Editorial

When the heavens open up, bringing torrential rains, floods, and misery to people, it is also a heaven-sent opportunity for politicians, especially aspiring Members of Parliament, to rise to the occasion by taking dry rations, drinking water, and other relief to the affected. The inclement weather came at no better time for most of them with less than a month to go for parliamentary elections.

It’s not just floods across this country; there is freak weather around the world. From Florida to Sao Paulo to Nigeria and Myanmar, coupled with toxic fumes from wars in Ukraine and West Asia and falling debris from spaceships exploring Jupiter, Mars and the Moon, the alarm bells of climate change, global warming and the dangers to island nations like Sri Lanka facing rising sea levels are sounding.

The cry of the flood victims in 12 of the 24 districts that were badly affected is that successive governments have done very little to solve this recurring problem. The largest district vote-wise—Gampaha—was the worst hit. Around this time last year too, it was the same story; the flood waters came and went, and all was forgotten until it happens again and again. Millions are being doled out as relief, this time by the new Government, and committees appointed to ‘study’ the situation, but more long-term solutions are the obvious answer to the misery people have to repeatedly undergo. Climate change is not the only culprit, though. Bungled attempts at installing Doppler weather systems to detect oncoming bad weather, radar and other expensive meteorological equipment coupled with unauthorised constructions in main towns that corrupt local councils tend to ignore or give permission for are contributory factors.

As the rains and floods abate, naturally so too does the interest of governments. Focus is diverted elsewhere. It is not disaster management during floods that is required, but disaster mitigation during fair weather.

Genocide continues as UN looks on haplessly

The manic, unrestrained Israeli Prime Minister going on and on binge-killing civilians in Occupied Palestine and now Lebanon is also putting the lives of over a hundred Sri Lankan peacekeepers serving under the United Nations flag at risk.

That Israel can take on the entire UN system, and all that the UN can do is nothing, even right in the middle of its annual General Assembly sessions, is telling. Res ipsa loquitur. The facts speak for themselves.Naturally, the bravado to be willing to thump the UN on its nose by shelling its peacekeeping base in South Lebanon last week and demanding the Secretary-General withdraw the multinational contingent comes from the support they get from the United States and some European nations. Feeble noises keep coming out of those capitals to ‘stop the fighting’, but they seem to want Israel to thrash the Iranians, whose proxies, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis, have created what the Israelis rightly call a ‘ring of fire’ around its state.

To some extent, the Israelis’ security concerns are justifiable as a result. With their traditional enemy states, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia neutralised one way or another, Iran has filled the vacuum with its armed militia.

And yet, the Israeli onslaught now continuing unabated on a daily basis for a year is inhumane and inexcusable. Under the cover of liquidating the pro-Iran groups, they are committing unadulterated genocide and getting away with it.

UN international tribunals like the ICJ and the Security Council itself stand exposed for their sheer powerlessness in the face of Western domination of the current world order.

Disintegrating Commonwealth

The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), once the highlight of the British old colonies club, will be held next week for the first time in the small island nation of Samoa.

A significant departure for the group of 56 nations is that the largest member-nation, India, will not be represented at the summit level. And what is even more significant is that India’s Prime Minister is skipping CHOGM for the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) summit in Kazan, Russia—a clear pointer of a rising global power wanting to shed its colonial history and embrace the future.

Britain, the mother organisation of the Commonwealth, has itself opted to distance itself from its old colonies, which it saw as of little use come the 21st century. Its foray into the European Union (EU) decades ago left it with little time for past sentimentality. Only the monarchy, then the Queen, and now her son as the titular heads of the Commonwealth, had/have any affection for the colonies, as country after country sundered the umbilical cord that links them to Britain by becoming republics.

The Commonwealth Secretariat has been rather dormant, by and large starved of funds from the already stretched Treasury in London. The entire group of nations has been split for some time into a ‘White Commonwealth’ and a ‘Non-White Commonwealth’. African nations are introducing motions calling for compensation for slavery from other members who were responsible for it. Some of the members are engaged in browbeating other members with charters and rule books that espouse Commonwealth unity, but in Geneva, it is two such Commonwealth countries that are spearheading the charge against Sri Lanka. And it cannot be for values of human rights, because they stand accused of talking from both sides of their mouth, supporting blatant violations elsewhere in the world, such as in Palestine and now Lebanon, and of prioritising parochial domestic vote-based politics.

The current Canada-India spat over the expulsion of Indian diplomats is going to further tear this group apart. In slamming India for what they called “clear evidence” that it was involved in the targeted assassination of Indian separatists in Canada, the Canadian Foreign Minister said, “For Canada, it is a question of principle” to oppose the targeting of opponents in other countries. But Canada, which supports Sri Lankan separatists in Canada, and Trudeau who spun fake news and disinformation about ‘genocide’ in Sri Lanka maintains a deafening silence on targeted assassinations in Iran and Lebanon by Israel. Quite apart from the mass murder of civilians in Occupied Palestine and Lebanon. Principles?

Sri Lanka has only four Cabinet Ministers and with elections around the corner, they clearly have a lot on their plate. So Sri Lanka chose to send a senior official to BRICS and make only a nominal presence at CHOGM with the result that, for the first time, it will not be represented at a political level at a CHOGM—leaving one old club to join another more relevant to the country and the world today.