Editorial
A return to the bad old days
View(s):The importance — and significance of the re-opening of the railway line up to Kankesanthurai this week — cannot be downplayed.Unfortunately, the whole exercise has been soured by seemingly valid claims that the cost overheads were nearly triple what they should have been, a common and frequent complaint about this Government’s accelerated economic development programmes.
That is the high price the people have to pay for development. It is the grease that motivates accelerated development because kick-backs and wastage often are partners in crime. We saw this during the days of the Mahaweli Development Programme when a 30-year project was fast forwarded to a six-year one.
Still, notwithstanding such drawbacks, ‘Yal Devi’ , the train synonymous with connectivity between the ‘south’ and the ‘north’ (even more so than the A9 highway) being back on track after the LTTE severed this link is a noteworthy achievement of the Mahinda Rajapaksa Government.
In this backdrop it was rather churlish on the part of the Northern Province Chief Minister and his councillors to have boycotted the Development Council meeting chaired by President Rajapaksa who was in Jaffna. This is typical of the duplicitous politics of the northern politicians. They claim in affidavits to the Supreme Court they stand for a united Sri Lanka and then keep away from a meeting the President has summoned to discuss issues of the north.
The previous week, the Chief Minister made an astounding if not treacherous statement. He called on India to be the “guarantor” of the interests of the Tamil people of the north and east of Sri Lanka under the Indo-Lanka Agreement of 1987 and its corollary, the 13th Amendment. Where does such a position exist in the Agreement? He has the gumption to call upon a foreign country to directly interfere in the internal affairs of Sri Lanka, and he gets away with it.
This is the price President Rajapaksa has to pay for establishing the Northern Provincial Council under Indian pressure due to his Government’s own mismanagement; the human rights resolution in Geneva and the CHOGM summit, for which the then Indian PM did not turn up anyway.
Time and again, the Government has been warned that the Tamil National Alliance (TNA)-run Northern PC is going to be a proxy for India — now it is official.
The Secretary General of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) went on record very recently pointing out to the hidden face of the TNA. In a letter to the Indian PM he has exposed the dangerous politics they played once, acknowledging the LTTE as the sole representatives of the Tamil people of the north and east. The TNA supports an international probe into the conduct of the Armed Forces that liquidated the LTTE in 2009.
The Rajapaksa Government must be ruing the fact that it didn’t do what the Allied Powers did following the end of World War II. They started a process of de-Nazification and had the Nuremburg Trials. Germans who supported Hitler’s Nazi Party were asked, “Did you have a relative or close friend in the Third Reich?” Those who did had their fate sealed. The TNA leadership escaped this course of action.
That said, the Government has gone and shot itself in the foot. Having claimed to have liberated the north in 2009, it has gone into a state of withdrawal, and a state of paranoia clamping blanket restrictions on foreign passport holders visiting the north, conceding that there is a two-state policy or at least a one-state; two systems policy in existence.
The whole purpose of re-building the north after its liberation from the fascist grip of the LTTE is being lost with such a move. National Security is paramount, but the ghost of the LTTE must not unnerve a confident Government. The connectivity between the south and the north must be fully encouraged; that is the best antidote to separation and the communal politics in the country.
Both the Government and the TNA are just propelling this country back to the bad old days of not so long ago; as if this generation has not had enough of what was suffered in the past 30 wasted years.
Ebola: Need to put our gloves on
It takes a death or two in the United States or Europe to make the world wake up to the deaths of more than 5,000 (officially) — 12,000 unofficially — and counting, in West Africa due to the latest deadly strain of Ebola.
Airports all over the world are now putting in place health counters to check travellers from Africa. Sri Lanka for once, might take the External Affairs Minister’s “Look Africa” policy a bit more seriously at least on this epidemic.
The dangers loom. Thousands of Indians work in West Africa and travel back home. There is the great danger of the disease — though not airborne and contractible only through bodily fluids — breaking out in the vast subcontinent of India.
There have been similar scare stories before of Apocalyptic proportions. AIDS and then bird flu and SARS – the first starting off in Africa and the latter two in East Asia. It is good to see the relevant authorities locally getting geared (see our story on Page 8 ) to ensure the country is safeguarded from infectious diseases while continuing to promote tourism.
There’s no cause for panic — yet. Nor is there the need to discriminate or stigmatise Africans (we received some 4,000 tourists from Africa last year and some African students are here on Presidential scholarships for higher education), but the UN has admitted the International Community has failed to curb the Ebola outbreak.
There is, therefore, a need for immigration, health and quarantine agencies to work together and put their gloves on.When public health officials are grappling with the tackling of the persistent Dengue menace in this country, with cutbacks on fogging and spraying being reported (See page 10 for our story), with a Public Health Inspector’s own family members succumbing to the fever, one shudders to think of the inherent dangers in tackling this deadly disease Ebola if it ever reaches this country.