No more soap for dirty laundry in Mahinda’s basket
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| The country is riddled with debt, masses are hungry and Lipton Circus agitations are but harbingers of doom for the Rajapaksas. They came to power out of nowhere and they are bound to fade into oblivion. |
by Pearl Thevanayagam
(August 04, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) If truth is the first casualty during war, it is still under wraps for Sri Lanka’s perpetrators of war post war. Every utterance of the government from the President downwards is cloaked in lies, damned lies and total denial that war crimes occurred. Yet there is ample evidence from the horses’ mouth by their own admission that civilians may have been inadvertently killed just months after the initial blanket denial no civilians were killed.
It gets even better and funnier. Now a state media journalist who was plied with alcohol is purported to have supplied Channel 4 with material for the video, Killing Fields, in return for monetary kickback according to Major Shavendra de Silva.
Then of course we have the credible and incontrovertible evidence of the UNSG’s Darusman report that both parties were engaged in war crimes; the government security forces bombed safe zones and killed thousands of civilians and the LTTE used civilians as human shields while shooting point-blank those who were fleeing. If all the western nations and INGOs are pointing accusing fingers at the government then it is up to the government to prove them wrong.
Rajiva Wijesingha has become the latest comedy actor ( acting is his forte and not being spokesman for the government) who is continuously putting both his feet in his mouth and embarrassing the government by coming out with statements contradicting his previous ones and in effect making a right asshole of himself. But then he has proven time and again that this is what he excels at. And his outpourings of his socially upward mobility in Oxford with UN VIPs, his rapport with diplomats attending their cocktail parties and dinners and his most risible comparison of personalities with Harry Potter and Agatha Christie novel characters only proves he has the brain of an amoeba and the wisdom of an ass.
Dayan Jayetilleka in comparison comes out as an extremely intelligent person and that is saying something. Neither Rajiva nor those who gave evidence at LLRC barring civilians who were present during the last stages of the war in Mullivaikkal had any tangible evidence to give. A fine example of a witness is the fraudster terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratne who is lecturing at an obscure Singapore university on counter-terrorism. He even managed to give a speech alongside Prof. G.L. Peiris, that legal luminary who is being held to ransom by President Rajapaksa and promise of further making him a statesman one day. GLP must have been cringing at the recent confab in Colombo where Sri Lanka lectured to some invitees on how they defeated terrorism with brutal force against an invincible terrorist outfit which is the LTTE
Yet more worms are emerging out of the woodworks particularly from soldiers who were in the war-front and from some sections of the independent media. Most alarmingly for the government the civilians who managed to leave Lanka’s shores are providing substantiated evidence before immigration authorities in the West as to rape, torture, abduction and other war crimes and these are being taken seriously and collated to charge the government of war crimes.
Folks do not pay more than Rs 15 lakhs to human traffickers risking their lives travelling in decrepit boats and condemned to years of working for a pittance in foreign climes when they could safely put this money in a fixed deposit and live a carefree life in their homeland.
Some media pundits in Colombo are squeaking that US and UK should talk because they themselves are accused of war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and of course the Middle East. The Rupert Murdoch debacle could not have come at a better time for these pundits whose editorials are replete with patting themselves on their own backs and proving British media lacked ethics.
What do you expect when their bread is buttered by the government and to hell with media ethics in their own doorsteps. And these are pathetic brainwashed veteran journalists who wear blinders of patriotism and were forced to swallow downright lies the government media machinery feeds them on a regular basis. Mind you, they did not start off as convincing liars for the state. They were inculcated into the ethics of journalistic practice until they were denied access to the foreign land which is the North and East and truly they do not know what they are writing because they honestly do not know.
Like repenting naughty boys they feel that media censorship is a given and they should take this to be in their own interest since there are those wild asses in the Sunday Leader and other independent media who would sell their own grandmothers for a bit of stark sensationalism. Hmm; like that bloody lie about White Flag and Sarath Fonseka.
Meanwhile the government is now plastering the cracks in its credibility with thin wall papers of post-war development projects and showcase rehabilitation of former LTTE cadres who are made to sing the national anthem and vow to repent for their past mistakes of fighting with the LTTE.
The country is riddled with debt, masses are hungry and Lipton Circus agitations are but harbingers of doom for the Rajapaksas. They came to power out of nowhere and they are bound to fade into oblivion. The new government will have a lot of cleaning up to do starting with taking off posters of the Royal family and taking off their plaques and statues in ports and other places of posterity. Then send China packing tucking its pigtails between its nimble extremities, ports and projects with them.
Justice may take some time but it will happen.
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