Blind man's bluff

by Wijitha NAKKAWITA

The past few days witnessed some politicians who like some characters portrayed as animals in Aesop fables seemed to be trying to find loopholes or fault the government and the Armed Forces whenever anything new cropped up.

When the Forces captured a terrorist stronghold where there was a boatyard with vessels likened to submarines, Kandy district UNP parliamentarian Lakshman Kiriella as usual said the workshop was set up by the terrorists after 2005 and the intelligence services either hid the fact from the public or were not able to get information about it.

The parliamentarian seemed to be suffering from amnesia as he had perhaps forgotten that it was his party leader Ranil Wickremesinghe who had entered into a ceasefire pact with the terrorist outfit awarding legal status to the LTTE giving them areas under their jackboot as territory of their own. It was during that time the LTTE was allowed to import sophisticated equipment for their `Voice of Tigers' and strengthen their fire power by smuggling in shiploads of arms. Kiriella was a member of that government and seemed to have forgotten that it had given the LTTE licence to run the clandestine transmission of their propaganda arm.

Now Kiriella and others in the same party ranks were conveniently forgetting that it was the same government that sent a canine police officer on a hunt of the Army intelligence unit at the Millennium city exposing their names to the terrorist outfit. Those valiant officers were killed one by one as the pistol gang of the LTTE were let loose by Pottu Amman to kill them.

Kiriella also seemed to have made a great discovery that the LTTE boatyard was destroyed by the tsunami but everyone knows that thousands of innocent people in several regions not only suffered the loss of their property but also their very lives.

The point that he seemed to be making was that suddenly the LTTE developed new capabilities after 2005!

To any student of rebel groups it should be clear that no government either autocratic or democratic had ever allowed a terrorist group or for that matter any group fighting against its Armed Forces and committing mass murder to strengthen themselves rather than preventing it.

We are the exception. It was the leader of the UNP, President R. Premadasa who was recorded as having supplied lorry loads of arms and ammunition, vehicles, cement and funds to the LTTE.

And it was the latter day leader of the UNP, Wickremesinghe who allowed the LTTE to open so-called political offices in the areas under the administration of the government under infamous CFA of 2002.One may wonder why most of the UNP parliamentarians and even lesser individuals seek to find weak spots in the war effort without accepting the fact that the LTTE's days are numbered and President Mahinda Rajapaksa had given strong political leadership to the Armed Forces to rout the rebel group.

National Freedom Front leader Wimal Weerawansa recently was reported saying that the public gave a clear mandate to the President in the last election to defeat the terrorist group.

The public expected the President to keep that pledge but like Kiriella many others in the UNP possibly were not happy about the victories of the Armed Forces as they would have to fill the Opposition benches for a very long time to come.

At a very recent UNP meeting in Weligama, the party General Secretary and parliamentarian, had said the government while fighting the war against terrorists in the North was spreading its own terrorism in the South against its political foes.

Yet Attanayake who too was a member of a government that was responsible for thousands of involuntary disappearances and killings during 1988-90 period perhaps had overlooked the fact that there were no corpses of youth sometimes in numbers burning on tyre pyres as then.JVP's General Secretary Tilwin Silva was reported to have said the government was gambling on elections now when he was referring to the forthcoming provincial council elections.

Usually it was the Opposition that called for elections and made the campaign platforms their propaganda base but in the case of the JVP it appeared that it was fighting shy of facing elections for obvious reasons.