"Maubima saha Mahinda” – Speech by Dr. Dayan Jayathilaka on 02-04-2015

Video : Massive Public Financial Fraud drives Sri Lanka’s Economy to the Verge of Collapse-The truth that cost his SLFP CC membership

By One Sri Lanka

April 13, 2015

Please watch this short video in which  Parliamentarian Bandula Gunawardane explains the biggest ever public financial fraud committed in Sri Lanka’s history.

Ironically, this was committed by the first ever Sri Lankan government came to power with its main promise being the establishment of Good Governance.

Please share this information with your Sri Lankan friends who truly care for the well being of their motherland.

This is much more than another deception by  our political swindlers. The mass fraud is driving our national economy to the verge of collapse .

Youtube Video

Sri Lanka: Its Identity & Constitution

By Shenali D Waduge

April 13, 2015

The definitions, terminologies, norms and political correctness cannot be determined by people who have built their nations and developed their political influence as a result of plundering, murdering, converting and influencing indigenous nations and people. Nevertheless that is the status quo. It is the will influenced by former colonial power houses who have set up political systems, monetary systems, trade regulations that create the benchmarks to decide how nations should function and what is acceptable or not against what suits their interests. For far too long former colonies given independence have ritually followed rules and regulations determined by the very nations that have brought them to Third World in debt status. The power they yield internationally with their hold over global economic systems networked to show their might have forced national leaders to succumb to their will. Nevertheless, this subservience cannot go on forever.

Nations cannot simply lay to rest rich histories, civilizations, discoveries, monumental artifacts and heritage, ancient governing systems that held people and nations together without animosities simply because a handful of profit making nations find it convenient to have a world in conflict. Should the constitutions of these nations be drafted taking stock of these ancient systems without tapping into the colonized versions?

Must we therefore as a nation go by what the West that plundered and destroyed nations determine as the internationally accepted nomenclatures for all that governs the world?

Why is Africa, Asia and Latin America not challenging presenting examples of how their ancient governing systems kept societies and communities together instead of dividing and ruling them? In what ways have these western created Constitutions and systems actually helped foster and generate peace and harmony in this world? How ‘democratic’ has governance been to the People who vote their leaders? What are the achievements against the colossal sums of money spent to keep Western democratic systems afloat? Many of these concepts were created with the aim and objective to keep people subservient is no understatement and becomes reason for the failures taking place. Is there a need to continue destructive liberal ideologies?

We are at a critical juncture. We need to create our own destination and to do that we need to determine who we are to know where we are going. To determine who we are as a nation we need to turn to our history. We cannot determine where the nation is heading by copying what foreign idealists or locals following foreign idealism determine. With nationalism comes the need to protect what is ours and to protect what is ours we need to know what is ours and to be able to do that we need to return to our roots and the timeline of history and appreciate how the nation was built.

Our nation was certainly not built after 1505 by foreign occupiers as some wish to believe. Our people need to know who our real heroes are and who the enemies are and why they are called enemies. We need to all know the wrongs that have been done to our nation and people and in learning those facts we are inspired to realize that individually we too have a role to play in protecting what we have left and determine not to compromise or give up what we have left. It is only people who value cultures and history that were shocked at how US-UK trained ISIS are ruining ancient artifacts and cultures. While US is a created democracy UK is a nation that ruled 90% of the world by adopting strategies to divide people and make them forget their past.

All those who do not know the past are destined to repeat mistakes. This is why the education system must at every level not only for child but for adults alike engrain the history and heritage into the minds of the people.

Thus, the Constitution has to be the soul of the nation for it must protect that history. It is pointless us adopting a Constitution picking bits and pieces of governance credentials relevant to other nations most of which do not even have a history of 1000 years to be proud of. It is those that have no history or whose histories are blood soaked that wish to influence nations that have rich histories to forget or replace their history with common terminologies and nomenclatures which are no doubt fancy words but are hollow in actual meaning. We must learn to carve our own destiny instead of being a nation copying what others want us to.

The Hela civilization history unfolded.

• 123,000 BC – Oldest human found in Pathirajawala, (Ambalantota) Sri Lanka (estimated population at the time 0.8-1.5 per SqKm in dry zone and 0.1 in wet zone.) The discovery also revealed the existence of flake and stone tool industry 125,000 to 75,000 BC proof of civilizational existence.
• 80000 BC – 2^nd oldest human found in Bundala. Archaeologists discover remains of lions, rhinos, hipps in Ratnapura
• 30500 BC – 3^rd oldest Lankan human found in Fa Hien cave. He was over 150cm in height, 282 cm long. Pahiyangala could accommodate over 3000 humans. Rice, kurahan, salt used. 27,000 years usage of salt. Female body remains found near Bulathsinhala. Proof that Lankans were engaged in agriculture for over 20,000 years.
• 28,500 BC – Balangoda man discovered. Males were 174cm tall, females 166cm tall. Features are regarded as typical Lankan features. Business activity using shells and beads between inland and coastal inhabitants.
• 15000 BC – agro substance found 7000 years before world did. Discovery in Horton Plains of herding and farming of barley and oats. Archaeologists discover necklaces and needles.
• 12000 BC – Maduru Oya world’s oldest findings of use of steel, copper and irrigation technology.
• 6500 BC – Human remains found in Bellan-Bendi Pelessa near Embilipitiya.
• 6300 BC – Discovery of geometric microlithic industry and pottery in cave near Kegalle (depicting transfer from Mesolithic Balangoda culture to protohistoric iron age)
• 6000 BC – Mahamevuna uyana in Anuradhapura remains of a huge city dated 9000-6000BC found in 2001 AD. Proof of horses been used even before their use in North India.
• 5000 BC – Hambantota site where proof of pre-historic shell midden found suggesting Mahasona beliefs.
• 4000 BC – pre-historic grave site near Dambulla
• 3500 BC – Boat with capacity to carry 150 passengers found Attanagalle oya – proving well established water-based transport system. (however the first civilization in the world Sumerians in Iraq was said to be discovered in 3500 BC)
• 3000 BC – Sigiriya claimed as greatest fortress mansion (Alakamandava of Ravana)
• 1000 BC – Further proof of Hela people on par with rest of the world is the discovery of iron technology – with own steer factories.
• 900 BC – Alphabet discovered depicting the Hela people used alphabet by 900BC.
• 700 BC – Anuradhapura town said to be 125 acres and became home to people who used pottery, cattle, horses, cultivated paddy and used iron technology
• 624 BC – Prince Siddhartha born – the founder of Buddhism.
• 564 BC – Lanka known as Sivu-Hela (Simhala) – 4 tribes (Yakshas from Mahiyangana / Naga / Deva & Raksha) Simhala became Sinhala
• 528 BC – From North India Buddha makes his first foreign visit to Lanka – Mahiyangana 9 months after enlightenment accompanied by 500 Arahath monks. The Mahiyangama dagoba is built on this location.
• 528 BC – First Buddhist Bana & First Buddhist in Lanka Sumana Saman, a provincial chief from the Deva clan in Sabaragamuwa, attained the state of “Sovan” at this first Bana in Mahiyanganaya. He went back to spend the rest of his days in Samanala mountain. Mani-Akkita Na-raju, of Naga clan in the Western Province, also came to listen to the preaching of Buddha.
• 528 BC – First Dagaba in Lanka When Sumana Saman requested for a relic, Buddha gave him a fistful of hair. He built Mahiyangana Dagaba enshrining this relic. This Dagaba had a priceless gem at the peak (an Indraneela Manikkaya). This will be the first and the only Dagaba built by a local, before the arrival of Vijaya.
• 523 BC – Buddha’s 2^nd visit to Sri Lanka – Nagadeepa (5 years after enlightenment)
• 520 BC – Buddha’s 3^rd visit to Sri Lanka – Kelaniya (8 years after enlightenment)
• 482 BC – Vijaya lands in Lanka and Buddha expires in North India. Buddha’s 3 arrivals in Lanka shows that Hela people were living before Vijaya’s arrival.

Small as we are, Sri Lanka has much to feel proud of. 180 Sinhala Buddhist kings ruled the nation following the dasa raja dharma which even the South Indian invader kings followed.

The conflicts only arose after the arrival of foreign invading occupiers who adopted strategies to divide the people so they could plunder the nation undisturbed. That was 500 years ago.

Now these nations are back to plunder what they could not by devising ways and means to denationalize our people and distance us from feel pride in our ancestors, our heroes and defending the nation and moreover they are attempting to tell us how our constitution should be drafted.

We are doomed if we do not know our roots and history.

The Coup of 08 Jan 2015 – The ‘Afghan Aftershock’ that Caused Tremors in South Asia

By Sarojini Dutt

April 9th, 2015

Reportedly hatching plans behind embassy walls, the US – Indian axis executed a major coup in South Asia when it dented China’s influence in the region with the defeat of the Rajapakse Presidency in Sri Lanka on 08 Jan 15.

The coup dramatically changed the geo political dynamics in the region forcing China and Pakistan to urgently review the status quo and to plan necessary measures to restore geo political balance in South Asia.

Analysts describe what happened on 08 Jan 15 as the ‘Afghan aftershock’ which jolted Sri Lanka’s geopolitical balance from its existing centre of gravity and which the US – Indian axis woolgather rode China out of Sri Lanka on a rail.

The aftershock in Colombo was caused by the major ‘quake’ in Kargil in 1999 that rocked the geo political tectonic plates of South Asia.

Kargil, these analysts say, was a masterstroke of US Machiavellianism. Overnight, India a frosty foe from the cold war days which had not signed the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty and which only months before had joined the exclusive Nuclear Club was metamorphosed into a warm and grateful ally of the US
In a neatly contrived ruse US CENTCOM Chief Anthony Zinni – in cahoots with Pakistan Army Chief Pervez Musharraf – brought India and Pakistan to the seeming edge of a nuclear confrontation. With, Pakistan dominating the mountain heights of Kargil, problems of high altitude acclimatisation plaguing India, Pakistan taking comfort in a military alliance with the US (the sole global power) and India militarily isolated globally and regionally the dice appeared loaded against India in the battle for Kargil.

That was to forget one Narendra Modi, a US point man in India, yet to be four times Chief Minister of Gujarat and 15^th Prime Minister of India.

Contact was made and Modi the Pracharak, as reported in the Indian Telegraph of 21 Sep 14, was welcomed in Washington. He had no difficulty in convincing the US administration to pressurise the Pakistanis to withdraw from the commanding heights of Kargil.

Modi left his indelible stamp on HR 227 (House Resolution 227) which called for economic pressure to be applied on Pakistan in the event Pakistan did not comply.

The US congress almost unanimously passed the resolution. A blissfully ignorant Navaz Sharif was forced to eat humble pie. The geo political balance in the region was violently quaked off centre. Pakistan lost its position as the sole ally of US in the region.

Capitalising quickly on the gains of Kargil Robert Blake, the de facto US ambassador in India, engaged the Indians and crafted the landmark bilateral agreements between the two countries; the Agreements were signed in Washington on 18 July 2005. Analysts say that when Pakistan animadverted on the Agreements the US silenced Pakistan, pulling out the ‘A Q Khan’ card.

Of the several US – Indian agreements signed in 2005, it is in the ‘Security Agreement’ that the US resolves to establish India as a global security partner of the US. 

US State department analyst Alan Kronstadt says that the aim of these Agreements is to assist India to become a major power. This is to be a part of the US grand strategy to counterbalance the rise of China as a major power.

Rajapakse the incumbent President who was unanimously selected by the governing party as their candidate for the 2015 Presidential election had (in 2009) the US/NATO leadership hightailing when they attempted to pressurise him to rescue the terrorists and keep intact the US/NATO beachhead that had been established with the CFA in 2002 and consolidated thereafter with the PTOMS in 2005.

Analysts argue that the rationale for US interference in Sri Lanka’s internal affairs is comprehendible. The US had hijacked the vehicle of Tamil Nationalism when they commandeered the LTTE from under the very noses of Delhi; this was abundantly clear when in 1985 India expelled the LTTE leadership of Prabhakaran, Balasingham, Satyendra and Chandrahasan from the country.

US imperialism had piggy backed on the LTTE to establish a beachhead in the North and East of the island and deviously gained suzerainty of this beachhead comprising 2/3^rd of the island coastline, 1/3^rd of the land mass and the adjacent sea; finances, ‘policing’ the land and the sea, planning and governance of the region were in their hands.

Paradoxically, the US had taken a page from Lenin in making its imperial war on Sri Lanka the island’s internal ethnic war.

Sri Lanka watchers say that it was clear to the Rajapakse government that the ultimate destination of that hijacked vehicle of Tamil Nationalism would be determined by the hijacker and not the hijacked.

These observers say that the Battle of Nandikadal was the culmination of a near thirty year war the US forces had waged on Sri Lanka, a proxy war; the US beachhead in Sri Lanka was smashed and the US backed fighters decimated.

The hijacked bogie of Tamil Nationalism was derailed; the US instrument through which it converted its imperial war on Sri Lanka to Sri Lanka’s internal ‘war’ was made dysfunctional.

In the run up to the Sri Lankan Presidential election of 2015, credible sources say that the US – Indian axis, strengthened by US point man Modi, concurred that the Rajapakse government had to be overthrown if the derailed hijacked bogey of Tamil Nationalism were to be put back on track.

When asked what was there for Modi’s India in the deal, these sources replied, The US shook hands with Modi on the assurance that what Krishnaswamy Sundarji could not achieve with the IPKF, Modi would; and more.” The ‘more’ according to some eminent analysts would include the plantation areas, that would bring the land, the people, the entire originating sources of water in the island, the country’s hydro energy resources and the island’s economic bedrock of tea under de facto  Delhi control. Queried an alarmed observer, Can the remaining part of the country (often referred to inaccurately as the Sinhala areas) survive independently in these circumstances?”

In 1987 when the Indians invaded, (sorry, were invited to”), Sri Lanka their plan that was ruined by the islanders was to clear the Northern and Eastern provinces of the Sinhalese and Muslims and thereafter eliminate the LTTE prior to installing Perumal the marionette. While de jure control of the North and the East would likely have been with Colombo the de facto control was to be ceded to Delhi. If the plan had succeeded the North and the East would have been one step closer to being severed from Sri Lanka and integrated with the Union of India.

Senior Indian diplomat Melkulangara Bhadrakumar analysing the Sri Lankan Election in his piece ‘The Lankan transition resets Indian Ocean Politics’ says that what happened may not have the look of a classic ‘regime change’ like a ‘colour revolution’ as in Georgia or a coup as in Ukraine but that without doubt the US and UK had got involved and choreographed the election.

Bhadrakumar a specialist on South Asian affairs reports, Politics do make strange bed fellows and the Anglo – American project (in Sri Lanka) probably drew confidence from that dictum. No doubt the new government will reset the compass of national and regional policies and its impact will be felt far and wide, since Sri Lanka happens to be one of the most coveted real estates in the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean. For the US, Sri Lanka figures as a potential lynchpin in its rebalance strategy in Asia.”

As the global security partner of the US, Modi’s India played a significant role in the Sri Lankan Presidential election; in Dec 2014, the RAW chief was booted out of Sri Lanka, an exit some red faced Indians dismissed as ‘routine’. A Reuters report on 17 Jan 15 pointedly alleges that RAW interference had contributed to Rajapakse’s defeat. Bhadrakumar ratifies Indian perception that Sri Lanka is within India’s legitimate ‘sphere of influence’.

The word on the street is that on the day prior to the Sri Lankan election the RAW chief was strategically moved into the Indian Base in the Maldives; that the axis of evil had drawn up several plans catering to varying contingencies and that the Sri Lankan cabal was made privy to a few of these plans; that this cabal enjoyed playing cloak and dagger, hedgehopping in the wee hours of the night between houses in Colombo 7, to do their bit parts in this ‘foreign production’; that there were massive voting irregularities in the North and the East; that the ‘foreign production’ was based on the notorious  Afghan model of John Kerry used in the  Presidential election of  September 2014 to ensure that the new Afghan government would sign the Bilateral Security Agreement – Karzai had refused to sign it –   that would prevent Afghanistan  prosecuting US soldiers for the many war crimes committed there.

The objective of the ‘Afghan’ model was to subvert, the will of the people, the powers of the parliament and the country’s Constitution by installing in power the loser while stripping the winner of a large component of his effective power; the end result was then marketed by the US at various times as ‘Power Sharing’ or Unity Government or ‘National Government’.

The loser, in violation of the Constitution, was appointed ‘Prime Minister’ by Presidential Decree. Again by Presidential Decree, the President shed a great deal of his powers enshrined in the Constitution vouchsafed him by the people through the same sacred Constitution of the people.

The ‘Kerry’ plan first used in Afghanistan was dependent on two decisive factors for its success: Buying over the support of key political figures with massive financial inducements: Rigging the votes on an unprecedented scale in selected regions.

Constitutional experts are unanimous in their opinion that Presidential Decrees have to conform to the Constitution and cannot controvert it; these decrees cannot subvert democracy and the functions of the organs of state that are guaranteed by the Constitution. Paul Keating in his piece to the Guardian on 26 Sep 14 says that the power sharing deal has left many Afghans wondering ‘What is an election for?’

There have been violent protests in Afghanistan forcing the UN to conduct a one hundred percent audit of all the votes cast; the results of the audit have been suppressed by the UN at the request of the US and the loser who was made ‘Prime minister’ by Presidential decree.

As seething anger mounts in that country there is a shrill demand to challenge the Presidential Decrees in the Courts of Law and have them declared ‘null and void’.

There is also a growing turbulence that the matter of subverting the Constitution be investigated thoroughly by the law agencies at the highest levels and bring all those responsible for subverting the Constitution to justice. It is tantamount to a military coup when the Constitution is subverted by a minority group of interested parties coming into ‘closed door’ non transparent agreements. The President leaves himself open to be impeached” said an indignant Rassoul, a Constitutional expert.

The consequences of the subversion of democracy in Afghanistan have been startling. If Batalanda invokes memories of mass political murder in Sri Lanka, Dasht – e – Leili was the site where US troops with Afghan warlord Rashid Dostrum tortured, shot and buried over 2000 Taliban prisoners of war who had surrendered. Award winning film maker Jamie Doran visited the site and made a documentary of the 2001 massacre ‘Convoy of death’. Calls for investigations have fallen on deaf ears; Bush prevented three investigations and Obama started one and suddenly put a cap on it. Calls to the UN for an International War Crimes Inquiry have not even had the courtesy of a response. After 14 years the vermin have resurrected. Rashid Dostrum is today the Vice President in the aberrated form of Franchise in Afghanistan.

The questions on the streets of Sri Lanka are also many: Were the axis forces standing by ‘off-shore’, to be deployed in Sri Lanka at short notice? Was the armed takeover of the Katunayake airport by the axis forces a part of any contingency plan? Had the axis forces planned to get quisling Sturmtruppen on the street to create a ‘Gaddafi’ type Libyan situation? Could there have been any Blue on Blue situation between Para military units and the military that would have actuated foreign intervention?

In those 45 days preceding the election, to distract the attention of the people from the menacing ‘US – Indian’ Tsunami’ that was roaring in the direction of the island nation, the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie – the Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, Burgher and the local Kautskys – engaged in the classic ‘pick pocket’ diversion.
Aptly put by a venerable monk It was the case of one group of pickpockets fingering another group and hollering ‘pickpocket’; a one mighty ‘pickpocket’ rumpus was created.”

While all eyes were riveted on the animated ‘pickpocket’ diversion, the deadly ‘US – Indian tsunami’ hit Sri Lanka catching the people unawares. Today the country is in the throes of that disaster.

On 08 Jan 15 US imperialism hit back with a vengeance turning tables on Rajapakse. With its faithful Gujarat aide – de – camp and the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie of all hues in tow, the US was successful in putting back on track the hijacked bogey of Tamil Nationalism, to enable the hijacked bogey to continue its role as a ‘transformer’  that converts US’s imperial war on the island to Sri Lanka’s internal ethnic ‘war’. This was almost to a month, 200 years ago when the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie signed off the country’s sovereignty and traitored the country’s leader to the British.

Bhadrakumar says that despite all the machinations of the Anglo American combine, Sirisena barely managed to scrape 51.28% of the votes; he comments Paradoxically, it is the overwhelming Tamil support for Sirisena that ultimately proved the clincher.”

That would be to discount the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie, whatever their ethnicity, religion or party politics may be; the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie in the tradition of their forefathers opened the door for the imperialists to slink in. And the coup of 08 Jan 15 eased the imperialists into the country.

The coup of 08 Jan 15 also kindled a vague notion of Gujarat Lebensraum in the sub continent. Strutting around in an attempt to establish an ‘Asian Monroe Doctrine’ the Viceroy from India marked his ‘sphere of influence’ in a manner which Gerald Durrell would have described as ‘using scent to mark territory’. Of the four countries Modi made winged visits to recently, only Sri Lanka does not have a military pact with India or an Indian military base.

For the first time since the ‘Parippu’ drop in the 1980s Indian aircraft and security were seen swarming all over the country side virtually usurping Sri Lanka’s sovereign role in providing security.

Providing training for selected persons to man the Jaffna airport and enabling RAW and military personnel with DPL passports to move in and out of Sri Lanka at will, analysts say that Modi has signaled intent: there are no barriers between the two countries, it is one country and entry to Sri Lanka through Jaffna will de facto be controlled by and from Delhi; there is a strong likelihood that people from the world over visiting Jaffna would do so via India, further distancing Colombo from Jaffna.

While Modi speaks of the 13^th Amendment and beyond, Colombo maintains a deafening silence on the subject. With Wickramasinghe  breaking protocol to meet Modi in Katunayake and walking deferentially a few feet behind the big man and with Maithripala again breaking protocol to bend over backwards to humour Modi  in Polonnaruwa, it is no wonder that tongues are wagging that with Ranil and Maithripala prostrating themselves across the sea at the feet of Modi, the Adams bridge has been replaced by the Rama bridge with Modi walking all over them and Sri Lanka; and that if Chandrika is unhappy being left out it could be renamed Ramach bridge.

Commentators say that the situation is ominous and portends a threat to the sovereignty of the island. The need at the moment” they say is not clamouring to expand the scope of investigations of financial profligacy to the Kumaranatunge period, or to the Premadasa period or up to the Jayewardene period; the need of the hour is to demand a 100% audit of all the votes cast considering the massive voting fraud that took place primarily in the North and the East as is being angrily alleged, challenge the legitimacy of the controversial Presidential Decrees in a Court of Law, demand  a police probe to investigate whether the circumstances that led to the controversial Decrees was a deliberate attempt to frustrate the sacred Constitution of the people and to ascertain in parliament the level of confidence enjoyed by the current Prime Minister.”

Political analysts perceive that at this vital moment of Sri Lanka’s history it is critical that all Sri Lankan proletariat – Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, and Burgher – unite to defeat the US – Indian axis forces in this country.

In the meantime the one Sri Lankan the imperialists fear and who would stand up to them, defeat them if necessary and who could give positive leadership to the proletariat is out on a limb done in by the ‘Afghan Coup’  of the local bourgeoisie with imperialist planning and money.

How Sri Lanka Won the War: Lessons in strategy from an overlooked victory

By Peter Layton
TheDiplomat.com

April 09, 2015

How to win a civil war in a globalized world where insurgents skillfully exploit offshore resources? With most conflicts now being such wars, this is a question many governments are trying to answer. Few succeed, with one major exception being Sri Lanka where, after 25 years of civil war the government decisively defeated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and created a peace that appears lasting. This victory stands in stark contrast to the conflicts fought by well-funded Western forces in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decade. How did Sri Lanka succeed against what many considered the most innovative and dangerous insurgency force in the world? Three main areas stand out.

First, the strategic objective needs to be appropriate to the enemy being fought. For the first 22 years of the civil war the government’s strategy was to bring the LTTE to the negotiating table using military means. Indeed, this was the advice foreign experts gave as the best and only option. In 2006, just before the start of the conflict’s final phase, retired Indian Lieutenant General AS Kalkat in 2006 declared, “There is no armed resolution to the conflict. The Sri Lanka Army cannot win the war against the Lankan Tamil insurgents.”
Indeed, the LTTE entered negotiations five times, but talks always collapsed, leaving a seemingly stronger LTTE even better placed to defeat government forces. In mid-2006, sensing victory was in its grasp, the LTTE deliberately ended the Norwegian-brokered ceasefire and initiated the so-called Eelam War IV. In response, the Sri Lankan government finally decided to change its strategic objective, from negotiating with the LTTE to annihilating it.

To succeed, a strategy needs to take into account the adversary. In this case it needed to be relevant to the nature of the LTTE insurgency. Over the first 22 years of the civil war, the strategies of successive Sri Lankan governments did not fulfill this criterion. Eventually, in late 2005 a new government was elected that choose a different strategic objective that matched the LTTE’s principal weaknesses while negating their strengths.
The LTTE’s principal problem was its finite manpower base. Only 12 percent of Sri Lanka’s population were Lankan Tamils and of these it was believed that only some 300,000 actively supported the LTTE.

Moreover, the LTTE’s legitimacy as an organization was declining. By 2006, the LTTE relied on conscription – not volunteers – to fill its ranks and many of these were children. At the operational level some seeming strengths could also be turned against the LTTE, including its rigid command structure, a preference for fighting conventional land battles, and a deep reliance on international support.

Grand Strategy 

Second, success requires a grand strategy. A grand strategy defines the peace sought, intelligently combines diplomacy, economics, military actions, and information operations, and considers the development of the capabilities the nation needs to succeed. The new government decided not to continue with the narrowly focused military strategies that had failed its predecessors, but rather adopt a comprehensive whole-of-nation grand strategy to guide lower-level activities.

In the economic sphere, the new government decided to allocate some 4 percent of GDP to defense and increase the armed forces budget some 40 percent. This would significantly strain the nation’s limited fiscal resources so annual grants and loans of some $1 billion were sought from China to ease the burden. Other forms of financial assistance, including lines of credit for oil and arms purchases, were provided by Iran, Libya, Russia and Pakistan.

Diplomatically, the government took steps to isolate the LTTE, which received some 60 percent of its funding and most of its military equipment from offshore. This succeeded and over time the group was banned in some 32 countries. Importantly, a close working relationship was formed with India, the only country able to meaningfully interfere with the new government’s grand strategy. The U.S. in the post-9/11 counterterrorism era also proved receptive to the government’s intentions of destroying the world’s premier suicide bomber force. America assisted by disrupting LTTE offshore military equipment procurement, sharing intelligence, providing a Coast Guard vessel, and supplying an important national naval command and control system. Canada and the European Union also came on board by outlawing the LTTE’s funding networks in their countries, severely impacting the group’s funding base.

Internally, the government set out to gain the active support of the public. By 2006 many Sri Lankans were war weary and doubted the new government’s abilities to achieve a victory no one else could. To win popular support the government realized that development activities had to be continued, not stopped while the war was fought. Moreover, various national schemes addressing poverty needed to be sustained, a prominent example being the poor farmer fertilizer subsidy scheme. These measures made financing the war very difficult and foreign financial support important, but were essential to convincing the people that there was a peace worth fighting for. The measures worked. Before 2005, the Army had difficulty recruiting 3,000 soldiers annually; by late 2008, the Army was recruiting 3,000 soldiers a month.

The increased budgets and popular support allowed the Sri Lankan armed forces to grow significantly. The Army in particular was expanded, growing from some 120,000 personnel in 2005 to more than 200,000 by 2009.

Astute Tactics

Third, to meet the ends that the grand strategy seeks, the focus of the lower-level, subordinate military strategy needed to be exploiting the enemy’s weaknesses while countering its strengths. The LTTE had limited numbers of soldiers, fielding only some 20,000-30,000, and with astute tactics could be overwhelmed. In this regard, the government forces had already won a major success before Eelam War IV started in mid-2006.

In late 2004, a senior LTTE military commander, Colonel Karuna, defected, bringing with him some 6,000 LTTE cadres and seriously damaging the LTTE’s support base in Eastern Sri Lankan. The mass defection provided crucial intelligence that offered deep insights into the LTTE as a fighting organization. Crucially, for the first time, the government intelligence agencies now had Lankan Tamils willing to return to LTTE-held areas, collect information, and report back. The scale of the defection also clearly showed that the legitimacy of the LTTE was waning.

At the start of Eelam War IV, the LTTE were able to operate throughout the country. There were no safe rear areas as high-profile suicide attacks on the foreign minister, defense secretary, the Pakistani high commissioner and the army chief underlined. This capability was countered by using the enlarged armed forces and police on internal security tasks, and by developing a Civil Defence Force of armed villagers. Operations were also conducted to find and destroy LTTE terrorist cells operating within the capital and some large towns. This defense-in-depth neutralized the LTTE’s well-proven ability to undertake both leadership decapitation strikes and terrorist attacks on vulnerable civilian targets.


These defensive measures in the south and the west of the country allowed the Sri Lankan military strategy in the north and east to be enemy-focused rather than population-centric. The primary aim there was to attack the LTTE and force them onto the defensive rather than try to protect the population from the LTTE – the conventional Western doctrine. The areas under LTTE control were accordingly attacked in multiple simultaneous operations to confuse, overload, tie down and thin out the defenders. Tactical advantage was taken of the Army’s new much greater numbers.

In these operations, small, well-trained, highly-mobile groups proved key. These groups infiltrated behind the LTTE’s front lines attacking high-value targets, providing real-time intelligence and disrupting LTTE lines of resupply and communication. Groups down to section level were trained and authorized to call in precision air, artillery and mortar attacks on defending LTTE units. The combination of frontal and in-depth assaults meant that the LTTE forces lost their freedom of maneuver, were pinned down, and could be defeated in detail.

The small groups included Special Forces operating deep and a distinct Sri Lankan innovation: large numbers of well-trained Special Infantry Operations Teams (SIOT) operating closer. The considerably expanded 10,000 strong Special Forces proved highly capable in attacking LTTE military leadership targets, removing very experienced commanders when they were most needed and causing considerable disruption to the inflexible hierarchical command system. Of the SIOTs, Army Chief General Fonseka, who introduced the concept, notes that: “we also fought with four-man teams… trained to operate deep in the jungle…. be self-reliant and operate independently. So a battalion had large numbers of four-man groups that allowed us to operate from wider fronts.” When Eelam War IV started there were 1500 SIOT trained troops; by 2008 there were more than 30,000.

Learning Organization

With enhanced training in complex jungle fighting operations, Sri Lankan solders generally became more capable, more professional, and more confident. The Army could now undertake increasingly difficult tasks day or night while maintaining a high tempo. The Army had became a ‘learning organization’ that embraced tactical level initiatives and innovations.

The LTTE was unique amongst global insurgency groups in also having a capable navy that conducted two main tasks: interdiction of government coastal shipping and logistic sea transport.

For interdiction operations the LTTE developed two classes of small, fast boats: fiberglass-hulled, attack craft armed with machine guns and grenade launchers, and low-profile, armored suicide boats fitted with contact-fused, large explosive charges. In Eelam War IV, sizeable clusters of some 30 attack craft and 8-10 suicide craft operated as swarms, mingling with local trawler fleets to make defense difficult. These were eventually defeated by even larger counter-swarms of 60-70 government fast attack craft that used targeting information from some 20 shore-based coastal radars coordinated through the command and control system the U.S. had provided.

For sea transport operations the LTTE used eleven large cargo ships that would pick up military equipment purchased from around the globe, station themselves beyond the Navy’s reach some 2,000 kms from Sri Lanka and then dash in close to the coast and quickly offload to waiting LTTE trawlers. In Eelam War IV though, the Navy used three recently acquired, second-hand offshore patrol vessels (including the donated ex-U.S. Coast Guard Cutter) combined with innovative tactics and intelligence support from India and the U.S. to strike at the LTTE’s transport ships. The last ship was sunk in late 2007 more than 3,000 km from Sri Lanka and close to Australia’s Cocos Islands.

The combination of the three factors of adopting a strategic objective matched to the adversary, using a grand strategy that focused the whole-of-the-nation on this objective, and adopting an optimized, subordinate military strategy proved devastating. The LTTE was completely destroyed. The government proved able to change its strategies in response to continuing failure and win, whereas the LTTE doggedly stuck to its previously successful formula and lost.

Some have criticized the Sri Lankan victory as only being possible because the government disregarded civilian casualties and used military force bluntly and brutally. This view correctly emphasizes that wars are by their nature cruel and violent and should not be entered into or continued lightly. However, it unhelpfully neglects critical factors and explains little. As this article has discussed, victory came to the side with the most successful strategies – even if it took the government more than 22 years to find them.

In this regard, a comparison with the two other Western-led counterinsurgency wars of the period comparing soldiers and civilians killed is instructive:

Breakdown of Overall Deaths in the Conflict
Category of those Killed	Sri Lanka War (1983-2009)	Iraq War (2004-09)	Afghanistan War (2001-14)
Friendly Force Personnel	29%	17%	29%
Enemy Force Personnel	37%	22%	46%
Civilians	34%	61%	25%

These were three different civil wars that each featured counterinsurgency strategies that progressively evolved. All involved significant civilian casualties with Iraq markedly the worse with 61 percent of those killed being civilians and Afghanistan the best at 25 percent. The Sri Lankan war with 34 percent of those killed overall being civilians, and thus broadly comparable to Afghanistan, then seems somewhat unremarkable except that the Sri Lankan war was decisively won. In Iraq and Afghanistan there was no victory, there remains no peace and people continue to die.

In Sri Lanka the guns fells silent in 2009, there is 7 percent GDP growth, low unemployment, and steadily rising per capita incomes. Even an economically poor country it seems can win the peace in a civil war. The key is to focus on getting the strategy right.

Peter Layton has considerable defense experience and a doctorate in grand strategy.

“Tamilnet” Reveals Ten Point Accord for Regime Change and Executive Presidency abolition reached in 2013 at Meeting in Singapore Involving Mangala Samaraweera

 January 23, 2015

 

The “Tamilnet”website long regarded as the mouthpiece of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam(LTTE)organization has in a news report revealed details of an alleged “understanding”involving among others the current Foreign Affairs minister Mangala Samaraweera and Tamil National Alliance(TNA)national list parliamentarian MA Sumanthiran that was arrived at in Singapore in the year 2013.

Mangala Samaraweera M.P.

The “Tamilnet” website claims that the understanding reached in 2013 formulated a conceptual framework on abolishing the executive presidency based on ten basic principles described as the “Singapore principles”. The news report further states that current Presidential adviser Dr.Jayampathy Wickramaratne, Colombo University Law professor VT Thamilmaran and unnamed representatives of the Global Tamil Forum(GTF)along with a lawyer from the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress also participated in the conclave.
The conference was organized by South Africa and funded by two European countries alleges the “Tamilnet”.
Quoting an unnamed participant in the meeting the “Tamilnet”says “Mangala Samaraweera came as a ‘beggar’ urging Tamil support for regime change and abolition of the executive presidency. It was 2013,”

M.A.Sumanthiran M.P

The Tamilnet report also outlines the ten « Singapore principles » described as “hitherto unrevealed Singapore Principles of 2013”


The “Tamilnet” report of 22nd January 2015 is reproduced here in full –
Singapore Principles of 2013: Tamil polity taken for ride from Oslo to Singapore
[TamilNet, Thursday, 22 January 2015, 07:19 GMT]
Right from the Indo-Lanka agreement of 1987 to Oslo Declaration of 2002 and to hitherto unrevealed Singapore Principles of 2013 that brought the Sampanthan polity into a conceptual framework for the recent regime change in Colombo, the external forces seeking to influence the affairs of the island have taken the Eezham Tamils for a ride to confine the Tamil polity into the unitary State of genocidal Sri Lanka without securing any concrete and descriptive guarantee from the Sinhala polity. By its latest move, the ITAK has pushed the Tamils back into the past, Tamil political observers in Jaffna said citing the so-called Singapore Principles from 2013. TamilNet brings out the text of the so-called Singapore Principles for the edification of global Tamils.
All the clauses of the so-called Singapore principles are non-descriptive with regards to a principled approach in resolving the national question.
Mr M.A. Sumanthiran, the non-elected national list ITAK parliamentarian and Mr V.T. Thamilmaran, the dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Colombo were the Tamil representatives from the island while representatives of the so-called Global Tamil Forum (GTF) were representing the Diaspora Tamils at a meeting in Singapore in 2013 when Dr Jayampathy Wickramaratne came with his proposal points to agree upon a conceptual framework aimed at regime change, the removal of Executive Presidency and other arrangements targeting good governance. Dr Jayampathy Wickramaratne was an adviser to Sri Lanka’s past two Presidents.
“Mangala Samaraweera came as a ‘beggar’ urging Tamil support for regime change and abolition of the executive presidency. It was 2013,” said one of the participants, reflecting on the Singapore meeting.
When Tamil aspirations came for discussion, M.A. Sumanthiran wanted to avoid the mentioning of terms such as Nation and Right to Self Determination in the document.
Only the voice of a human rights defender, a Sinhalese, representing the civil society, was in favour of a formula based on the recognition of nationhood to Tamil people with their traditional homeland in the North-East.
V.T. Thamilmaran, who was once respected for his principles on Tamil sovereignty, was silent and was talking only about good governance.
Tamil aspirations went missing in the proposal. Instead, the document was drafted with the intention of being non-descript. But, a consensus was achieved on winning Tamil voters through the TNA for the regime change.
A lawyer from Sri Lanka Muslim Congress was also represented at the meeting apart from several other representatives.
The meeting was organised by South Africa and was funded by two European countries.
The directors of South African ‘In Transformation Initiative’ Roelf Meyer, Ivor Jenkins and Mohammed Bhabha organised the meeting.
Ironically, the ‘approach’ of the South African outfit, according to its website is “premised on the philosophy that any solution to differences or even conflict must be designed, must evolve, and must be developed and settled domestically; solutions cannot be prescribed from external actors.”
The ‘Singapore principles’ was giving secondary status to religions other than the Buddhism.
The 10-points agreed between the Sampanthan polity and the regime changers including the new SL Foreign Minister, Mangala Samaraweera, at Singapore in 2013 follow:

Singapore Principles
1. In describing the nature of the State what is important is the substance; the labels are secondary.
2. The Constitution shall be based on basic constitutional principles and values including sovereignty of the people, participatory democracy and supremacy of the Constitution which shall form an unalterable basic structure.
3. Power sharing shall be on the basis of self-rule and shared-rule within an undivided Sri Lanka.
4. The Executive Presidency shall be abolished and the form of government shall be Parliamentary.
5. The pluralist character of Sri Lankan society as well as identities and aspirations of the constituent peoples of Sri Lanka shall be constitutionally recognised.
6. There shall be a strong and enforceable Bill of Rights consistent with universally accepted norms and standards.
7. There shall be a separation of powers and an independence of judiciary which includes a Constitutional Court.

8. Important institutions shall be independent and accountable. Appointments to these and High Posts shall be through a transparent mechanism that provides for a national consensus, example Constitutional Council.
9. Institutions of the State shall reflect the pluralist character of Sri Lankan society.
10. The Republic of Sri Lanka shall be a secular state. The Foremost place to Buddhism and equal status to other religions shall be assured.

* * *
The controversial paragraph of the so-called Oslo Declaration of December 2002 follows:
Responding to a proposal by the leadership of the LTTE, the parties agreed to explore a solution founded on the principle of internal self-determination in areas of historical habitation of the Tamil-speaking peoples, based on a federal structure within a united Sri Lanka. The parties acknowledged that the solution has to be acceptable to all communities. [Related story with full text]
* * *
On 11 November 2011, Mr Erik Solheim was claiming that it was the UNP politician Mr Milinda Moragoda and himself, who were behind the drafting of what he termed as ‘Oslo Declaration’ in December 2002, which was signed by Mr Ranil Wickramasinge on behalf of the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) and by Mr Anton Balasingham on behalf of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
“It was Milinda and myself who wrote that document at the [...] restaurant here in Oslo and Balasingham accepted it and he took it to Prabhakaran and Prabhakaran refused. It was not public at that time, but it was clear he was furious because he was reluctant to federalism,” Solheim said during the evaluation of the Norwegian Peace Process [Video evidence].
Mr Balasingam has recorded his version of the narrative on the subject in his book, “War and Peace: Armed Struggle and Peace Efforts of Liberation Tigers”: “[I]t must be stated that there was not any specific proclamation titled ‘Oslo Declaration’. The decision to explore federalism was included in the record of decisions at the Oslo talks and signed by the chief negotiators of both delegations and the head of the Norwegian facilitating team.” (page 403)
He further explains LTTE leader’s position that Tamils were prepared to consider favourably a political framework that offers substantial regional autonomy and self-government from the part of the Sinhala side.
But, failing the delivery of regional self-rule, the position of the LTTE leadership was that the Tamils have no alternative other than evoking the external right to self-determination. In an implied sense, Balasingham explains the objection by the LTTE leader to the exact phrasing of the paragraph in the so-called Oslo Declaration.
It was after the LTTE submitting the ISGA framework, which stressed the external dimension of the right to self-determination in its preamble and after the publishing of the War and Peace book questioning the ‘Olso Declaration,’ Mr Balasingham was brought back into the negotiations as chief negotiator by the LTTE leadership in 2006 during the Norway facilitated talks between Mahinda Rajapaksa’s GoSL and the LTTE.
While there was a leadership committed to principled political foundations, the Tamil polity had internal mechanisms to address the external manoeuvrings that sought the Tamils to abandon their principles.
But, now, the Tamil polity claiming to represent the Eezham Tamils in the homeland has no such fundamental principles or mechanisms.
The Tamil polity could be course-corrected and brought back to track only through the edification of the masses.
Courtesy:Tamilnet

From Elephants to Blue Whales, Sri Lanka Leads the Way on Biodiversity

 
Oct 02 2014 (IPS) UNITED NATIONS- Sri Lanka will host the World Biodiversity Congress (WBC) Nov. 24-27. Given its long and active history of preserving biodiversity, it would be most appropriate for Sri Lanka to be the next host of this global event, which also marks the U.N.'s Decade on Biodiversity.

The world is confronting massive threats to its biological resources due to climate change, pollution, agricultural chemical usage and pest control, land degradation, deforestation, unbridled development, indiscriminate harvesting of wild stocks, uncontrolled slaughter, accumulating waste, in particular, slow degrading waste, etc.

Sri Lanka, while sharing many of the problems of other countries, remains strongly committed to the environment. It is no surprise that it is a party to many of the major international agreements that address environmental issues, especially biodiversity.

Sri Lanka ratified the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 1994. In 1979, it became a party to the 1973 Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (commonly known as the Bonn Convention) and the 1973 Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). The decision adopted by CITES in 1989, in Lausanne, banning the trade in ivory is strictly adhered to by Sri Lanka.

These international agreements have been implemented in Sri Lanka through its own domestic efforts to protect its extensive biodiversity, which is considered to be a unique national asset. Sri Lanka boasts of many endemic species and diverse ecosystems in both its terrestrial and marine environments.

Sri Lanka's uniquely diverse range of ecosystems range from the wet and semi-dry highlands to the low-lying coast. There are grasslands, wetlands, many types of forests, including wet-zone, dry-zone and mangrove forests, lagoons, and coral reefs.

Furthermore, Sri Lanka, a country of only 65,000 square kilometres, is home to a staggering number of species of animals - some of which are endemic.

There are 91 known species of mammals, 171 species of reptiles and over 106 species of amphibians, 90 of which are endemic. Sri Lanka may be the only country in which you can see both the Earth's largest land mammal (the elephant, close to 6,000 remain in the wild according to the last count) as well as its largest marine mammal (blue and humpback whales) within a few hours of each other.

From the Sri Lankan leopard to the delicate Ceylon Rose butterfly, Sri Lanka possesses a larger percentage of endemic species than almost any other country of similar or larger land mass and is listed as a global biodiversity hotspot by the IUCN.

Protecting its biodiversity at a national level has been a key challenge and a series of measures have been taken to protect elephants, a prized national asset, including through providing two refuges for orphaned calves and facilitating captive breeding.

The country boasts a long history of training elephants for religious, commercial and domestic purposes. Elephants play a key role in Peraheras (Buddhist religious processions) where they carry the sacred relics of the Buddha with great dignity.

The annual Kandy Perahera could feature over one hundred caparisoned elephants regally parading through the streets of the ancient city of Kandy by torchlight.

India refuses visa to UN team probing Sri Lanka

 By Ananda-USA

July 21, 2014

MAYBE, just maybe, that India REFUSING A VISA to the UN team probing Sri Lanka augurs that the tide is beginning to turn in Sri Lanka's favor in Indo-Lanka relations.

I had hoped and prayed for this ever since Narendra Modi appeared on the scene as a Presidential candidate, based on his character, experience, nationalist posture, and effectiveness as a leader. I argued for receiving him warmly his acsension to his new role, as President Mahind Rajapaksa has WISELY done.

Many PATRIOTS of Lanka, myself included, have LONG RECOMMENDED that India be totally EXCLUDED from any involvement in Sri Lanka's internal matters, including its economy.

There is NO NATION in South Asia whose majority community is OVERWHELMINGLY in favor of good relations with ALL PEOPLES OF INDIA than the Sinhala Buddhist majority of Sri Lanka, which genuinely regrets the destruction of that relationship by successive myopic and egotistic Indian governments that interfered in the internal affairs of our Motherland.

Because of INDIA's actions in FOMENTING Tamil Terrorism in Sri Lanka, invading our nation militarily, and dictating how we should govern ourselves, we have drifted away from our historically close and amicable relationship with our Indian cousins.

Perhaps this DENIAL OF VISAS to Western Neocolonialist troublemakers inciting Regime Change under various PRETEXTS in Sri Lanka is a signal that India truly wants to mend Indo-Sri Lanka relations, and open a new chapter reminiscent of the Asokan Age of its hallowed past.

We Patriots of Lanka WELCOME WITH OPEN ARMS these new developments under President Narendra Modi's leadership, and await better things to come in the years and decades ahead!

.............................
India refuses visa to UN team probing Sri Lanka

ColomboPage News Desk, Sri Lanka.

July 21, Colombo: India has refused to grant visas to the United Nations team appointed by the High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay to probe the alleged human rights violations during the last seven years of three-decades long conflict in Sri Lanka.

India and four other South Asian countries have united in expressing objection to the UN probe mandated by a resolution adopted at the 25th session of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva in March 2014.

Commissioner of the Sri Lanka Human Rights Commission, Dr. Prathiba Mahanamahewa has said that India has rejected to provide visa to the investigations committee to enter that country to conduct the probe, national news agency Lankapuvath reported.

Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and the Maldives have expressed their objection to the international investigation into Sri Lanka.

The investigation team appointed by Pillay to conduct a comprehensive investigation into the alleged war crimes committed by Sri Lanka's security forces and the Tamil terrorists comprises 13 members and three experts.

While conducting investigations from Western countries, the team has sought to conduct the investigations in a country close to Sri Lanka since Sri Lanka has refused to cooperate with the investigation.

"India is an important country in this regard, but India has rejected entry. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Maldives are in a similar stance, they are not willing to provide support for a suggestion brought on an individual country. They will want to conduct investigations in a country that is close to Sri Lanka, since they cannot enter Sri Lanka," Dr. Mahanamahewa has said.

The human rights official has noted that even Afghanistan has shown their objection towards the probe. "The SAARC countries have united for the first time in this manner," Dr. Mahanamahewa added.

"The UNHRC Committee will have to conduct the investigation from outside South Asia. They will have to contact witnesses in Sri Lanka through Skype and teleconferencing," he has said.

He said refusal of visas is a very significant gesture from the part of the Indian leadership.

Pillay last month appointed Nobel Laureate Martti Ahtisaari, international judge Dame Silvia Cartwright of New Zealand, and Ms Asma Jahangir, former President of Pakistan's Supreme Court Bar Association as experts to the investigative team which will be coordinated by senior human rights official Ms. Sandra Beidas.

Earlier this month India reiterated that it is against sending the UN team to Sri Lanka to probe human rights violations allegedly committed by the Sri Lankan security forces during the decades-long war.

India's External Affairs Ministry, recalling that India abstained on the Resolution and also voted against the specific paragraph that wanted to send a team to the island, has said that the international bodies need to address human rights through a cooperative framework, not a punitive approach.

Meanwhile, the committee appointed by Navi Pillay will initiate its investigations from three different locations worldwide. Centers established in New York, Bangkok and Geneva will initiate the investigations connecting via Skype, and Satellite, the agency reported.

Mythical tales of Tamil persecution in Sri Lanka

By Lakshman I.Keerthisinghe LLB, LLM.MPhil, 
Attorney-at-Law 

Courtesy The Daily News
LankaWeb.com
July 15, 2014

There’s a great danger in this that we accept one side in this narrative…It’s not just a Tamil Tiger’s narrative; it’s a narrative about a complex society rebuilding itself after 35 years of vicious violence and not doing badly

-Bob Carr, Former Foreign Minster of Australia

It was recently reported in the media that Labor’s last Foreign Minister of Australia, Bob Carr, has ridiculed refugee advocates’ urban mythology” about endemic persecution of Tamils in Sri Lanka, saying the previous government couldn’t find a single case” of returned asylum-seekers being abused by authorities.

Carr, who retired from politics last October, accepted Sri Lanka’s recovery after 30 years of ethnic conflict was not a perfect exercise”, but rejected former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser’s likening of the Abbott government’s policy to returning Jews to Nazi Germany.

Carr’s comments come as the Abbott government determines the fate of 153 Sri Lankan nationals being held aboard an Australian Customs vessel after their interception at sea. However as reported in The Australian newspaper, it is understood that the Australian government has no intention of sending the boatload to Sri Lanka, nor are authorities in Colombo preparing to receive them. Those now on board the Customs boat could be transferred to the Manus Island offshore processing centre in Papua New Guinea, the Nauru centre or repatriated to India.

Refugee advocates

Refugee advocates argue Tamils should not be returned to Sri Lanka because they fear persecution. Carr said Sri Lanka was not doing badly” given its decades-long ethnic conflict with the bloodthirsty” Tamil Tigers led by the diabolic leader Prabhakaran, whom he compared with genocidal Cambodian dictator Pol Pot. Things I’ve been hearing from the refugee lobby are simply unsustainable,” Carr, a former NSW Labor premier who served as foreign minister to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, told ABC Radio. The idea that there is entrenched apartheid in the country like old South Africa or the West Bank just cannot be sustained…You’ve got 12 per cent of the population of Sri Lanka of Tamil background and they are heavily represented in the leadership of the country. You’ve got Tamil political parties sitting in the parliament, Tamil judges, Tamil doctors and engineers, a Tamil business leadership…There’s a great danger in this that we accept one side in this narrative … It’s not just a Tamil Tigers’ narrative; it’s a narrative about a complex society rebuilding itself after 35 years of vicious violence and not doing badly.

Scott Morrison

Carr said the Labor government returned a boatload of Sri Lankan asylum-seekers about August 2012, none of whom were treated inhumanely. Rather, they were interviewed and then released.

There were only four issues raised with returnees by the High Commission, their position was carefully investigated and there was no mistreatment confirmed,” Carr said. There was extraordinary urban mythology promoted about their treatment. I had it put to me in a meeting with NGOs at DFAT once that there were hundreds of returnees from Australia held in detention; now that was pure myth. It’s in the interests of Sri Lanka to send a message to the world — for goodness sake, the country’s under constant close observance by the Human Rights Commission in Geneva — that in cases like this it adheres to its own law.” Carr said the international community looked the other way” during the Tamil Tigers’ bloodthirsty” insurgency.

This is a country that recovered from three-and-a-half decades of the most vicious ethnic conflict. If the Tamil Tigers had won, if they’d carved out their own republic in the north of Sri Lanka, there are good reasons for thinking … it would have ended up being very similar to Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia. It would have been bloodthirsty…This was an insurgency that pioneered the use of suicide bombings that blew up religious monuments, children, killed people on a huge scale while the rest of the world looked the other way…The country is recovering from three-and-a-half decades of a vicious civil war and it’s not going to be a perfect exercise, and it isn’t, and we should keep our eye on human rights abuses. But I’ve got to say a lot of progress has been made.”

Asylum propaganda

Tony Abbott and Julie Bishop

Ambassador Bandula Jayasekara, the Consul General of Sri Lanka for NSW and Queensland has said in a statement published in The Australian newspaper that vested interests were pushing asylum propaganda to profit from a lucrative trade. The Australian’s editorial of July 7 had commented that Former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser doesn’t help his standing by likening the return of Tamils to Sri Lanka to handing over Jewish refugees to Nazi Germany. Such intemperance can only damage Mr. Fraser’s cause.” It certainly has, as has the hysterical language in the lopsided” asylum debate in Australia in the past few days.

Ambassador Jayasekera said that a misconception has been created among some Australians regarding asylum-seekers arriving from Sri Lanka because of a huge and very well-funded misinformation campaign carried out by parties with vested interests. As the representative of Sri Lanka, Jayasekera stated that he could say with complete authority that those Sri Lankans (and he emphasised, Sri Lankans — be they Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, Malays or Burghers) who return to Sri Lanka do not face death or torture, as the prophets of doom claim in their vicious around-the-clock campaign here in Australia.

Profitable business

Failed or returned asylum-seekers are arrested and produced before a magistrate as people who have violated the immigration laws of Sri Lanka, as any country would do. The Criminal Investigation Department of Sri Lanka, under the Sri Lankan police, questions them to see if they have a criminal record and obtains a statement from them, and they are subsequently released without delay. Jayasekera went onto say that well-organised groups who are aware of any boat coming to Australia coach prospective asylum-seekers to say they were harassed and tortured in Sri Lanka, and would be harassed and tortured if the Australian authorities were to send them back. These groups have the support of refugee councils” and refugee lawyers.

It is no secret that this has become a very profitable business — these journeys cost US $5000 to US $8000 a head — sugar-coated with the sympathy of unsuspecting Australians. Even some in the media are not aware of the racket although unfortunately certain journalists in Sydney quote nameless, faceless people raising doubts whether they were really journalists or in fact refugee advocates. At the carrying fare Jayasekera indicated, this journey would have netted some USD 1.2 million to someone (at USD 8000/- per passenger) and if those in the boat came from India as has been stated, they would have come from a refugee camp in India, where they could have followed due process and applied for political refugee status, as refugees in many camps in the world have to.

In this context, the rightful procedure now would be to return these people to where they came from, India. Failure on the part of authorities to do this would send the wrong signal to other people smugglers, if indeed the vested interest are such people. It should also be noted that this is the first vessel (boat or otherwise) that has left India carrying persons seeking political refugee status in Australia. The timing of this exercise is very suspicious as it has happened in the backdrop of the UNHRC investigation panel on Sri Lanka commencing their investigations. If the motive of the vested interest was to give the maximum negative publicity to Sri Lanka at this juncture with this incident with the support of the media including the ABC, human rights activists and refugee advocates who know nothing about Sri Lanka, and some unintelligent parliamentarians, one could say have succeeded.

Tamil Diaspora

In this respect, Australian Sri Lankans who are appalled at this one sided castigation are truly grateful to Bob Carr, Former Foreign Minister and The Australian for giving viewers another point of view besides the one sided tirade that has been leveled against Sri Lanka at the behest of the vested interests, who Sri Lankans suspect are the paid vassals of the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora in Tamil Nadu. It is noteworthy that Robert John “Bob” Carr (born September 28, 1947) is a former politician from Australia. A member of the Labor Party, he served in the government of Australia as Minister for Foreign Affairs from March 2012 to September 2013, while also serving in the Australian Senate as a Senator for New South Wales. From April 4, 1995 to August 3, 2005, Carr was the Premier of New South Wales. He was the longest continuously serving Premier of the state (only Sir Henry Parkes served longer, although Parkes held the office on five separate occasions).

Immigration Minister Scott Morrison has refused to comment on the two boats – one carrying 153 asylum seekers and the other carrying 50 asylum seekers – maintaining that the government does not comment on ”speculation or reporting” regarding on water operations. Asked if Australians had a right to know what was happening with asylum seekers on the two boats, Abbott said: ”The public deserve safe and secure borders…They deserve a country that has not become open for the wrong kind of business, the people smuggling business,” he told reporters in Melbourne. “Everything we do is consistent with safety at sea and everything we do is consistent with our international obligations”, the Prime Minister further stated.

The motive for these Sri Lankan asylum seekers to seek greener pastures in countries such as Australia as stated by Sri Lanka’s High Commissioner in Australia Admiral Thisara Samarasinghe is that since the ceasefire in 2009 there has been peace in Sri Lanka and thus there is no reason for any Sri Lankan to leave Sri Lanka other than economic opportunities. “There have been thousands of failed asylum seekers who have been either voluntarily or involuntarily returned to Sri Lanka. They are leading a normal life in Sri Lanka with no harassment.”

Admiral Thisara Samarasinghe, refuted claims of ongoing human rights abuses, saying those who are returned to Sri Lanka would face the magistrates court and be released on bail.

People smuggling

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has defended the Abbott government’s asylum seeker policy after the United Nations said it was “profoundly concerned” by reports on the treatment of Tamil asylum seekers. “Australia abides by its international obligations and will continue to do so, but we will also restore our border protection laws to ensure that people do not die at sea,” Minister Bishop told the ABC.

There is nothing humanitarian about encouraging the people smuggling trade to put people on unseaworthy boats”. Indeed it is a fact that such asylum seekers pay a high price to the persons engaged in the very profitable business of people smuggling. The asylum seekers are attracted by the rosy picture painted by these smugglers in order to entice them to undertake the perilous voyage by sea along with their family members.

With the money they spend on this fruitless venture these asylum seekers could start small businesses in Sri Lanka and live happily in our motherland. It is no secret that the Tamil diaspora which operate the Tamil Refugee Agency use these asylum seekers in demonstration against Sri Lanka subsequent to their arrival in the countries in which they seek refuge. They are used as tools to bring disrepute to our motherland.

The funds for smuggling operations also are provided by these agencies. As Admiral Samarasinghe very correctly pointed out: “There is no reason for any Sri Lankan to leave Sri Lanka other than economic opportunities.” Once these asylum seekers gain employment opportunities in Western countries with the help of the diaspora they are required to commence paying part of their earnings to the diaspora organizations fattening their funds which are used to destabilize the government of Sri Lanka in the propaganda machinery set up to achieve a separate state in the north and east of Sri Lanka.

LTTE sympathizers

It heartening to note that Bob Carr and the Australian Prime Minister have assessed the true situation prevailing in Sri Lanka. The Prime Minister very correctly pointed out that: ”The Australian public deserve safe and secure borders…They deserve a country that has not become open for the wrong kind of business, the people smuggling business.” It is an open secret that these Tamil asylum seekers actively support LTTE sympathizers, who have helped them with funds to seek refuge in these Western countries.

In conclusion, Sri Lanka has to assist the Australian government in resisting attempts by greedy people smugglers from duping innocent people to risk their lives in the fruitless venture of seeking refuge under false pretexts in Australia.

Major Tamil party agrees to accept a unitary state in Sri Lanka

By Ananda-USA

July 16, 2014


If the news report below  is TRUE, and the TNA has accepted the 6th Amendment to the Constitution affirming that Sri Lanka is a UNITARY state, that INDEED is a major turnaround in the TNA's position.

However, Sri Lanka should not trust the TNA which was calling for a separatist state of Eelam in cahoots with Tamil Nadu politicians YESTERDAY, just because they have reversed their position TODAY, because they can just as well return to their separatism TOMORROW! 

This acceptance, offered as a way to avoid being found guilty in the lawsuit before the Supreme Court, could very well be another calculated ploy to gain the separatist powers they failed to get by CONFRONTATION & BLACKMAIL!

NEVER TRUST THESE LYING TRAITORS as far as you can throw a Grand Piano!

In addition, they MUST STILL BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE, PROSECUTED & PUNISHED for their TREASONOUS ACTIVITIES over the past 30 years ... INDIVIDUALLY & COLLECTIVELY as political parties, including the recent call for a SEPARATIST STATE in TNA's Election Manifesto, and affirmed by the current Chief Minister of the Northern Province.

The TNA is not saying so now because they really believe it, but because they see that the majority of Sri Lankans are FIRMLY RESOLVED to OPPOSE THEM .... COME WHAT MAY from their barking Diaspora dogs, their NGO puppets, and their Western Neo-Colonial masters plying their  own geopolitical agendas.

So, what should we Patriotic Sri Lankans do in response to this new turn of events?

Ask them to go the EXTRA MILE, and seamlessly integrate into the greater Sri Lankan Society, GIVING UP their

1. Separatist Communal party names, party constitutions and party platforms,
2. "Thesawalamai" and other Community Laws and customs that exclude Sinhala amd Muslim citizens from Tamil majority regions,
3. demands for SHARING POWER based upon Tamil ethnicity. Embrace Sri Lankan citizenship as the ONLY BASIS for rights in Sri Lanka, for communal considerations should NEVER BE a basis for Governance,
4. demands for any right not equally available to other Sri Lankan citizens,
5. opposition to other communities settling and living among them in Tamil majority areas, and INVITING and ENABLING other communities to do so just as they live among Sinhala people in the South,
5. conniving with Tamil Nadu to create a Greater Tamil Nadu incorporating Sri Lankan territories, and
6. conniving with the Racist Separatists of the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora in their quest to create an Eelam in Sri Lanka, and with Western Neo-Colonialists attempting to undermine and destabilize Sri Lanka for their own gain.

These are among the main ADDITIONAL things the Sri Lankan Tamil Community, and the TNA in particular, should do to REGAIN the TRUST of the MAJORITY of Sri Lankans and be ACCEPTED again as Law-Abiding Patriotic Citizens of Sri Lanka.

They should be aware that THEY WILL NOT REGAIN THE TRUST THEY LOST OVERNIGHT; it will take perhaps another 30 years of Good Sri Lankan Citizenship for that to happen.

The SECURITY & INTEGRITY of the Motherland is not something we can entrust Today to the SEPARATISTS of Yesterday, but they should GRASP the hand of FRIENDSHIP that the Sinhala people WERE ALWAYS EXTENDING TO THEM and WORK ASSIDUOUSLY to reintegrate themselves into the social fabric of Sri Lanka. That includes suppressing ALL THOSE DISRUPTIVE elements within your community, within Sri Lanka or abroad in the Diaspora, who attempt to REVIVE separatism.

Do it willingly and voluntarily now, or be marginalized forever as Sri Lanka forges ahead without you, leaving your community only the option of leaving Sri Lanka for good.

...........................
Major Tamil party agrees to accept a unitary state in Sri Lanka

 ColomboPage News Desk, Sri Lanka.
 July 16, 2014, Colombo:

 




Sri Lanka's main Tamil political party, Tamil National Alliance (TNA) has agreed to denounce separatism and accept a united Sri Lanka for all communities.

The TNA on Tuesday agreed to submit an affidavit to the Supreme Court, stating that Sri Lanka is a unitary State.

Lawyers appearing for the Secretary of TNA and its main constituent Tamil Arasu Kachchi (ITAK), parliamentarian Mavai Senathirajah and Leader of TNA R. Sampanthan on Tuesday (15) agreed to submit the affidavit to the Supreme Court that Sri Lanka is a unitary state when six petitions filed by representatives of Sinhala majority nationalist organizations were taken for hearing.

The six petitions filed in the apex court alleged that the political objective of the TNA is to form a separate government in Sri Lanka.

The petitioners, Galage Don Punyawardana, Gunadasa Amarasekera, U. Abeykoon, Ven. Bengamuwe Nalaka Thera, U.K. Anura and Ravi Kumar alleged that the main Tamil party campaigned for a separate state in the North and East during the Northern Provincial Council elections held in September 2013.

The petition claimed that the ITAK and TNA distributed election manifestos among voters in the North indicating that they are planning to form a separate state in Sri Lanka.

Petitioner has further cited in the petition that the manifesto is in line with the hidden agenda of the defeated Tamil terrorist organization LTTE.

In its election manifesto, the TNA, once considered as a proxy for the terrorist group LTTE during the war, has called for establishing power sharing arrangements in a unit of a merged Northern and Eastern Provinces based on a Federal structure.

The petitioners also claimed that the TNA manifesto violates the sixth amendment of the Sri Lankan Constitution which says that no political party or other association or organization shall have as one of its aims or objects the establishment of a separate State within the territory of Sri Lanka.

Under the Constitution, the Supreme Court has power to proscribe any political party or other association or organization found guilty of having the objective to establish a separate State within the territory of Sri Lanka.

TNA leaders have vehemently rejected the allegation that its election manifesto demanded a separate state of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka.

A three-member Bench comprising Chief Justice Mohan Peiris, Justices Rohini Marasinghe and Priyantha Jayawardana heard the petitions.

Counsels appearing for the respondents told the court that the two parties are for a unitary state in Sri Lanka and there was no intention to form a separate state. The petitioner's counsels said the agreement must be submitted to the court as an affidavit and the respondents' counsels agreed.

The Court postponed the case till 22 September.

THE ROVING EYE: BRICS against Washington consensus

By Pepe Escobar
ATimes.com

July 15, 2014

The headline news is that this Tuesday in Fortaleza, northeast Brazil, the BRICS group of emerging powers (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) fights the (Neoliberal) World (Dis)Order via a new development bank and a reserve fund set up to offset financial crises.

The devil, of course, is in the details of how they'll do it.

It's been a long and winding road since Yekaterinburg in 2009, at their first summit, up to the BRICS's long-awaited counterpunch against the Bretton Woods consensus - the IMF and the World Bank - as well as the Japan-dominated (but largely responding to US priorities) Asian Development Bank (ADB).

The BRICS Development Bank - with an initial US$50 billion in capital - will be not only BRICS-oriented, but invest in infrastructure projects and sustainable development on a global scale. The model is the Brazilian BNDES, which supports Brazilian companies investing across Latin America. In a few years, it will reach a financing capacity of up to $350 billion. With extra funding especially from Beijing and Moscow, the new institution could leave the World Bank in the dust. Compare access to real capital savings to US government's printed green paper with no collateral.

scale. The model is the Brazilian BNDES, which supports Brazilian companies investing across Latin America. In a few years, it will reach a financing capacity of up to $350 billion. With extra funding especially from Beijing and Moscow, the new institution could leave the World Bank in the dust. Compare access to real capital savings to US government's printed green paper with no collateral.

And then there's the agreement establishing a $100 billion pool of reserve currencies - the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), described by Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov as "a kind of mini-IMF". That's a non-Washington consensus mechanism to counterpunch capital flight. For the pool, China will contribute with $41 billion, Brazil, India and Russia with $18 billion each, and South Africa with $5 billion.

The development bank should be headquartered in Shanghai - although Mumbai has forcefully tried to make its case (for an Indian take on the BRICS strategy, see here )

Way beyond economy and finance, this is essentially about geopolitics - as in emerging powers offering an alternative to the failed Washington consensus. Or, as consensus apologists say, the BRICS may be able to "alleviate challenges" they face from the "international financial system". The strategy also happens to be one of the key nodes of the progressively solidified China-Russia alliance, recently featured via the gas "deal of the century" and at the St. Petersburg economic forum.

Let's play geopolitical ball
Just as Brazil managed, against plenty of odds, to stage an unforgettable World Cup - the melting of the national team notwithstanding - Vladimir Putin and Xi Xinping now come to the neighborhood to play top class geopolitical ball.

The Kremlin views the bilateral relation with Brasilia as highly strategic. Putin not only watched the World Cup final in Rio; apart from Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, he also met German chancellor Angela Merkel (they discussed Ukraine in detail). Yet arguably the key member of Putin's traveling party is Elvira Nabiulin, president of Russia's Central Bank; she is pressing in South America the concept that all negotiations with the BRICS should bypass the US dollar.

Putin's extremely powerful, symbolic meeting with Fidel Castro in Havana, as well as writing off $36 billion in Cuban debt could not have had a more meaningful impact all across Latin America. Compare it with the perennial embargo imposed by a vengeful Empire of Chaos.

In South America, Putin is meeting not only with Uruguay's President Pepe Mujica - discussing, among other items, the construction of a deepwater port - but also with Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro and Bolivia's Evo Morales.

Xi Jinping is also on tour, visiting, apart from Brazil, Argentina, Cuba and Venezuela. What Beijing is saying (and doing) complements Moscow; Latin America is viewed as highly strategic. That should translate into more Chinese investment and increased South-South integration.

This Russia-China commercial/diplomatic offensive fits the concerted push towards a multipolar world - side by side with political/economic South American leaders. Argentina is a sterling example. While Buenos Aires, already mired in recession, fights American vulture funds - the epitome of financial speculation - in New York courthouses, Putin and Xi come offering investment in everything from railways to the energy industry.

Russia's energy industry of course needs investment and technology from private Western multinationals, just as Made in China developed out of Western investment profiting from a cheap workforce. What the BRICS are trying to present to the Global South now is a choice; on one side, financial speculation, vulture funds and the hegemony of the Masters of the Universe; on the other side, productive capitalism - an alternative strategy of capitalist development compared to the Triad (US, EU, Japan).

Still, it will be a long way for the BRICS to project a productive model independent of the casino capitalism speculation "model", by the way still recovering from the massive 2007/2008 crisis (the financial bubble has not burst for good.)

One might view the BRICS's strategy as a sort of running, constructive critique of capitalism; how to purge the system from perennially financing the US fiscal deficit as well as a global militarization syndrome - related to the Orwellian/Panopticon complex - subordinated to Washington. As Argentine economist Julio Gambina put it, the key question is not being emergent, but independent.

In this piece, La Stampa's Claudio Gallo introduces what could be the defining issue of the times: how neoliberalism - ruling directly or indirectly most of the world - is producing a disastrous anthropological mutation that is plunging us all into global totalitarianism (while everyone swears by their "freedoms").

It's always instructive to come back to Argentina. Argentina is imprisoned by a chronic foreign debt crisis essentially unleashed by the IMF over 40 years ago - and now perpetuated by vulture funds. The BRICS bank and the reserve pool as an alternative to the IMF and World Bank offer the possibility for dozens of other nations to escape the Argentine plight. Not to mention the possibility that other emerging nations such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Iran and Turkey may soon contribute to both institutions.

No wonder the hegemonic Masters of the Universe gang is uneasy in their leather chairs. This Financial Times piece neatly summarizes the view from the City of London - a notorious casino capitalism paradise.

These are heady days in South America in more ways than one. Atlanticist hegemony will remain part of the picture, of course, but it's the BRICS's strategy that is pointing the way further on down the road. And still the multipolar wheel keeps rolling along.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

ADB grants $300 million to aid Sri Lanka's push to cut fuel oil use, boost renewables

ColomboPage News Desk, Sri Lanka.

July 15, Manila: The Asian Development Bank (ADB) today announced that it has approved a $300 million dual-tranche loan to help Sri Lanka scale up its use of clean energy and cut its reliance on costly petroleum oil for electricity generation.

The loan will help Sri Lanka expand the use of renewable energy for power generation and have major benefits both for poor communities and the broader economy.

"The country's heavy dependence on expensive imported petroleum oil hurts the economy, undermines energy security, and harms the environment," said ADB Principal Energy Specialist Mukhtor Khamudkhanov.

The first $150 million tranche will finance a 30-megawatt (MW), run-of-the-river hydropower plant at Moragolla in Central Province and expand and upgrade transmission lines and other infrastructure in needy areas, including the former conflict-affected Northern and Eastern Provinces. The hydropower plant will generate an additional 97.7 million units of hydropower for the grid, saving about 72,300 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions every year while improved transmission lines will further reduce annual CO2 emissions by 98,400 tons.

Environmental and social safeguards will be incorporated into the design of the program to minimize impacts, and a mechanism will be developed to guarantee downstream river flows so that sensitive fisheries, including the endangered Green Labeo, will not be adversely affected by the hydropower plant.

The second tranche, expected to be delivered in 2016, will include expanding the 33 kilovolt medium voltage network to improve distribution of electricity to consumers and the development of transmission network facilities to allow power delivery from two 100 MW wind parks due to be built in the Northern Province in 2017 and 2020.

Assistance will also be given for demand-side energy efficiency improvements including the use of smart grid and metering technologies, the retrofitting of buildings with energy saving features, and the installation of cold thermal storage in selected buildings.

The improved transmission system is expected to boost access to reliable power for about 300,000 customers in rural areas and small towns who currently suffer from low quality supplies. The program also supports Sri Lanka's wider energy investment road map, including its plan to increase the share of grid power generated from nonconventional renewable energy sources, such as mini-hydropower, wind power, and solar power, to 20% of the total by 2020.

In addition to ADB funds, there will be co-financing of up to $60 million from France's Agence Française de Développement, and counterpart funds of $80 million from the Government of Sri Lanka, for a total program cost of $440 million. The program is expected to be completed by late 2020.