Cannot silence be a better greeting – a wholly appropriate one for these APRC proposals?
Do you not know the power of silence?
]]>The existence of extreme discrimination against the Tamils of Sri Lanka, especially in the North East, is denied by some Sinhala extremists in the South. The JVP “fools the foolish in the South” with such a false denial.
The real situation in Sri Lanka is that the attitude and behaviour of any Sinhalese and any government is determined by one factor alone and that is whether you are a Sinhalese or a Tamil.
Those who deny discrimination place the argument that it is not only the Tamils but the Sinhalese are also suffering. This is fundamentally wrong. Even if Tamils and Sinhalese suffer together because of economic factors, there is solace to Sinhalese in specific areas but not to any Tamil.
Any Sinhalese person gets good treatment by the the police and he is PROVIDED with a good education, a job by the state, industrial and farming facilities, fertile state land, better health facilities, an impartial judicial system, economic and development support, export and import preferences, manufacturing and trade licences, better access to consumables, easy travel and communication, security favour and rehabilitation from tsunami, just because he is a Sinhalese.
On the Contrary, any Tamil person is abused by the police
and is DENIED a good education, a job by the state, industrial and farming facilities, fertile state land, better health facilities, an impartial judicial system, economic and development support, export and import preferences, manufacturing and trade licences, better access to consumables, easy travel and communication, security favour and rehabilitation from tsunami, just because he is a Tamil.
This “just because” factor differentiates the attitude and the treatment meted out to any Sinhalese or Tamil by the state in Sri Lanka.
In apartheid South Africa, it was the same “just because” factor that differentiated the attitude and treatment meted out to any black or white person.
Apartheid system was considered oppressive, cruel, wicked and evil. There is no doubt whatsoever that the discriminatory system against the Tamils is equally oppressive, cruel, wicked and evil yet the world is not equally vociferous against it.
]]>In order to understand the reasons for procrastinating on the Thirteeth Amendment one has to go back to the history (a poor record at that) of constituion making in Ceylon/Sri Lanka. What became of the consensual 1948 constitution? And how was it unceremoniously ditched in 1972 and substituted by a unilateralist one which gave primacy to Sinhala and Buddhism while rejecting the aspirations of cultural minorities. The Thriteenth Amendment which tried to forge power sharing with largely Tamil speaking people of the north east was still born. The All Party Conference tried to revive it under the same kind of process from 1998 to 2000 and failed. With hindsight what has happened to the present one (sans the majority of Tamil speaking MPs from the north and east this time round) is a stilted job which cannot pass muster by any consultative political standard or process.
It has become well known that the present ad hoc document is what the President (and his supporters) want to see for reasons best known to themselves. It is surmised that the objective may be to utilise it to secure aid from the international community apparently for development of the north and east for whatever it is worth. What became of the $4.5 b in aid under the botched 2002 CFA and tsunami foreign aid under the guise of reconstruction of war affected areas are all too fresh in people’s minds.
Nothing is lost by trying . But the APRC document is not going to solve any of the political problems of the affected people or the north and east. It is an artifificial sop at best.
]]>The Sinhala and the Tamil communities are like the right and left half of a brain. They were joined with a connective tissue, the “corpus collosum”. Mr. B and his majority blocked communication between the two brains with the Sinhala Only Act in 1956. Mrs B and her leftists performed the surgery to cut the connective tissue in 1972. It is foolish for the right-half to pronounce that there is no left half and that both are one, the right. It is best not to harm each others independent existence until such time we are creative enough to grow a new connective tissue better than the old one, to make both halves benefit equally from each other.
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