A gangland attack on UNP national list MP Sarath Kongahage last Saturday night has received scant media attention - hardly to the extent it surely deserves. The UNP itself, surprisingly has maintained a deafening silence on an attack on one of its own MPs.
Here was an incident where some thirty young men armed with T-56 automatics raided the restaurant owned by the MP, and one of them actually held his weapon at the head of the Member of Parliament. The gunman only stopped short of pulling the trigger, probably because he could not identify the MP in the dark and thought perhaps he was only a diner at the restaurant at which the incident took place. Nevertheless the MP was dealt a blow and made to lie face down until the rest of the raiding party smashed up the restaurant firing into the walls and mirrors. Diners fleeing for their lives from the scene were threatened in what seemed like a wild-west style raid in a posh residential area in the city of Colombo where the restaurant is located. It was only last week that The Sunday Times condemned the assassination of PA MP Nalanda Ellawala. We urged PA and the UNP leaders to call a halt to this tit-for-tat cycle of violence.
Even as the editions of our weekend paper were rolling off the presses, this raid on Mr. Kongahage and his restaurant was on. Was it a tit -for-tat for the Ellawala assassination? Or could it have been spurred by the fear that Sarath Kongahage, a close friend of Vijaya Kumaratunga might make certain embarrassing revelations while speaking to film stars he was hosting that night added to the fact that the attack came on the eve of the death anniversary of Vijaya Kumaratunga? Or was it a plain and simple act of gangsterdom and robbery? Whatever the motives, the evidence points to an organised armed raid carried out with impunity by a group of some 30 young persons on a public restaurant which they possibly could not but have known was owned by an opposition MP. Everything no doubt leads to the conclusion that such a raid could not have been carried out without the blessings of some person or persons in authority. The subsequent investigations contrasts so sharply with armies of detectives that have been deployed to probe the late Mr. Ellawala's death. Here was, by all accounts an attempted murder of an MP.
How indeed can the government keep talking honestly about an era of Beeshanaya of not so long ago when it is happening right now with nary a word from the Police. Apart from a routine check for fingerprints no CID probes appear to have been initiated and no condemnations have been forthcoming. The Beeshanaya era still continues it sadly seems. It is the same difference.
As the red banner is dipped in Beijing,
the world's most populous and potentially the most powerful country along with the rest of the world will remember Deng Xiaoping as the master-builder of the new China and one of the greatest men of this century ranking alongside Gandhi and Mao, Roosevelt and Kennedy, Lenin and Gorbachev, Churchill, Mandela and others.
On the one hand, Deng was a hardline and orthodox Maoist or Marxist, especially on largely political issues such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square tragedy, Taiwan and Tibet. But on the other hand, in essentially economic issues, Deng's vision and goals were not based on unquestioning conformity to any theoretical ism, but on what would work for his country with its own special qualities and characteristics. We saw that in the Hong Kong episode where Deng worked out the principle of "one country two systems." In typical Chinese phraseology with animals and all that, Deng would say that what mattered was not whether the cat was white or black but whether it caught the mice. He was a practical man and a pragmatist and perhaps it was his pioneering work and push that put China today in a position where within two decades it could overtake the United States in economic growth with Asia becoming the financial centre of the world. What a world it would be then -the last becoming the first. Den Xiaoping's attitude and approach in economics specially provide an important lesson for all countries, including Sri Lanka, though the problems or issues confronting us may not be similar. The lesson is that instead of swallowing wholesale what the west or World Bank tells us or what Stalinist socialists might tell us, we should take what is good from all sides and work out what is best for us.
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