Our Future As A Post Conflict State
By R.M.B Senanayake -September 11, 2013
R.M.B. Senanayake
The President has expressed his annoyance with the TNA Manifesto perhaps because of their demand for the merger of the North and East- the original provisions of the 13th Amendment which were overturned by a Chief Justice who lawyers would say, certainly exceeded his mandate.
At the end of every conflict there is a peace treaty or Agreement where the two sides that engaged in the Conflict agree to co-operate in future on some agreed basis. The Government has failed to engage in such talks and reach a solution to the demands of the Tamils despite promises to India and the UN. The International Community has been urging the Government to reach out for a political solution. But the Government has looked upon the Tamil problem as merely the result of the neglect of the development of the Tamil areas by previous Sinhala Buddhist governments and proceeded to spend an enormous amount of money on restoring and even developing the infrastructure of the North and East. The cost of this program will have to be borne by all the people particularly the majority Sinhalese Buddhist population in the days to come. The Government has ignored the cost that people have to pay for this development either by way of inflation or taxation or both. It would have been much easier and less costly if a political solution was put in place giving the Tamil people the necessary devolved power to enable them to develop the area themselves since the expatriate Tamil population has enough resources having made good in the West.
Anyway economic development is no substitute for the resolution of the political demands of the Tamils. True that the LTTE wanted nothing less than Eelam and hence the war had to be fought to a finish. But the TNA is asking for autonomy and not for a separate state. There is really no case for refusing a wide measure of autonomy to them except the fears of the Sinhala Buddhist nationalists that autonomy would lead to secession. It could but not necessarily so if enlightened policies are put into effect to work in co-operation with the Northern Provincial Council instead of trying to dominate and dictate to them. Read More
R.M.B. Senanayake
The President has expressed his annoyance with the TNA Manifesto perhaps because of their demand for the merger of the North and East- the original provisions of the 13th Amendment which were overturned by a Chief Justice who lawyers would say, certainly exceeded his mandate.Regaining Consciousness
By Vagisha I. Gunasekara -September 10, 2013
Dr. Vagisha Gunasekara
In the 2011 World Economic Forum in Davos, the U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon warned that “our model of economic growth has become not merely obsolete, but a global suicide pact.” We have drilled our way to growth, burned our way to prosperity, and staunchly adhered to our faith in consumption without considering the consequences. In 2013, all resources are depleting before our eyes; the clock is ticking even faster; and we must wake up in time to build a new sustainable economic model for survival. Last week, I argued (echoing many others) that we are on the cusp of a new era in which only a radical change of our current worldview can save us from plunging down to mass extinction.
A Flawed Core
The anthropologist Gregory Bateson argued (in his 1972 book Steps to the Ecology of Mind) that the basis of the environmental crisis of the modern age lay in the realm of ideas. Humankind suffered from an “epistemological fallacy”: we have constructed an erroneous dualism – that mind and nature operated independently of each other. The way we perceive the world can change that world, and the world can in turn change us. He wrote: “when you narrow down your epistemology and act on the premise ‘what interests me is me or my organization or my species,’ you disconnect from other loops of the interconnected web of life. An example would be the disposal of industrial waste into lakes. We do this because we forget that the “ecomental” system which is the lake is a part of our wider ecomental system – and that if the lake is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience. Our inability to see this truth, Bateson maintained, was becoming egregiously apparent. “Purposiveness” has become the prerogative of human consciousness; and we believe that it is our right to get what we want, when we want it. This condition, spread mass scale, produces some disturbing effects: vanishing forests, smog, global warming. “There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds,” Bateson wrote, “and it is characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself.”
