“As for Sri Lanka, Colombo knows fully well that it is too proud an island state – where Father Adam is believed to have descended from heaven – to be manipulated by the illegal Zionist entity, which is supplying arms to both the Sinhalese and the Tamils to senselessly shed each other’s blood, when the need of the hour is diplomacy to bury the hatchet and work for peace on the basis of mutual respect.”________________________
by: A. Sabzevari
(April 29, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The Iranian President’s 3-nation South Asian trip has been hailed as a landmark visit by the media of the host countries – Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India.
Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his high-ranking delegation are right now in Colombo and its environs on the second leg of their visit to launch vital economic joint ventures, after having held fruitful talks a day earlier in Islamabad with President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Reza Gilani on a wide range of issues including border security.
Tomorrow evening they will fly home to Tehran from New Delhi after ice-breaking talks with Indian leaders, who are beginning to see the folly of following Uncle Sam’s anti-Gandhian and anti-Nehruvian dictates, and the wisdom of reviving the traditional ties with Iran that would give them a vital corridor for trade with the landlocked countries of Central Asia.
The whirlwind trip seems to have tripped Washington’s hegemonic designs to keep South Asia perennially divided by making a bogeyman out of age-old ally, Iran.
For long the Islamic Republic has called on its friendly neighbours in the Subcontinent to forge fraternal ties by tapping each others’ rich potential for collective regional development that would certainly make them independent of unnecessary reliance on insincere outsiders.
Tehran fully understands the limitations of the governments in the region, and for this reason is willing to go the extra mile. It is also aware of the peculiar situations – each different from the other – faced by the energy-starved developing states of South Asia, which are presently not in a position to bluntly tell the US to keep its much-bloodied nose out of their internal or regional affairs.
The patience shown by the Islamic Republic, and that too under circumstances when the mischief-makers on the other side of the world had almost succeeded in driving a wedge between time-honoured and time-tested neighbours by politicizing Iran’s peaceful nuclear programme, has certainly proved fruitful.
Fortunately commonsense has prevailed, as is evident from developments of the past few weeks in the region and the statements of defiance coming out from both India and Pakistan concerning the feverish US attempts to stop the two countries from importing gas from Iran.
The potential for cooperation is immense, and there are indeed many other common fields to explore for the sake of collective development, and above all, for peace and independence of South Asia, of which the “peace pipeline” is only the beginning.
As for Sri Lanka, Colombo knows fully well that it is too proud an island state – where Father Adam is believed to have descended from heaven – to be manipulated by the illegal Zionist entity, which is supplying arms to both the Sinhalese and the Tamils to senselessly shed each other’s blood, when the need of the hour is diplomacy to bury the hatchet and work for peace on the basis of mutual respect.
The fact that Dr. Ahmadinejad’s epoch-making visit has been widely acclaimed by the multi-ethnic press in all three languages – English, Sinhalese, and Tamil – speaks of Iran’s sincere efforts.
The Iran-aided multi-purpose Uma Oya dam project in Wellawaya that in addition to irrigating 25,000 acres of hitherto dry lands will also generate over 100 Megawatts of power to the national grid, is certainly a national asset for all ethnic groups. And so is the Sapugaskanda refinery, which will make Sri Lanka self-sufficient in aviation fuel, bitumen and LPG used mainly as fuel for cooking.
So far so good, but we urge vigilance to all three countries against the designs of our common enemies.
To sum up it is worth recalling how in the 1950s the architect of Non-Alignment, India’s first prime minister, Jawaherlal Nehru, saw through the US plot to wreck New Delhi’s national development plans by offering sophisticated military help including nuclear know how that would have fundamentally compromised India’s commitment to independent foreign policy and prevented the country from achieving the status it enjoys today.
- Sri Lanka Guardian
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