Barack Obama, who is now viewed as the beacon of hope by Americans and rest of the world, views the problem of the 21st century as “problem of others” meaning today’s problem in the world as the failure of the states to accept minorities as equal, and his first choice of an example in a google interview is Srilanka followed by Ireland. Obama with his remarkable acumen in differentiating terrorism and civil war gives a slight hope for minorities who are suppressed by the majority.

i felt it was funny that he should being it up specifically -indicating he’s in for a 2nd term .. shouldnt he atleast have served 2-3 years before making a comment like that? we only want to see , what we want to SEE:::::::::::::::::

“What was referenced were the expression and implementation of disturbing and essentially violent policies and practices, no different in spirit to those employed by the LTTE and with sickening consequences, that run counter to addressing significant challenges of democracy, human rights and terrorism.”

One reason that we don’t have a Sri Lankan version of Obama is simply that our “liberals” are too clueless and disconnected from the country outside of Colombo. Obama won because he crossed lines and boundaries. He won “red states.” He gained credibility by vowing to continue the battle against anti-US terrorism.

Contrast this with the attitude of our own NGO snobs as demonstrated quite eloquently in the above article. The author constructs a Sri Lankan ignoramus in the immigration officer who does not share the author’s belief in peace and love with the LTTE. Perhaps if the author had some understanding of US history, he would’ve known that the process that ended with Obama’s presidential victory had begun with a very bloody and costly Civil War fought by an earlier President who did not believe in a “political solution” with the slave-owning southern secessionists. That Civil War was interesting because there were American versions of our own NGO pundits:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copperheads

During the American Civil War (1861-1865), the Copperheads nominally favored the Union and strongly opposed the war, for which they blamed abolitionists, and they demanded immediate peace and resisted draft laws. They wanted Lincoln and the Republicans ousted from power, seeing the president as a tyrant who was destroying American republican values with his despotic and arbitrary actions.

…As war opponents, Copperheads were suspected of disloyalty, and Lincoln often had their leaders arrested and held for months in military prisons without trial — one famous example was General Ambrose Burnside’s 1863 General Order Number 38, issued in Ohio, which made it an offence (to be tried in military court) to criticize the war in any way: the order was used to arrest Ohio congressman Clement L. Vallandigham when he criticized the order itself.

Obama won on a ‘God bless America’, not ‘God damn America’, a point you may like to learn !!

These factors are what makes the election of Barack Obama a highly significent event. In the Sri Lankan context, I believe that it is perfectly possible for someone who incarnates and upholds such ‘inclusive ideals’ to come to power in future. I may not know how long it will take, but the arrival of an ‘Obama-equivalent’ in our land will be marked by the political success of someone who successfully surpasses ethnic boundaries, calls for inter-ethnic accomodation and measures to reach that goal, makes Sri Lanka a modern, cosmopolitan state open to the world, makes it a state that absolutely respects parity in all sectors of government, gives equal status to our languages and cultures, and facilitates innumerable opportunities for the youth, irrespective of who they are, where they come from, and to what ethnic community they belong.

Whatever his/her own ethnic identity is, such a person is bound to command the support of a majority of Sri Lankans (within and beyond our shores) of the 21st century generation(s).

All we could do at this stage is to continue a constructive dialogue, and develop awareness among people about the importance of making peace and ways of doing so. People from different groups and backgrounds view the ethnic issue through different and conflicting stereotypes, and helping them view it beyond those seems to be an essential step forward.

Such a project requires you to go into history and go into demography and go to the deconstruction board and place within it the multi-ethnic, multi-religious diga palala of Sri Lanka. You have to tell us what ‘multi-ethnic’ and ‘multi-religious’ means. And if you want to compare and contrast Obama, the US citizen with the Sri Lankan Obama of your imagination, then you must mention that Obama does not have slave ancestry. You must compare the contributions of whites, blacks and Hispanics in the making of the USA on the land robbed by genocide and trickery from the Native American with the contributions of Sinhalese, Tamils, Moors, Burghers and Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Christians (of all denomination) to the making of Sri Lanka throughout the longer-than-US-history of the island.

My comment on this can be found here…http://www.lakbimanews.lk/special/spe13.htm

your quite right when you say that there were sinhalese people who did commit those crimes … and they deserve to rot in hell. however, i’d like to note that not all Sinhalese were involved in those activites. a few thugs are bound to get out of hand at times, but one cannot claim the entire sinhalese race is like that. there were so many cases in which sinhalese families actually protected their tamil friends and families during the 1983 riots, to protect them from thugs.

do not forget that the LTTE drove 121,000 Muslims away from the north in the late 1980’s, that they massacred 60 buddhist monks in 1986 and annihilated countless sinhalese villages in their quest to create a terrorist state. all extremists will get out of hand and there are extremists on both sides, sinhalese and tamil. don’t twist the truth so that its like as though the sinhalese thugs are the only criminals. only the extremists on both sides commit the crimes; the vast majority of sinhalese and tamil live together happilly and free from the idiocies of these extremists.