Sinhalization of the North and the Tamilzation of the South.

By Sebastian Rasalingam, Toronto, Canada

What has all this to do with Sinhalization of the North, and Tamilization of the South?

 

(June 29, Toronto, Sri Lanka Guardian) Two recent articles highlight various aspects of a debate fundamental to the "National Question" of Sri Lanka. Unfortunately, it is hardly discussed in the national press in Sri Lanka, although much discussed in gatherings of expatriates. I hear of sinhalese "intrusion" into the north being discussed by my children (people in their fiftees) and their friends.

D. B. S. Jeyaraj, the well-known columnist has high-lighted the settling of some 150 "Sinhalese" in the "Tamil Village" of Kokkacchankulam, near Vavniya (click here to read). This is presented as an example of the "sinhalization" of the North.

A comment on Jeyraj's article, written by a Sinhalese academic appeared in the Sri Lanka Guardian (click here to read). According to him, the place-name Kokkacchankulam is said to be Sinhala, arising from Kok-Aththana, a type of Datura with fruits having hooks ("koku") for seed dispersal. 

Also the area is claimed to have a Buddhist past as recorded by the archeology department. All this utterly unsurprising to me. The majority of the Sinhalese (and any Tamils of that era) lived in the North of the Mahaveli river untill about the 10th century. Populations have moved north, and south, depending on the pressures of war, pestillance or peace.

The anger against Colombo doing things in the North reminds me of the anger of the Tamil parliamentarians in the 1940s. It was against the Colombo authorities building causeways connecting villages in the North. The real anger was that such "intrusions" disturb the power- and caste- structure enjoyed by the Lords who ran the affairs of the Tamils.

Reading through the blogs to Jeyraj's article, we find that some bloggers express the sentiment that this is a "land grab" of the territory that belongs to "Eelam". To others this is "state sponsored colonization" of "Tamil territory". Still others feel that any-one should be able to live anywhere in the Country, but settling these "Sinhalese families" have been done without notifying the right administrative officials etc., etc. Others, mainly Sinhala bloggers, have pointed out a massive "Tamil colonization" of the South.

The big North-South migration started in 1905, when the British opened the Jaffna-Colombo railway. Anyone who made it good moved to the south. Today moving to the South is a first step to moving abroad, preferably to Canada. I too moved from Jaffna to Mannar, and from there to Hatton, and finally to Colombo in the 1950s. Coming from a "low-caste", and having married an Indian Tamil woman in Hatton, I was truly an out-caste paraiah among the Tamils. Although most Tamils could readily get a housing loan from the "Bank of Ceylon" run by Mr. Loganathan, especially at the Wellawatta branch, I found that I could not even open an account even with a government pay cheque.

However, although I was an outcaste among the Tamils, I found that my Sinhalese mates invited me to have tea with them - a strange experience for a man who was always spoken to by Tamils in the curt "inga va" Tamil. The politics of the Tamils in the Ramanathan era was Caste Politics. Ramanathan wanted the caste system written into the Ceylon constitution. The Tamil politics put into place by G. G. Ponnambalam and S. J. V. Chelvanayagam was Race Politics vis a vis the Sinhalese. Caste politics continued within Tamil society itself. It was only the Leftists who went beyond these shackles -- but then they were considered a lunatic-fringe. Even in the 2010 presidential elections, they garnered less than a fraction of a percent of the votes.

What has all this to do with Sinhalization of the North, and Tamilization of the South?

The best thing that could happen to Sri Lanka, and the only thing that would guarantee the stifling of future ethnic discord is the disruption of in-grained ethnic enclaves which are not only racially segregated, but also caste segregated. Mr. Jeyaraj had mentioned villages including Kokachchankulam around Nedunkerny, but failed to note that even up to the 1980s, these had Caste Enclaves that even the war lords did not disrupt. The war did not destroy the segregation of Caste and Women in Tamil society, but mobilized them and hijacked them for political ends, as they were the easiest to subjugate and control.

I strongly believe that the State should have a clear program of settling Sinhalese in the villages of the North, and at least some Tamil IDPS in the villages of the south. The Sinhalese, with 75% of the population, would be demographically highly pressurized and hence the move to the sparse regions of the North and the East would be no different than the move of the White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestants (WASPS) of the US East coast to the "homelands" of the Hispanics West in the USA. Such redistribution of population, and NOT devolution of power into the hands of corrupt regional lords, is the best investment for long-term peace in Sri Lanka. Such a redistribution of population will also strongly undermine the Caste and gender discrimination endemic in traditional Tamil society with its Manu Dharma. Sinhalese society is far far less caste conscious, and accords greater power to its womenfolk.

The Sinhalese, lving in the prosperous and modern Southern Sri Lanka would need state incentives to settle in the sparsely populated North which needs labour as well as investors for its deveopment. The pro-LTTE expats have done little to help the North, and instead push their "boycott Sri Lanka" campaigne which hurts the poor Tamils more than any other ethnic group.

Instead of emphasizing divisions and differences, we need to emphasize the close similarities and common basics of the citizens of Sri Lanka.

Modern Hinduism and Buddhism have much in common. Instead of objecting that "Sinhalization" inevitably leads to the Buddhist temple and the Bo tree "invading Tamil land", we must welcome the Buddhist monks to the Hindu Temples, asking them to build the Buddha Statue and plant the Bo tree just next to the Temple itself. The Kururals and the Buddhist Sangha should be colleagues. After all, Buddhist temples in the South HAVE already integrated Hindu Gods like Vishnu, Skanda and Ganesh. Some Buddhist temples have Kururals, known as "Kapuralas", as officials. The Sinhalese and the Tamils have an enormous amount of common cultural and genetic baggage, as well as linguistic commonality. A Tamil sentence, translated word for word, without changing the structure, already becomes Sinhalese. The alphabets and grammar are very similar. Both Vivekananda and Radhakrishnan said that Buddhism is the most refined rendering of the Vedic-Hindu-Jain tradition of Indian belief.

So, Jayraj should rejoice in the implantation of Sinhala Villages in the North, and the Sinhalese nationalists should welcome the Tamilization of the Greater Colombo region, with its flourishing Hindu temples. Population redistribution is a must. As an old Tamil who has seen Tamil politics opposing the Donoughmore reforms, and finally morphing into Eelam militarism, I believe that these are the best investments for a future of peace and prosperity in Sri Lanka.

If there had been population restructing in Sri Lanka, together with the further development of the railway and road ways left by the British, we would never had three decades of civil war. So, let us plan for the future intellegently and avoid ethnic, caste or religious enclaves of any kind.

LESSONS FROM SERENDIB - A model of social achievement, Sri Lanka still lacks pluralism

By Ananda-USA

June 29, 2011

While the author of this article describes some aspects of the achievements made since Sri Lanka regained her sovereignty, he neither recognizes, nor credits, the policies of governance that led to those achievements in Sri Lanka in contrast to policies implemented in India.

First of all, he takes exception to our honoring Lanka with the prefix 'Sri' to indicate its resplendence. We children of mother Lanka recognize and value the special beauty and astonishing bounty of our resplendent island home, more than any others. We honor our country, for it is anointed by the Lord Buddha himself as the permanent refuge of his compassionate teaching. We are also the protectors of the ancient heritage our forefathers created in Sri Lanka, and are committed to make this land shine again. Is it then a surprise that to our minds, Sri Lanka is an altogether proper and fitting name for this Resplendent Land?
  
He then suffers a major  relapse and joins the chorus of ignorant critics of "Sinhala majoritarianism" as if it were alien Martians who, in his own words, "made this country what India might have been if we had got things right." 

He fails to realize that the things he praises in Sri Lanka were created by successive Sinhala-dominated governments. Does he not realize that caste, sex and race discrimination were eliminated by them? Does he not realize that enlightened policies enacted by Sinhala-dominated governments created the highly literate citizenry of Sri Lanka, and opened up jobs in government and industry to all irrespective of community? Enlightened policies made universal healthcare, public transport, and electricity, available to every citizen in equal measure. It is also not by accident that the International Labor Organization (ILO) identified Sri Lanka as a model of fair and just labor relations for developing nations.

He should walk the streets of Sri Lanka, and experience the religious freedoms and cultural diversity enjoyed by Sri Lankans, and test their hearts and minds by speaking with them at depth, before implying wrongly that somehow "Sinhala majoritarianism" denied legitimate freedoms to any segment of Sri Lankan society. He should not confuse racist discriminatory demands by some groups  for special privileges unavailable to other citizens with lack of equity. Sri Lanka does not govern by devolving power on communal bases, as India often does; that is why Sri Lankans enjoy greater social equity than Indians.

Granting political, police and land rights to various groups based on communal considerations of race, religion, language, sex, caste or wealth, as India often does to its ultimate detriment, are not the policies that led to the high level of social equity in Sri Lanka that this author praises. On the contrary, it is the refusal to grant them on communal bases that underpins Sri Lanka's success. Policies geared to creating only ONE COMMUNITY of Sri Lankan citizens irrespective of communal attributes should be preserved, and extended, as the principal means of ensuring peace, harmony, social and economic progress in Sri Lanka.

National Integration through equal citizenship blind to communal considerations should be the path forward, not National Disintegration by allocating different privileges to different people, slicing and dicing the nation into communal fiefdoms.

The National Goal should be the creation of ONE Nation, of ONE People, sharing ONE Destiny. All Government Policies should be geared to achieving that goal.

...................................

By Mukul Kesavan

TelegraphIndia.com
June 29, 2011

 I’ve spent my holiday in Sri Lanka trying to resist the conclusion that this country is what India might have been if we had got things right.

I know this is a lazy comparison, not least because India is so large and Sri Lanka so small. Delhi and its suburban satellite towns add up to 22 million people which is two million more than the entire population of Sri Lanka. On the other hand, if you were to compare India’s national capital region to Sri Lanka, the island nation would come out of that comparison very well indeed. I suppose the better comparison would be with Kerala, which is adjacent to Sri Lanka, roughly the same size, similarly literate and generally more evolved than the rest of India. But even here the Sri Lankans come out ahead: they have (or had) a world-conquering cricket team; Kerala has Sreesanth.

I’ve always known in a distant way Sri Lankans live longer than Indians do, are vastly better educated and that their country ranks nearly 30 places higher than India does on the United Nations Development Programme’s human development index. But this abstract superiority hadn’t prepared me for a) the general absence of squalor and wretchedness in Sri Lanka b) the all-round loveliness of the place and c) the civility and courtesy that marked my transactions as a tourist.

To start with, the immigration official at the airport gave me a visa and waved me through in less than a minute. The squinting plain-clothes policemen in Delhi who pretend to be immigration officers take a lot longer letting me back into my own country. Inside 15 minutes of landing, I was in Ceylon.

Yes, Ceylon. I was a teenager when this country changed its name and early socialization makes it hard for me to think of it as Sri Lanka. Radio Ceylon played Hindi film music non-stop at a time when All India Radio, in a hissy fit of high culture, banned its broadcast, so my memories of the discarded name are good. Besides, Sri Lanka doesn’t sound right. As the name of a slightly self-important person, yes. As the name of a nation, no. Why not just Lanka? Think of the Indian republic amending its Constitution to rename itself Mr India. Or Sriman Bharat. An honorific built into a country’s name? What were they thinking?

We travelled north from Colombo to Habarana to visit Anuradhapura and Sigiriya, two of the oldest sites of Sri Lankan Buddhism. In the course of a five-hour road journey, a few things stood out. First, the landscape was continuously lovely in a lush way that North Indians like me are unused to. Paddy-fields, palm trees, pineapple stalls, lagoons and little houses with tiled roofs and pillared porches, unspooled mile after mile, hour after hour. It was a little like Goa on a grand scale. The villages and little towns we passed through seemed to take the highway for granted, so they weren’t rimmed by dhabas and truck repair shops and rickety hoardings and assorted ugliness.

The non-stop prettiness of the journey became a kind of provocation. I began to look for the brokenness and poverty that I see as South Asia’s signature qualities. We stopped for lunch at Kurunegala, a little market town. The open-air restaurant overlooked Kurunegala Lake, one of the dozens of lakes that made the Sri Lankan landscape ridiculously beautiful. I walked around its edge, actually looking for plastic bags and the other detritus of tourism, but it was all perfectly clean. It was then that I realized that I didn’t have to selectively process the world around me to edit out squalor. The tourist route, at any rate, didn’t seem to do squalor.

The other remarkable thing about the world we drove through was the systematic and visible presence of the State… in a good way. In every other substantial village that we passed we saw solidly built, tended structures with clearly painted signs that indicated they were early learning centres or training institutions or small government hospitals and everywhere we saw boys and girls in the white uniforms common to all government schools in Sri Lanka. Tiny towns had substantial local assembly buildings. The welfare State in Sri Lanka, even to a casual tourist’s eye, isn’t an aspiration, it actually exists.

This Sri Lankan talent for not allowing the built world to crumble has some paradoxical results. Anuradhapura, the country’s ancient capital and home to its oldest and most venerable Buddhist sites, is at least 2,000 years old. Many of its stupas or dagobas, are so old that they make Banaras’s built heritage look recent. The Abhayagiri Dagoba, for example, was first built in the 2nd century BC. While it’s understandable that the toll of time, the vandalism of Indian invaders and the need for renovation have led to modifications of the original structures, the zealousness of the restoration is sometimes excessive.

For example, the Ruvanvelisaya Dagoba, like Abhayagiri, was built in the 2nd century BC. Except that it has been whitewashed with such municipal zeal that it looks as if it had been built yesterday.

To the tourist, Buddhism seems everywhere. There are splendid seated and standing statues of the Buddha on streetcorners, on lakesides, on hill-tops, generally painted a serene white. We passed through villages decked out with ribbons and banners for a Buddhist festival, our car crept behind Buddhist processions, the lifts in one magnificent seaside hotel, Mount Lavinia, announced special vegetarian meals for Poya, the full-moon day which is sacred to Buddhists and is marked every month as a public holiday.

It isn’t hard to empathize with Ceylon’s post-colonial impulse to invoke a Buddhist past as the foundation of the new nation. To the political leaders of a small island nation with an ancient and unbroken Theravada Buddhist tradition, off the southern tip of a sub-continent marked by the massive presence of both Hinduism and Islam, it must have seemed reasonable to consolidate a Sinhala Buddhist republic. Travelling through Sri Lanka I can see how attractive the idea of a culturally homogeneous nation can be, and how homogeneity can begin to seem to mean not uniformity, but a kind of harmony.

It doesn’t, though. The promise of the idyllic, organic homeland is always a lie, even in Serendib. I didn’t travel to the north of Sri Lanka so I can’t comment on the state of the Tamil country, but history has taught us that everywhere in South Asia, even in this island Eden, majoritarianism has always led to violence and pogrom and civil war.

If, after the end of the civil war, there has been any attempt to replace Sinhala majoritarianism with a more inclusive pluralism, it isn’t evident in the country’s newspapers. All the commentary about Channel 4’s documentary, Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields, denounced it as biased, fraudulent and intent on discrediting President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government. It’s possibly too early for the Sinhalese majority to rethink the nature of their State; the end of the civil war and their army’s victory over the monstrous Prabhakaran are too close to them. But it must happen and those of us who see in Sri Lanka’s social achievement a model for the rest of South Asia must hope it happens soon

Provoking, persecuting and pushing Sri Lanka: Enough!

By Dayan Jayatilleka

GroundViews.org

June 21, 2011 

 

Special Forces Combat soldiers ride in a parade during a war victory ceremony in Colombo May 27, 2011. Sri Lanka holds a military parade and memorial for fallen soldiers on Friday to mark the second anniversary of the defeat of the Tamil Tigers, which ended a quarter-century civil war in the Indian Ocean nation.

“Revolution is not a dinner party, not an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery; it cannot be advanced softly, gradually, carefully, considerately, respectfully, politely, plainly and modestly”. – Mao Ze Dong

The matter is rather simple really. What do you do, or more correctly, what does a state do, and what does a leader at the helm of state affairs do, when faced with a situation of a heavily armed movement dedicated to dismembering the country through secession; a movement which has repeatedly resorted to terrorism; has repeatedly returned to war after episodes of ceasefires and negotiations with successive governments of two countries, has finally been outmanoeuvred and is cornered, trapped? What does a state do when such a movement, its cadres back in civilian clothes, has surrounded itself with and embedded itself in a population of civilians, many of whom had chosen to follow the secessionist army when it retreated from its citadel over a decade before and has been touted as a weapons trained militia? What does a state do when such an armed force has placed heavy guns and command centres amidst that populace and is firing those guns and mortars at the surrounding army? What does a state do when the strategy of the cornered terrorist army is to catalyse an externally induced ceasefire and live to fight another day? What does a state, especially a democratic republican state, do when the vast majority of its citizenry are urging a decisive finish to a decades-long plague of terrorism and when its armed forces are straining at the leash to defeat and destroy the beast which has been tormenting the state and generations of its citizenry?

Agree to yet another ceasefire and yet another round of talks, not based upon unconditional surrender – the only realistic option in the situation – but contingent on or resulting in the evacuation of the secessionist terrorist leadership? Or go in, as the Allies crashed into Berlin or Paul Kagame’s troops went into the civilian camps across the border?

When you go in, do you do so flailing about blindly, or while making the risky effort to breach the enemy defences and facilitate the exit of as many of the civilians as possible?

And once you’ve done so to the fullest extent possible, what do you do?  How do you deal with the efforts to breakout by the enemy; efforts which include the tactic of embedded suicide bombers in civilian clothes?

And when the final battles take place in the dark pre-dawn hours; a battle which does not entail a surgical strike by commandos against a lone enemy leader but with the elite praetorian guard of the cruellest of enemies; a battle which is fought not with pilotless Predator drones and Hellfire missiles but by foot soldiers who probably come from villages where night raids have left bodies and memories of huddled infants and breastfeeding mothers, against the backcloth of a long struggle which has reawakened historical anxieties of an existential sort, do you expect the final scene to be pretty? Revolution, said Mao, is not a dinner party. Still less is a secessionist war a dinner party. The Russian Bolsheviks led by those epitomes of Reason and modernity Lenin and Trotsky, sanctioned the physical elimination of the Tzar and his family (a ghastly act which Trotsky, the epitome of Western reason and modernity, justified and Bolshevism’s original sin, according to Reggie Siriwardena in the Lanka Guardian), the Italian partisans hanged Mussolini and his woman friend upon capture, elements of the Sri Lankan armed forces fed their co-ethnic and generational peer Rohana Wijeweera into the fire.  Not my idea of the ethics of violence, but who practised those ethics anyway, apart from Fidel, Che, the Cubans, the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and perhaps some Lusophone African liberation movements? These were exceptions and veritable saints by comparison with the normal practices and practitioners of war in History– History described by Hegel as a “slaughter bench”.

So what now?

Does anybody seriously expect a state, especially one that is sufficiently democratic at base to be responsive to public opinion, to open up the war and its closing stages, which are felt to be a liberating triumph by the overwhelmingly greater number of its citizens, to international scrutiny? Which state has done so, where and when, two years after a victorious war? Why should Sri Lanka be the first in line of a questionable doctrine, when it should be at the back of the queue if there is one?

This is not a matter of a nasty regime defending itself. Liberal democratic Spain, a member of the EU and NATO, filed a case against its most celebrated judge, Balthazar Garzon, who started universal jurisdiction rolling with his admirable decision of Augusto Pinochet, because Garzon sought to open up for possible accountability the crimes committed during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.

Each state and society decides on how, when and who by, the issues of accountability and impunity are settled. How can the UK, which let Augusto Pinochet go, and which took 38 years to issue its report into Bloody Sunday with no prosecutions having yet taken place, wag its finger at Sri Lanka on impunity?

Are those who argue that accountability is a pre-requisite for reconciliation and that an international or independent national inquiry is a prerequisite for accountability, seriously hold that an inquisition into the Sri Lankan armed forces will assist rather than wreck reconciliation? Who then will reconcile the rather large armed forces (with the stress on the adjective) with those who seek to or permit them to be placed in the dock for having risked life and limb to  liberate the country from one of the most violent militias the contemporary world has seen?

Who will reconcile the vast Sinhala peasantry with that element of urban society and its expatriate cousins, which wishes to put their sons in the dock at the behest of some foreigners or liberal legal doctrines? Who will reconcile an ancient nation which constitutes the vast mass of the island, with the former colonial powers that issue deadlines and ultimatums and a neighbouring landmass from which incursions took place throughout history, and now passes resolutions calling for economic blockades?

Did the pressure from the anti-Castro Cubans in Florida and the economic embargo by the USA lead to a softening within Cuba? Where in the world does a combination of such external pressures and outrageous demands, from historic invaders and occupiers, not lead to an internal hardening?

By which logic does anyone call for a risky lacerating inquiry in the name of reconciliation with a minority, when it the idea of penalising, persecuting and prosecuting a loved and socially rooted, army will incense the vast majority?  Who or which is more organic to the country: the armed forces or those who are calling for accountability hearings, so loudly, so aggressively and so soon after the war? Will Sri Lanka’s citizens heed the threatening calls of an ex-colonizer and occupier or the resolutions of the assembly of a neighbouring site of ancient incursions, or protect its elected government, a leadership of its democratic choice and a military consisting of its children?

What makes any intelligent person think that the people of this country will not defend from those deemed intervening outsiders and their local lackeys, those who defended the country—and do so ‘by any means necessary’? What could make an intelligent person think that the majority of Sri Lanka’s citizens do not see the Tiger flags and Tamil Eelam graphics (the map of the island with the North East differently coloured) in the photographs of the demonstrations and events taking place among the re-mobilised and revengeful elements of the Tamil Diaspora in the West? A literate people know that the Tiger is not a self-serving embellishment of the incumbent administration, but the old enemy propelling its front organisations and fellow travellers; its ‘useful idiots’, while straining to leverage the ex-colonial states against Sri Lanka and waiting to leap from beyond the oceans.

How can anyone seriously believe that inter-ethnic reconciliation will be possible, still less accelerated, by or in the aftermath of anything that smacks of victimising the popular armed forces? Accountability hearings AND devolution? Devolution AFTER accountability hearings? Is not the choice one of devolution OR accountability, under this or any other administration? Can any administration that accedes to a full-on accountability hearings, this present one or a successor, follow it up with liberal measures of ethnic compromise and reconciliation and hope to avoid a ferocious backlash? How long would a Wickramasinghe- Karunanayake-Samaraweera administration that moves on ‘accountability’ AND devolution (not to mention neoliberal economic reform) last? Is not an ‘accountability hearing into the closing stages of the war’ – as distinct from domestic inquiry into concrete instances of crimes involving aberrant armed forces personnel—precisely the single measure that will render radioactive any liberal interethnic compromise whatsoever?

How can any serious analyst draw parallels with South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation process, when that was in the context of a negotiated transition from minority rule to majority rule and entailed for the most part, a re-telling of coercive transgressions by the minority against the majority? What would have been the mechanism and practice had the South African outcome been one of outright military victory by the majority forces?

How could a serious commentator draw parallels with the Serbian government handing over Milosevic and Mladic to The Hague? Serbia lost the war as conspicuously as Sri Lanka won it. Yugoslavia broke up or was broken up. Serbia was attracted by the EU option. Sri Lanka is in Asia, and in Asia, as the President of Slovenia (and political science scholar) Danilo Turk put it at a UNESCO Roundtable in Paris a few weeks ago, Westphalian sovereignty prevails. Henry Kissinger emphasised the same point in his new book ‘On China’.

An ancient nation, possibly one of the oldest on earth, with a long chronicled history, a unique language, specific religious denominational adherence and strong identity and consciousness, demographically well-positioned on an island in Asia; a nation which has beaten back a thirty year old ferocious suicide–terrorism and survived an external intervention, a nation with a fairly sizeable population and tough armed forces: does this look like a pushover, or a collective that’s going to bend over for six of the best from a former colonial schoolmaster?

Those doing the pushing see only the target, the incumbent regime, and perhaps the endgame, regime termination, but are poor students of history and politics and therefore do not have foresight or sense of direction. They are oblivious to pattern, process and trajectory, which is one of polarisation and radicalisation: of hardening. Instead of polarisation they may get regime shift or displacement, which ranges from intra regime displacement of the regime’s ‘centre of gravity’, to radical regime transformation.

Under extreme siege, or the collective perception of such, regimes recompose and mutate into or are displaced  and succeeded, not a by a neoliberal or liberal one so beloved by the West, the émigrés and urban civil society, but precisely by one that will be widely mandated to resist more resolutely: an organic, probably elected, Praetorianism or Caesarism. Is it inevitably, axiomatically, unsustainable and therefore bound to be but an interlude, however horribly Hobbesian? I don’t know, but one may ask Myanmar or Pakistan or imagine a fusion.

Sri Lanka’s cities were hit hardest by terrorist suicide bombings but its civil society is the least grateful to those who saved it. We didn’t save ourselves; we were saved by the Sinhala peasantry which sent its boys into the armed forces and bloody battle.

The best portrait of the Sinhalese peasant as protagonist came from the pen of Leonard Woolf, in The Village in the Jungle. Silindu –unforgettably portrayed by Joe Abeywickrema in Lester’s movie — slow, superstitious, is repeatedly pushed, prodded and pilfered by the slick Fernando and Ratemahattaya, until, like the water-buffalo, he finally perceives process and enemy and turns, game-changer in his grasp: a double-barrelled shotgun. This is what happened after the years of the CFA, the PTOMS and unilateral appeasement and national humiliation, facilitated by the intermediaries, the compradors, represented by Ranil’s UNP. The Silindu streak in the collective Sinhala spirit and psyche took it to the next level, pushing back right up to ‘the Day of the Guns’ (to quote a favourite American thinker, Mickey Spillane) at Nandikadal. Today, the ‘social media’ savvy civil society sympathisers of the Darusman Report and the Channel 4 spin are the inheritors and continuators of role of the Fernandos and the Ratemahayttayas, connected to the same colonial overlords.

It makes little sense to push such a nation into a corner – to the point of crystallisation of a determination to resist and recoil in the face of an existential threat of incursion into the inviolable and irreducible sovereign space.

True, the physical fate of Silindu and his family was a tragic one, but as the thirty year old Mervyn de Silva, my father, concluded in his Introduction to Leonard Woolf’s Diaries (1961), these poor rural Sinhala folk had “a far greater moral worth than the Fernandos and Ratemahattayas of this world”.

TNA revisiting Tamil Chauvinism’s game plan of May 14, 1976?

Malinda Seneviratne 

DailyMirror.lk
June 2011 01:34

The 30-year old conflict, like all conflicts, was a monumental tragedy.  Like all tragedies it came with costs.  People died.  Property was destroyed. Hundreds of thousands were displaced. Thousands were maimed. Some scars healed, some never will.  No community in this island was spared.  No one, however, suffered as much as the Tamils, i.e. those who lived in the primary conflict zone (those who fled these areas to Colombo and preferred destinations in Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand can’t claim to be too unhappy – they are not returning in droves to the ‘traditional homelands’ now that the guns have gone silent).

There’s a pathway to war.  There are contributors. There are co-conspirators. They are those who give two-cents and those who give millions. They are those who learn and those who repeat error.  There are those who are ignorant and those who are persuaded by mal-intent.  There are those who have aspirations, who take legitimate grievance, pad it up, dress it in the colours of aspiration and based on this monumental lie that has been carefully constructed declare war for non-addressing of ‘grievance’, even long after the original issue has been resolved.

It is no secret that Tamil politicians wanted a separate state. Such ‘wanting’ is not illegitimate.  The Vadukoddai Resolution of May 14, 1976, authored by S.J.V. Chelvanayakam is a classic expression of dressing up aspiration as grievance.  This piece of paper does not require fresh rubbishing.  What is important is the fact that it contributed in great part to creating ‘need’ for a separate state among Tamil people, fed ‘logic’ to this newly constructed need and shamelessly preyed on the emotions of the ill-informed.

‘And this Convention calls upon the Tamil Nation in general and the Tamil youth in particular to come forward to throw themselves fully into the sacred fight for freedom and to flinch not till the goal of a sovereign state of TAMIL EELAM is reached.’

There was ‘flourish’ in that conclusion.  There was no flourish when the script was played to its logical end.  It was a recipe for a tragic outcome.  This particular delicacy was consumed for the next thirty 33  years.  It was all done on May 18, 2009.  There is only one lesson that is relevant: that path leads to Nandikadal Lagoon.

I re-read the Vadukkoddai Resolution a short while ago after I heard that the Tamil National Alliance was calling for a re-merger of the Northern and Eastern Provinces.   M.K. Sivajilingam is the TNA candidate for the Velvittithurai Urban Council.  He’s a politician and he’s playing the part to perfection. That’s the kindest interpretation I can think of at this point.  I don’t know whether he speaks for the TNA.  He has stated that the North-East merger had not been mentioned in the proposals submitted by the TNA to the Government regarding reconciliation.

The Tamil National Alliance has a history.  It was birthed, bathed, baptized, fed, breathed and lived Tamil chauvinism and separatism.  Its manifesto in 2001 was a wishy-washy re-hash of the Vadukoddai Resolution. The 2004 manifesto was an unabashed expression of servility to the LTTE.  To this date, the TNA has not engaged in any self-criticism over its past including its shameless ‘tongue-tiedness’ regarding atrocities committed by the LTTE.  To this date, the official website of the TNA carries the ‘Eelam Map’ that was on the LTTE flag. To this date, the TNA fails to acknowledge that history, demography and geography (never mind political ‘doability’ and economic sense) rebel against separatism, including devolution of power to existing provincial boundaries. To this date, the TNA has not worked out the logic of devolution (with or without re-merger) when more than half the Tamil population lives outside the North and East, large swathes of the Eastern Province remain non-Tamil etc.

The TNA has not, will not and cannot deal with the objections to the assertions of the Vadukoddai Resolution, its unadulterated chauvinism, intellectual dishonesty and political demagoguery.

All this may be ‘so-what’ as far as the TNA is concerned, I concede.  Politicians and political parties are seldom interested in truth and honesty.  They prey on insecurity and innocence.   The TNA forgets that the path that Chelvanayakam chartered for Tamil chauvinism not only saw its key articulators such as A. Amirthalingam being slaughtered by Chelvanayakam’s political heirs, but many Tamil politicians found it impossible to live, die or even be buried in the so-called ‘traditional homelands’.

A lot of Sinhalese people died over the past 30 years.  Some 27,000 combatants died.  Thousands perished in terrorist attacks carried out by the sons and daughters of the Vadukoddai Resolution.  More Tamils died.  More Tamil civilians were killed by the LTTE than by the Sri Lankan security forces.  One in every ten Muslim in this island became an IDP.   That’s the end-count of the process that the Vadukoddai Resolution precipitated.  And that’s where the TNA insists we should all travel towards, a second time!
 Sivajilingam talks about re-merging the North and East.  The 13th Amendment carved this country into 8 parts. The Supreme Court made it 9.  The security forces turned it back to ONE COUNTRY.  Considering the costs incurred by us all, I doubt anyone will want a re-playing of this terrible, terrible tragedy.  That, however, seems to be what the TNA wants.

There are some numbers the TNA must not forget.  They are asking for control of ONE-THIRD the land mass and HALF the coastline for SIX PERCENT of the population!  Even if every Tamil in this country decides to go live in the so-called ‘traditional homelands’ this still amounts to LAND THEFT.  Sivajilingam just cannot expect the peace-loving people of this country (many of whom have lost loved ones in the struggle to eliminate the terrorist threat and many who have suffered immense deprivations courtesy of their self-appointed representatives)  not to object and, if it comes to that, to fight.

 I am wondering what Mathiaparanan Abraham Sumanthiran has to say about all this.

Repeal the 13th Amendment & Deny Police and Land Powers to Provincial Councils

By Ananda-USA
June 11, 2011

I applaud the Government of Sri Lanka for refusing to grant police and land powers to the Provincial Councils of the Northern and Eastern Provinces of Sri Lanka, despite pressure applied by Tamil Separatists at home and abroad, and by the Indian Government pandering to its own Tamil citizens at Sri Lanka's expense.

Provincial Councils should not be accorded police and land powers in any part of Sri Lanka, for that is a prescription for the creation of communal fiefdoms in the country that will deny all citizens of the country an equal right to settle in, and enjoy all resources, in all parts of their motherland. It will also immeasurably weaken the authority of the central government to defend the integrity of the nation and the lives of her people, and utilize its resources for the common good of all of her citizens.  Without a doubt, devolution of Police and Land powers to the provinces is a perfect recipe for the eventual disintegration of Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka recently emerged from a devastating ethnic conflict waged by Tamil separatists who sought to create a separate state for the exclusive use of their own community. They ethnically cleansed all other communities from the Northern and Eastern provinces which they claimed solely for themselves, even as the great majority of Tamils lived among the Sinhala majority in the rest of the country secure from the murder and mayhem inflicted upon them by their self-proclaimed saviours. The loss of power to police the Northern and Eastern provinces during LTTE control, made it impossible for the Government to protect its Tamil, Sinhala and Muslim citizens of those provinces. The first duty of a government is to ensure the safety of  its people. That duty must never be abandoned again.

Over a period spanning nearly 30 years, the LTTE separatists had de-facto control of police and land powers in the Northern and Eastern provinces. They exercised arbitrary dictatorial power over the population, most of whom either fled their grasp to live in the South in security among the demonized Sinhala majority, or were manipulated into becoming refugees and were illegally transported to other countries to form a tax base for funding their terrorism in Sri Lanka. Those illegal refugees, who now form the bulk of the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora, are still dominated and controlled by the global LTTE terrorist mafia network which wages a global propaganda war to undermine Sri Lanka.

If police and land powers are granted to the Northern and Eastern Provinces, the Tamil majority Provincial Governments of those provinces, controlled by the Tamil National Alliance that was the political arm of the now defunct LTTE military, will enact racist discriminatory policies to further solidify the results of the ethnic cleansing operations of the LTTE that eradicated the Sinhala and Moslem communities in those areas. They will implement policies ... both overt and covert ... to prevent the emergence of a truly multi-ethnic society as in the rest of the country. Furthermore, with police power in their hands, the extensive coastal border of the North and the East will again revert to the large scale illegal smuggling of arms, drugs, people and terrorists, as when the LTTE had controlled it, posing a grave threat to the national security of Sri Lanka. We recall that it was with great sacrifice of lives and treasure, that Sri Lanka developed the naval capability and the skills to defeat the Sea Tiger naval force of the LTTE. Sri Lanka must never lose control of its coastal border again to its enemies.

Given these undeniable facts, it would be completely unreasonable and foolish, for Sri Lanka to accede to these demands for police and land powers, by the very same separatists who yearn to win in peace the separatist goals they failed win by 30 years of unremitting terrorism, and open warfare.

India, attempting to placate its incurably racist and communal Tamil citizens at Sri Lanka's expense, continues along the same foolish path they pursued in the past, promoting Police and Land powers for the North and the East of Sri Lanka. The old objective of the LTTE to gain unfettered access to Tamil Nadu, and foreign supplies of weapons and recruits across an unguarded coast, would be attained by granting these powers. The historical separatist tendencies in Tamil Nadu coupled to the palpable animosity of Indian Tamils towards the non-Tamil Indians of North India, will guarantee the growth of a violent separatist movement in Tamil Nadu if a militant Tamil mini-state wedded to a Pan-Tamil agenda is again resurrected in Sri Lanka's North and East as a consequence of devolving police and land powers. Therefore, the Indian Government would be very shortsighted if it advocates the devolution of police and pand powers that would weaken the control of the lawful Government of Sri Lanka over its provinces: it is inimical to the integrity and national security of India itself.

The 13th Amendment in the Sri Lanka's Constitution, was ILLEGALLY forced upon Sri Lanka by India after it invaded and occupied parts of Sri Lanka. Under national and international law, agreements imposed by force upon victims are INVALID; they are declared null and void as soon as conditions permit it. For example, all international agreements imposed by Hitler's Nazi Germany upon neighboring nations under the threat of war, were repudiated upon the defeat of Nazi Germany.

The 13th Amendment imposed upon sovereign Sri Lanka by India is no different from the infamous Munich Agreement that delivered Czechoslovakia bound hand and foot to Nazi Germany on the eve of World War II; it should be repudiated and expunged in its entirety from Sri Lanka's Constitution as fundamentally inimical to the integrity and long term survival of Sri Lanka. Instead, India should offer Sri Lanka an abject apology for this criminal act against an innocent sovereign nation. This is not the way for India to win friends among neighboring countries; peaceful co-existence with neighboring nations requires non-interference in their internal affairs. India should control and discipline of India's own citizens and groups who attempt to undermine and spawn terrorism in Sri Lanka. Just as India deplores terrorism by Pakistani groups within India, Sri Lanka deplores interference by Indian groups, and the Indian Government, in Sri Lanka's internal matters.

National Integration of all people of Sri Lanka, without regard to race, religion, language, sex, caste or wealth into ONE PEOPLE of ONE NATION with ONE DESTINY should be the path foward for Sri Lanka.

National Disintegration into a collection of ethnic bantustans that separate people from each other, and wall them off in non-viable communal mini-states, will only guarantee economic stagnation, multiplication of bureaucracies, internecine competition for limited resources, and continued strife between communities.

One vote for each person to elect his/her representative to the national parliament is sufficient franchise for all citizens; no administrative units or individual rights that are based on communal attributes should be allowed in the name of ensuring a FALSE community "diversity". Diversity will thrive in the private sphere within families and community organizations where it rightfully belongs under in our democratic system of government. Communal labels should have no place in the public sphere, or for granting special privileges to some citizens that are unavailable to others.  Let us INTEGRATE our people into ONE SRI LANKAN PEOPLE without differentiating between them in law, or in governance, by community.

The Sovereign People of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka are completely capable of deciding what serves their own interests, and of formulating their own policies and laws to govern themselves. Foreign nations should not arrogate to themselves that inalienable right of our sovereign people.

REPEAL the 13th AMENDMENT that India imposed by force upon Sri Lanka, NOW!

DISSOLVE and ELIMINATE Provincial Councils as Unnecessary Bureaucracies that SEPARATES the people from their National Government, NOW!



.............
No police, land powers to PCs

President conveys decision to Indian officials, collision course feared

By Our Diplomatic Editor
SundayTimes.lk
June 11, 2011

President Mahinda Rajapaksa told a high-powered Indian delegation yesterday his government was not able to concede land and police powers to provincial councils in accordance with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.

The move, the Sunday Times learns, follows strong opposition from constituent partners of the United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA). On Friday, President Rajapaksa drove to the parliamentary complex in Sri Jayawardhanapura-Kotte for a meeting with the leaders of political parties that constitute the UPFA. They are said to have expressed strong objections.

One of the primary purposes of the visit to Colombo by a three-member Indian delegation was to urge the government to fully enforce the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. The fact that India urged that such a step be taken by the government was reported exclusively in the Sunday Times of May 15.

The Indian delegation comprised National Security Advisor Shiv Shanker Menon, Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao and Defence Secretary Pradeep Kumar. India’s High Commissioner Ashok Kanth was also associated with yesterday’s talks.

The government’s tough stance in not giving land and police powers to provincial councils is expected to pitch Colombo and New Delhi on a collision course diplomatically. This is particularly in the light of talks in the Indian capital between Indian External Affairs Minister S.M.Krishna and his Sri Lankan counterpart G.L. Peiris when he visited India.

Dr. Peiris had agreed that a “devolution package, building upon the 13th Amendment, would contribute towards creating the necessary conditions for such reconciliation”. The move, Indian officials argue, was the latest commitment given by a Sri Lanka Minister and was thus incorporated in an official joint statement.
However, President Rajapaksa is learnt to have told the Indian delegation that his government would concede many other subjects that are incorporated in the Concurrent List that accompanies the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. He has also told the Indian delegation that his government will withdraw Emergency Regulations with regard to terrorist activities in the North and East since there was no more war in these two regions.

The issue of both Indian and Sri Lankan fishermen poaching in each other's waters also figured extensively during yesterday's talks.

With regard to actions against fishermen who poached within Sri Lanka's territorial waters, the government side explained that they were enforcing the law without the use of any undue force on Indian fishermen.
The Indian side was to point out that poaching by Sri Lankan fishermen in Indian waters did not cover only their southern seas. They claimed there were instances where Sri Lankan fishermen were found poaching in the waters off the states of Orissa and Andhra Pradesh.

Tensions in the high seas between both sides have eased in the past weeks due to the spawning season. However, this season ended last week and fishermen were due to resume fishing activity.

Meanwhile the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) is expected to issue a statement saying it is not happy with the progress made in the dialogue with the Government on how to address grievances of the Tamil people.
Mr. Menon told Colombo-based Indian journalists yesterday that India had conveyed to Sri Lanka that it was left to Sri Lanka’s government to change the 13th Amendment to bring in a suitable political resolution that would enable all communities in the country to live together.

“If they think, they want to do better than the 13th Amendment as many of them do including the government (which) also speaks of 13th Amendment-plus …they want to do different…whatever…that’s for them but they all must feel comfortable,’’ Mr. Menon said.He said the goal was a political arrangement under which all communities in Sri Lanka would be comfortable. “We naturally feel (that) the quicker they themselves come to a political arrangement within which all communities are comfortable, works for all of them, the better. We will do whatever we can to help,’’ he said.

Mr. Menon said that the Indo-Lanka Accord of 1987 had provided an enabling environment for the Amendment. “It was their amendment, not our amendment by the way,” he said.

No police, land powers to PCs

By Ananda-USA
June 11, 2011

I applaud the Government of Sri Lanka for courageously resisting pressure from the Tamil separatists in Sri Lanka and abroad, and from the Indian Government attempting to placate India's Tamil citizens at Sri Lanka's expense, to grant Police and Land powers to the Provincial Councils of the Nothern and Eastern Provinces of Sri Lanka  identified ethnic bases.

Provincial Councils should not be accorded Police and Land powers in any part of Sri Lanka, for that is a prescription for the creation of ethnic, religious and provincials fiefdoms in the country that will deny the rights of all citizens of the country to an equal right to settle in and enjoy the resources of any and all parts of their motherland in equal measure. It is a recipe for the eventual disintegration of Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka recently emerged from a devastating ethnic conflict waged by Tamil separatists who sought to create a separate nation exclusively for their own community, by ethnically cleansing all other communities from the Northern and Eastern provinces that they claimed solely for themselves, even as the great majority of Tamils lived among the Sinhala majority in a bid to escape the murder and mayhem inflicted upon them by their self-proclaimed saviours.

During a period spanning nearly 30 years, the LTTE separatist terrorists in fact exercised de-facto control of police and land powers in the Northern and Eastern provinces. They  exercised dictatorial control over the population, most of whom either fled their grasp to live among the demonized Sinhala majority, or were manipulated into becoming refugees and transported in other countries illegally to form their tax base for funding their terrorist separatist activities in Sri Lanka. Those illegal refugees, who now form the bulk of the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora controlled by the LTTE terrorist mafia network, continues to undermine and wage war against Sri Lanka internationally.

If Police and Land powers are granted to the Northern and Eastern Provinces, racist policies will be enacted by the Tamil majority Provincial Government ... dominated by the Tamil National Alliance that was the political arm of the LTTE ... to solidify the results of the ethnic cleansing operations of the LTTE that eradicated the Sinhala and Moslem communities in those areas. They will implement policies ... both overt and covert  ... to prevent the emergence of a truly multi-ethnic society in that part of the country. With Police power in their hands, the extensive coastal border of that part of the country will again revert to large scale smuggling of arms, drugs, and trained terrorists from abroad that was commonplace during LTTE's control of the area. Expecting the fox to mind the henhouse is foolish in the extreme.

Given these undeniable facts, it would be completely unreasonable and foolish, for Sri Lanka to accede to these demands, by those very same separatists hoping to win by subterfuge in peace the same separatist goals they failed win through 30 years of unremitting terrorism and open warfare.

India, attempting to placate its incurably racist and communal Tamil citizens at Sri Lanka's expense, continues along the same foolish path they pursued in the past in promoting provincial Police and Land powers for the North and the East of Sri Lanka. Clearly, the old objectives of the LTTE in gaining uninhibited access to Tamil Nadu and foreign suppliers of arms, would reemerge by granting these powers. Given the separatist tendencies, and racial demonization of non-Tamils that persist to this day in Tamil Nadu, that would guarantee the growth of a violent separatist movement in Tamil Nadu. This is something that no Indian Government should promote if they care about the integrity and national security of India.

The 13th Amendment in the Sri Lanka's Constitution, was an amendment that India ILLEGALLY forced upon Sri Lanka at the point of a gun. In international law, as well as in national laws, agreements enforced through blackmail are INVALID, and are usually repudiated as soon as the aggressive parties are defeated. For example, all international agreements imposed by Hitler's Nazi Germany upon neighboring nations, such as the annexation of the Sudentenland and the partition of Poland, were repudiated upon the defeat of Nazi Germany.

The 13th Amendment imposed upon sovereign Sri Lanka by India is no different: it should be declared an ILLEGAL ACT and be repudiated in its entirety as fundamentally inimical to the integrity and long term survival of Sri Lanka.

Instead, India should offer Sri Lanka an abject apology for this criminal act against an innocent sovereign nation. This is not the way to win friends among neighboring countries; peaceful co-existence among neighboring nations demands non-inteference in their internal affairs.

Ethnic Integration of the people of Sri Lanka, devoid of barriers based upon race, religion, language, sex, caste or wealth, is the

The sovereign People of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka are completely capable of deciding what serves their own interest, and of formulating their own policies and laws to govern themselves.

.............
No police, land powers to PCs


President conveys decision to Indian officials, collision course feared

By Our Diplomatic Editor

President Mahinda Rajapaksa told a high-powered Indian delegation yesterday his government was not able to concede land and police powers to provincial councils in accordance with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.
The move, the Sunday Times learns, follows strong opposition from constituent partners of the United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA). On Friday, President Rajapaksa drove to the parliamentary complex in Sri Jayawardhanapura-Kotte for a meeting with the leaders of political parties that constitute the UPFA. They are said to have expressed strong objections.
One of the primary purposes of the visit to Colombo by a three-member Indian delegation was to urge the government to fully enforce the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. The fact that India urged that such a step be taken by the government was reported exclusively in the Sunday Times of May 15.
The Indian delegation comprised National Security Advisor Shiv Shanker Menon, Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao and Defence Secretary Pradeep Kumar. India’s High Commissioner Ashok Kanth was also associated with yesterday’s talks.
The government’s tough stance in not giving land and police powers to provincial councils is expected to pitch Colombo and New Delhi on a collision course diplomatically. This is particularly in the light of talks in the Indian capital between Indian External Affairs Minister S.M.Krishna and his Sri Lankan counterpart G.L. Peiris when he visited India.
Dr. Peiris had agreed that a “devolution package, building upon the 13th Amendment, would contribute towards creating the necessary conditions for such reconciliation”. The move, Indian officials argue, was the latest commitment given by a Sri Lanka Minister and was thus incorporated in an official joint statement.
However, President Rajapaksa is learnt to have told the Indian delegation that his government would concede many other subjects that are incorporated in the Concurrent List that accompanies the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. He has also told the Indian delegation that his government will withdraw Emergency Regulations with regard to terrorist activities in the North and East since there was no more war in these two regions.
The issue of both Indian and Sri Lankan fishermen poaching in each other's waters also figured extensively during yesterday's talks.
With regard to actions against fishermen who poached within Sri Lanka's territorial waters, the government side explained that they were enforcing the law without the use of any undue force on Indian fishermen.
The Indian side was to point out that poaching by Sri Lankan fishermen in Indian waters did not cover only their southern seas. They claimed there were instances where Sri Lankan fishermen were found poaching in the waters off the states of Orissa and Andhra Pradesh.
Tensions in the high seas between both sides have eased in the past weeks due to the spawning season. However, this season ended last week and fishermen were due to resume fishing activity.

Meanwhile the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) is expected to issue a statement saying it is not happy with the progress made in the dialogue with the Government on how to address grievances of the Tamil people.
Mr. Menon told Colombo-based Indian journalists yesterday that India had conveyed to Sri Lanka that it was left to Sri Lanka’s government to change the 13th Amendment to bring in a suitable political resolution that would enable all communities in the country to live together.

“If they think, they want to do better than the 13th Amendment as many of them do including the government (which) also speaks of 13th Amendment-plus …they want to do different…whatever…that’s for them but they all must feel comfortable,’’ Mr. Menon said.He said the goal was a political arrangement under which all communities in Sri Lanka would be comfortable. “We naturally feel (that) the quicker they themselves come to a political arrangement within which all communities are comfortable, works for all of them, the better. We will do whatever we can to help,’’ he said.

Mr. Menon said that the Indo-Lanka Accord of 1987 had provided an enabling environment for the Amendment. “It was their amendment, not our amendment by the way,” he said.

Sri Lanka President commissions multipurpose transmission tower in former LTTE heartland

ColomboPage.com

June 06, Mullaitivu: Marking a historic moment, Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa this morning commissioned the rebuilt Kokavil Multipurpose Transmission Tower in the former LTTE Tiger heartland of Mullaitivu.

The 174-meter communication tower, built at a cost of 450 million rupees under the Northern Spring program, is considered as the tallest transmission tower in South Asia.

The tower is to begin digital transmission covering the entire Northern Province of the island from today, according to the Telecommunication Regulatory Commission.



Secretary of the Media and Information Ministry W. B Ganegala said the communication between north and south will be restarted with the setting up of the tower.



Telecommunication Regulatory Authority, Sri Lanka Rupavahini Corporation, the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, and the Independent Television Network jointly provided the funds for the construction work of the tower.



The original Sri Lanka Rupavahini relay tower in Kokavil was constructed in 1981 to facilitate the people in the North to view television broadcast clearly. However, it was destroyed by the LTTE Tiger terrorists on the 11th of July 1990 when the army lost the Kokavil army camp to the terrorists.















The President placed a floral tribute to honor Captain Saliya Upul Aladeniya and other war heroes who sacrificed their lives to safeguard the tower from the terrorists. The President was offered a guard-of-honor at the event.



The Army recaptured the town on December 1, 2008 during the government-launched final offensive.



Foundation stone for the new tower was laid in August 2009 and the construction work was carried out under the supervision of the Ministry of Mass Media and Information.



The tower, which is Sri Lanka's first ever multi-channel broadcasting tower, will be allocated for the providers of services of high speed internet, radio, television, and telecommunications transmissions, as well as military communication operations.



Governor of the Northern Province, Major General G.A. Chandrasiri, Governor of the North Central Province, Karunarathne Divulgane, Ministers Keheliya Rambukwella, Ranjith Siyambalapitiya, Douglas Devananda, Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, armed forces chiefs including Army Commander Lieutenant General Jagath Jayasooriya, Chief of Defense Staff Air Wing Marshal Roshan Gunathilaka, Acting I.G.P. N.K. Ilangakoon, Director General of Telecommunication Regulatory Commission, Anusha Palpita, Secretary to the President Lalith Weeratunga, Secretary to the Media Ministry W.B. Ganegala, Provincial politicians of the Northern Province and media personnel were present at the occasion.

(Photos by Chandana Perera)