Odds and Ends

In the fictitious republic of Aknal a few months ago unknown to the bulk of its population made up of cattle (with our sincere apologies to genuine bovines) the new ruling mob staged probably the greatest heist in history. In this democratic socialist reublic, the bulk of the “gentlemanly” importers have been keeping imported trinkets well within the reach of the cattle for quite some time by under invoicing whereby cheating on exorbitant taxes and settling the difference owed to foreigners through the black market money changers said to be controlled by the world’s most ruthless cats. This matter was well known to all mobs who ruled Aknal in the past as well and therefore they milked the illegal industry in a gentlemanly fashion. So no wonder one previous mob even granted a blanket pardon to Mafiosi who had got caught doing various such rackets. The new mob however simply raided all the dirty money joints in a fort area and the surroundings and cleaned them up in style and also got real damning evidence not only against the dirty money handlers, but even against men who posed off as gentleman importers. So imagine what it must have cost all of them to ensure no further action and most of all not having to count iron bars at a state guest house.

So now everyone in Aknal is living happily ever after. But one good thing is for the moment there is no under invoicing as there is no underground system to the one that was busted so far.

Sole lay parliamentarian of the Jathika Hela Urumaya and Environment Minister Patali Champika Ranawaka predicts dire consequences for two UNP big wigs in the next two weeks over the Benz car incident. He says those big shots thought they could attack the monks and easily get away. They have already abandoned the Benz and it is now lying in a temple. Asked whether they had turned to the occult to obtain such revenge, he said “I do not comment.”

British Conservative shadow Defence Minister Liam Fox who was on a three day fact finding mission to Sri Lanka early this week visited Vakarai and Trincomalee to assess the ground situation in the East. In Vakarai he even met civil society representatives.

The message he took back to the Tamil diaspora living in England was for them to invest in the East and Jaffna, the same way the diaspora had been investing in the Western Province. He had told Lankan officials, what was needed in the East and Jaffna were employment generation investments.

Lotteries boys who were shivering in their boots after receiving summons from the Parliamentary Committee on Public Enterprises (COPE) to explain irregularities early this week were virtually let off the hook. Though some serious shortcomings were cited, including one lottery even publishing unaudited accounts, no fireworks were observed. The main reason being that there was only one comrade present and on the green side it was even more shameful as there was no show at all. Don’t know whether there was some deal like the alleged one with the Tigers.

Long cherished wish of President Rajapaksa, who headed the Palestine-Sri Lanka Friendship Association for about a quarter century, to open a Sri Lankan embassy in Palestine materialized on Tuesday when Lanka’s first ambassador to that country Dr T. Jayasinghe presented his credentials to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah in the West Bank. Palestinians have been maintaining an embassy in Colombo now for a few decades.

How to trust an NGO which rushed lists of disappearances and killings to the Geneva based UN Human Rights Commission, when it was looking into human rights violations in Sri Lanka recently. In the process it did a wonderful hatchet job to put on Government account even killings of Government soldiers and wild life guards by the LTTE. And listed among the disappeared is a NGO worker who was shot and injured one night in Trinco a few months back, when he walked into a high security zone at night while wearing headphones.

He had in fact left the country when his wounds healed. One other example is where Lt. Col Jayantha Suraweera killed by the Tigers has been listed as “Lipitinana Kernal Jeyanthasurvira - Anuradhapura”, an obvious twist to the name.

LTTE’s new Political Head P. Nadesan summoning SLMM Head Maj. Gen. Lars Solvberg to the Wanni this week to express their displeasure over the silence of the official peace facilitator Norway to the killing of S.P. Tamilselvan, may be the beginning of a new learning curve for striped variety, who have been mollycoddled by the peace facilitator all this while, while almost totally ignoring other Tamil voices. Tigers should consider themselves lucky that the SLMM weekly report has so far said nothing about their Peace Secretariat crowing to the world about the success of their suicide attack on the Anuradhapura Air Force base on October 22. Winds of change are probably here already. Early this week new Norwegian Ambassador Tore Hattrem met the EPRLF Leader T. Sritharan for the first time in the company of PLOTE Leader Dharmalingam Sidharthan.