Major General (Ret.) Janaka Perera was attending to operational details at his base command at Anuradhapura directing his green shirted party workers on the day's programme when he received a call from a friend asking him how he was faring.
I thought I must write to you instead of sending you a ‘get well’ card, especially after you were badly beaten up by your rivals recently. Apparently one shot is not enough to silence you, but that is only to be expected, isn’t it?
More often than not visiting officials, whether they are from foreign governments, multilateral organizations or INGOs proffer reams of advice on how to run this country and what we should do to be acceptable to them. Criticism of the country, particularly on human rights, is liberally made as though the moral authority to do so rests with them and them alone.
Leadership is vital for a country’s economic development. This is particularly so in the context of external economic shocks and internal war and insecurity. Does Sri Lanka have the kind of leadership that can face up to the multiplicity of her economic problems and get it out of the economic crisis that we are heading to?
Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa's pious exhortations this week that we must all first think as Sri Lankans and later as Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim or Burgher rings seductively easy on the ear. Equally so is his reminder that "if Tamils are not with us, then that is our weakness."
NEW YORK - As predicted in these columns last month, the Cold War is hotting up at the United Nations, precipitated, this time, by a new crisis that has resulted in another political deadlock in the Security Council -- the turmoil in Georgia.
