Status Of Tamils, Women, And Homosexuals In Sri Lanka
By Jagath Asoka -October 9, 2013 |
Dr. Jagath Asoka
Every “emotion-based reaction” is a complex; all fundamentalists and racists react to comments on religion, race, or ethnicity as if their religion, race, or ethnicity is their own mother. When you combine ethnicity and religion—e.g.,Sinhala Buddhist—even the psychiatrists cannot figure out how to name such combined complexes.
When I was ten-years old, I saw what this “mother complex” can do to a person. While my elder brother and I were playing, a teenager from our neighborhood insulted our mother; he just used two Sinhala words; my brother punched the guy in the nose, and the guy left with a bloody nose, weeping like a willow tree. My brother did not even have time to think; he just reacted; literally, he was faster than his own shadow; I stood there, totally transfixed; then I laughed, thinking, “How is he going to do that to my mother?” If you have a complex, it will give rise to abnormal or pathological behavior.
I was somewhat struck by the number of malevolent responses given to my previous article: A Tamil President in Sri Lanka. Contrary to what we see and hear, there are Sinhala Buddhists who would support the idea of a Tamil President in Sri Lanka, provided that he or she is a decent, honorable, erudite person who is fluent in Sinhalese. What do you want to do? Make an amendment to the Sri Lankan constitution to keep cloningMahinda Rakapaksa and his brothers so that they can rule Sri Lanka for forever?
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The UNP’s Strategic Perspective
Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka
It is Sri Lanka’s good fortune, one supposes, that it is blessed with an alternative government – an Opposition—that is as blind to national realities as the regime is to international (and inter-mestic) ones. Or to amend it slightly, we have a regime that is myopic in relation to the international dimension of reality and an Opposition that is blind to its national dimension.
Consider the essay by the UNP’s communications chief, Mangala Samaraweera, compelling entitled ‘Yes Ranil Can: Why I Support him’ Mr Samaraweera for one cannot be accused of not practising what he preaches. The Sunday Times chose to highlight his call that “It is also imperative that the UNP be reorganised as a non-violent ‘resistance movement’…”TV viewers nationwide saw exactly what he meant when he spearheaded just such a non-violent resistance movement in the South last weekend. If anything is likely to repel voters from the UNP and render less ridiculous the incessant claim of the regime’s security managers that the Opposition is being geared for regime change through destabilisation and street fighting, that display was it!
The essay would have been curious even had it been published a week before the violence. It had not a single reference to the most important feature that has shaped voter consciousness and frames our political reality, however negatively one might perceive that to be, namely the military victory over the LTTE. In fact the Tigers and/or Prabhakaran make no appearance whatsoever in the article. A Martian reading the piece might not know that there was a suicide bombing militia, described by the Foreign editor of The Australian, Greg Sheridan as perhaps the most ruthless and successful in the post World War II era, terrorising Sri Lanka for decades, nor would it know that this movement was defeated in a war waged on Mahinda Rajapaksa’s watch. Analytically this is as intelligent as trying to understand De Gaulle’s or Maggie Thatcher’s political grip with no reference to Hitler and the French resistance or the Falklands war. Read More
