Mr President, it is better be now than later

Mr President, don’t think that the ethnic problem in Sri Lanka can be resolved by military means. It is time for you to resolve it politically.

by R. Manoharan

(October 24, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) Mr President when you became the President of Sri Lanka, we thought perhaps you may be a better person than your predecessors. But with regret, we say that you are the worst president that Sri Lanka ever had.

There is a proverb that a person who is actually sleeping can be awoken but not a person who is pretending to sleep. Are you justifying to your own people and to the international community that whatever the ethnic problem prevails in Sri Lanka cannot be resolved if the government has the will.

Instead, we hold that you are directly responsible for undoing whatever had been done towards unsettling the problem. You cannot pretend that you are not responsible for the de-merger of North and East. You have no right to squander the wealth of the country to kill mother Lanka’s own citizens.

Today you may think that by beating the war rhetoric, you are a hero, but you are wrong. The present stock of masses of Sri Lanka, are well educated and sophisticated to distinguish between what is happening in the world and in Sri Lanka.

When the whole world is choosing a progressive way, the unscrupulous Sri Lankan politicians have chosen a regressive path. Instead of Sri Lanka being a model for prosperity and political stability in the whole of Asia has turned out to be the beggar of Asia.

So, Mr President, don’t think that the ethnic problem in Sri Lanka can be resolved by military means. It is time for you to resolve it politically. If not the ethnic problem in Sri Lanka won’t go away on it’s own until the last Tamil live in Sri Lanka.

You have wantonly ignored the advice of the international community and particularly India to not resolve this problem politically. We now invite you show statesmanship to resolve this problem honourably. There is no precedent in any part of the world to prove that militarisms have resolved ethnic problems. - Sri Lanka Guardian