Wii Friday Forum seek the help of foreign missions to persuade the President or something like that?

Most Sri Lankans have got used to the fact that if you don’t support those in power then you won’t get anything from the government and that this is normal.

Three or four days ago a Puttalam UPFA MP and a bunch of goons beat up a Dankutowa traffic policeman because he had given a ticket to the MP’s son for riding a motor cycle without a helmet.

The really sad thing was that all the comments on the newspaper report on the web considered this quite normal.

The police have just restarted their policy of shooting dead those they considered to be criminals claiming they tried to throw a hand grenade at them whilst being taken to search for arms (three murdered in the last fortnight).

It scarcely rates a mention in the local newspapers and is generally accepted by the population.

The same policy was carried out last year with the open support of the government and head of the police force, and was only put to an end when the OIC of a local police station took it to its logical conclusion and murdered a couple of lads who had insulted his girlfriend.

And the whitewashing of Mervyn Silva, who abused his position as deputy minister to tie a government worker to a tree for not turning up to a Mervyn photo-opportunity he had no right to ask her to attend in working hours anyway, has made it clear that anything the government wants goes.

Now much of this has been happening for the last thirty years, but at least the people could throw the government out and vote in the other side, so there was some kind of imperfect control.

With effective one party government, journalists afraid to criticize, government servants afraid to whistleblow, and the government prepared to prosecute the opposition on all kinds of trumped up charges (the police are charging the printer of a set of opposition posters criticizing the 18th amendment on the grounds that they would have annoyed government supporters and thus caused public unrest), as well as the withdrawal of security from those who criticize the government, it is becoming clear that we are heading for a Mexican system without even the cosmetic change at the top the one term limit forces on the ruling party.