Thoughts from London

Birthday bash and the Oslo repudiation
They are all preparing to pay homage to "Anna" when he celebrates his 50th birthday this month. November 27 is the day when the faithful, the prodded and the coerced, the threatened and the menaced, will gather at Excel in the London Docklands to sing happy birthday Velu P.

A day later, no doubt. But then who cares if the organisers here are able to show the great leader that they could gather the flock and bring them to the arena as the Romans did to the Christians before introducing them to the lions.

They are even invited to send greetings to the Herr Fuhrer on specially printed glossy paper that carry the photograph of a smiling Prabhakaran (or is it Piripaharan? Don't they believe in standardised spelling?)

Under (you cannot put anything above the leader can you? Well, not if you fear being reminded of it later) the photograph is the legend printed in Tamil and in English.

The English message reads: "Please convey your greetings either in Tamil or English." Something surely was missing there. The sentence seemed so incomplete and drab too. Of course. Two crucial words were, for some inexplicable reason, missing from the text. What on earth happened to "Or else!"

Come on, this seemed like cadging for greetings messages. Surely 50-year old Praba has other things on his mind than to be reading messages from afar, however obtained.

After all he has to prepare his speech to be broadcast to the shepherds and their sheep gathered at the Docklands that is scheduled to begin at high noon and continue till 7 pm.

Apparently the organisers - an organisation styled "BTA" at Eelam House - have not been able to rustle up a Gary Cooper to make an appearance at High Noon. Not surprisingly, since all the pistol-packing paisanos are busy in Colombo and in the east of the island.

Well if they cannot find a Gary Cooper they seemed to have found a near-imitation of the rugged hero of what cliché experts call the silver screen. Who? Who else but the veteran of many a verbal skirmish whose memory unfortunately, appears to be undergoing some peculiar transformations and is suddenly seized by a mist of forgetfulness that even days on a psychiatrist's couch is least likely to unravel.

Such is the influence of his memory lapses that this has even afflicted those who some bad tempered politician back home derisively labelled the salmon or sardine eaters. The Norwegians, bless their dear hearts, have been trying with the persistency of a mole, to bring peace to Sri Lanka that people with suspicious minds are beginning to ask whether this is a ploy to dump rotten sardines on our people.

If I have not mentioned any name, it is only because the organisers have not done so either. Some of my Tamil friends here gave me the many -- splendoured leaflet announcing the great day. Someone helped translate its contents for me but could only say that one of the attractions of the afternoon would be an address by the "political adviser."

If this is the same political adviser I am thinking of, then I've been trying to get his address for a long time. Okay, so I don't want his home address but he could at least oblige with his telephone number.

Anyway the only chap who appears to fit the bill is this Anton Balasingham fellow who has cultivated the art of writing books when he wants to deny one thing or another. The first bit of evidence that his memory is slipping is that he has called his book "War and Peace" as though his inventive mind had thought of it first.

Now I have not laid my hands on this book yet and somebody I know called me the other day saying he had ordered a copy for me. I only hope that it is not as voluminous as the one written by this Russian chap named Leo Tolstoy. Otherwise my regular postman, a nice enough fellow called Cliff, would surely have a problem trying to squeeze the bloody thing into my letterbox.

This is what, I suppose, those psychoanalysts or some such breed, call the association of ideas. If Balasingham consciously or unconsciously, steals the title of Tolstoy's celebrated novel, it is not because he has not studied his intellectual property law (though the less educated call him an intellectual. Not another of those Third World intellectuals one hopes).

It is simply because Balasingham's War and Peace has one thing in common with Tolstoy's novel. Both are set in a historical milieu but are essentially works of fiction.

Now it is true that I have not read Anton "Goebbels" Balasingham's latest contribution to the world of English-language literature. But when I was in Colombo a couple of years ago I was intrigued by the title of another book written by the aforementioned Balasingham.

That was titled "The Duplicity of Politics." One thing one must say for Herr Goebbels of the LTTE that he is able to pick titles for his books that truly reflect the very nature of the organisation of which he is the political adviser.

If all the reports of Balasingham's latest venture into the world of letters are to be believed, "War and Peace" (Balasingham's that is, not Tolstoy's) is said to claim that there is no such thing as the "Oslo Declaration."

It was at a Colombo press conference last year that by Chris Patten, then European Union Commissioner for External Relations, said he told Velu P that any solution must be based on the Oslo Declaration and so on and so forth.

Japanese special envoy Akashi has on several occasions referred to the Oslo Declaration. So have various representatives of the United States. Now, some two years or more after the Oslo Declaration was first mentioned, Balasingham finds that there is no such thing, that the man who was a chief negotiator cannot ever remember agreeing to the political parameters of a negotiated solution.

As though Balasingham's volte face is not sufficient cause for concern, one finds the so-called facilitators or mediators or whatever the politically acceptable appellation is, also taking a running jump onto the LTTE bandwagon. Some lowly second secretary from the sardine (or is it salmon?) eating-country tries to add some Norwegian oil to Balasingham's baloney by claiming there is no Oslo Declaration.

Were the Norwegians in self-induced torpor when the rest of the international community was proceeding on the basis of an Oslo Declaration? Why did it take so long for the Norwegians to come up with this latest construction? It is of course not surprising they would want to forget Oslo declarations after what happened to the one on the Middle East.

The title of Balasingham's earlier book "The Politics of Duplicity" surely exemplifies Norwegian and LTTE politics better than "War and Peace." So await the Fuhrer's birth speech when he is expected to slam some foreign nations as interfering so and sos and possibly announce a go it alone plan.

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