|
|
 |
 |
| Sunday, 10 August 2003 |
 |
|
 |
Editorial |  |
| News Business Features Security
|
Please forward your comments to the
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 Restraint The direct talks between the Government and the LTTE may be in suspense, and there may be intermittent controversies over the behaviour of the military forces on both sides of the conflict, but the cease-fire still holds. As long as the cease-fire holds, there is hope for a permanent peace. More importantly, there are emerging concrete, real, results in the economy and society of the ending of the fighting. Even the slightest improvement in the economy has results in society that go a long way to improve social well-being and harmony. All this points to the need to protect the cease-fire and the politico-military stability and equilibrium that it engenders. Meanwhile, the people and their leaders must focus all energies towards improving the conditions that sustain the cease-fire while refraining from any action or pronouncement that would undermine these conditions. Even if political co-habitation at State level is inadequate to help a rapid progress towards a political settlement, as long as there is no political confrontation, what little equilibrium there is between the political power blocs can be nurtured rather than subverted. Anyone subverting the fragile equilibrium between the Government and the LTTE on the one hand, and the Government and the Presidency on the other, will answer to history for taking the nation back to chaos and suffering. Restraint is a key word in these days of a cautious peace. WMD Even as the search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) is proving fruitless in Occupied Iraq, the world last week remembered the only attacks ever carried out using nuclear weapons: the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States in the closing stages of the Second World War. At 8.02 a.m. on August 6, 1945, the city of Hiroshima was obliterated by a single nuclear fission bomb. At 11.00 a.m. on August 9, 1945, the city of Nagasaki suffered a similar fate. While scores of thousands of people were killed instantly in both cities at the moment of the bombings by the US Air Force, the cruel long term devastation of nuclear explosions is such that by the end of 1945 the Hiroshima death toll was estimated at over 140,000 and the Nagasaki death toll at over 74,000. This was the result of severe physical injuries of various form caused by the blasts and also due to the effects of massive toxic radiation. In the ensuing decades, many thousands more died due to diseases from radiation, while hundreds of thousands of other surviving people suffered disabilities and permanent illnesses of various kinds. Today, people of the second generation of citizens of these two cities are suffering the effects of this greatest ever massacre in human history that occurred in just two successive attacks. Today, the world still debates the legitimacy of this most devastating use of weapons of mass destruction. After the country that suffered the bombings, no one agonises more over the morality of the nuclear bombings than the people of the United States of America, the perpetrator. The country that launched the atomic age under the secret 'Manhattan Project' and which today possesses the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons of power that far exceeds the small World War 2 atom bombs, is acutely aware of the enormous responsibility toward humanity it carries in wielding this terrifying destructive capacity. Last week, ceremonies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki commemorated the bombings and the citizens of these two cities issued afresh a call for global nuclear disarmament. As we, in Sri Lanka, benefit from Japan's generous aid programme towards our development and also look to the Japanese diplomatic contribution to our peace effort, let us join in solidarity with that nation's call to humanity to re-assess its too easy resort to crude power and violence in resolving problems. |
|
News | Business | Features
| Editorial | Security Produced by Lake House |
