Pulicats become pussycats and see how they all run!

Good Bye Kappang Highway Welcome Liberation Highway

By Catapult Thangavelu on the Liberation Highway

(April 27, Jaffna, Sri Lanka Guardian) I have my bicycle now. I intend cycling often along this great highway which used to be known as A9 Kandy Road until the now going, going almost-gone pulicats – kotiyapussa - made it the Kappang Highway with their vicious illegal tax; that was soon after the Norwegian brokered ceasefire which itself was a conspiracy.

This illicit highway cash cow extortion brought about untold miseries to the very people for whom the pulicats wanted to be the sole voice. This even made prancing kurangs or vantaros of the Sam Pantham dancers to the pulicat piece of music; in other words the types that dance for the organ grinder.

Today this great thruway from Kandy all the way to Jaffna becomes the Liberation Highway and will hail the unity of all the people of Sri Lanka as one nation.

We who haunted the Tigers in Wanni and exposed many of their evil activities, the reprehensible and nefarious role of the Norwegians and their colleagues in the monitoring mission, Bishop Joseph Rayappu and his heavy involvement with the Tigers and several other Tiger schemes and tantrums will miss the name Kappang Highway.

It is now part of history and will never be forgotten and also how we would often have vadai and valaipalam (plantains) in the company of hard core Tigers who really thought we were pulicats (tiger cats) like them too.

In fact one of us was hinted at about the possibility of being invited to go to Oslo with Zoo-Pah for talks because they had no one conference-familiar with English. They were really missing Anthony Bala and were doubtful and dubious about lawyer Rudrakumaran domiciled in the States. And of course they were right for Rudrakumaran did not oblige them.

The Oslo performance was pathetic but Zoo-Pah did bring back some military equipment like night glasses and the Norwegian Embassy officials made sure they were cleared through the customs without any ado or bustle. It was noted he went with one checked baggage and came back with twelve and none of them was opened by the Customs staff. This was quite a scandal just like the gift of a major communication unit from Norway to the Tigers.

How did the government of that time overlook the shocking coincidental actuality that most members of the Scandinavian Monitoring Mission were top grade retired military people and at least one of them was working for a munitions manufacturer? Although the rest of the world was made to see them as monitors, in actual fact they were advising the LTTE in the art of warfare.

When an LTTE military training and parade facility was bombed which used to be an orphanage earlier, one of the monitors rushed to the scene and told the world that it was the orphanage that was destroyed.

There was suspicion that not only the Charles Gnanakone boats carried illicit arms for the Tigers but even Norwegian boats helped especially to unload weapons and war material at mid-sea into Tiger vessels. This brazen outrage on the sovereignty of Sri Lanka would not have been possible without the knowledge of the government.

This was also part of the LTTE’s involvement in the global illicit arms trade. Subidcham and Independentsl websites have focused on these on a number of occasions.

Also, during that time LTTE would often overrun the army camps and considerable arms would be spirited away. On mere cursory inquiries it would be seen, and far too often for comfort, that sentry security for such camps would be less than minimal and lives rarely, if ever lost. There was hardly any doubt such overruns of camps were a covert and clandestine means to supply arms to the LTTE and corruption being the main if not the sole factor. The LTTE also operated a major underworld in Colombo.

Apart from many activities including missing persons, whenever the Tigers needed vehicles in Wanni, a team would arrive from Kilinochchi and work along with the Colombo underworld and appropriate whatever they fancied and lo and behold another vehicle or vehicles would go missing and never will be recovered. This operation is done with surgical precision.

When an attempt on the life of President Chandrika Bandaranaike-Ranatunge was made, it was the Tiger underworld that provided the support team and at least one person involved in it fled to Canada and sought refuge. The LTTE packed this person off fearing the free of tongue nature of this female of the species.

Talking of pulicats I have to make reference here to a doggerel that I received from my nephew in London. He is annoyed with the behavior of Tiger gangs in that part of the world and also the attacks on the Sri Lankan Embassy in Oslo and Berlin. He coined an appropriate name for the Tigers, “pulicat” and set it in free verse to express his views about how a ferocious feline turned into a pitiable pussy. His verse reminds us about a cat that was chasing a mouse under the chair of her Majesty the Queen.

Pulicat, Pulicat why in such hurry?
I’m going to Oslo, Norway’s capital
Pulicat, Pulitcat, why to Oslo now?
I’ve to scratch Eric Solheim’s face.

Of course, of course Eric Solheim, the friend of Zoo-Pah and our dear friend too who was evidently made to depart by the Sun God, deserves to have his face scratched. He represented the Norwegian role in the LTTE interests following a long line of Norwegian volunteers who fouled up a great deal as the friends and supporters of the LTTE.

It was just too late when Eric Solheim tried to tell the specious megalomaniac that the Tigers must lay down the arms and surrender. You do not give good counsel to the irrational and the illogical and expect that to hold ground.

This was a hell of a how do you do to Cyanide Chief with a capsule on his neck, a rope waiting for him in India and a guy called Shevendra Silva almost his door and all three spell the same eventuality for a man who got his thrills in torture and murder and will probably go down in Sri Lanka history as killer of the most number of lives including pregnant women and kids.

The Cyanide Chief spoke rude Tamil, a ruder scattering of market English but nothing else. So he was suspicious of everyone whose conversations he could not understand. Anthony Bala was a great support for him but he lived in England. So he was suspicious of everyone whose language he did not understand and two of them were Daya Master and the other is George.

The Norwegians loved the Cyanide Chief but the latter hated the former but he needed them. After all, they were his lifeline too. Now how can one expect the Cyanide Chief to be rational? He will be the last person to accept what Eric Solheim would have told him about laying down the arms.

There are so many speculations as to what the Cyanide Chief will do next? Eelanadu, a tabloid trash published simultaneously in Toronto and Paris claimed the Cyanide Chief was doing aerial flights over Wanni. If that be true then he did not wish to flee but to stay in his dwindling Lilliputian kingdom and dream the impossible of bringing about the doom of the Sri Lankan Armed Forces. He was seen beating his chest to announce to the world the Macbethian dictum, “I am the mighty puli and no son born of a woman can destroy me.”

We do not know whether there is an army officer in the forces busy in Wanni who was of Caesarean birth but if the astrologer of the Cyanide Chief is right, there must be one unless of course he himself is one and the capsule has been hanging around his neck far too long.
ENDS -Sri Lanka Guardian