The “Beautification” Of Urban And Rural Sri Lanka

BAn example of the figures on the hotel roof

BBy Emil van der Poorten -July 27, 2014

Emil van der Poorten

Ever since I’ve had the misfortune to observe the wholesale political and ethnic “cleansing,” in the name of “aesthetic re-arrangement,” of Sri Lanka’s capital city, I have had no desire to get closer than I absolutely had to such monstrous work.  And I really mean the word “monstrous.”

It was a while back that Time or Newsweek ran a cover story on Rumania and the “success” it allegedly was in contrast to the rest of the Eastern Bloc of the time.  It talked in glowing terms of the beautiful, clean lines of the new city of Bucharest among other “facts” that pointed to the country of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, as a beacon of freedom and democratic practice, where its citizens enjoyed a quality of life without equal in the countries behind the Iron Curtain of that day.

It was not long before the horror of Ceausescu’s “reforms” emerged and they hardly bear repetition here.  With some exceptions.

Yes, he had razed old Bucharest to the ground and replaced it with a brand, spanking-new city. To people who knew what the classic old city looked like, the new Stalinist monstrosity, “block concrete architecture” personified, was an unbelievable horror.  In addition, those who were “re-located” from their residences were put in state-owned apartments with no provision for their pets.  In a city where virtually everyone had pets, particularly dogs, one can well imagine what a huge problem tens of thousands of dogs suddenly cut loose with nowhere to live presented!  The orphans caged, literally, like animals and other horrors that the overthrow, street trial and execution of Nicolae and Elena brought to light are now history, but history with a lesson: take “evaluations” by “interested parties” of regimes responsible for such as “city cleansing” “under advisement”, as that old expression had it!                                              Read More