Rajpal's Column

8th November 1998

Now we are talking peace, what about the unemployed?

By Rajpal Abeynayake

So now we are talking peace?

Liam Fox has been replaced by Derek Fachett. So now we are talking talking. Will the Sri Lankan separatist crisis be mediated by a British team led by Fachett who are travelling here to open a trade fair? Nobel prizes for Chandrika Kumaratunga and Velupillai Prabhakaran to follow?

Will the sun rise from the West also? Fachett is scheduled to hold talks with both Kumaratunga and opposition leader Ranil Wickremesinghe, and Fachett rumouredly has intentions of hatching a Liam Fox type of agreement between the two leaders on the Sri Lankan situation.

All we know is that the Liberation Tigers are on talk mode once again. On September, the LTTE announced that they would like to resume talks facilitated by a third party mediator. The government instantly rejected this overture.

Though the government of Sri Lanka has consistently not been in favour of third party mediated talks, the government may now be forced to nod its head as what's becoming the international fashion. Peace, and mediated peace on the international arena is a la mode. So the government has to fall in line with that proclivity even though every single kitchen cabinet member of the dispensation probably believes that peace talks with the LTTE at this point will help the Tigers and hinder the war effort.

But Fachett little knows about Sri Lankan politics. Whether he sincerely believes that he can establish a lasting peace between the two warring Sri Lankan political parties is a different matter. These are the talks that he wants to make succeed, because Britain already has had the successful experience of having mediated a temporary agreement between Wickremesinghe and Kumaratunga in the past. So Fachett says again, bury the hatchet. He calculates that this is the real peace that has to be established, and that if this peace is mediated it will be a piece of cake to make peace with the aggressive Prabhakaran, (his aunt, his uncle, his bappochi and that particular caboodle.)

This of course, the business czars of this country have already tried to do. They in their pinstripe and white shirt wisdom, sat down to lunch, sat down to dinner, and sat on their seats through long and fullsome pre-conference sessions to try and establish a peace between the two warring parties of this country, the respective teams of Kumaratunga and Wickeremesinghe.

They didn't succeed of course. But that's another matter. The business community suddenly went peace mode. At least if they can't provide jobs, they thought they could provide peace. Just being flippant. But, these business leaders who are hard nosed competitive business martinets had to discard their aggressive exteriors and sit at table for the somber task of preparing a truce between the countries' two major political parties, at least if they couldn't possibly get that Clint Eastwood from Jaffna to lay down his guns.

In the meantime, there were hosts of almost unnoticed protest marches and threatened death fasts by a tribe of people called unemployed undergraduates. A degree holder from Peradeniya who serves at table, said that he is underemployed and acknowledged that the government cannot provide all the jobs for unemployed undergraduates such as himself. Mr. Lalith Kotelawala, was at almost this very moment of time, peering through a pair of glasses and delivering himself of a homily on the vast need for peace in the country at the moment.

As for the unemployed and underemployed undergraduates at their enclaves of protest, their minds, to say the least, were on different things. Was the war depriving them of jobs? Not really, they said.

Business commentators and the jobless graduates agree on one thing (see Midweek Mirror, our sister paper Nov. 4). They said they that undergraduates are not being hired for private sector jobs due to the employer's perception that they are weak in English.

For business leaders who are bent on bringing about a fast and durable peace, the undergraduates probably offer something to chew on. We, the undergraduates they say, represent the social underside. Business leaders won't hire us because we can't speak the Queen's English.

As far as the peace issue is concerned, the business leadership has stepped in, even if it is to close the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Kotelawala and his gallant knights, the technocratic Mr. Ken Balendara included want to make peace with a sense of purpose.

Maybe the business leadership can for once think about closing the stable door before the horse bolts, trite though that may sound to their ears. Here is a bunch of undergraduates in the South, the only peaceful oasis of our country, saying that the business leadership of this country keeps them unemployed and underemployed because they do not know an alien language.

Perhaps, when the south erupts, these same business leaders will mount their tables (I nearly said stables) to preach about the dire burning (ad nauseam) need for peace. They always believe (as Mr. Neville Kanakaratne said in public during the last JVP crisis) that the departed horse can be brought back to the stable, and the door bolted ex post facto. They should try telling that to unemployed non English speaking undergraduates.

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