The re-capture of Kilinochchi and the continuing military gains had placed the Government in an almost unassailable position. It was doubling up its efforts to convert those battlefield successes into electoral gains.
Bahukutumbi Raman, a retired additional secretary of India’s cabinet secretariat who has set himself up as an analyst of topical issues in some Chennai outfit, has come a cropper again.
In one of his regular pieces to the local media he wondered, nay virtually predicted, that Kilinochchi besides being another Stalingrad would be the Sri Lankan army’s fatal kiss.
It did not take much time after the announcement that the international financial crisis had no repercussions on our financial institutions to find ourselves having our own home grown financial crisis. It certainly had no connection with what was happening in the United States and its repercussions on advanced financial centres.
The Government which was buoyed up by the military successes in the north, saw a rapid turnaround in its fortunes when the news broke first of the arson attack on the MTV/MBC television station and then of the brutal slaying of Mr. Wickramatunge, giving the much-needed ammunition to the opposition to criticise the Government.
The Government's logic, albeit plaintively articulated, that it had no earthly reason to attack media stations and kill journalists while the forces were winning spectacular battles on the war front, is as peculiar as it is utterly specious.
A cartoon in a US news magazine many moons ago showed a Palestinian woman huddled together with her child in a makeshift shack as American-made Israeli Phantom jets rained fire on the refugee camp. As she looks up at the skies, the woman says to the child: "I think the UN must have just passed a resolution condemning Israel." She was probably dead on target -- and she may have been right about it last week too.
