Aid and Tony -- damage controlled

The President’s meeting with the British Premier is in the backdrop of a firestorm that’s brewing over aid. Ulf Henrricson lit this firestorm when he left Sri Lankan shores, saying that the killing of 17 aid workers was probably the work of Sri Lankan paramilitaries.

This was before the investigation on the issue was over. The commentators have been firing ceaselessly on this issue and some heavy cannon has been hitting newspaper readers. It’s probably why a little more clarity is needed.

The question of the killings seems to have been tied, almost automatically, to the question of future aid. Newspaper stories are legion, about the possibility of a suspension of aid by certain aid giving organisations.

The issue is not a complex one. Killings and reprisal killings have taken place after the exacerbation of the conflict, but that does not necessarily mean that any aid giving organisation is willing to abandon aid recipients in Sri Lanka.
A media construct says that the aid agencies are about to cut and run.

This is not the truth, going by reports that emanate from the United Nations aid agencies, for example.

Tony Blair’s Chequers pow-wow with the President could be seen in this light to be a pivotal meeting in which the international community could be apprised of the current developments regarding conflict, aid, and sustainability in these times of conflict.
Blair knows all about resilience, and he knows also about hyperbole. Media hyperbole has almost cost him his tenancy at 10 Downing street many times, but he has been astute, as he has been calm.

His Presidential visitor possesses a similar temperament. They are almost conjoined at the hip — speaking figuratively of course — as politicians who can connect with public perceptions.

But Blair’s set of problems, are different from Rajapkse’s.

The Sri Lankan President has no survival problems — his term has barely begun, in contrast to Blair’s that is on the wane. That however makes Blair a consummate global player who can parley the Sri Lankan President’s message to the global community.

His intervention is needed at a time when several media players - - at the instigation of whom we do not even want to guess — are attempting to queer the pitch by raising non-existent queries about questions of aid.
The newspaper angle that the Sri Lankan state is somehow remiss in regard to the aid brouhaha, is a media construct primarily, and then it’s also a state of mind.

There is none more suited than Tony Blair to clarify the Sri Lankan situation, for the civilised world.

Law Enforcement?

The recent mowing down of a family by a police bus has to signal the nadir for law enforcement in the city of Colombo. A traffic bus mowed down a family at a pedestrian crossing, and the question that begs an answer is not how it could happen, but how things could get any worse than this? It’s a culmination of a general police tendency to flout the rules in a bid to enforce them. Police cars regularly mount pavements and cross double lines, ostensibly in a frenzy to catch those who are supposed to be doing the same things. This is an absurd version of ‘’set a thief to catch a thief.’’ That circus now seems to be at an end.

If no steps are taken now to arrest this trend of audacious highway devilry by Law Enforcement, we citizens will have to police the cops - - while there will be none available to police us.