A Soldier's view of ethnic harmony in Sri Lanka - Part Four

A Soldier says Tamils, Sinhalese and all others can live in concord in Sri Lanka, and here is how ( True stories & facts)

Written by Day
Link to Part One
Link to Part Two
link to Part Three

(August 08, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian)If I have the powers or am the President of Sri Lanka I dial his number and invite him to the President House and I have a one on one, heart to heart, frank and candid discussion with him. I look him in the eye and say “I am old but I like change. I want to do some ‘social engineering’ one more time. These I will give to you.

1. Powers to make bold and unique decisions.
2. Powers to select your own subject matter expert “Tiger Team-the Crisis Managers in an Organization” or the best troubleshooters.
3. A secure compound for you and your family and for tour team members and their families.
4. The resources you need.
5. No undue interference or influence.
6. You and your team and their family members will be guarded by an elite Special Forces or STF squadron.
7. I will provide anything else you may need to find solutions for Tamils to live in concord with Sinhalese.

I tell him these are what I expect in return.
1. No traditional Homelands or separate state.
2. Every Sri Lankan must be able to travel, work and reside wherever they want.
3. Homogeneity of population, No Enclaves of Tamils, Chinese, Muslims or Sinhalese whatsoever
4. Explain to Tamils, with homogeneity, in a few years, Sri Lankans will be multilingual and there will not be a language issue.
5. Abide Security forces and police being all over Sri Lanka doing what they are supposed to. They are there to stay
4. No chance for revival of Tamil terrorism
5. Explain to Tamils the citizens of any other county that has a literacy rate like in Sri Lanka regardless of his or her ethnicity (in some cases, nationality) are free to work, buy a home, have fun, live and raise children wherever he or her wants in that country without being chased out or killed, regardless where that country’s armed forces or police are.
6. If you and your team are not honest, you all pay the ‘heaviest price’!

So I will give him the chance, if he makes an honest mistake I let him to learn from it. As long as he produces results for all Sri Lankans to work, live and have fun wherever they want I am for him. And I guard him and his team with their families and take well care of them. I give them the best and a lot of perks to motivate them. I gauge the ‘atmospherics’ from time to time talking to all segments of society whether my ‘social engineering’ experiment is working or not.

I know deep in my heart he is a professional, and chances are he and his team will succeed given proper support, motivation and leadership. Sinhalese and Tamils can live in amity and in concord. And I go from there.

There is nothing permanent except change- Heraclitus of Ephesus

In the mean time, firstly, GOSL should use money and resources wisely; the India International Film Awards (IIFA) staged recently was a flop, a fiasco. It was squandering of money or wasting of national resources. Sri Lanka should have known better. The powers that be, the organizers and tourism ministry all thought the IIFA 2010 participants and viewers, said to be all over the world, will spread the message or word that Sri Lanka is a tourist destination. I follow the media but I did not see semblance of the IIFA 2010 in the electronic media overseas, in western news outlets.

Scandal was such the chief protagonist; Amitabh Bachchan himself did not attend. The ‘bogus’ hero (went to zero) of Hindi silver screen just caved in to the Diaspora and LTTE sympathizers’ pressure’ showing his ‘colors’, definitely not Eastman colors! In my humble opinion he needs to be subject to a gender test to find out whether A Bachchan has undergone recent sex change to act like a eunuch he finds in his own country in abundance. I am sorry to call names in public but how do you deal with a coward without sending a message in very effective or therapeutic way so that he will pluck up some spunk and gain his manliness back, than to yield to pressure and threats in future. Money is not everything in life, and the Bachchans have tons of money. Show some leadership, and though A Buchan is old he needs to grow up ‘socially’.

Why a nation spends a ‘mountain’ of tax payer money to have a molehill of ‘tourism’ effect. I do not get it. The ’pancha maha balawegaya’-teachers, farmers, doctors, clergy and workers do not get it either, but they send these rascal politicos who come up with ambitious, fancy and crazy ideas to parliament nonchalantly or without regard to what happens as a result of voting for them. These rascal politicos no sooner sworn-in as MPs, start ‘screwing’ the people, misusing the resources and swindling the nation’s money. The voters wait another five years to teach a lesson or take revenge. But during election campaigns they (the voters) are or get mesmerized by the eloquence of politicians and gulp down some sop or accept sops promised by these rascals and happily as if nothing mattered or happened and vote them again to power again. Thus the vicious process is perpetuated.

What is farcical is that the whole IIFA 2010 was ostensibly supposed to be tourism promotion. Check this recent news: “The government has decided to sell off 16 ships wrecked in Sri Lankan waters. Tenders are to be called for the purpose. There are around 84 ships wrecked around the coast of Sri Lanka.”

Abandoned shipwrecks rich in marine life and have the potential to be steady magnets for eco-tourists or for dive tourism. The problem is that they are being salvaged indiscriminately for scrap metal by ‘individual’ divers living close by because they are poor and need some money. But if a government is ready to sell the shipwrecks that are tourist attraction for divers and snorkelers it is whole different story and scary. Are we to understand the GOSL is so broke or hard up for money? By looking at the Royal Family cabal or coterie, by looking at their extravaganza, profligacy or prodigal nature I do not think so. But I am also aware truth is stranger than fiction!

Like Argentina a couple of decades back wanted to sell the blood of the Argentineans to pay for foreign debts, maybe, Sri Lanka may be resorting to novel ways. I know vast majority of Sri Lankan citizens have no blood to sell as they are walking skeletons. They do not get paid enough or earn enough to eat a balanced diet and be healthy to donate blood or plasma. What is next? Since GOSL has started with scrap metals, the India’s famous ‘G. B. Road’ equivalents in Colombo, Galle and Kandy, lined up with brothels for tourists or selling the bullion then and the plunderers migrating to cooler climes?

I digressed too much. The GOSL should have used the money unnecessarily spent on the IIFA 2010 to organize CORDEL (Congressional Delegations )visits from all over the world to Sri Lanka ’free of charge’ to tell the truth and win them and their governments over. That is how you ‘cultivate’ friends, one at a time. They should have been taken on well organized tours starting from Hotel Galadri to Hettividiya to Kotahena to Wellawatte (Small Jaffna) to Beruwela, Hambantota, Maskeliya, Kiran and to some rubber and tea plantation to tell and show them that these are the Tamil and Muslim GENOCIDE CEMETARIES protected by GOSL for the International Court and Human Rights organization to see and conduct forensic tests to find out how many thousands of Tamils were massacred by Sinhalese in Sri Lanka in the last three decades at those places. I am sure the CORDEL will ‘throw up’ (have some buckets for the vomited matter and tissues to wipe, nearby) seeing these genocide sites of Tamils in Sri Lanka. They will go and tell their respective government that MIA, Vany, (s)Tweet DBS, Pasupathi, AI, AHRC, MSF are all right about the human rights violations and Tamil genocide by Sinhalese and GOSL.

That is what the GOSL should have done with the money spent on the IIFA 2010 and WHY? In this hour of need and in this moment of truth what Sri Lanka needs ‘most’ is more and more lawmakers, policymakers and influential people and power players of the other countries on Sri Lanka’s side rather than sex tourists and pedophiles arriving in Sri Lanka in droves without large amount of foreign currency to spend lavishly.

Secondly, the GOSL need not play the second fiddle to any nation, organization or individual about homogenizing every square inch of Sri Lana with Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, Malay and Burger etc; about setting up naval units around the island and military camps all over to meet any contingency due to floods, tsunami, lawlessness, terrorism or to simply to deal with criminal elements; about using government property appropriated by the LTTE de facto government to put back to good use.

Thirdly, the last but not least True Story:
“In August 1984। ASP Siri Jayasundera who was on a patrol with an Army unit on the VVT–Pt. Pedro road was killed in a crude claymore charge. The LTTE covered the landmine with large pieces or chunks of granite (Kalugal used for house foundations) so that it appeared to people passing by as an innocuous pile of granite. Force of the blast sent all these chunks in all directions and one of the chunks took out his head one side. He was said to be without his helmet. There were two Jayasundaras in the vehicle, late ASP Jayasundara and Major Jayasundara from Sinha Regiment (SR)”.

The driver of the vehicle was lucky as he was sent to the backseat so that the two officers could ride in the front. Let me tell some things about Major Jayasundara, SR; a graduate of University of Peradeniya; Always Prepared-when he left the camp even in curfew hours he was in ‘full battle order’ ‘from head to toe’ as if he expected the worst; was a visionary and had a plan”
As a result of the blast ASP Jayasundara’s body arrived at Jayarathne Florists, Boralle and Major Jayasundara was admitted to the ‘old Army Hospital’। Pure coincidence, I was warded there too. I am no doctor but the way I understood his conditions he had suffered concussions and I saw scrape marks on his face. I was very inquisitive as a young man and picked up a conversation with him and discussed the situation in Jaffna, the modus operandi of tigers and new dimensions tigers are exploring. He was happy to talk to me and went to his room in the ward (Majors and above were in personal rooms in the ward) and brought his leather bag and pulled out a file. It was the PLAN.

The Plan was why Sri Lanka Army needs to have a cantonment around the SLA Madagal Camp and how it should be a sprawling complex with infrastructure facilities for soldiers and families.
If you ask a good, capable and energetic naval officer [then LT Dhammika Shirantha Udawatte ( Either Long N-long or Long ND-specialized in Navigation or Navigation and Direction) why Madagal should be the focal point he would say majority of LTTE boats used to land in Madagal when they came in from India towards the mainland Jaffna। They could have an easy (buggee) ‘fix’ or good bearing because of the vantage position of Madagal.

I am not sure if Major Jayasundara is living now or not। It is no harm, after all, it might save some money if you might have a look at his plan and implement it as it is not from an architect or a Town and Country Planning professor from University of Moratuwa (they are limited to their discipline as are not aware of intricate ‘operational matters’) but from a former operational commander.

That is just a suggestion from an 8th Grade soldier, like they say a farmer is fit enough to be a ‘KING’ once the mud on him washed, sometimes soldiers talk sense too.
With regard or respect to Human Rights Commissions:

“British Prime Minister, David Cameron, addressing the House of Commons Tuesday afternoon after the release of Saville Report on the killing of thirteen civil rights marchers in Northern Ireland in January 1972, acknowledged that British paratroopers had fired on fleeing unarmed civilians, that British soldiers had fired the first shot, many of the soldiers lied about their actions, and that British soldiers had shot and killed already wounded civilians. The Prime Minister then apologized on behalf of the British Government, according to a BBC report.
The inquiry was set up to establish a definitive version of the events, superseding the tribunal set up under Lord Widgery that had reported on 19 April 1972, 11 weeks after the events, and to resolve the accusations of a whitewash that had surrounded Widgery report।”

The above is good news for Sri Lanka, and it is high time to get MFA diplomats ‘down and dirty’. Let’s do the maths. The Bloody Sunday happened in 1972 and UK is a nuclear power and developed or 1st world country. And the Savillile Report was released after 40 years. Now, Prabakaran the terrorist and his hangers-on were killed on or about 18 May 2009; 40 years from that day will be 17 May 2049. If IC does not want to believe GOSL ‘autopsy report’ and IC suspects foul play then the GOSL needs to tell them that a Saville Report equivalent will be released on or before 17 May 2049 provided the UK government provides the state of art crime labs UK has to Sri Lanka do the ‘forensics’! If not add another 40years and the report will be out in 2089. WHY? Because Sri Lanka is a Third World country and the western nation go with the cry of the Diaspora for boycotting Sri Lanka’s goods and services so the GOSL simply does not have money to setup advanced crime labs.

If a western government acts the fool GOSL needs to act the fool. If a western country gets stupid Sri Lanka needs to get stupid. If a western nation behaves rationally then the Sri Lankan nation need to behave rationally and be good to that nation! It is that simple, Period.

This article is getting longer and I need to stop, though I can go on and on, with a dire warning for all Sri Lankans.

Sinhalese and Tamils can go back and forth, say ‘not us!’ but ‘You!’ Tamils can say SLA rape, overrun, kill, rob, and dismantle vehicles belonging to Tamils for parts and remove roofing and windows of the abandoned houses. Sinhalese can say where are the houses, bakeries, movable properties that had to be left behind in the N&E due to LTTE ethnic cleansing. Will this solve the problem? NO!

Only way to solve this vexed problem is if and when Tamils are ready to accept the right of a Sinhalese to live and work any nook or corner of Sri Lanka and Tamils’ genuine willingness to abide the Sri Lankan military camps in their neighborhoods and the Sinhalese are ready to protect their peace-loving, law-abiding Tamil brethren, no matter what, forget the past and live in concord. If that is not the case, if Tamils have wrong agendas and ulterior motives that is ‘Separate State then the Sinhalese will not let it happen.

Here is the DIRE WARNING. If Tamils and Sinhalese do not make up soon and live in concord, I hope this will not happen, if another ethnic violence to erupt or flare up due to the follies of the Tamil Diaspora, it is apt to remember and mention in this July 2010 taking into account the Black July 83, it will be worst than in Kigali, 10,000 Hutus a day for consecutive 100 days, no UNSG, no superpower, no AI or HRC, no MSF or RSF could prevent it until 1 million people were butchered. As I mentioned elsewhere there will be NO Major Jayawardena, Major Karunathilaka, Body Guard Nissanka or the ‘young officer’ to be firm and fair and protect Tamils as no fool would stand in front of a tidal tsunami wave of Sinhalese anger and rage as time and time again the patience has been tested to the limit and is fully exhausted. Every moderate Tamil to need think about it at sunrise and going down and tell his fellow brethren the time is right now to forget the sorry past, shake hand, move on to work and live wherever one wants.

I wish you Sri Lankans all the luck and best in the world to live in concord!

Concluded.