cat’S eye

Acceptance, accommodation and action are best

Yes, this cat in all her feline wisdom refers to the suggestion by the UNHRC and its promotion of foreign judges et al to help our own to hopefully nail the coffin of ethnic and human rights investigation once and for all. Then the government of Sri Lanka needs to go ahead with what the Committee/Commission recommends as steps to be taken. Hopefully that coffin can then be buried and progress ensured.

Previous negativity erased

We had only gained an adverse reputation in the international community by the intransigence, the lack of response, the delaying tactics and the sheer pride (foolish by any measure) of the previous government.

It definitely was hoity toity and we thought we could be independent of most western countries and the UN and its organizations and go it alone, supported by China. Our then Head of State embraced Gaddafi though he now says Gaddafi embraced him. No verifying the truth unless through a clairvoyant!

Our previous government also courted some useless banana republics, one Head arriving here with some of his 38 wives as was rumoured. The then government laughed when Mervyn Silva, then a Rajapaksa pet cum court jester, insulted the head of the UNHRC when she visited the island by proposing marriage. We ordinary people shrank in shame at those and other juvenile tactics.

We take pride in the foreign relations build up and honours extended to our President and Prime Minister in the US, at the UN Headquarters in New York, and in Japan. We distinctly saw how they were received and how the hosts recognized the graciousness of the President and the personality of the Prime Minister.

Being a small nation and poor to boot, we just have to be cognizant of what other countries’ attitude to us is. We cannot align ourselves away from the US and western nations and the UN and its organs. This does not connote servility or even a slight degree of paying pooja.

It is being equal but balanced and dignified and non-aligned in all our foreign relations. We have achieved this now. Our recent foreign associations have been dignified and meetings very cordial. Remember some years ago when our Head of State had to escape through a back door of a hotel in London because of a slogan-shouting crowd.

Speaking for myself, this cat is no longer angered by the supposedly suave Wimal Weerawansa continuing to deride our stance as subservience to the West and selling the country. It was his boss and that government that sold our country for personal gain and benefit.

He still talks a lot and tries to make capital by bringing the soldiers in as having been let down or to be used as pawns. The latest gimmick of his was to smuggle a cloth poster and exhibit it in Parliament, assisted by his follower the Gammanpila lad. What I now feel for him is derision, pure and simple, mixed with pity for his eternal flogging of a dead animal.

Calm association is best

We need to remember how Gandhi faced effectively the power and might of the British Empire. He did not waste his breath deriding the British nor shouted against colonial power. He went about his resistance calmly and persistently. Did he react when an outraged elitist Winston Churchill declared for all to hear that ‘that half naked fakir’ had no business climbing the steps to the Viceregal Palace in Delhi and entering it? The much more informed, gentlemanly pragmatist Lord Louis Mountbatten welcomed bare bodied Gandhi in, and Lady M put her arms across his thin shoulders. They knew they had to deal wisely with the wily old man! They liked him too.

Unruffled action

I have just read a detailed article: Blood at the Root by David Remnick about how the majority of Southern African Americans are dealing with recent assaults on them by white persons. Among many incidents narrated is the attack on the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, following the murders of back American youth in Ferguson and Baltimore by white police officers.

Dylann Roof, white, a 21-year-old ninth grade dropout, ‘fired with Confederate romance and a demented determination to spark a race war’ shot and killed nine churchgoers including Clementa C Pinckney, a Democrat in the State Senate and the pastor of the church.

He declared on internet: “We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”

Here is the point of the story. The churchgoers and society in general feel that the best course to take is not to retaliate, not to hate whites, but to pray and have faith in God and in the (somewhat black) African American President to right wrongs. Younger hot bloods want action but it is curbed by wiser counsel of the majority.

Somehow that Roof mass murderer reminds me of some politicians over here, one in particular. They don’t run around with pistols, though a Mayor down South brandished a (toy) one in the face of some visiting UNPers.

But these Sinhala nationalists do spout hate speech and try to foment racial trouble since they are not in power. This is a damning practice which will lead to eternal racial disharmony, affecting badly the economy and reputation of the country. Bhikkhus or rather men in yellow robes did damage to the country by attacking Muslims. Some politicians, who ranted with the likes of Weerawansa on a lower key of course, pour praise on the new President now. He showed maithri to them, much against public opinion, by gifting cabinet posts. We saw Premajayantha ensconced with wifey on the trip to the Land of the Rising Sun.

It is hoped very much that the President and the Prime Minister will continue their non-aligned stance and direct greater cooperation with the US and Japan. This will ultimately benefit us, the people of this land.

Hence my heading: accept, accommodate the advice, even slight interference, and be gracious to the visiting judges and UNHRC officials and act on gaining peace. Moves have been made since January 9 this year to accommodate more the requests (some come as demands, but never mind) of the Tamils of the North. Peace and living together in harmony is what is needed. So get those who shout warnings of the loss of sovereignty, danger to soldiers, conceding too much to the minority races, electric chair to the Brothers Rajapaksa (what imagination, nay playing to the gallery), to shut their traps.

Menika