket science involved in this study. The report is full of trite observations such as that "Police corruption is generally defined as misuse of authority by a police officer in a manner designed to produce personal gain..." (Can it be anything but that?) Even the researchers themselves seem to have been embarrassed by the superficial nature of this study and the recommendations at the end are more about improving the police service generally such as by providing modern interrogation rooms etc, than about ways and means of eliminating bribe taking.

One recommendation that tickled this columnist most was the one which said that "Police officers must be encouraged to attend courses/lectures organized by civil society organizations…" Given how new and interesting the contents of the Police Corruption study was, police officers caught taking bribes could perhaps be made to attend a course of studies on corruption conducted by Transparency International as a part of the punishment!

Non-work

The mismatch between the cost and the significance of what is produced runs through virtually every project of TI that I have examined. In 2005, TI got over 3.8 million from the Canadian International Development Agency for a "Programme for the protection of Public Resources." What they meant by this was the use of public resources for the presidential election campaign of that year. They had spent something in excess of Rs.2.2 million, on observing the use of state resources for the election campaign, around Rs.900,000 of which was paid to ‘investigators’. They don’t seem to have been doing anything more than duplicating the work already done by elections monitoring bodies which keeps track of complaints of the misuse of state property for elections. A sum of over Rs 1.6 million was left over from this project and this money was utilized for the compiling of a five year ‘strategic plan and donor programme’ for Transparency International from 2007 onwards. A sum of nearly Rs.1.5 million was spent on producing this strategic plan and here too, the end product does not justify the cost. In the first place, since this document was meant to be a strategic plan for TI and a programme for donors to funnel funds to the organization, one would think that a document of this nature should have been compiled free of charge by the directors. But in the NGO sector, nothing happens without money – lots of it. In this instance, they were given money by Canada to design a programme for other donors to give money to them. How lucky can you get?

What then about the strategic plan itself? Here too this plan could have been done by a reasonably able post graduate diploma student, for a santhosam of about Rs. 50,000 or less. There is no way that this could have cost Rs 1.5 million to produce. This strategic plan came together with some gibberish called a ‘log frame analysis’. I had never heard of such a thing before, but I can recognize nonsense when I see it. This is a document with text within boxes, and impressive looking numbering systems and shaded areas to give it a pseudo- professional look. But the content is nonsensical nevertheless. According to this log frame analysis, they want to conduct ‘anti-corruption moral literacy programmes’ for trade unionists. What does ‘moral literacy’ mean? Every bus conductor who pinches money from the collection knows that what he is doing is wrong – there’s no need to labour the point. Then they want to create ‘integrity laboratories’ in schools. The picture conjured in my mind by this term is a room where school principals would have their heart beat and brain activity monitored while being asked questions like "How much do you take to admit a child to this school?" – that’s the only kind of ‘integrity laboratory’ that I can think of. Then they also want to include ‘anti-corruption modules’ into the curricula of schools and universities.

They want to turn the second Buddhist precept and the eighth commandment into an academic discipline in itself, and make us swallow it all. Such courses will be so trite that they may better serve the judiciary as a form of punishment for those convicted for taking bribes, in lieu of a prison sentence. Moreover if the government wants to curtail the intake of university students for arts courses, they can be made to do the anti-corruption modules first, after which they’ll willingly drop out of university! The problem with the NGO sector is that they have a tendency to create work or what deceptively looks like work, to suit the funding available. What is of primary importance is the funding and not the work.

Incredible plasticity

A good example was a 2006 project with the title "Sensitizing public servants on combating corruption". The original budgeted amount for this project was Rs.10.2 million, but they got only Rs. 3 million. With a 70% shortfall, most people would have shelved the whole project, but not TI. They cheerfully went ahead. The Rs. 1.3 million allocated for the development of a training manual was dropped forthwith, another Rs. 1.3 million for training of trainers was dropped, one million for documentation and printing was dropped, as was 500,000 for the media programme. A training programme which was to be designed for 200,000 was designed for 144,000. Transport and secretarial work which was budgeted at 500,000 was somehow met with just 96,000. The Sri Lanka Institute of Development Administration which played the role of tout in delivering the public servants to TI’s door was to be given 600,000 as administrative costs, but was fobbed off with just 45,000. (Of course TI which was also to have got 600,000 gave themselves 467,000.)

Twelve awareness seminars which were budgeted at 2.5 million, was carried out with less than 1.3 million – (Presumably by serving plain tea and biscuits instead of chocolate cake and iced tea to participants?) I learnt from a TI official that at the end of the project a ‘validation seminar’ was held at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute for around 25 participants and this had cost Rs.831,000. How a seminar for 25 participants can cost that much is beyond me, but the actual budgeted amount was nearly twice that at over 1.5 million! This was not a seminar on Nuclear Physics. This was about public officials pinching the taxpayer’s money or fleecing the public, and resource persons need not have been paid more than a few thousand at the very most. Even if participants were paid to attend, it still could not have cost that much. An NGO budget is a miraculous thing. It can be as little or as much as one wants. They did the programme with just three million, but if they had got the original budgeted 10.2 million, they would somehow have found ways and means of spending that too.

In 2005/6, TI conducted a programme to introduce ‘value for money audits’. (To others, not ironically to their own organization.) This too got a hefty grant of nearly 10 million from the Swedes. As is usual, they had asked for much more – Rs.12.5 million no less. The unearthly, other dimensionally plastic nature of NGO budgeting was to be seen in this case as well. Even though they were short of their budget by close to 2.5 million, they were able to complete the project and still have nearly 1.5 million left over! In this 10 million project, 6.5 million was paid to various individuals as consultancy fees as well as management fees, with the project director alone getting nearly 1.5 million. An architect, civil engineer and quantity surveyor shared 1.2 million amongst themselves. An Indian consultant got 667,000. One would think that in a project on getting value for money, meetings with stakeholders would be paramount. The sum allocated for this in the original budget had been 410,000. But they had managed to do what was necessary with less than 13,000. (Yes, thirteen thousand).

Then again one would have thought that meetings with community based organizations and beneficiaries of the value for money audit would be equally paramount. The amount allocated in the budget for this was Rs 936,000, but not a cent was spent for this purpose. Then a sum of over Rs 2 million had been budgeted for traveling while the actual expenditure was around Rs 351,000. Documentation and information gathering had an allocation of over Rs 500,000 but the actual expenditure was 30,000. The reason for this incredible budgetary plasticity is because much of what an NGO does involves non-essential expenditure on non-essential work. You can cut down on the work as well as the expenditure with no loss.

Money for nothing

What happened to the money that was left over from this exercise in futility called the Value for Money Audit? As can be expected, it was utilized in yet another project where there was no value for money at all. This was for a 2007 project called "Community Interactive Programme in the Tsunami Recovery Programme: Voice out corruption". As usual, they wanted nearly Rs 4.2 million for this project. But they got only Rs 2.8 million from the Swedes. However with the Rs 1.4 million left over from the Value for Money project and the Treasury bill interest thereof, they actually had even more money than was originally estimated with nearly Rs 4.4 million. One quarter of this, over Rs 1.1 million went to the project director and another Rs. 900,000 for researchers and other personnel. Nearly half a million rupees was spent on traveling. The preparation of the final report cost nearly three quarters of a million. This kind of expenditure on non-work and on producing nonsensical reports is a crime against humanity, and here it is happening under our very noses. The horror of it is that Transparency International is an organization that seeks to work closely with our state sector. If the state and local government sector begins to think that it’s okay to spend money on this scale on nonsensical projects, that’s the end of this country. I can almost hear a DIG telling a subordinate "I say, my daughter’s wedding is coming up, let’s do a report", and the subordinate replying "Sir we don’t have enough money for a report, can’t you make do with just a survey?"

If it was simply a case of a few influential people diddling money from overseas donors, nobody would be interested in knowing what was happening. But the suspicion in this country is that money was being funneled for the use of certain individuals and that these projects are only a facade, to enable the transfer of millions. The political stands taken by the people who run these foreign funded NGOs tends to increase this suspicion. There is a certain uniformity across the entire NGO sector. One would think that if these were bona fide social service organizations, there would be a diversity of opinion among them, which would reflect the political divisions in the country.

However, that is not want we see. This is why there is this suspicion that these large sums of money given for nonsensical projects is just a reward for holding and disseminating certain political views. The views expressed by these foreign funded individuals get wide publicity in both the local as well as international media as they pose as ‘experts’ and ‘commentators’ and it is possible through them to colour the international perception of the country in this day and time when perceptions are of such paramount importance.

2010-03-11T17:58:00.001-08:00

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පෙරඹර

අමල් උඩවත්ත-විදුසර

අප කා අතරත් ජනප්‍රිය පියල් අපට මුලින් ම හමු වුණේ අසූව දශකයේ මුල් භාගයේ දී දෙහිවල සත්ත්ව උද්‍යානයේ එවකට සිටි අධ්‍යක්‍ෂ ලීන් ද අල්විස්‌ මහතා ගේ උපදේශකත්වයෙන් ආරම්භ කළ ශ්‍රී ලංකා සත්ත්වවේදින් ගේ සංගමයේ සාමාජිකයකු ලෙසිනි. එවකට සත්ත්වවේදීන් ගේ සංගමයේ සාමාජිකත්වය ලබා අධ්‍යාපන කටයුතුවල යෙදුණු පරිසර නීතීඥ ජගත් ගුණවර්ධන, රේගු අධිකාරියේ සමන්ත ගුණසේකර, පරිසර නීතීඥ ආනන්ද නානායක්‌කාර, පර්යේෂක කැළුම් නලින්ද මනමේන්ද්‍රආරච්චි වැන්නවුන් සමග පියල් පරාක්‍රම ද විය. උරගයන් පිළිබඳව අධ්‍යයන කටයුතු කළ අය අතර පියල් ද, ආනන්ද නානායක්‌කාර ද මම ද වීමු. ජගත් ක්‍ෂීරපායින් පිළිබඳව අධ්‍යයන කළ අතර කැළුම් මත්ස්‍යයන් පිළිබඳ අධ්‍යයන කටයුතුවල නිරත වූවා මතක ය. අප සැවොම සිතැඟි පරිදි විවිධ ක්‍ෂෙත්‍රවල අධ්‍යයන කටයුතුවල යෙදුණ ද මිතුදම් පැවැත්වූයේ එකා මෙනි. සත්ත්වවේදීන් ගේ සංගමයේ අධ්‍යයන කටයුතුවල නිරත වී කෙටි කලකින් එහි උපදේශකයකු ලෙස කටයුතු කිරීමට පියල් සමත් විය. සර්පයන් අතින් අල්ලා උන් පිළිබඳ තොරතුරු කියා දීමට පියල් දැක්‌වූයේ දැඩි ආශාවකි. ඔහු මට වඩා ජ්‍යෙෂ්ඨයෙක්‌ විය. ඔහු ගෙන් සර්පයන් පිළිබඳව මම බොහෝ දේ උගත්තෙමි.

එක ම නිවසේ සොහොයුරන් ලෙස විවිධ අධ්‍යයන කටයුතුවල යෙදුණු අපට පසුව විවිධ වෘත්තීන්වල නියෑළීම හේතුවෙන් මඳ කලක්‌ ඈත් වන්නට සිදු විණි. අද මෙන් එදා ජංගම දුරකථන හෝ ගෘහස්‌ථ දුරකථනයක්‌ හෝ නො තිබුණ ද ඉඳහිට හෝ මුණ ගැසුණු අප අතර මිතුදම් බිඳී ගියේ නැත. කෙසේ වුවත් මාධ්‍ය සම්මන්ත්‍රණවල දී අප සැමට යළි යළි හමු වීමට ලැබිණි. ජගත් පරිසර නීතීඥවරයකු ලෙසත්, සමන්ත ශ්‍රී ලංකා රේගුවේ ජ්‍යෙෂ්ඨ නිලධාරියකු හා පරිසරවේදියකු ලෙසත්, පියල් නිදහස්‌ අදහස්‌ දරන පරිසරවේදියකු ලෙසත්, මට මාධ්‍යවේදියකු ලෙසත් නැවතත් මිතුදම් අලුත් කරගත හැකි විය. මේ වන විට අපි විවිධ මතවාද දරන, එකිනෙක හා ගැටෙන දේශපාලන දර්ශන දරන්නන් වුවත් පරිසර සංරක්‍ෂණ කටයුතුවල දී බොහෝ විට එක අරමුණක සිට කටයුතු කළෙමු. ඉඳහිට හෝ මාධ්‍ය හමුවක දී අප අතර ප්‍රබල ගැටුම් ඇති වුවත් මිතුරන් ලෙස ගැටුම් ඇති නො වීම අදටත් සිතට ගෙන දෙන්නේ සහනයකි.

බොහෝ අවස්‌ථාවල දී පියල්, තමන් නිවැරැදි යෑයි සිතන මතයේ අපට වඩා ඉදිරියෙන් සිට හඬක්‌ නැඟුවේ ය. දේශීය දේ හිස මුදුනින් අගය කළ පියල්ට ඒ සම්බන්ධව තිබුණු දැනුම ද අනල්ප ය. ගුවන් විදුලිය, රූපවාහිනිය මෙන්ම පුවත්පත ඔස්‌සේ ද ඔහු සිය හඬ පතුරුවා හැරියේ ය. උස්‌මහත් වූ දේහයත්, වටකුරු හිසත් ඔහුට ම ආවේනික වූ දෑසත්, සිනහව හා කතා විලාසයත් පියල්ට මනා පෞරුෂයක්‌ එක්‌ කළේ ය. මේ පෞරුෂය ඔහු ගේ හඬ පතුරුවා හැරීමට මහත් පිටිවහලක්‌ විය.

මාර්තු 3 වැනි දිනය උදා විය. ශ්‍රී ලංකා තරුණ සත්ත්වවේදීන් ගේ සංගමය විසින් සංවිධානය කරන ලද මෙවර මැතිවරණ ප්‍රචාරක කටයුතු සඳහා පොලිතින් වැනි නො දිරන ද්‍රව්‍ය භාවිතය පිටුදැකීම පිළිබඳ මාධ්‍ය හමුවක්‌ පුස්‌තකාල ශ්‍රවණාගාරයේ දී පැවැත්විණි. මෙහි දී අදහස්‌ දැක්‌වූවන් අතර පියල් ද විය. මෙදින ඔහු ගේ අදහස්‌ දැක්‌වීම වේගවත් විය. පරිසරය දූෂණය කරන දේශපාලනඥයන්ට ඔහු පහර පිට පහර දුන්නේ ය. ඒ ඔහු ගේ පෞද්ගලික අදහස්‌ අනුව ය. පැයක පමණ කාලයක්‌ ගත වීමෙන් පසු මාධ්‍ය හමුව අවසන් විය. ඉන්පසුව තිබුණු තේ පැන් සංග්‍රහයේ දී ජගත්, පියල් සමග මට ද මඳ වේලාවක්‌ සතුටු සාමීචියේ යෙදෙන්නට අවස්‌ථාව ලැබිණි. පියල් මා අමතමින් අමල් ලබන සතියේ විදුසරේ ලිපියක්‌ පළ කරමු යෑයි කිවේ සුපුරුදු සිනාමුසු මුහුණෙනි. පසුදින උදෑසන ම කාර්යාලයට දුරකථන ඇමතුමක්‌ ලැබිණි. ඉන් කියෑවුණේ පියල් පරාක්‍රම පෙර දින රාත්‍රියේ දී මිය ගිය බවකි. මරණය අප කා හටත් පොදු වුවත් ආරංචිය අදහාගත නොහැකි විය. රාත්‍රියේ හටගත් හෘදයාබාධයකින් පියල් මිය ගොස්‌ තිබිණි. පරිසරය වෙනුවෙන් දිවිය කැප කළ පියල් ඉන් උපයාගත් මුදලක්‌ නැත. පරිසරය විකුණාගෙන කෑවේ ද නැත. කෙටි ආයු කාලයකින් වටිනා දිවියකට විරාමයක්‌ තැබුණේ ශ්‍රී ලාංකීය පරිසරයට එවන් පුද්ගලයකු ගේ නො පිරවිය හැකි හිදැසක්‌ ද තබමින් ය. පියල් දැන් අප අතර නැත. ඔහු නැගු හඬ තව කලක්‌ යන තෙක්‌ ශ්‍රී ලාංකික පරිසරයේ රැව් දෙනු ඇත.

A book by Kumar Rupasinghe on how Norway intervened in Sri Lanka

2010-03-11T07:27:00.000-08:00

Li nk1, 2, 3

Head of the Foundation for Co-existence and International Alert, Kumar Rupasinghe, who is currently under severe mental pressure following the decision of the Norwegian government to slash millions of dollars of funding provided to his organization, is reportedly planning on publishing a “tell all” book on how Norway intervened in Sri Lanka.

A key activist at the Foundation for Co-existence when inquired about the book said it was merely a rumor being spread by Kumar Rupasinghe to create a fear among officials at the Norwegian embassy in Sri Lanka. He said that Rupasinghe would also be exposed if he wrote a book on the functions of the Norwegian government in Sri Lanka.
Work at the Foundation for Co-existence has come to a standstill due to the lack of funds and Rupasinghe had last week terminated the employment of veteran actress Swarna Mallawarachchi, who was the Media Spokesperson for the organization. Rupasinghe when terminating the employment of many other workers at the organization had said they should file action against the Norwegian government before an international court.

The Norwegian embassy decided to withdraw the funding provided to the Foundation fro Co-existence after Rupasinghe had failed to provide account details on the funds received by the Norwegian government.

Rupasinghe has been working closely with the President and Senior Presidential Advisor Basil Rajapaksa and has been secretly supportive of the government’s anti-democratic acts.

It is learnt that unable to balance the accounts and provide bills for monies used for various anti-democratic acts, Ruapsinghe had informed the Norwegian government that he could not provide account details in a hurry as the employees who handled the organization’s accounts had left their jobs.

Sarath Fonseka

2010-03-03T14:22:00.000-08:00

හමුදා අත්අඩංගුවේ සිටින සරත් ෆොන්සේකා මහතා තමා සමග සිටි මිතුරන් සම්බන්ධයෙන් දැඩි කළකිරීමට පත්ව ඇතැයි දැනගන්නට ලැබී තිබේ. ජනාධිපතිවරණයේ දී ඔහු සමග සිටි ජවිපෙ අනුර දිසානායක හා ‘ම’ පාර්ශ්වයේ මංගල සමරවීර දෙදෙනා ෆොන්සේකා සම්බන්ධයෙන් අනුගමනය කරන ප‍්‍රතිපත්තිය මේ කළකිරීමට බෙහෙවින් හේතු වී තිබේ.

Lanka C news

ලැබුවේ අවවාද නොහොඹින ආරකය
දුදනන් නිසා විය හෙනහුරු මාරකය
මං පෙර ගියේ වරදින් පිරි පාරකය
ඒ ගිය මගේ අවසානය පෝරකය

සර්... මම ජනාධිපතිවරණයට තරග කරනවා. මට ආරාධනා ලැබුණ එක්‌සත් ජාතික පෙරමුණේ පොදු අපේක්‍ෂකයා වෙන්න. මම දැන් ඒ තීරණය අරගෙන ඉවරයි.

ප්‍රශ්නයක්‌ නැහැ ෆොනී මම ඔබට ඊට සුබ පතනවා. නමුත් මම මගේ අවංක හැඟීමක්‌ ඔබට කියන්න ඕන. මගේ හැඟීමේ හැටියට ඔබ මේ තීන්දුව ඔබේ ජීවිතයේ ගත්ත ඉතා වැරැදිම තීන්දුවක්‌. ඔබට කවද හරි දුක්‌වෙන්න සිදුවේවි මේ තීන්දුව ගැන. මොකද ඔබ මේ රටේ ලොකු දෙයක්‌ කළ උදාර රණවිරුවෙක්‌.

මේ ජනාධිපතිවරණය මම ජයගන්නවා. ඒක ඒකාන්තයි. ඔබ ඉන් ලබන පරාජයෙන් පසුව ඔබට ඔය අද ඔබ ළඟින් ඉන්න එක්‌කෙනෙක්‌වත් නැති වෙනවා. මේ අයට එල්ලෙන්න වැලේ වැල් නැතිවයි හිටියේ. කිසිම මාවතක්‌ නැතුවයි මොවුන් සිටියේ. අද ඔබ ඔවුන්ට එල්ලෙන්න ලොකු අත්තක්‌ දුන්නා. ඔවුන්ට යන්න මාවතක්‌ පෙන්නුවා. අන්න ඒ නිසයි ඔබව මෙතනදී ඔවුන් පාවිච්චි කරන්නේ. ඉදිරියේදී ලබන පරාජයෙන් පස්‌සේ ඔබට ඔය කවුරුවත් නැති වෙනවා. කමක්‌ නැහැ ඔබට මම ඉන්නවා. ඔවුන් ඔබව අතඇරියට පසු ආයෙත් මා ළඟට එන්න. මම ඔබව පිළිගන්නවා. අපි ආයෙත් එකතුවෙලා වැඩ කරමු.

ජනාධිපති මහින්ද ජෙනරාල් සරත් ෆේන්සේකාව වාහනය ළඟටම එනතුරු ඔහු පසෙකින් පැමිණ ඔහුගෙන් සමුගනිමින් අන්තිමට කීවේ එයයි.

Divaina 15/11/09

Michael Moore on The Young Turks

2010-03-03T14:17:00.000-08:00

Link

Denazification: how the West removed a virus

2010-03-03T11:48:00.000-08:00

by Susantha Goonatilake

One of the longest wars ever in the entire world ended in May by the military defeat of the LTTE. But there are disturbing signs that the beast may rise again. The TNA, especially over the last decade had a unanimity of views with the LTTE and was its spokesman. The TNA's recent electoral victory in the Vanni should be a cause for worry.

The reports that tens of thousands of LTTE supporters are missing from IDP camps (while innocent Tamils still languish) are a further sign that the LTTE could regroup. The creation of the so-called expatriate Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam is another symptom.

Our war started in 1973 with the import of 20,000 detonators from Tamil Nadu for 20,000 explosions to Jaffna. But before and after that, was a set of fiction created for separatist propaganda. For at least two decades in the areas controlled by the LTTE,people especially children had been brainwashed on lies to hate others and to fight. UNESCO has a slogan that it is in the minds of men that wars begin. These hateful minds must be cleaned.

Are there any lessons for us from other countries that have faced a similar situation of a brutal war carried through a brainwashed fanatical group? Yes, we have in the case of the denazification programme after the Second World War. We should follow a similar path.

There are many obvious parallels between the Nazis and the LTTE. These parallels include: the creation of an artificial exclusive mono ethnic traditional homelands (in Hitler it was his Lebensraum), ethnic cleansing of all other groups, the indoctrination of gullible segments by raw racist propaganda, the undisputed rule by one man (Prabhakaran as Sun God and Hitler as Fuehrer), conscription of the young ("Hitler Jugend" and the LTTE "Baby Brigade") - the list of parallels goes on.

At the end of World War II, the Allies were faced with the problem that although militarily defeated, the ideology of Nazism was probably intact among the German population. The Allies also had in their memory the fact that the Second World War arose only two decades after Germany was defeated in the First World War. The lesson was not to humiliate the defeated Germans as they did after World War I, but to remove Nazi thinking. We must follow a similar path. Let me first describe the Western Allies' program of de-nazification whose details can be found by anyone going to the Internet. My presentation is also informed by a lived-in-experience while I was trained as an engineer for three years in Germany where I interacted with a wide cross section of Germans.

Opinion surveys conducted after WW II showed that after the military defeat, the Nazi virus was still very much alive. For example, a majority of Germans surveyed five years after the war said that Nazism was a good idea. Even after being shown after the war the horrors of what had been done to Jews and Poles through extermination (Die Endlösung - the "Final Solution"), over one third of Germans approved it as necessary and said that Jews should not have the same individual rights as Germans. Even by 1952, roughly 1/3 said Germany was better off without Jews and that Hitler was good. The Nazi ideology had lasted long after the military defeat.

A post World War II official US document stated "Only an inflexible long-term occupation authority will be able to lead the Germans to a fundamental revision of their recent political philosophy." Beginning in January 1946, a few months after their victory, the Allies issued a series of "Denazification Directives". The target was any Nazi remnants in the society, culture, press, economy, judiciary and politics. The process identified groups and persons who were both directly or indirectly associated with the Nazis and their ideology and brougssht out means to deal with them. Those in charge of the denazification program were partly those Germans who had been persecuted by the Nazis (in our case anti-LTTE Tamils). They were the persons who interrogated the prisoners of war and who searched for Nazi sympathizers.

Very early on, the US established a screening process for those Germans that were to be re-educated. All Germans were put into five categories: major offenders, offenders, lesser offenders, followers, and exonerated persons. The newly appointed German administration established no less than 545 civilian courts for the denazification process which oversaw 900,000 individual judicial cases. The result was that by 1947, 90,000 Nazis (not ordinary Germans) were put into concentration camps, while another 1,900,000 Nazi sympathizers were forbidden any work apart from manual labor. That is, they were removed from any potential position of intellectual or ideological influence.

The advent of the Cold War from 1948 lessened these activities somewhat because the West found a new threat from the Soviet Union. Later on, denazification was carried out by newly appointed German Ministers. The US Army and its Information Control Division had a direct hand in ideologically changing the minds of Germans. By 1946, it was controlling 37 German newspapers, 101 magazines, 237 publishers of books, 7384 book dealers and printers and six radio stations. One result was the banning of 30,000 German book titles which covered not only school textbooks but also even books of poetry. Possession of a banned book was considered a crime. All this was to completely erase the Nazi stain - what was then called the "Persil process", Persil being a detergent. The denazification detergent was being applied to the whole German society to remove Nazi dirt. In the Soviet occupied zone of Germany, the denazification process was much harsher.

Apart from Germany, other European countries also followed denazification programs. Greece which had suffered under the Nazi jackboot had Nazi collaborators tried in special courts. It sentenced to death Greek Prime Ministers who had collaborated. Ordinary Greeks who collaborated were publicly humiliated, some tried on treason charges and others were repressed.

Some of the most stringent denazification programs were carried out by the Norwegians (who are one of the biggest sponsors of the LTTE). This included publicly humiliating and demonizing those Norwegians who supported the Nazis and their ideology. Norwegian Quisling, the pro-Nazi leader was tried for treason and executed by firing squad.

These denazification processes strongly influenced the contents of the subsequent German Constitution (Grundgesetz) and Germany's new polity. The total re-education through denazification and removal of the ideological virus has been successful. Germany is today a very peaceful country averse to war. Two generations of Germans have grown up after denazification and most of them are extremely embarrassed by what their Nazi forefathers did. The ambitious plan of post-World War II German reconstruction, especially through the Marshall Plan brought about what was subsequently called the German Economic Miracle.

We have all the prerequisites today to perform our own Economic Miracle whose essential constituent is continued peace and the rapid reconstruction of the North and East. To guarantee our own economic miracle, a prerequisite is a removal of the threat of a future racist war by undertaking our equivalent of denazification.

Turtle hatcheries of Sri Lanka

2010-02-25T09:06:00.000-08:00

Just like another "Modern industry" turtle hatcheries are an utter abuse of nature.

News item

This is a good video documentary; show the magnificent grace of the sea turtle, shows two sides of the story and the video flows smoothly. But the documentary suffers from lack of scientific explanations. The reporter could have easily made a few phone calls and found out about other journalists, or scientists with knowledge on this subject, and there are plenty in Sri Lanka.
Unfortunately the video also contains unscientific urban myths, this again as a result of lack of scientific consultation.

Digging up turtle eggs from their deep nests and covering them in sand mounds (visible in the video) affect the sex determination of the hatchlings.
The story of earths water level rising 3 inches per 8000 years is a lie he just made up for his advantage, it’s an urban myth. No scientific journal reported such a thing.

Hatchlings have the most energy immediately after they hatch, most of the energy from the egg yolk is still present in their body, and they don’t feed for about a week. Instead they use the energy to swim away from shallow coastal waters to deeper safer waters. After a week or so they don’t have the energy to swim, when they are released to the sea they will either get washed ashore and desiccate and die or become easy prey for crows, sea birds or fish.
None of the hatchlings released after a week can survive, this story of hatchlings navel being open is “hocus pocus”, it’s an urban myth there is no scientific truth behind it.

The only thing the hatcheries have done for the past decade or so is saving the eggs from being eaten , but trapping the hatchlings ashore for some time and releasing them for a certain death.
In other words hatcheries have just delayed the death of a hatching from egg stage to hatchling stage.
It is true that these people need to make a living, if hatcheries are banned they will just sell the eggs in the black market for food.
Here is a easy plan, just let the turtles hatch in their natural nests, put a net over the nest s so other predators cannot dig it, and take a few nests and bury them in the hatchery, and keep a few hatchlings also for the tourists attraction, just don’t kill the duck laying the golden eggs. May be the minister also can help, by promoting the hatcheries as tourists destinations, so the hatchery owners get a better income.

Ravi Karunanayake, Raj Rajaratnam and Money laundering , a story that the media is trying to hide from us.

2010-02-24T09:25:00.000-08:00

Story

Violation of Exchange Control Act: Ravi K Indicted

Sandasen MARASINGHE

United National Party (UNP) Parliamentarian Ravi Karunanayake was served indictment before the Colombo High Court yesterday for violating provisions of the Exchange Control Act.

Colombo High Court Judge Deepali Wijesundara ordered to impound the passports of Ravi Karunanayake and of two other accused. The Court also granted them Rs. 100,000 each in cash bail and two sureties each of Rs. 1 million.

President’s Counsel Faisz Musthapa appearing for Karunanayake requested before the Court not to impound Karunanayake’s passport as he was a leading politician and public figure but Senior State Counsel Dileepa Pieris objected. The Court observed that these were the bail conditions that applied to all and refused the request by the defence counsel.

The Court also ordered Karunanayake to submit his passport on Monday to Court when the defence submitted that he had not brought his passport to Court yesterday. The Attorney General filed indictment against Nexia Corporate Consultants its consultant Lincoln Piyasena and Ravi Karunanayake. Ravi Karunanayake was charged for aiding and abetting Nexia Corporate Consultants of Park Road, Colombo 5 to withhold US$ three million.

The money in the Kirulapone Branch of the Standard Chartered Bank was withheld between 2006 and 2007 without the permission of the Central Bank.

According to the indictment Nexia had received US$ three million in December 2006 and January 2007 from non resident Galleon International Master Fund and also non resident Raj Rajaratnam and withholding the money in Standard Chartered Bank on behalf of them violating provisions of the Exchange Control Act.

Both Galleon International Master Fund and Raj Rajaratnam were from the USA.

The US$ three million (Rs. 321 million) was received and withheld by Nexia allegedly for the purchase of shares in the Union Bank of Colombo without the permission of the Central Bank.

Administrative Manager of Nexia Corporate Consultants Ranjith de Silva was produced before Court on behalf of the company. Senior State Counsel Dileepa Pieris appeared for the prosecution.

Attorneys Ananda Weerasooriya and Sudath Jayasundara appeared for the first accused, Attorney Anil Silva appeared for the second accused while President’s Counsels M.L.M. Ameen and Faisz Musthapa appeared for the third accused.

New developments

On Lakbima (Need Internet explorer)

Ravi Karunanayake case: Court overrules defence objection
Wednesday, 24 February 2010 01:44

By T. Farook Thajudeen

Colombo High Court Judge Deepali Wijesundera over-ruled a preliminary objection raised by the defence seeking the dismissal of the indictment filed against Ravi Karunanayake. Counsel on behalf of Karunanayake contended that the said indictment was not in conformity with the provisions of the Foreign Exchange Act and allowed the prosecution to lead its evidence.

Following-up the Judges order, Deputy Solicitor General Dileepa Peris testified the Deputy Controller of Exchange Sisira Kumara Perera
In the action filed before the Colombo High Court, the Attorney General filed indictment papers against three accused, namely; Nexia Corporation Consultants (Private) Limited, Linton Piyasena and Ravi Karunanayake, for allegedly aiding and abetting the 1st and 2nd accused to act in violation of the Exchange Control Act.

The accused are alleged to have violated the Exchange Control Act by depositing USD one million, remitted by a non-resident named Raj Rajaratnam of Galleon International Masters' Fund at the Kirulapone branch of the Standard Chartered Bank, when the said money should have been deposited at the Union Bank for the purchase of its shares.

Sequel to reading of the charges to the accused by Court, Senior Counsel Anil Silva appearing for the first accused submitted that he was objecting to the hearing of the case before the High Court, as the provisions in the Exchange Control Act did not permit the Attorney General to decide whether the case should be heard as a summary or a non-summary one. Counsel submitted that it was up to the Magistrate to decide on that and that the Attorney General had erred by deciding on such a matter. On that premise Counsel sought the dismissal of the indictment.

President's Counsel Ananda Wijesekera and Rienzie Arsecularatne agreed with Anil Silva's submissions and submitted that the Attorney General had acted in violation of the conditions of the Exchange Control Act by filing indictment papers in the High Court.

Senior State Counsel Dileepa Peiris, in reply submitted that the case had been heard before the High Court for a reasonable period of time. He said the defence had not objected on any of those occasions and were now making an irrational objection. He also cited sections from the Criminal procedure Code to buttress his arguments.

President's Counsel Ananda Wijesekera with Sugath Jayasundera instructed by K. Ganeshayogan appeared for the 1st accused; Senior Counsel Anil Silva instructed by G.G. Arulpragasam appeared for the 2nd accused; President's Counsel Rienzie Arsecularatne with Methsiri Paranavithana Thejitha Koralage, Wasantha Batagoda and Dharshana Kuruppu appeared for Ravi Karunanayake.

Further trial was fixed for today.

Lies, damned lies and computer jilmaat

2010-02-17T16:34:00.000-08:00

The Island Editorial

No sooner had the final result of the Jan. 26 presidential polls been announced than the JVP claimed that President Mahinda Rajapaksa had won fraudulently by manipulating the Election Department computers. While results were still being released, rumours were also floated that Elections Commissioner Dayananda Dissanayake had been placed under house arrest and the government was doctoring results to secure victory.

There were various other rumours about the election results doing the rounds not only here but also across the globe. Sadly, in this country, where a sucker is said to be born every minute, there were many who fell for those lies hook, line and sinker.

JVP Leader Somawansa Amarasinghe was the first to go public audaciously with the allegation of a computer fraud. In his inimitable facetious style, he coined a term 'computer jilmaat', which became popular in no time. The Election Secretariat denied the allegation vehemently. So did the University of Colombo, which technologically assists that institution in handling election results. But, the JVP and others of its ilk continued to disseminate their false claim prompting the Elections Commissioner himself to summon a press conference and put the matter to rest.

If any backer of the defeated presidential candidate Gen. Sarath Fonseka had had irrefutable evidence of a computer fraud as claimed, it would have been sufficient to challenge the re-election of President Rajapaksa successfully in court. (A 43-page election petition could have been shortened quite effectively to just one page!) So, the ardent supporters of the main Opposition candidate and the JVP expected the computer jilmaat to figure very prominently in Tuesday's election petition. But, lo and behold, the jilmaat was conspicuous by its absence in that document! What happened?

There could not have been a lapse on the part of the drafters of that vital document which they took three weeks to prepare painstakingly. We were told that former Chief Justice Sarath N Silva himself had undertaken the drafting of the petition. The legal brains behind it must have known that the computer jilmaat for what it really was––a Goebbelsian lie, which would have been laughed out of court.

Now, the JVP leader and others who tried to pull the wool over the eyes of the public by propagating the jilmaat lie owe an explanation. They ought to tell their backers why that allegation was omitted.

The JVP cannot bluff its way through anymore. The last straw it clutched at desperately snapped on Jan. 26 and now disaster is inevitable. The outfit lacks a definite goal and a clear strategy and depends on tactical moves for survival. It is a political wanderer looking for issues. It signals left and turns right like asphalt cowboys on our highways and even does not hesitate to compromise its much flaunted ideology for expediency. It also has no qualms about co-habiting with anyone or opting for political marriages of convenience, if that serves its purposes in the short term. Else, its honeymoon with the UNP, which it once accused of having cremated its founder leader Rohana Wijeweera alive in 1989, would never have been possible. Today, it is even ready to coalesce with the ultra capitalist UNP, whose ideology is diametrically opposed to its 'Marxist' one to contest a general election, should the latter agree to a common symbol!

Having squandered its political fortunes for the past six years, the JVP finds itself in the exalted company of the Old Left reduced to a political creeper. No amount of political jilmaat will help it make a comeback.

The April polls will mark the end of the JVP’s political hitchhiking.

Allegations of computer fraud dropped

2010-02-17T13:50:00.000-08:00

The petition did not make any reference to the Opposition’s main allegation in the wake of the Jan. 26 polls that President Mahinda Rajapaksa had won a second term through a computer fraud, a claim vehemently denied by Elections Commissioner Dayananda Dissanayake. The UNP, JVP and the SLFP (M Wing) alleged that the election staff had collaborated with the government to perpetrate an unprecedented computer fraud to deny Opposition candidate General (retd) Sarath Fonseka victory at the January 26 polls. JVP leader dubbed the alleged computer fraud, ‘computer jilmaat’. The non-inclusion of this much publicised allegation has raised many an eye brow in political and diplomatic circles.

People feel safe after SF lost

2010-02-11T17:23:00.000-08:00

P. S. Mahawatte

The Presidential election has been peacefully concluded and Mahinda Rajapaksa was re-elected with a historic majority. Whilst campaigning, Mahinda Rajapaksa addressing the massive crowds said that he was expecting not just a victory but a historic victory to convince the so called international community to give up their machinations for a regime change.

One can see how our people have changed governments in the past by the -intelligent use of their democratic weapon the VOTE!

They have done so at this Presidential election too! We have seen that the loosing side after every election, complains of election fraud etc. mainly to maintain the morale of its supporters.

Economists and other professionals of this country must feel safe that Sarath Fonseka, has lost the election because if he won, he said that he would get rid of economists and professionals as he will not be able to give salary increases etc. because of them. I clearly heard him say this and was rather concerned about our friends in the Economic Association and the OPA! Let us briefly examine the election results.

The whole of the North and the East was rather surprisingly won by the opposition candidate Sarath Fonseka. It’s surprising because, President Rajapaksa took a special interest in looking after the IDPs and their resettlement. He spared no expense. Above all, the President has ensured that all people could live in harmony and peace without fear of the LTTE jackboot. The only explanation for Sarath Fonseka winning the North and East of the country is that the alleged secret agreement between the TNA and SF influenced the Tamil voters. The ‘white flag’ allegations made by SF may have led the Tamil people to believe that SF wanted to save the lives of LTTE terrorists! Be that as it may, President Rajapaksa has achieved what he considered most important - the establishment of Democracy which was denied to the people of the North and East for the last three decades.

The Tamil speaking people in the North, South, East and West Will no doubt now realise that they have been mislead by the TNA. A significant feature of the Presidential election is that although Digamadulla and Trincomalee was won by SF, President Rajapaksa won the postal votes of Digamadulla by 62%, Trincomalee by 63.7% and even Vanni by 51%!

Lakbima Cartoon

2010-02-11T07:53:00.001-08:00

Fonseka arrest- The correct action for the country

2010-02-10T15:16:00.000-08:00

Gen. Fonseka arrest has elicited a range of reactions from different fractions; local and international. It is interesting to see that the hysteria of the opposition protests is directly proportional to the political impact, this arrest is having on their particular parties.
As I indicated on my earlier blog, the UNP leadership, who stand to gain most from the incidence has resided to issuing statement on the legality of the arrest, while JVP, the party that stand to loose most are carrying out violent protest. While the opposition is crying foul, the NGO's and INGOs have joined the band wagon, United States is concerned, even the usually calm Ban Ki-Moon is alarmed.

I pointed out in my previous blog that the government would not gain any political milage from arresting the already unpopular General, instead government stand to suffer some political damage as the opposition protests mount. Even foreign governments have expressed their displeasure. The public also seems to be divided on the issue, some argue that arresting Gen. Fonseka is the correct move as he has vilolated the law, some claim his crimes are not severe for such treatment.
These factors show that the government is actually suffering some political damage for the arrest. Before this incident the topic discussed on most news media was, " How would the opposition contest in the fourth coming parliamentary elections". The disagreements had even begun to get so sour that some fractions of the opposition were even starting to balme other parties as doing governments dirty work by resisting a common opposition alliance. By arresting Gen. Fonseka governmnet has changed the topic and has made the environment unfavorable to themselves. Why would the government do this? Specially on the brink of a parliamentary election, where the government is expecting a massive 2/3 mandate from the people, and at a time the opposition seemed to be committing harakiri, why would the government give them a point to coalesce.

Many observes seems to have missed this point. The reason presumably lies with certain statements Gen.Fonseka made immediately after the election. After the election, when the government was arresting , those who were believed to be associated with military coup, Gen Fonseka challenged the government to arrest him instead, he further claimed that he is aware of the illegal orders of high ranking government officials and if any harm is to come to him these sensitive secrets would be released.
Gen. Fonsekas "Gota ordered them shot" story even after being retracted publicly, draw huge attention form international agencies, that Minsiter Mahinda Samarasinghe had to brief the UN highcommision explaining the falsity of the statement. In this context the latest claim by Fonseka would have ellicited much more pestering from international agencies , forein governmneta and LTTE lobby. Fonseal would have surely made that one of his campaign slogans as he did in his presidential campaign. This continuous babbling of government commiting illegal actions would have made the LTTE lobby and foregin governmnets to call for a fresh round of investigation on the final phase of war.
Government by arresting Gen. Fonseka has effectively nullified this "illegal action" claim , and has prevented exasperating actions by international bodies that would destabilize the country.

Any other previous governmnet would have choosen the politically correct path of , letting Gen. Fonseka be and postponed facing the repurcussions of his irresponsible statements. This governmnet is not like any other, specially Mr. Mahinda Rajapaksha, when he sees a problem he faces it head on, by doing so on this matter he has averted another adversity that would have hurled upon the government and war heroes.

Fonseka Arrest- Political Implications.

2010-02-09T15:52:00.000-08:00

Ret. Gen Sarath Fonseka was arrested by the military police, on at his residence on charges of politicking while in uniform. It is laughable to see those who attempted to hang Fonseka during the war are now crying foul and demanding his release.
Lets leave the legality of the situation aside and see the political implications.

Government-UPFA
At the time of his arrest Fonseka was not at his height of favorability. His enraged and foul mouthed speeches and hesitation to accept defeat gracefully, has taken a heavy toll on his likability. Therefore it is hard to see that the public outcry would develop against the government. The people who are questioning Fonseka's arrest , were one time against him and were with the LTTE lobby; therefore it would be easy for the government to label those who question the arrest as allying with LTTE lobby and discredit them.
This indicates that there is no direct impact on the government-UPFA fraction by this arrest. How about indirect implications, or the implications on the opposition parties?

UNP.
It was reported that at the time of his arrest Fonseka was attempting to forge a broad opposition alliance to contest for the parliamentary elections. His presence in the opposition is a grave threat to Ranil Wikaramsinge's UNP leadership. RW is already unpopular in his party, Fonseka's admittance to UNP would have severely thretened his future as the UNP leader. Therefore RW was taking all nessary steps to keep him away from UNP. Fonseka was awarded deputy leadership of UNF and even a national list appointment to the parliament. Fonseka has refused this offer and indicated that he is willing to contest from his home district of Galle. This would have created worries in RW protege and aspiring deputy leader of UNP Wajira Abewardena, as this means he has a fight to retain his No.1 position in the Galle district preferential vote. This again would have threatened RW, as Fonseka would have most likly gathered a greater percentage of preferencial votes that RW, and would implicate that he is the most popular leader in the opposition.
This broad opposition coalition would have allowed JVP to contest with the UNP and other opposition parties; as happened in 2004 this would mean many JVPer getting parlimentay seats by UNP votes and UNP contesntants loosing their possible seats. This issue was also reportedly discussed in UNP meetings and it was disided that If JVP wants to join the alliance they had to run under the elephant symbol and only one JVP candidate per district would be allowed. With Fonseka out of the secen there is no one to lobby for a UNP-JVP alliance, UNP Mps who were scared of loosing their seats for JVP members might be breathing a sigh of relief.
These factors show that removal of Fonseka from the political arena is benificial for the UNP leadership and even for the low level MPs, as their positions would be secured.

JVP
The JVP stands to loose most form this incidence, as indicated above as there is no one else to lodge a strong campaign for a UNP-JVP alliance, they would have to contest alone under the "Bell". It was also reported that as the UNP-JVP alliance was seemingly unlikely they were contemplating on contesting under "Hare" symbol with a small coalition, with Fonseka as the leader. With his departure this coalition is also meaningless and only option is contesting alone.
It was revealed during the past provincial elections and the presidential elections the JVP's voter base has severaly eroded and if they were to contest alone they would at best get two seats one from Hambantota and the other from Anuradhapura. This means all most all JVP stalwarts , like Anura Kumnara Dissanayaka, Vijith Herath and Sunil Hadunhtti would loose their seats. The thorn in the eye would be the JVP breakaway fraction JNP; will be getting nominations under UPFA and are likely to retain most of if not all of their seats.
The photo above was supposedly taken, at the moment of Gen Fonseka being arrested, the helpless expression on the faces of JVP leaders says a lot about their future.
As this analysis shows it its clear that the government cannot gain any political milage from this arrest, but they would not loose much popularity either. On the other hand the UNP stands to gain most from it and it spells the end of JVP.

ඓතිහාසික ජනාභිෂේකය

2010-01-27T12:50:00.000-08:00

රැව්දුනි පොකුරු බොරු වැල් අහසටත් උසින්
සුරැකිණි එහෙත් හද රැඳි ආදරය විසින්
දිරියෙනි නැගී ලද ඔද තෙද පඬුරු ලෙසින්
සගයිනි හෙටත් මා ඔබ ළඟ පුරුදු වෙසින්

- දිවයින

රනිල්-අනුර ෆොන්සේකා දමා පැනයයි

2010-01-27T12:44:00.001-08:00