Won war on terror

failed miserably on hunger relief

| by Pearl Thevanayagam

(May 28, 2012, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) 'Kodithu kodithu varumai kodithu; athilum kodithu ilamayil varumai'. This Tamil saying translated spells, 'poverty is cruel but worse still is to be poor when young'. The following incident touched me deep within that I felt my own problems paled into insignificance.

Just before I left for the UK many years ago I decided to treat my Colombo neighbours who were very kind to me during a period of emotionally trying time to a holiday in Bandarawela. One of them was my neighbour's daughter whose husband had abandoned her along with her four year old girl. Unfortunately the government has no provisions for these single mothers such as allowance or housing as they do in the West. They become totally dependent on their family or relatives.

These are not isolated tragedies. These happen on a regular

 basis. Economists are screaming that the country is heavily

 in debt to IMF and World Bank till they are blue in the faces.

Ironically banks will not lend the middle classes and the poor

 credit since they are liabilities.

This neighbour was not particularly well off since she had to look after her own two other sons as well as her poor siblings who were constantly at her house draining her husband's remittance from the Middle East. I poured a glass of fresh milk for this child and just when I thought she was drinking it I turned round to see the mother gulping it down. This disturbed me somewhat badly. How could a mother deprive her own kid a glass of milk for Pete's sake? This is middle class poverty.

It was the Malaysian economist and journalist Martin Khor who first declared at the World Affairs Council summit in Monterey California in 1993 that 80 percent of the world's resources are consumed by just 20 percent of the population. He received a three minute standing ovation.

Regional news of a student committing suicide because his parents could not afford to provide him with necessities, mother and child jumping into the river since there was no money for food and a father shot dead and son critically wounded all because they stole some cashew fruits should make front page news. War widows are selling their bodies to feed their families and not for luxuries or sexual gratification. CNN and BBC should be despatching their news crews email-haste and WFP (World Food Program) flying in emergency supplies.

These are not isolated tragedies. These happen on a regular basis. Economists are screaming that the country is heavily in debt to IMF and World Bank till they are blue in the faces. Ironically banks will not lend the middle classes and the poor credit since they are liabilities. One is not talking about Sudan, Somalia or Ethiopia. These tragedies are occurring in Asia's emerging economic miracle which is Sri Lanka! If only one could raise the people's President Premadasa from the dead.

In the '80s he turned Peliyagoda rubbish dump and its surrounding hovels into liveable accommodation for hundreds of families and provided them with electricity and running water for the first time. He kept his promise of one million houses for the homeless. He gave free meals and milk for every child. His poverty alleviation program, Janasaviya, provided the poorest of the poor with some dignity and wherewithal to start a livelihood. In short people did not starve under his presidency and he shared the wealth of the nation with the common masses.

There is only so much the hungry masses would tolerate.

Charles Dickens and John Steinbeck were practising journalists before they embarked on writing novels depicting the cold, cruel and hungry world of lesser mortals let down by the system in their days which while professing and upholding the highest moral standards failed to see through the predicament of these wretched human beings left to rot for want of the plain and meagre necessities of life.

Dickens lived in the 19th century Victorian England when orphans born out of wedlock were incarcerated in work-houses run at state expense but the beadles who administered them like the character Mr Bumble in Oliver Twist made sure these work-house children got just enough to barely scrape through and no more. But his writings along with that of dissident Christian Socialist Reformist author Charles Kingsley of Water Babies fame brought about radical changes in the system and as a result of their campaigning Britain now provides for each and every one of its citizens with adequate housing, healthcare and benefits.

Their novels did make a change in the UK and US in that slavery was mitigated and governments took responsibility for these unfortunates and transformed work-house conditions to state responsibility.

Steinbeck lived through the 1930's depression and California's laws made indentured labourers poorer not unlike our plantation Tamils who suffered and continue to live in penury thanks to the British who denied them education beyond Grade five so that child labour could be beneficial to their interests in tea plantation. Steinbeck's novels Cannery Row, Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men speak volume for capitalism cloaked in democracy.

The plantation workers brought down from South India with the promise of dried fish and fresh fish as they disembarked from Talaimannar were in fact marched through snake infested jungles barefoot to the hills. And to this day they remain mostly stateless, working timelessly for plantation owners and lilving in the same hovels aas they did during the British Raj.. The Jaffna Tamils should bear the most brunt of the plight of plantation workers who enslaved them far worse than the British colonials.

But no more would the suffering masses take it lying down. Lipton Circus demonstrations and trade union uprising would sound the death knell for the current regime. God forbid for when this happens Arab Spring would seem like a tea party.

The writer is Asia Pacific Journalism Fellow at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, California and a print journalist for 22 years. She can be reached at pearltheva@hotmail.com)