| by Pearl Thevanayagam
(May 7, 2013, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) Former President Chandrika Kumaratunga Bandaranaike is being quite generous with interviews. This is a smoke signal she is making a come-back and the time is right. Sell-by date for war victory expired long time ago. Chandi’s come-back could spell doom for the Rajapakses.
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Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. This is where Mahinda Rajapakse’s war victory over the LTTE comes in. Drunk on power and the support of Sinhala nationalists he forgot the Tamils and the untold misery he heaped on them. If 600 unions held May day Rally to protest the rising cost of living a wise President would make a rethink as to where he went wrong.
What concerns the average Sri Lankan is the rising cost of living. Bigen and flashy smile of the President who equates himself to Dutugemunu do not cut much ice with the populace when fuel charges, rising prices in commodities and general standard of living for the average person dips to its lowest level with nary a sign of recovery.
This can only mean one thing. People are pretty well fed up with the government.
National pride takes a back seat when hunger strikes and 80 percent of the Sri Lankan people are living a hand to mouth existence.
FTSE (Financial Times Stock Exchange) bounces back faster than Mahinda’s switching smile when confronting UNHRC. Thank your lucky stars Gotha stopped giving interviews to international media with poorly constructed sentences and flailing arms.
Central Bank Governor Ajith Nivard Cabraal is most disingenuous when he says Sri Lanka’s economy is on the road to recovery. If so, why go with the begging bowl to IMF and World Bank?
North East polls are in the offing and memories of the war are still ingrained in those who lost their loved ones and property. Tamils were not liberated from Tiger Terrorists. Tamils were plundered of their wealth, dignity and homes not to mention their nearest and the dearest.
Chandrika tried four times to talk to the Tigers when she became president in October 1994. But she was surrounded and restricted by few ill-chosen ministers. Her uncle Anuruddha Ratwatte, a womaniser who divorced his wife while she was dying of cancer and took up with his childhood sweetheart and wife of a senior Tamil Lawyer, Lakshman Kadirgamar, a Tamil who shied away from talking in Tamil but seen by foreign dignitaries as an erudite scholar and Mahinda Rajapakse who was suffering from inferiority complex that he is no match for the Bandaranaike and Senanayake dynasties were not exactly the right choice in her cabinet.
Under Chandrika, journalists had no fear. No journalist was abducted, killed or imprisoned on her instructions. She is arrogant but honest the latter quality of which is absent in our present day politicians. Corruption and nepotism is rife as can be seen in media reports. Need one say more about the Rajapakse tentacles in every lucrative deal.
It was Chandrika who instigated Trial-at-Bar on Krishanthi Kumaraswamy’s murder in September 1996 when she and her mother were raped and killed by 11 soldiers at a Jaffna checkpoint and her brother and a neighbour who went in search of her were also murdered in June 1996. Rajapakse Government exonerated the suspects and they are roaming free.
Questions abound as to why she kept negotiating with the LTTE when they were adamant in thwarting peace talks. Chandrika’s concerns were the civilians over and above national pride and Sinhala hegemony.
The government would be not be up for world scrutiny on its performance during the war which annihilated 40,000 civilians or more and the whole of LTTE and their family members had it considered civilians.
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. This is where Mahinda Rajapakse’s war victory over the LTTE comes in. Drunk on power and the support of Sinhala nationalists he forgot the Tamils and the untold misery he heaped on them. If 600 unions held May day Rally to protest the rising cost of living a wise President would make a rethink as to where he went wrong.
No, he continues his own merry way allowing his sons to lord it over everything from rebuilding and reconstruction, rugby scores and skirmishes with referees, distributing donations of tractors to government supporters in the North and East and appropriating lands of Tamils who migrated to foreign shores after the wars.
November is fast approaching to placate UNHRC as to the promises the LLRC recommended to mend fences with the Tamils and North and East are going to the polls pretty soon.
Can we expect another rigged polls? Only time will tell but time waits for no man or president Mahinda Perceival Rajapakse.
(The writer has been a journalist for 24 years and worked at Weekend, The Daily News, Sunday Leader and Weekend Express in Sri Lanka as sub-editor, news reporter and news editor. She was Colombo Correspondent for Times of India and has contributed to Wall Street Journal; Washington Bureau, where she was on work experience from The Graduate School of Journalism, UC Berkeley, California. Currently residing in UK she is also co-founder of EJN (Exiled Journalists Network) UK in 2005 the membership of which is 200 from 40 countries. She can be reached at pearltheva@hotmail.com)
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