The Forgotten Four Drivers Of Reconciliation
Salma Yusuf
Central to post-war reconciliation efforts is undoubtedly the political aspect. However, there exists in Sri Lanka, four key strategic points of intervention which ought to be mainstreamed into the national reconciliation project by all stakeholders involved in furthering the imperative of nation building.
Politics By Other Means
At a cursory glance, the links between sport and inter-state reconciliation seem abundant. Some pundits credit Ping-Pong Diplomacy with facilitating the subsequent thaw of U.S.-China relations in the 1970s. Others point to Table Tennis Diplomacy and the attempted Olympic Diplomacy as effective difference-bridges between the two Koreas in the latter decades of the 20th century. More generally, there has been a widely held sense that sports, as Jeremy Goldberg states in his ground-breaking work titled ‘Sporting Diplomacy: Boosting the size of the Diplomatic Corps,’ serve as “a ‘safe’ way to ease a country out of isolation, acting as a first step of engagement.”
This transformation of conflict-laden bonds is not limited to inter-state rivalries. In 2007, the apparent success of the Côte d’Ivoire’s national men’s football team in rallying the country and ending a five-year long civil war between Northern rebels and the government-controlled South was hailed as a testament to the remarkable power of sport in peace-building.
Judging from both the Ivorian example and the images of a celebrating multi-ethnic Iraq following that country’s victory in the Asian Football Confederation Championship, it would seem that sport has at least a temporary ability to create intra-state linkages between conflicting factions.
In both Côte d’Ivoire and Iraq which experienced either “cold” (potential) or “hot” (open and violent) inter-state and intra-state conflicts, there have been concrete examples in which at least a segment of those involved point to sport as a significant factor in obtaining reconciliation. Read More
No More Shanie Column
August 13, 2013
Colombo Telegraph is sad to announce the death yesterday (Aug. 11) in London of one its recent and most respected columnists, Lankanesan Nesiah. As a writer he used the pseudonym Shanie, a pseudonym derived from all six letters of his surname Nesiah, saying he did not wish to be “white-vanned.” His precision and the use of language through elegantly employed turns of phrase, were clearly from his father, Kunasekaram Nesiah. who was Head of the Department of Education at Peradeniya and, as a school boy at St. John’s, the proud recipient of the runner-up prize for essay writing in the British Empire.
Born on May 17, 1940 Lanka schooled at Chundikuli Girls’ College to Grade 5 and moved during grade 5 to St. Thomas’ College when his father moved from St. John’s College Jaffna to teach there. Lanka excelled in sports (boxing and swimming) and studies at St. Thomas’ and read sociology honours at Peradeniya.
Lanka’s father K. Nesiah, based on his wide writings and newspaper observations on the education scene while a teacher at St. Thomas’, had been invited by first Vice Chancellor Sir Ivor Jennings to teach at the university which was on temporary premises in Colombo. Then just before Lanka entered the university, as if to keep him under his mother’s loving care, the department shifted to Peradeniya in September 1957 according to his sister Pushpadevy’s recollection, and after a brief stay in the St. Thomas’ hostel, Lanka was back at home for his four year undergraduate sojourn at Peradenya. He graduated in 1964 or 65 with the last English medium BA class, the last class of BA graduates to secure high level positions. He is remembered for his comment that while studious Buddhist monks mugged through several books day and night to get an ordinary pass degree, he enjoyed life reading Time and other current affairs material that helped him understand society well-enough to get a class. Read More
