Madam, we're sitting on a volcano 

Dear Sirs/ Madams, 

Now Sirs/Madam, we are no fools. You were voted into power in 1994 with an overwhelming vote of confidence by the people of Sri Lanka to put things right that were all wrong during the previous 17 years. We did not give our vote for you to give excuses or blame others for all the problems we now face. You and your government must take the responsibility for the tardy situation we now live in. 

Take the cost of living. How on earth do you think a person who takes home a salary of Rs. 7,000 can exist? Commuting from home to work has become expensive, the staples are at an all time high, meat and fish are out of our reach, milk powder is unaffordable and the story is the same for every item we consume at home. We are told that when the war is over, our worries and hardships will disappear but will it? Or, will it then be another set of excuses? Sirs/madams, please take Rs. 1000 to the market and do a shopping round and you will see what I mean. Only then will you see the difficulties your less fortunate citizens face. Take for instance the CWE. They purchase items from abroad at rates much higher than those paid by the private sector. But your ministers have the audacity to point out that these premiums are paid for better quality products. The CWE has been purchasing goods from abroad for the past 50 years and its executives must surely by now be competent to know about quality and specifications of the commodities the CWE imports better than a minister must. The COL is over the roof not because of high world prices but because of the rampant corruption out there. 

You asked us to vote for you a second time in December 1999, which many of us did. You told us in October 2000 to vote your government in and you would end the war in six months. That time period is now long over but there is no end to the war in sight. 

And your blame all and sundry for your failure. We can only blame you. We placed our faith in you to bring peace and it is you who must deliver. We are fed up with seeing you on our television screen, singing hosannas about your government and your achievements, but suffering in our homes, we see a different picture. 

You ask us to tighten our belts and make sacrifices for the country and you appoint a cabinet of nearly 90 ministers and deputy ministers who are on a spending spree like never before. Most of them do not have work to do and waste their time at our expense.

Our forces suffer disaster after disaster while our boys out in the trenches fight for us to keep Sri Lanka free. You don't hold the heads of your Army, Navy or Air Force responsible for the mad and bad decisions they made. In any other country the entire lot would be dispatched home. Instead, you keep the same tired and retired Generals in the fore. The younger and the brave have no place in the forces. Take for instance, what happened to Major General Janaka Perera. You retired him and dispatched him to Australia because you were scared he would do a coup and felt he was a threat if he stayed here. There is no war in Australia; he is needed here. Disaster after disaster, you keep changing the same old hats around, without sacking them for their misadventures. Loyalty does not breed success. And, loyalty at the expense of inaptitude and incompetence comes with a price. That price — the lives of our soldiers — you must not play with, employing failures with a proven track record. 

The recent Pallai debacle proves beyond an iota of doubt that your "war" cabinet is out of depth. They say, "Old soldiers never die", and this is very true of your very general Generals! Yes, most of them are very very general. Your Defence Ministry has no idea of how to conduct a war, how to make purchases, how to organize intelligence or what the hell is going on. 

New faces, fresh breath, dynamic personalities are what you need? Simply said Sirs/madams, you cannot win this war with the cronies who run the forces today. They want more and more sophisticated arms only to fight the war from the corridors of Colombo and the cocktail circuit. 

Next take the police. Ask any of your citizens and they will tell you that our cops are useless. Today the people have lost respect for the uniform. Police stations have become political surgeries. It is the local politician who calls the shots. The OIC, the ASP, the SP and SSP and even the DIG take orders from his master, the politician. The hallowed service we trusted in the past to protect us has gone to the dogs. The IGP is a nice guy. People just don't have confidence in the law keepers of the nation. Whoever who fed you the information that crime rates have gone down in the past few years must surely have lived abroad during this period! Sirs/madams, people do not report all crimes to the police now. Ask the first ten people you meet in the street about what they think of your police service. Every honest policemen (Yes, there are yet a few left!) are surely squirming in their uniforms frustrated because they are unable to carry out their duties for fear of demotions, transfers or sacking. These officers will not raise a finger to save you at the next revolt. You will surely have a revolt in your hands if you do not arrest the situation and let police carry out their duties and implement the law. The hoodlums, the thugs and army deserters must be arrested and locked up if we are to sleep peacefully in our homes. The law and order situation is very bad today. It was once regarded as a characteristic of life in this country that our cities and suburbs were safe at any time of day or night. This you know is no longer the case. Daylight robberies and plunder are as abundant as the sunshine. Get someone who is fearless to do the job. Make the IGP and his deputies accountable. Give them a task to reduce crime, arrest the thugs and curb all illegal activities and I bet they will do their part as long as you and your politicos leave them alone. It's as simple as that. 

What happened in Mawanella is indeed a tragedy. It is a shame on all of us in the eyes of civilized society. Thugs close to a leading politico of the governing party (the politico could be in Timbuctoo at the time and this makes no difference) go, demand from a shopkeeper a meal for which they will not pay. When the shopkeeper quite rightly refuses to succumb to this dastardly request, he is dragged out of his shop, tied to a statue and thrashed and stabbed. And look at the ensuing mess! It then takes a dangerous turn towards being a racial attack. What was the OIC of the police station doing? Where was the ASP? All these guys should be made accountable. If they have shirked their responsibilities they should be sent home instead of being transferred. How absurd is it to say that they did not and could not act because the perpetrators were close to a local politico? If this politician has interfered and you have evidence of it then he too should be sent home. This is the very reason why people of Mawanella and later Maradana reacted as they did. If the Mawanella OIC had done his job in the first place, all the mess that followed would not have occurred. And you blame some virtual conspirators for the mess, when the culprits are right before the police. We are tired of hearing that the UNP, the LTTE or the JVP has carried out one of their usual conspiracies to unsettle and obstruct you and your government. If they have, then for God's sake take those responsible into custody. Then, look at the CID. They have not solved any of the major crimes of this country for the past five years? The public perception is that now you hand over cases you don't want solved to the CID. Your own assassination attempt is the best example. It's almost 16 months now and the CID has been unable to bring the culprits to book. In another country the head of the CID would have rolled. 

The government's track record on politically enriched violence is a bad one. From Wayamba to Kandy where all PA politicos have been rewarded with the plums of office speak for them. Surely it was not the UNP that appointed all the PA MPs elected from the Central Province last October as Ministers or Deputies. The level of cynicism about politics and political institutions in Sri Lanka is most starkly revealed in the attitudes of young Sri Lankans. Their widespread contempt is based on the uneasy feeling that political parties don't stand any more for an identifiable philosophy and leaders are chosen on the basis of their potential as television performers and the quantum of false promises they are prepared to make. Your own Prime Minister has said that the party manifesto is packed with lies. But you must remember that our attitudes have changed under the influence of events since Independence - a period of relentless social, cultural, economic, political and technological change. Leadership is about helping all of us to change our values, motivations, fears, hopes and dreams towards a better Sri Lanka. Otherwise, God help us for you and I are sitting on a volcano. 

May I end by humbly asking you to stop kidding yourself and as the good saying goes, " Let the truth set you free." May God bless you to put things right. 

Yours Truly

Tim Eisbad 

Two steps back, one step sideways towards unity

Point of ViewBy Susantha Goonatilake

All the independent media had given a correct description of the reason for the riot, namely that political thugs of the PA had set it off. The trigger was non-communal but a symptom of the politicisation and criminalisation of our lives by our ruling parties. It soon took a communal turn as PA thugs whipped up communal feelings, and Muslim fundamentalists in turn took up the issue in Maradana. A leader of the Muslim United Liberation Front was arrested.

The President in her speech blamed unnamed political foes and extremists for the Mawanella incident but ignored the direct trigger, namely the thugs of her own party, which her own actions and inaction had spawned. Her broadcast was similar to the infamous interview she gave after she won the presidential election. 

It also had similarities in its deception to the one J. R. Jayewardene made in 1983, three days after the rioting had begun to announce that the Sinhalese had to be appeased.

Sri Lanka's and the Sinhalese heritage has historically been an accommodating one. In the crossroads of global trade and of cosmopolitan interaction for nearly 2,500 years, she had always accommodated other ethnic groups and religions. We were in our history glad hosts to many nations. We had visitors from all over the sub-continent, South East Asia, Rome and China. We had Christians by the 4th century probably before the British had. The Muslims were accommodated as traders probably from the 8th century. The Muslims came here as peaceful traders. They were not the marauding Muslim invaders that destroyed India's Hindu and Buddhist civilisation by killing off thousands of monks and setting fire to all non-Muslim religious buildings. The Taliban are a direct outcome of that.

But "our" Muslims were a different sort. They arrived, as they did in South East Asia through trade, not conquest. They became an assimilated and a fully equal partner of our society. And when our real barbarians came to kill and maim in the form of the Portuguese, our Muslims also became their targets. 

The Portuguese, with the full sanction of the Pope under the Treaty of Tordesillas, destroyed all Buddhist and Hindu temples in their midst. That is why one does not see any significant ancient remains in our West coast unlike in other parts of the country.

The Pope over the past ten years has apologised and asked for forgiveness for many misdeeds of his predecessors. These included the barbarities of the Inquisition, the indirect collusion in the extermination of Jews and just last week, apologised for attacks nearly thousand years ago on the Greek Orthodox Church. 

We have been the only country in Asia to get the full brunt of Church sanctioned brutality. And as the 500 years of the landing of the Portuguese come near we must prepare to launch a campaign for apologies, compensation and return of loot. Friday's arrest of the leader of the Muslim United Liberation Front very possibly on incitement, brings home the danger of insidious Muslim fundamentalist forces.

But the persons who should have been arrested in the first place and who set in motion the chain of ugly events were the PA political thugs. They roam free while fairy stories are spun accusing the UNP and the JVP. Such stories are a mixture of Nero singing while goon squads burn Rome and of king Kekille gives atrocious judgments. 

This bane of petty politicisation began in the late fifties. At that time it was perhaps understandable in that the administrative machinery of the country, a direct product of colonial needs, was divorced from ordinary people.

In the early 1960s political appointments, pressure and control were limited only to the level of peons. By the 1970s it had spread to the whole spectrum of public office. The 1972 Constitution guaranteed political interference by putting administration under the direct control of ministers. Internal rules and regulations, remnants of the AR & FR still guaranteed financial integrity of officials. 

Yet, the corruption and criminalisation of politics that began in the 1980s has spread like a wild fire devouring fair play of officialdom, including the police. The 1982 referendum, the mass murders in the period 1987-90, the Wayamba and recent elections are a few markers in this decline.

Our politicians spin around themselves webs of deceit and opportunism dragging the citizens increasingly down an abyss. But such webs are only a temporary relief. 

There are inevitable reactions, as politicians themselves thus cut the ground from their own feet. Crabs with little minds and inflated egos, they dance while the forces they have let loose boil their own pots.

Abu-Marzuq bulldozed into a mere statistic 

By Ian Katz in Rafah, Gaza

It is unlikely that Mr Abu-Marzuq will earn so much as a footnote in the history of the second Palestinian uprising. He is not among the more than 430 Palestinians who have died, nor one of the Tanzim gunmen engaged in the cat and mouse war against Israel. 

But early yesterday morning the seven-month conflict came crashing into Mr Abu-Marzuq's home. "It was around 12.30am. The first we heard was shouting and we opened the door and found them coming towards us," he said. "There were two bulldozers and five tanks. We just had time to pick up the children and carry them out." 

Mr Abu-Marzuq, his wife, and their six children, aged between five and 19, were on the ground floor of the house when the tanks came. Upstairs were his brother, sister-in-law, and their four children. 

There was no time to rescue any possessions. "I have no identity documents, no birth certificate, no books for the kids, no fridge, no furniture, no TV," said Mr Abu-Marzuq. He holds up the string of worry beads he has been flicking to and fro: "This is the only thing I took." 

Two-and-a-half hours later the bulldozers left, flattening another home and a police post before retreating through the gap they had earlier smashed in the concrete wall yards behind Mr Abu-Marzuq's home. 

On the other side of the wall, a few hundred yards away and across an Israeli "security road" to the south, lies Egypt. Israel says it is demolishing homes close to this border to prevent gunmen taking cover there and weapons being smuggled into Gaza. 

Mr Abu-Marzuq, who has already lost one son in the intifada, insists his home was not used for any military activity: "Even if people wanted to shoot from here we would prevent them because we knew this would happen." 

The work of the bulldozers at Yibna, on the southern edge of the Rafah camp, will barely warrant a mention in the news. 

These "sweeping" operations - the destruction of trees is described by the Israeli army as "shaving" - have become so commonplace that when the army demolished 32 homes in the Khan Younis camp a few miles north, only four journalists made the journey to cover the story. 

Back in Rafah, Mr Abu-Marzuq tugs at a towel that hangs from the wreckage of his home, ignoring the distant shots that crack periodically like fireworks. 

There is a sour irony to his misfortune: until a year ago he and his family lived in the Canada refugee camp on the Egyptian side of the border. They were moved into the Gaza Strip under the Israeli-Egyptian peace deal. 

"There can be no peace with Israel," he said. "All the agreements we make are just ink on paper."
- The Guardian, London