Category Archives: reconciliation

Courtesy of the Sunday Leader, 3 October 2010

The Jaffna Open Forum, a joint venture between the Point Pedro Institute of Development (PPID – independent private social science research institution based in Point Pedro) and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES – social democratic political foundation of Germany working in Sri Lanka for 46 years), took off at the Jaffna Public Library auditorium on September 02, 2010. This was the first of a series of Jaffna Open Forums to be conducted in the peninsula jointly by PPID and FES. The theme of the first Jaffna Open Forum was “Pathways to Knowledge-based Development” and was envisioned to address the following questions:
* What are the prerequisites to foster knowledge-based development in the North?
* How can the state and private sector (in partnership with the diaspora) take the lead in founding knowledge-based development in the North?

* What could be the specific ways and means by which the government, corporate sector, academia, and schools facilitate and promote knowledge-based development in the North, where natural resources are scarce?
* What are the policies and regulatory framework should the government put in place to create an enabling environment for the private sector (national, international, and diaspora) to undertake knowledge-based development in the North?
* What strategies should schools, universities, and other higher education institutions adopt to improve the learning outcomes of primary, secondary, and tertiary students in the North that could in turn generate nationally and globally competitive workforce?
* How could modern information and communication technologies contribute to enhancement of teaching quality and learning outcomes of students at schools, universities, and other tertiary educational institutions?
The overall objective of this public conclave was to present submissions and debate the ways and means and costs and benefits of transforming the traditional agrarian cum fisheries economy of Jaffna and the North into a modern knowledge-based economy.

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Dayan Jayatilleka, Courtesy of the Island, 20 August 2010, but with liberties taken by the web-controller in altering the title.

Photographs of Pirapaharan are courtesy of Shyam Tekwani except for that which shows him in a red beret (in my possession)

History tells us that ports are not only a driver of rapid development but a multiplier of modernization, and the Deep South, which after centuries of neglect has generated and benefited from a provincial power shift, will never be marginalised again. The quiet pride, hope and gratitude that most Sri Lankan citizens feel with regard to the Hambantota port and our long standing friend China, must be set alongside another lesson about our friends that we could learn from another recent development which has not drawn anything like the attention it merits.

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Web Site Editor’s Preamble: This letter under the official letterhead of NERDO with the typed authorship of “T. S. Pathmanathan,” was sent to me by a Tamil activist in Australia who has been in touch with KP and is assisting one aspect of his programme, namely, teaching former Tiger students sitting for GCE exams.

                                                                                                             July 27, 2010

 Dear Sir/Madam,

I am writing to invite you to become a partner in our effort to alleviate the hardships of our people in the post-war rebuilding and empowerment, of the war victims.  Every nation has their own share of their own problems. The problems of the Tamils must be dealt by all people at home and abroad.   Be assured that our objectives are humanitarian and also would strive for self-respect, brotherhood, just peace, eradicate poverty and self-reliance.

 We need your help. We need it now. We need your physical, intellectual and financial contribution. We need your advice and plans. We want to count on your experiences and effective execution of this mercy mission.

KP as best man at Pirapaharan’s wedding in Tamilnadu

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Q and A session with Wathsala, from the Sunday Leader, 1 August 2010

The LTTE chief renditioned by Sri Lanka from Malaysia, has spoken from being under house arrest and declared that “in our lifetime, there will be no more armed struggle”. Speaking exclusively to The Sunday Leader on Tuesday, July 27, KP struck a conciliatory tone immediately. It was clear that there was an implied and tacit agreement on the part of the government to allow KP some freedom not otherwise afforded to others who are captive. This tacit agreement manifested itself in many forms: the use of the internet, the use of a mobile telephone just for starters. KP confirmed that he had visited the Wanni and also the camps. He admitted to being “very sad” at the plight that innocent men women and children had to face as a result of the LTTE military defeat.
KP was pragmatic and realistic: he assured this columnist that there was no way, that in “our lifetime” there would be a resurgence of the separatist war. KP went on to say that the monies being now collected by the Tamil diaspora was being done so by giving the Tamil people false hopes and in essence leading them up the garden path. The Tamil people in the West were being told lie after lie and their media spin departments were extremely vociferous and worked hard. The government must, he advised, combat this problem and enlighten the diaspora of the ground reality.
Speaking with the confidence of the leader of the Tamil people or at least the diaspora, KP made it plain that the people suffering were “my people” and said that it was his first mission to help those suffering along the way to a permanent peace. What is clear is this: that either way, the government faces a tough call when it comes to a decision about rehabilitating KP and letting him play the lead role to gather together the diaspora in aid of the cause of a permanent peace. They may well be gambling with a possible resurgence or they may well take the view that the LTTE is done with forever.
Either way the government is set to take the least contentious route and use KP as a state witness on the way towards achieving their objective of a permanent peace with the minority Tamil people. KP also spoke to a daily newspaper the day after he spoke to us. We reproduce some of his comments not published previously:

Wathsala: So what was the deal?
KP: (laughs) Deal means? What deal? What do you mean?

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Asanga Welikala, courtesy of www.goundvies.org, where you willsee many blog comments

Savouring the richly deserved cascades of press coverage last week of Muttiah Muralidaran’s retirement from Test cricket on the magnificent record of 800 wickets, it is difficult to resist a surge of heart-warming patriotism. It was not only the doosra-like sequence of events in the last day of the Galle Test against India – wholly implausible had it been a fictional plot – that precipitates this onrush of Sri Lankan pride. For once, international media coverage was depicting Sri Lanka, due to the achievement of a man who epitomises the best in it, as it always should be: for world-conquering talent, effervescent spirit, generosity and humility in public, ebullient camaraderie in private, and unflappable good manners throughout.

Courtesy of Lake House–see Essaying Cricket

 In the field of Test cricket, we shall never experience again that delightful frisson of pregnant expectation in the images of Murali’s impish smile and devious, quizzical glances, disconcerting last minute field adjustments followed by devilish deliveries, nor the anarchic pleasures of his agricultural cameos with the bat. To be sure, we shall continue to see him in the shorter version, and also perhaps in that ultimate expression of vulgar populism in cricket, Twenty-20. But Test cricket is how cricket should be played, and it is the template that enabled the dazzling displays of stratagem and stamina, attack and attrition, subterfuge and intelligence that characterised his spin bowling.

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Dayan Jayatilleka, courtesy of the Sunday Leader, 18 july 2010

My first book had an awful title (Sri Lanka: The Travails Of A Democracy) conferred by the publisher in Delhi, but the subtitle was mine, and it was Unfinished War, Protracted Crisis. Today, that war is finished but the crisis protracts.

In a critical review of that first book, Prof A.J. Wilson, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of New Brunswick and son-in law of S.J.V. Chelvanayagam, kindly ventured the opinion that “Dayan… is perhaps the last liberal thinker among the Sinhalese” (Sunday Island, March 23, 1997, p14, 16). Significantly, the same book was met with a blistering full page critique by leading Tiger ideologue and spokesman Anton Balasingham in his Brahmagnani column, in which he said: “Sri Lankan political discourse, in recent times, has produced an amazing variety of political theorists and analysts whose main vocation seems to be to produce denunciatory criticisms of the politico-military strategy of the LTTE and offer ideas or solutions as to how to end the so-called terrorist menace. Among these political theorists Dayan Jayatilleka stands out as a unique character in his irrational and ruthless criticism of the LTTE.” (Inside Report – Tamil Eelam News Review, June 30, 1995) Indian reviewers were divided, with Partha Ghosh, then Chairman of the Indian Council of Social Sciences Research producing a very positive assessment while Prof S.D. Muni who succeeded the more liberal Prof Urmila Phadnis as the JNU’s leading Sri Lankanologist, ripped into the book, hawkishly.

 Small military cantonment on coast between VVT and Pt Pedro in centre background, pic by Michael Roberts, June 2010

                                                                                     Sentry post at junction near siruvil, Kayts –pic by Roberts

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Michael Roberts, 28 June 2010

This essay could also be entitled “The Jaipur Foot and its Universe of Renewable Being.” As such it is a testimony to that great invention produced in 1971 by Dr. PK Sethi of Jaipur with the aid of an illiterate craftsman named Rām Chandra Sharma.[1] Through tales of its spin-offs and the benefits flowing from the newer-model versions of this artificial limb for amputees in Sri Lanka, this article is an epitaph for Dr Sethi.

As clarified for me by Dr. Susiri Weerasekera, “the foot is referred to as the Jaipur foot or footpiece. The whole prosthesis (artificial limb) is called the Jaipur limb. The Jaipur features are the feet and aluminium shanks with upper end shaped as the aluminium sockets lined with corduroy cloth…. [While] the footpiece is a composite: foam rubber or synthetic foam rubber pieces; composite wooden block and these items wrapped round with tyre cord sheeting, then this whole skeleton foot wrapped round with compound rubber layers; placed within the mould and heated to around 186 degrees C ;  left to cool for some hours.”

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Michael Roberts, 27 May 2010

The Colombo Friend-in-Need Society was established as a philanthropic body as far back as 1831 on the initiative of the British Governor, Sir Edward Barnes. Its history doubtless has many chapters and it will require an assiduous historian to detail its continuities and transformations. One transformation is self-evident. It has been run by Sri Lankans for decades. Its present President, Kalyani Ranasinghe, has been in charge for around ten years. She is a lady who has earned a reputation for her indefatigable work in many fields.  

The Board includes professional personnel such as Professor A.H. Sheriffdeen, Dr. L. Wijeyeratne (Rheumatologist), Dr. J.K.S.Weerasekera (Orthopaedic Surgeon), Dr. Ranjan Dias (Paediatric Surgeon) and Engineer Krishan Jayawardena. This management team’s work in this field is entirely voluntary.   

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