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| Sunday, 12 October 2003 |
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Editorial |  |
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Editor, Sunday Observer. E-mail: [email protected] Snail mail : Sunday Observer, 35, D.R.Wijewardana Mawatha, Colombo, Sri Lanka. Telephone : 94 1 429239 / 331181 Fax : 94 1 429230 Sons We, Sri Lankans, are quite familiar with patricide. After all, in the mythology of community origin that we uphold, the Vijaya legend, our progenitor, Sinhabahu, kills his own lion father. Then, one of the great wonders of our civilisation, Sigiriya, was the creation of a junior son-usurper, Kasyapa, who had his father, King Dhatusena, murdered in a particularly cruel manner. In very recent history, we saw many political leaders who were the founder-fathers of the Tamil movement for self-determination assassinated, one by one, by the militant organisation that now not only dominates that movement but benefits from the political ideas of their eminent predecessors. At the level of Government, this awful tradition seems to be continuing if not in terms of actual patricide, at least in terms of extreme misbehaviour and violence by the sons of Ministers, Parliamentarians and lesser politicians. Typically a ruling party phenomenon, the violence and criminality of the sons have besmirched the standing of numerous top politicians of both major political parties that have governed this country. Often the acts of these sons have been in situations of decadence: drunken brawls in luxury dens of fun and frolic. It has also been much worse: blatant violations of law, firing of weapons, wholesale assault on people and even police offices. And this is happening in a country struggling to lift its people out of poverty and the devastation of war. And what is more, the politician fathers of these errant sons have been elected to power and privilege on the basis of pious promises of social benevolence, hard work, sacrifice, and altruism. By their 'wicked' actions these sons are not only causing social and, in many instances, physical harm, but they are also endangering the credibility, and thus, the very political careers of their fathers. Sinhabahu's son Vijaya was considered 'wicked' enough by the citizens of Lata to be banished from the country. Our own political leaders too must take immediate and stern action against their errant sons if the sins of the sons are not to be visited on their fathers. Palestine The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Iranian lawyer and human rights activist Shirin Ebadi must be understood as a grudging, long overdue, acknowledgement by the Western-dominated international community that the Islamic civilisation, among other non-Western civilisations, also possesses the democratic impulse. Would this recognition be extended to the cry for justice by the Palestinian people who have been straining every muscle not only to merely survive the horrors of foreign occupation but also to fight back to regain their homeland. It is this civilised, democratic impulse of the Palestinian people, forcibly displaced as they have been by European-Jewish colonisation and the setting up of the state of Israel, that has led them to acknowledge, even in their extreme oppression by that same state, the right of the new-born nation of Israel to exist. All they ask is for a parallel right of national existence, something yet denied to them by outright military aggression. Surely the civilised and democratic world must see that the answer to the acts of terrorism by a terrorised people lies in a just response to their extreme predicament. When will the democratic impulse in the West triumph over political opportunism so that the West's role in West Asia can become truly a helping hand for justice and not merely one of self-interested geo-politics? |
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