Who is the donkey who wants to kill this dunce?

By Rajpal Abeynayake

(August 30, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Why anybody would want to mess physically with that utterly discredited Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, beats me.

Jehan Perera, Kumar Rupesinghe, Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, these people belong to yesterday. At least two of them, Jehan and Paikiasothy, called for a ceasefire when the Tamil Tigers were well on their way to a military rout.

Basically, Jehan does not have a job anymore because the National Peace Council is irrelevant. Peace has arrived, though not in the temporary Tiger-aggrandizing way that he wanted it. It's now a more permanent arrangement.

It's a story that needs to be investigated and written. With mega bucks, American backing, Rice awards for 'imposing rule of law' etc, the essentially anti-army pro-Tiger lobby lost out. They were in effect a highly overrated quantity, a bunch of snake oil salesmen (…and women) who had intellectual pretensions as well as activist pretensions.

The death threat story gives renewed credence to Paikiasothy, who did his utmost to petition UN agencies during the last phase of the assault against the LTTE, with hopes of getting the UN to intervene in the war and let the LTTE off the hook. He campaigned relentlessly, maintaining that the international community is abdicating its responsibility. Nobody listened, and his hopes of rescuing the LTTE fell in a heap at the banks of the Nandikadaal lagoon.

What good is issuing a death threat on a discredited quantity, a coin decidedly out of circulation?

It's probably why everybody who is out to make a killing out of this purported threat wants to describe Paikiasothy in glowing terms, embellishing him with credentials he cannot by any means lay claim to. One unknown fellow called Quadri Ismail writes -- we are told all the way from the US -- to say that Paikiasothy is one of the "most consistent, courageous, anti-racist voices.''

Anti-racist? This guy is one of the most obnoxious Tamil racists of all time, as was amply indicated by his effort to rescue the LTTE from annihilation, but that's now an old story.

Credibility lost

Anyway, as Margaret Thatcher once said --- being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are powerful, you most probably aren't. If people have to be reminded every hour on the hour that Paikiasothy is what he is supposed to be, ("courageous" "well-regarded') it goes to show indubitably that he is in fact discredited beyond repair.

But with regard to this NGO detritus, it's not just that their credibility is lost - - it's also that their standing in society has taken a hit. When a few writers such as Malinda and myself exposed the Jehans and Paikiasothys of our world relentlessly, literally for years, Colombo society pricked up their ears. Some believed us, but some gave these people the benefit of the doubt.

Today, nobody gives them the benefit of the doubt. Their frenzied and desperate banshee calls during that last phase of LTTE resistance, put paid to any credibility that the may have laid claim to. Today, who can say Jehan is not a liar and an alarmist, for raising the cry of ''mass killings'' which, he said, would blight the Sri Lankan government if the forces went ahead with the assault on the Tamil Tigers?

Despite all efforts of his ilk to artificially whip up the international community into censuring the Sri Lankan government and intervening to stop its final assault on the Tamil Tigers, nothing even remotely earthshaking happened. Apart from a few bumps along the road, the Sri Lankan state is credibly well regarded by the international community of nations. The UN human rights commission could not even get Sri Lanka on its agenda.

That's the extent to which the Jehans, the Paikiasothys and the Kumars of this world have been discredited. That anybody would want to issue a death threat against a washed out has-been such as Paki is beyond belief.

There are many dimensions to their failure, and all make happy reading. Most of these chaps, the Jehans Paikaiasothys and Kumars, often flaunted foreign educational credentials. They dropped "Harvard'' at the drop of hat, as if that was some god-given mandate in itself to begin ruling the country from the shadows. They even flaunted their relatives, such a Nirj Deva, the man with the unpronounceable taken-name, who at various times these days, makes a spectacle of himself in the European parliament.

In the end, a bunch of local educated journalists activists and truth-tellers, poorly funded and often propelled only by their convictions in contrast to NGO dollars that the foreign educated had access to, put paid to the game plan of these foreign agents and shamans.

It's a classic story of down-home Davids crushing dollar pumped Goliaths. These people are now struggling to stay relevant.

Irrelevent

Paikiasosothy has joined the UNP as its shadow foreign minister. They are clinging on to post war issues such as those that are still in existence, but are fast becoming irrelevant, such as freedom of expression issues.

Not that all of these issues will disappear entirely from the national agenda, or from any country's national agenda for that matter. All countries have governance issues, but people in Sri Lanka are falling back on less discredited people than the Paikiasothys and the Jehans to help them iron out these problems.

Today when the business community is falling over each other to invite Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, one of the primary architects of the military success, to launch its business initiatives, we know the extent of the wilderness that the Jehans and the Paikiasothys have been condemned to. In fact, these people simply wouldn't have been written about if some donkey didn't issue a death threat on one of them.

This 'threat' to Paikiasothy is in itself not credible. As the elite did in Venezuela, there is a desperate orchestration of events by the discredited Colombo lobbyists.

If anybody really wanted to 'intimidate'' Paikiasothy, it would have been done during the war, and the last phase. Now when it's all over, and all we have left is optimism and a parade of discredited dunces such as Paikiasothy on display, what is the earthly point in 'intimidating'' this eccentric has-been?

My conclusion therefore is that this is a textbook case of the street curs barking at the moon. You know how these street pups yap around, and urinate on every car tyre? In their world, they are bringing down the sky.

In the end, people know it's a bunch of strays raising a ruckus about nothing. Men will snicker, wives would yawn, and then they would snuggle up to each other in bed saying 'out there it's a dog's life.'

The current civil society initiative to raise governance issues is much the same. It's just a bunch of beat up clapped-out has-been pretenders urinating furiously onto car tyres.

-Courtesy: LakbimaNews

-Sri Lanka Guardian