Odds & Ends

Remember our story last week headlined: “Workers see misfortune in Lotteries Board move”? an underhand attempt was underway to hand over the printing of the Mahajana Sampatha lottery tickets to the private sector. The Government Press and the State Printing Corporation had printed the tickets since its launch in 1976.

This week Media and Information Anura Piyadarshana Yapa, who vehemently opposed the move as the very survival of the SPC hangs on this printing contract, submitted a Cabinet Paper to block the Board from calling for tenders to implement the scheme.

Tiger sympathisers and their front organizations who were clamouring to have Vinayagamoorthy Muralitheran, alias Karuna Amman, their ex-military leader tried for war crimes in London as soon as he was arrested by British authorities in October, after he slipped into England on a false passport have suddenly gone silent.

It had apparently dawned on them that the move could prove to be a double-edged sword, which could cut them one day as much as Karuna. Besides many of the crimes against humanity were committed by him while being a Tiger, like the massacre of 103 Muslims as they were praying inside a mosque in Kattankudy in September 1990 and the killing of 600-odd policemen in June of the same year after they surrendered to the LTTE. Besides, Britain and other Western nations mollycoddled the Tigers even long after the assassination of former Indian Premier Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991 on the lame excuse that the LTTE had not violated any British law.

The Foreign Ministry is now busy in a damage control exercise long after much irreparable damage has been done to the country by not being ready to educate the world adequately on the reasons for the abrogation of the highly ineffective Cease Fire Agreement early last week.

As a result of that laid back approach, message after message condemning Sri Lanka’s action, which many around the world saw as an unnecessary unilateral act, went virtually unanswered at the crucial initial stage. Last Tuesday saw Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama holding a Teleconference between his office in Colombo and Lankan Ambassadors and High Commissioners serving in key cities of the West, in Japan and India.

The inability and inconsistency to explain our decision resulted in the international community faulting us to the extreme. But the question is whether going on the diplomatic offensive now is like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.

All is apparently not peaceful in a place set up to co-ordinate the peace process. The man handling the media there, himself an old hand at Reuters having served them for some 20 years in Washington and also Uncle Sam for a number of years, is leaving apparently because his services were not made use of.

Now where else other than in this paradise isle, can someone who hastily left the chairmanship of a state venture early last year where he was accused of among other things of finishing a massive annual advertising budget within a matter of few months on printing a mountain of unauthorized calendars, bounce back to even a better post in the new year?

One of the key allegations was that he got approval to print 100,000, but he ordered 700,000. Who is going to watch consumer interests? One girl put it in pithy Sinhala and said it was like entrusting the safekeeping of fowls to a fox.