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Political stability

The reaction of the stock market and the business community to political talk about a snap general election was predictable. The stock market fell for the first time in months and usually publicity-shy business leaders made a rare foray in the mass media to urge against a resort to elections.

The United National Front Government's success with the ceasefire is to blame for the country's discomfort with the prospect of any form of disruption of normal life. Stability in society and polity is the key to economic dynamism and an economy that, for decades, had learnt to survive amid war, is now enjoying the sweet atmosphere of the longest running cessation of hostilities in more than a decade.

Although no one would claim that the country is enjoying an economic boom, still no one, except perhaps those extremists who would sacrifice all for a fantasy of ethnic supremacy, wants a return to any form of instability. The return to a modicum of stability has brought such hope that the possibility of this being shaken by the political activity and uncertainty of an election is alarming to most people.

What the country needs is more stability and certainty and not less. That is the message from those who work the controls of the 'engine' of the economy, the business community.

Business leaders have been quick to respond to the peace initiative with their own initiatives to explore the expansion of trade and other economic ties with the hitherto war-ravaged North-Eastern region of the country. One trade fair was held in Jaffna with much success and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe is due to officiate at the opening of a second later this week in Trincomalee.

If the end to war has returned the country to some form of normalcy, the on-going tensions between Government Ministers and the Presidency remain the biggest threat to a long-term stability that is sorely needed for any substantive economic revival.

Even if the dissolution of Parliament yet remains merely a speculation and not a direct threat or intention, the souring of the atmosphere that such speculation brings is enough to jolt the brittle stability that has been won with great difficulty. The whole country yearns for a more stable peace and will surely wholeheartedly embrace those political forces that take the courageous initiative to end confrontations and bring about that peace.

Nuclear terror

Last week Japan and the world marked the 57th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More than 90,000 people, virtually all of them civilians, died in a flash in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and another 130,000 people died in Nagasaki when, in the closing stages of humankind's biggest and bloodiest war, the United States dropped atom bombs on these two cities.

The debate still rages over the morality of this bombing but few deny that it brought to an end one of the most brutal periods in human history.

The first and only instance of the military use of nuclear weaponry still casts its cloud of terror over the world. Today, there are seven "nuclear powers" in the world with four of them, the most powerful states, possessing a destructive nuclear capacity literally millions of times greater than that unleashed in that epoch-making bombing fifty years ago.

If the United Nations was founded to bring about a permanent world peace, the world today is yet far from it. The threat of nuclear war is now in our own neighbourhood. The tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki took human history into a new and dangerous era, perhaps the most decisive moment in the Twentieth Century. They must serve as a reminder of the continuing danger of nuclear holocaust and the urgency of nuclear disarmament.

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