I can agree with pretty much every point you raised numbered 1 to 7. Regarding point no. 2, I like them only to the extent that they removed the LTTE from the equation, which, IMHO, was a necessary (mandatory?) step towards further progress. I was about to question No. 5, where you characterized the current regime as fascist. I did however, realize that, that too is not an entirely unfair label depending on how you characterize fascism, but the word itself is so loose, that it can be applied to a vast spectrum of regimes, including the likes of the LTTE and the Nazis if you so wish (clearly, this regime is way better. As Dayan J. points out, it still has the essential features of an elected democracy).

Also, by that token, given the political history in Sri Lanka, that would make a fair few regimes in the past fascist also don’t you think, making this regime nothing really new for us Sri Lankans! (But with one important bonus of having removed the LTTE) I say this not to defend the status quo, but merely to put things into perspective. There is no doubt that a lot remains to be done, but we have to inch towards progress, and the absence of that other immovable faction, the LTTE, is doubtless an improvement to the status quo. There really are very few choices available to us Sri Lankans, something that people who prefer monochromatic world views, like Aadhavan, cannot see. What’s the point in ceaselessly condemning something and harping on the obvious without looking at how to move forward with the choices available to us?

Please re-read my comment. And please don’t make assumptions about what I did or did not do when I was in Sri Lanka. Please also don’t assume I’m whitewashing the government when none of my comments or articles in the blogosphere point to that. It is pathetic that you pick and choose my comments to portray me as something that I’m not.

Let me frame this in language you may understand.
1. Me love Sri Lanka
2. Me don’t like GOSL
3. Me don’t like obnoxious right-wingers who think that winning the war gives MR carte blanche to do as he pleases
4. Me also don’t like Tamils who live overseas, contribute to the LTTE (never having to live with the bombings etc) and who want a separate state when there is no way in hell they’d leave their comfortable existence in the West
5. Me also don’t like people who fail to distinguish between fascism (which is what we’re seeing in SL now) and racism (which is what you cry about).
6. Me don’t like arrogant newsmen who will do anything to win the Pulitzer Prize
7. Me also don’t like people like Devananda etc who are a sellout

As you can see, my world view doesn’t fit into narrow parameters. Sophist and Ravana assure me that you’re an intelligent chap so how is it that you fail to understand that someone can defend their country and not the government? Or is that you buy the GOSL/right wing line that patriotism is love of the government (and not the country)? Please don’t bother answering these questions as they’re rhetorical. I’m not interested in a debate with you just I’m not interested in debating with some right winger. People like you are never going to contribute anything constructive to a debate or to the development of Sri Lanka as you can see beyond your noses.

Many of those who criticize the government here and elsewhere in the blogosphere do live in SL. Assuming that anyone who does so would automatically be detained or killed is false (at least at present. As the paranoia of the govt increases then they may start trawling the web too.) My issue with Sam is to do with his comments in general. He has these same few lines he parrots. I usually live in Sri Lanka but have been away this year for studies. I’m currently in the UK where I have many family members who range from outright supporters of the LTTE to sympathisers to empathisers to those who know better. I can confidently take my family here in the UK to be fairly representative of the Tamil diaspora in the UK due to their numbers and the differences in their approach to the issues in SL and I find that the support/sympathy and the level of misinformation among them is inversely proportionate to the number of times they’ve visited SL!

Which is why I asked Sam whether he lived in SL or lived abroad. While you’re absolutely correct when you said that none of us really know what’s going on, you get a far clearer picture in SL than you do here, where the news mainly comes from the LTTE propaganda machine, the rumour mill and of course, the media , which needs to sensationalise everything to retain readership/viewership.

This is such a polarising issue isn’t it? Everyone thinks they’re right and justify their side’s actions by pointing to the other side’s actions in the past.

Let’s just take this process of going back in time to its logical conclusion by blaming the British and then moving on! Wishful thinking of course…

– the personal problems of VP, RW, MR etc etc – all related to their inability to keep their egos in check?

and where does Dr DJ go from here? do you honestly feel used and discarded – I mean very well done – good innings and all that – but do you feel that at the end of the day basic humanness, decency and honesty is simply not there?? and if not what is the point in all this exertion??

Please enlighten me – “dont know much”

With love.

Wasanth Bandara Ranagala.

Dayan – my apologies for deviating from the topic.

But these notorious camps, the most inhuman structures in the world, similar to Hitler’s concentration camps, are places where people are made to scramble for crumbs, about 1400 persons die weekly, and insects and germs multiply rapidly with a one toilet available for 70 persons.

When Rajapakse classified these camps to be “the best”, I thought that sudden changes for the better had taken place with flush toilets, washing machines, refrigerators, electric cookers, TV sets and the like; much better than Tamil refugee camps in India, worth showing on BBC and CNN to the world, how best camps should be run !!

In the same week, after the government of SL (GOSL) asked the ICRC to scale down its staff, CNN showed the devastating images of these camps from outside barbed wire fences.

Weak, fragile and unhealthy Tamils; tearing and sorrowful, with flies sitting on their faces; facing the trauma of genocidal atrocities inside were shown.

The condition of the camps confirmed what the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon said in May this year after visiting a camp. He said the camp to be the worst he had ever seen.

Sinhalese are locked up in war crimes and Tamil genocide. They are quick to deceive the world, a behaviour that is distasteful but not surprising. Deception has become their cultural heritage and the GOSL has developed a way of changing a blatant lie to a flowery “truth”, an art practiced by criminals.

Cabinet ministers from this criminal state can make untruthful and preposterous statements, looking straight into the eyes, without batting an eye lid.

A few days after Mahinda Rajapakse’s statement, another Mahinda, Mahinda Samarasinghe, a cabinet minister, contray to nature, reason and common sense, justified the condition in these concentration camps, by comparing with the temporary shelter provided in Italy to the earthquake victims and put the question “if Italy can …Can’t SL?”. He also justified the scaling down of the staff of ICRC under the pretext that the “war was over”.

The lie under cover is that according to the Geneva convention, ICRC must be kept in any country to supervise the just and fair treatment of surrendered combatants; the two things lacking for any Tamil in SL, let alone the ex-combatants.

The message is clear. It is “get out we want to speed up genocide without any evidence whatsoever”, a hidden agenda.

The GOSL deceives the UN and the International Community with a view to make themselves invulnerable to any punishment. It deceived in the past, is deceiving now and will deceive in the future till punished.

Why is a war criminal tribunal for SL not yet set up by the UN? Why is genocide permitted in silence in concentration camps in the North? Although, the UN Secretary General asked the GOSL to “allow unfetterd access” to these camps, the GOSL is defiant as if SL is not in the UN. Why is the UN mute? The answer is simple. The UN has lost its clout on criminal states and has lost its purpose.

Don’t count on governments; count on the balance of forces. what happens when the Tamil representation reaches new heights, post election? much will depend on whether they will unite on a realistic programme.

I admit though that so long as RW remains Opp candidate, any Govt will have a free run whatever the economic burdens. He has already entered the Mahawamsa as an appeaser if not worse, and will be regarded as that for centuries to come, just as we remember Ehelepola, Don Juan Dharmapala et al.

As for Bopage, one of the writers to this website, Saliya, asked him for proof. I believe this Saliya had good reason, since at the time he was a young student and member of the Independent Students Union led by Daya Pathirana who was later abducted, stripped and murdered by the JVP. The ISU kids were at every JVP public meeting at which I challenged them and obviously he knows that no such thing happened.

My critique of the JVP appeared in the Economic and Political weekly Bombay sometime in 1978 ( when I was 21) and was republished in the Lanka Guardian. The transcripts of my public, face-to-face challenges to Wijeweera were re-published in the Lanka Guardian of that time. These challenges took place in the late 1970s at the New Arts Theatre at Peradeniya, when I was an undergraduate and the second at the New Town Hall in Colombo. Wijeweera also took it upon himself to refer to me and the Lanka Guardian at the YMBA Kandy and the Sugathadasa stadium in Colombo. NONE OF THOSE CRITIQUES AND EXCHANGES WERE ABOUT TAMIL EELAM! They were about the history of the world communist movement, Wijeweera’s neoTrotskyist line, the huge discrepancy between the JVP line and that of Fidel, Che and the Cuban revolutionaries whom they claimed to follow, etc!

In my polemical writings in the Lanka Guardian, I admit I did take a stand of mechanistically, dogmatically and a-historically transposing Lenin’s stand on the nationalities question, which I had extensively studied and absorbed, to Sri Lanka …but then again, I was 22 years old.

Wijeweera wrote a 300 page book on what he thought was the Marxist approach to the Nationalities Question, in which he had more consecutive pages criticising me by name, than he had on Velupillai Prabhakaran! Still, his critique was not that I was supporting Tamil Eelam but that I was pushing an alternative line and project, which he saw as counterrevolutionary, within the anti-Govt, anti-state, anti-systemic space, namely a strategic alliance with the Leftwing of the Tamil eelam movement, chiefly the EPRLF, for the purpose of an overall Lankan revolution. At that time, post July 83, when the ethnic divide seemed unbridgeable, ours was the first and only North-South bridge on the basis of common ideas and ideology. Ours was a multiethnic, multireligious, multicultural, multiclass grouping.

We, the Vikalpa Kandayama and EPRLF paid for our internationalism by being targeted and subject to slaughter by the chauvinists in South and North, the JVP and LTTE, and thus failed, but our North-South project was picked up and broadened by Vijaya Kumaratunga and mainstreamed later by the former commander of the EPRLF’s military wing, Douglas Devananda.