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India

There was a time, decades ago when people got into boats and motored across the Palk Straits to enjoy the latest MGR film in Tamil Nadu. This happy commuting was entirely non-legal but was hardly countered in those more placid and less regimented times.

Velvettiturai and other northern coasts were equally famous, in that halcyon past, as the embarkation and landing point for other boat traffic - for smuggling of various commercial contraband between the Sri Lankan island and the Sub-Continent and, also, for the arrival of illegal immigrants from India. All this traffic, too, was non-legal but, being non-lethal, did not prompt the deadly response that the secessionist insurgent traffic across the Palk Straits did in later years.

By the time of the insurgency, the Palk Straits was closed to the marine caravans of happier times. By then, thanks to the socio-cultural distortions of colonialism, the popular collective fantasies of ethnic supremacy and the manipulations of political leaders of all hues, the country was in dire straits.

Today, there is much hope of happier times to come. Even if the Palk Straits is yet navigated primarily by military craft and units of the Sri Lankan Monitoring Mission, fishing is slowly coming back. But there is a new vision of the marine caravans of old.

As the prospects for peace slowly improve, our governmental leadership has been quick to look beyond mere coastal boundaries. In the context of economic globalisation, the contours of prosperity are being seen as straddling not merely the Palk Straits, but the southern whole of the Sub-Continent.

Taking off from the Sri Lanka Freedom Party's traditional emphasis on Indo-Sri Lankan ties, the new United National Party leadership is energetically exploring whole new areas of regional linkages from a common economic co-operation and trading zone to closer, easier, people-to-people connectivity.

If Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe's vision of an 'integrated sub-regional economy' encompassing Sri Lanka and South India projects the larger picture of this country's and this region's desired future, then Minister Milinda Moragoda's proposal for a bridge across the Palk Straits shows us the real possibilities.

And the frequent commuting of Sri Lankan leaders to India in the past year confirms the new recognition of a regional community and economic and political solidarity that would be the foundation for a regional peace and prosperity. The Prime Minister's current visit to Delhi is part of the reviving cross-border traffic. That happy ease of commuting of the past, however, must return, fully legal this time, if that regional community is to be realised.

Iraq

Even as the Government makes costly contingency plans to meet the rigours of a major war in the Persian Gulf, in our neighbourhood, the world waits in suspense for its leaders to arrive at a decision on the future of Iraq. That beleaguered nation, yoked by dictatorship within and trapped in geo-political tensions without, faces an even more tragic future than its tragic present condition in the aftermath of the Gulf War and the United Nations' punitive sanctions.

The world's political leadership faces its biggest challenge yet, not so much on the specific issue of military action against Iraq as to how the world's current representative global political body can collectively decide and collectively act in a manner that bolsters the global trend toward democracy, international understanding and peace.

The modern democracies of the West that have led the way in building global democracy now face their toughest challenge to ensure that any international decision on Iraq is taken in a manner that will inspire a future faith in the political ethos and civilization they uphold.

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