Double standards and double deals of AG suppress Vaas’ crimes- Inquiring CID officers in hot water
(Lanka-e-News-22.July.2013, 7.30) The investigations into Vaas’ multiple heinous crimes had taken a dramatic turn owing to the Attorney General Department’s dubious actions and instructions.

The double deals and double standards practiced by the Sri Lanka Attorney general’s department had not only distorted the investigations into the multiple heinous crimes committed by DIG Vaas Gunawardena , but even created a curious situation which can potentially expose the CID officers who conducted the investigations to human rights violations, based on reports reaching Lanka e news inside information division.

Initially , the team of police officers who served in the special security unit of Vaas , and SI Bamunusinghe who first revealed the crimes of Vaas were detained under the criminal procedure code for 72 hours, but as they were disclosing copious information about the crimes , and the period of detention was inadequate , the Attorney General (AG) Department advice was sought , whereupon the latter had instructed to secure the DO (Detention order ) under the Prevention of terrorism Act (PTA). Accordingly , a 90 days DO was obtained by the CID ,and it is no less a person than the President himself as the defense Minister who had signed this DO.

Subsequently , the courts had instructed the police to secure the advice of the AG as to whether this case is to be conducted under the PTA (special Act)or under the normal criminal laws . The AG’s department had done a complete U turn when the CID had sought its advice pursuant to court instructions – it has given an entirely different advice diametrically opposed to its previous one.

The AG had turned around and asked the CID , how can you blokes obtain a DO under the PTA to question these criminals ? Except criminals who are indicted on charges of overthrowing the government ; collecting cash and/ or arms or killing with that objective in view, others cannot be detained under that Act, the AG’s department had adviced.

Following these instructions of the AG , the police officers who were on a detention order were produced before the courts on the18th , and placed in remand custody on court directive. So now, all the investigations into the Vaas’ multiple heinous crimes have been halted , and the case against Vaas is now confined only to Shyam’s murder. The investigation into monies taken from Shyam , the weapons used in the murder etc. are all now abruptly stopped.

Under section 296 of the criminal procedure code , Vaas and his team who are charged cannot be held in custody under the PTA , and it would be unlawful to do so. In the circumstances , those criminal police officers who were held under the DO can potentially file charges on the ground that their fundamental human rights had been violated.

According to top police sources , the bottom line is , this whole criminal drama was founded on a calculated and premeditated plan of Gota the infamously famous defense (criminal offense) Secretary of SL to save Vaas , the multiple murderer , abductor and extortionist.

WikiLeaks: Mahinda’s Devolution Proposals Were Sarath Silva’s Brainchild

July 23, 2013 |

“Most parties represented in parliament, including several elements of the ruling coalition, have come out publicly or privately against the governing Sri Lankan Freedom Party draft devolution proposals. The Sinhalese nationalist JVP has also attacked the plan, saying it is contrary to the President’s anti-federalist 2005 election campaign manifesto, which the JVP accepted when it supported him. The opposition United National party (UNP) is awaiting the return of its leader, Ranil Wickremesinghe, currently traveling in Europe, before taking a definitive position. The prevailing sentiment in the party is that the UNP has little to gain by engaging on basis of the SLFP text, which they regard as incapable of addressing the country’s ethnic conflict. Most Tamils believe that district-level devolution has been tried at least twice before in previous decades and found to be inadequate for Sri Lanka.” the US Embassy Colombo informed Washington.

Silva and Rajapaksa

The Colombo Telegraph found the related leaked cable from the WikiLeaks database. The ‘Confidential’ cable discusses the governing SLFP’s devolution proposals. The cable was written on May 04, 2007  by the US embassy Charge d’Affaires James R. Moore.

Charge d’Affaires wrote; “A key member of the SLFP drafting committee (strictly protect) confided to Pol that the President had rejected the work of his committee, which had proposed provincial level devolution. The President then convened a second, smaller working group that excluded this contact and other prominent SLFP moderates. Nevertheless, this working group had also reported out a proposal to devolve power to the Provincial Councils. The third and final draft was the brainchild of Sri Lanka’s Chief Justice (known for his extreme and quirky views) and a lawyer close to the JVP. Our source told us the President pushed this third proposal through the party’s Central Committee. He believed that his plan for devolution to the provinces commanded much support within the SLFP, but in the end, Central Committee members were unwilling to cast votes against the President. His own draft went down to defeat, 33 to 3, although the President subsequently endorsed several amendments he suggested.”                  Read More  

France's headscarf war: 'It's an attack on freedom'

22 Jul 2013:

Angelique Chrisafis

'The veil covering your eyes is much more dangerous than the veil covering my hair.' A woman wearing a tricolour headscarf makes her point in Paris. Photograph: Alamy

When Youssra's three-and-a-half-year-old son started nursery school, he really wanted his mum to come on a school trip. So she signed up to help out on a cinema visit. She buttoned the children's coats outside their classroom and accompanied them to the front hall. But there, she was stopped by the headteacher, who told her, in front of the baffled children: "You don't have the right to accompany the class because you're wearing a headscarf." She was told to remove her hijab, or basic Muslim head covering, because it was an affront to the secular French Republic. "I fought back," she says. "I brought up all the arguments about equality and freedom for all. But I was forced home, humiliated. The last thing I saw was my distressed son in tears. He didn't understand why I'd been made to leave."

The French charity worker is now part of the protest group Mamans Toutes Égales, or Mothers All Equal. Based in Montreuil outside Paris, it has blocked school coaches, boycotted outings and staged street demonstrations in protest at the growing number of mothers in headscarves being barred from school trips. "This is an attack on freedom and democracy in state schools. They seem to want to wipe Muslim women off the landscape," says Youssra, 36.                   Full Story>>>

Army to start profit making ventures : Outgoing Commander tells how wartime force is being turned into a peacetime force

TUESDAY, 23 JULY 2013 

Outgoing Army Commander General Jagath Jayasuriya who will be the next Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) spoke to Daily Mirror on a wide range of key untapped  developments already underway and responded to a number of allegations levelled against the Army. The second longest serving Army Commander in the country pointed out that no one could criticise the role played by the troops.

By  Supun Dias

Q:What was your role during the war?
Overall we had to coordinate with our main units involved in the war. We adopted small group operations, so there was no need to do a lot of planning. Main detail operations were done by the Divisions and the Task Forces.
They launch from a particular axis and manoeuvres. So controlling on a daily basis was done with proper coordination. Under me were all the divisional commands. So I had the 57 Division led by Major General Jagath Dias, 58 Division led by Major General Shavendra Silva and 59 Division led by Major General Nandana Udawatta. They were the divisions which fought the enemy most of the time along with Task Force 2, 3 and 4.
There were commanders at various stages. But the important part was maintaining essential services and looking after the people who were coming out from LTTE controlled areas and from areas we regained. The main issue was planning for the Internally Displaced Persons (IDP’s).                            Read more..

Towards International Solidarity In Progressive Politics

By Upul Wickramasinghe -July 23, 2013

Upul Wickramasinghe

The National Education Conference (NEC) 2013 was held on 10-12 July at the University of Adelaide under the facilitation of the National Union of Students (NUS) and I was privileged to participate as an international student. The idea behind this article is to discuss several matters related to the conference, which are politically important.

In Australia, which is considered as a developed capitalist country, right wing capitalist parties, the Liberal party and Labour party (ALP), politically dominate. Hence, it is obvious to expect that student movement also dominated by right wing student groups. Proving this to be true, the agenda of NEC-2013 was scheduled in order to fulfill the political interests of ALP by focusing on preparing students for the coming up election on September against the Liberal party. This is well exemplified when looking at the programs included in the agenda.

Anaesthetizing people politically is a very important thing for the existence of the capitalist system. In other words, in a context of people are adopting to a competitive life style; working hard with their maximum strengths to gain personal goals and achievements, they lose or minimize their potentials and possibilities to understand social injustice and inequalities in a broader sense and collectively fight against it. As Marx clearly puts, the capitalist system destroys human values and human relations are transformed into competitive relations that are heading to achieve personal successes in the market economy. In this context, the individual happiness or satisfaction is really based on up to which extent I am ahead of others or others are behind of me. One of the main strategies of anaesthetizing of radical political activism is, offering economical concessions or allowances for a selected group of individuals who involve with radical politics and encouraging others to get that kind of benefits.                             Read More 

Precendence setting determination by British court on SL Country guidance: Tamil lawyer

[TamilNet, Sunday, 21 July 2013, 23:19 GMT]
In an interview to TamilNet, Mr. Geetharthanan Kulasegaram, a Tamil lawyer based in the UK who assisted one of the solicitor firms in preparing material for UK’s Sri Lanka country guidance case, elaborated on the significance of the determination by the Immigration and Asylum Chamber of the Upper Tribunal in UK. Initially, the Home Office in the UK had tried to paint a picture of normalcy in Sri Lanka, basing on the findings of the report by Norway based Landinfo report. This was challenged and the recent ruling takes note of the ongoing oppression of Tamils in the island, especially ex-LTTE cadres. 

• Determination and reason by Immigration and Asylum Chamber of Upper Tribunal in UK

Mr Kulasegaram, a lawyer with Jein Solicitors, assisted the Birnberg Peirce & Partners solicitors in preparing material for the Upper Tribunal ruling on the Sri Lanka country guidance case. 

He added how some asylum seekers were forced by host countries to speak against the LTTE referring to some cases pending in the UK courts. 

The latest ruling was “powerful and very influential” as it would determine how courts in the UK would deal with Eezham Tamil asylum seekers in future, Mr Kulasegaram further said. 

Hezbollah military wing added to EU terror list

[TamilNet, Monday, 22 July 2013, 23:26 GMT]
Foreign ministers of the European Union have reached a consensus to classify the military wing of the Lebanese based militant-political group Hezbollah as a terrorist group. This decision was arrived at on Monday after Foreign Ministers of the EU met at Brussels and moved to place Hezbollah’s military arm under the EU terror list. Hezbollah, which functions as a legitimate political party in Lebanon, as such was not banned. In a statement they condemned the EU's "aggressive and unjust decision which is not based on any proof or evidence", Reuters reported, the group further alleging that the US and Israel were behind this move. Hezbollah’s active support to the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad is also claimed to be a factor influencing EU’s move. 

“Britain and the Netherlands have long pressed their EU peers to impose sanctions on the Shi'ite Muslim group, citing evidence it was behind an attack in the coastal Bulgarian city of Burgas a year ago that killed five Israelis and their driver,” Reuters reported on Monday. 

The US had designated Hezbollah as a terrorist much before. Israel had also been campaigning in the EU calling for a ban on the Hezbollah.

Though the EU had resisted a total ban on the Lebanese group, its decision to ban the military wing has been welcomed by Israeli circles. 

“Now the EU has joined the growing world consensus that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization,” the Israel Defense Forces tweeted. 

Hezbollah’s military wing now joins the LTTE, Hamas, and PKK in the list of organizations banned by the EU.

Deportation of Tamils helped the Sri Lankan state
         By Phil Miller |-July 18, 2013

The Sri Lankan state are said to be targeting the Tamil diaspora in London, who staged large anti-war protests during 2009 Southbanksteve under a Creative Commons Licence

It should now be much harder for Britain to deport Tamil asylum-seekers to Sri Lanka, after a new court ruling significantly revised the guidance for the country. Several important protection categories have been established, including for journalists, human rights activists and Tamil nationalists. The previous guidelines had allowed the UK Border Agency (UKBA) to deport Tamils on an almost industrial scale for 18 months from 2011 to 2013, despite mounting evidence that torture awaited those sent back to Sri Lanka.

On an unusually hot evening in London, immigration lawyers gathered on 12 July at the medieval Gray’s Inn for a briefing from the barristers who had battled assiduously in the courtroom to change the country guidance. The speakers gave practical advice on how solicitors should use the verdict to challenge deportations. ‘Look at your clients as if you are a Sri Lankan CID officer!’ exclaimed barrister Shivani Jegarajah, the leading counsel on the legal team, who warned that Tamil deportees are interrogated to establish their political connections.

From filming Tamil protesters in London, to developing face recognition software, there is a concerted attempt at using surveillance to stifle any criticism of Sri Lanka from the vast refugee communities living in exile. Evidence from expert witnesses strengthened my suspicion that the deportations from Britain were an integral part of the Sri Lankan State’s counter-insurgency campaign to prevent any resurgence of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the main armed resistance group in a conflict which is decades long. The Judge concluded that ‘the focus of the Sri Lankan government’s concern has changed since the civil war ended in May 2009... The government’s present objective is to identify Tamil activists in the diaspora who are working for Tamil separatism and to destabilize the unitary Sri Lankan state.’

Most of these revelations came from the testimony of Professor Rohan Gunaratna, a terrorism ‘expert’ with close links to the Sri Lankan intelligence establishment. What is less often mentioned is that he heads a think-tank whose advisory committee includes Sir Richard Dearlove, former boss of British spy agency MI6. Gunaratna unashamedly introduced himself to the court as ‘the architect of the rehabilitation process’, in which 12,000 Tamils were indefinitely detained without trial at the end of the last war.

It seems that intelligence gathering even takes place at interviews with the Sri Lankan High Commission (SLHC) in London, where ostensibly the nationality of Tamil asylum-seekers is verified before the UKBA can forcibly remove them. Gunaratna confirmed that it was his ‘understanding that when being re-documented for return to Sri Lanka at SLHCs abroad, applicants were routinely asked about past LTTE links’. Arguably, the UKBA facilitated the identification of Tamil militants for the Sri Lankan authorities, before handing them over on a plate.

During the height of controversy around the deportations, the UK Foreign Office confidently assured campaigners that its man-on-the-ground, Malcolm Lewis (a ‘Migration Delivery Officer’), waited at the airport to ensure no deportees were detained or tortured upon disembarkation. But when cross-examined, Lewis admitted ‘that the Sri Lankan airport authorities were not stupid; they knew that the British High Commission’s, and indeed the world’s, eyes were on the returns process. The authorities would not be so “daft” as to harm returnees at the airport.’ It is particularly embarrassing for Lewis that Gunaratna then announced ‘there were no detention facilities at the airport; if a returnee was of interest by reason of past or current links with known LTTE front organizations abroad, they would be invited for interview once they had returned home, rather than at the airport.’

The late Tamil journalist and military analyst Sivaram explained that counter-insurgency is ‘about forcing the target population to lose its collective will to achieve the objective which you are trying to destroy or head off’. This court case, and the testimony of Rohan Gunaratna, firmly proves that the Tamil diaspora are part of the ‘target population’ which the Sri Lankan State seeks to control and suppress. Although Britain’s expulsion of Tamils may now decline, it must finally be acknowledged that its government’s deportation policy was valuable to Sri Lanka’s counter-insurgency campaign. Sivaram was assassinated for his outspoken ideas about what he called ‘countering counter-insurgency’. Perhaps resistance from activists to UKBA deportations has been a chapter in that story.

- See more at: http://newint.org/blog/2013/07/18/tamil-deportation-britainsri-lanka/#sthash.uv2ubOtr.dpuf

Daddy: A Mad Incestuous Dance

Groundviews

21 Jul, 2013

Incest in this country has probably been always spoken about, albeit in hushed, almost reverent whispers. Curiosity has probably always led to incestuous acts among children, but then, is that something we can say out loud? It is universally accepted that Adults who engage in incestuous acts are despicable. Filthy. Sick. There is a joke about a Hillbilly family that suggests however, that we like to nervously giggle at the fact that it might be far more common than we allow ourselves to imagine. Far more common than what we admit to, is what we know though, we’re just too afraid to say it out loud and hear the truth. So, the joke:

A Hillbilly son comes home and sits down with his father on their wooden porch, plucks at a banjo, and tells his aging dad that he can’t marry the girl next door because neither her father or brothers had copulated with her.  To which the Hillbilly dad replies, “That’s a damn fine decision son, if she ain’t good enough for her family, she ain’t good enough for ours.”

Funny?

What is funny is that report after report of incestuous fathers and adult older brothers appear in our newspapers. And we placate ourselves by believing that this person, this perpetrator of incest, is as far removed for me and mine as can be. ‘Alleged’ becomes a popular word. Also, if it did happen, it must be an isolated incident. And you’re right – incest happens so often as isolated incidents. The isolation of a woman, a girl, who has no escape from her situation, because who would believe her, who would want to believe her. As for the little girls and boys, the ones who are four, what can they say to make you believe they’ve been violated?

Courtesy Daily Mirror                          Continue reading »

The Segregation Of Women And The Myth Of Equality

By Arjuna Seneviratne -July 23, 2013 |

Arjuna Seneviratne

I like the idea of the Hindu deity Ardhanarishvara.

Ardhanarishvara represents the synthesis of the masculine and feminine energies of the universe and depicts illustratively, the idea that Shakti, the female principle of God, is inseparable from Shiva, the male principle of God. The union of these principles is exalted as the root of all creation. I particularly like the fact that the vehicle or mover of the feminine part is the lion and that of the masculine part is the bull. While I can have a huge chuckle explaining the rationale behind this juxtaposition, for the purposes of this particular post, it is less relevant and therefore I shall desist. *heh*The keyword here is “inseparable”. As I mentioned in the previous post, attempting to understand systems that exist dependent on the right juxtaposition of a very large number or even an infinite number of parameters by breaking things down has only one practical outcome – it breaks them. Separating complex organisms merely separates them. No more and no less. While this is true with quite a few forms of human segregation, for this particular post, I will only concentrate on the segregation of “nari” (female) from “purusha” (male).

The ideas behind the buzzwords of the gender debate such as identity, traits, roles, relations, etc. have, to a large extent been based on segregating and separating females and males anatomically and these days people are creating new and improved versions of the very stereotypes that such differentiation is supposed to eradicate such as discrimination, rights, equality, mainstreaming etc.                   Read More 

Keheliya bungles with billions

MONDAY, 22 JULY 2013 

For Media Minister and Cabinet spokesperson Keheliya Rambukwella, these few weeks have been bad times. Then, this week he began getting his figures mixed up when he was briefing journalists after the weekly Cabinet meeting. The minister was asked what would be the estimated expenditure for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) to be hosted by Sri Lanka later in the year.

He said the expenditure would be around Rs. 50 to 60 billion surprising journalists. When he was questioned about it again he said the figure could be higher. But one of the journalists pointed out that the figure he has given was very high and initial media reports said the expenditure would be around Rs. 1.9 billion.

The minister corrected himself saying the estimated expenditure was around Rs. 1.9 billion. Later in the briefing he was asked about the expenditure for a road project and the minister said it could be Rs. 34 billion or Rs 3.4 billion.

The minister was questioned again and he said the figure was Rs. 34 billion.  No doubt the value of the Sri Lanka rupee makes no sense nowadays, but bandying about vague figures like this goes to show what billions mean to ministers.

Lankan ship sinks off UAE coast

2013-07-23 

Thirty-one crew men were rescued after their two ships collided off the coast of Umm Al Quwain in the early hours of Friday.

The police operations room was notified of the accident at around 3.30am and dispatched rescue teams to the area, about 9 nautical miles out.

"One of the ships with a Sri Lankan flag was coming from Iran to Dubai with 9 Indian crew members, it was empty, while the other ship with a Comoros Islands flag was leaving Dubai to Somalia with 22 crew members had a load of different goods including 46 cars," said UAQ police spokesman.

"After the collision the Sri Lankan ship sunk but all its crew were rescued and all were in good health."

He said efforts are underway to raise the sunken ship while the second vessel was brought to Sharjah Port for repairs.

Police said the cause of the accident was still being investigated but initial inquiries indicated the Sri Lankan ship had stopped and did not have its lights on.

It is suspected the ship had a malfunction with its engine, which cut out the power.

The case has been handed to UAQ prosecutors. (The National UAE)

Australia's PNG Deal: Vulture capitalism at its worst

BY ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN-

23 JULY 2013

The Australian government’s decision to send all refugee boat arrivals to Papua New Guinea (PNG) is a political earthquake. It has nothing to do with alleviating the suffering of asylum seekers – if Canberra cared about it, a regional solution would allow processing of claims in Indonesia – and will further burden a poor neighbour. Some will be licking their lips at the prospect of massively enlarged detention centres; private companies will make a killing.

Veteran ABC journalist Sean Dorney rightly worries about social cohesion in PNG with the inevitable influx of thousands of people. Local communities there are already concerned that once again, they’re being forgotten. There’s no welfare system in the state, and its health and education infrastructures are crumbling. They’ll rightly wonder why these new arrivals will be treated better than the countless families in squatter settlements, including in the centre of the capital, Port Moresby.

I visited these areas myself in 2012 and spoke to locals who reminded me that Australian aid, over $500m annually, was having no positive impact on their lives. Prime minister Kevin Rudd’s latest announcement – to improve hospitals and universities in a touching bribe to PNG’s political elites – will be greeted with necessary skepticism by the many citizens who never see a decent hospital or school for their children.

The problem has never been that Australia gives too much aid; it’s that we’re throwing huge amounts of money to avoid a failed state on our doorstep by backing rapacious mining interests and overpaid consultants. After decades of Australian aid, PNG’s rates of infant mortality, sexual violence against women and corruption have never been worse.

Read more...

Anne-Marie Slaughter: 'I think we need a men's movement'

Her article, Why Women Still Can't Have It All, caused a huge furore last year. But, she insists, we still need to fight for real equality – for both sexes

Anne-Marie Slaughter … 'I didn't anticipate the whole thing would go viral' Photograph: Denise Applewhite

Kira Cochrane

Monday 22 July 2013

Anne-Marie Slaughter strides backstage after her latest TED talk, fast-talking and hungry – she hasn't had time for breakfast yet, and it's well past midday. A little over a year ago, Slaughter was a highly respected but relatively anonymous academic. Her life changed last June, when herarticle for The Atlantic, Why Women Still Can't Have It All, became the most read in the magazine's history. Almost 220,000 people shared it on Facebook.

The speech she has just given, entitled Real Equality, considers what it would take for those twin pillars of human life – caregiving and breadwinning, as she terms them – to be given equal value, and for men and women to reach proper parity, at work and at home. The article and subsequent talk followed her decision to leave her job as the first female director of policy planning at the US state department, after a two-year stint working under Hillary Clinton. She left after concluding that "juggling high-level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible".

Full Story>>>

War’s End, The Numbers Game And Moral Responsibility

By Robert Siddharthan Perinbanayagam -July 22, 2013 

Prof. R.S.Perinbanayagam

Since the end of the war there’s been a great deal of discussion about the number of civilians killed in the last days of the conflict. These discussions, it seems to me, have both the comical and tragic antecedents and both of them illuminating, in one way or another, in their implications. The first example shows how numbers can be distorted to suit one’s heroic claims and the second illustrates how they can be used to further one political purpose another.

The comic antecedent that comes to mind is the way in which Sir John Falstaff kept changing the number of people he and this buddies vanquished when they were attacked by some thieves. Here is the relevant excerpt from Henry IV (1):

PRINCE HENRY

What’s the matter?

FALSTAFF

What’s the matter! there be four of us here have
ta’en a thousand pound this day morning.

PRINCE HENRY

Where is it, Jack? where is it?

FALSTAFF

Where is it! taken from us it is: a hundred upon
poor four of us.

PRINCE HENRY

What, a hundred, man?

FALSTAFF

I am a rogue, if I were not at half-sword with a dozen of them two hours together. I have ‘scaped by miracle. I am eight times thrust through the doublet, four through the hose; my buckler cut through and through; my sword hacked like a hand-saw–ecce signum! I never dealt better since I was a man: all would not do. A plague of all cowards! Let them speak: if they speak more or less than truth, they are villains and the sons of darkness.

 Read More

Video: Defend The Rights Of Muslims: Radical Muslims Speaks Against Sinhala-Buddhists Nationalist

July 22, 2013 
Abdur Raziq of Sri Lanka Thawheed Jamat speaks against BBS/ JHU/Sinahala Ravaya and other Sinhala Buddhists nationalist groups including the government of Sri Lanka. Police tried to prevent Sri Lanka Thawheed Jamat meeting by banning the meeting. However, the SLTJ officials went ahead to conduct the meeting at their office premises.

Defend the rights of Muslims -Part – 1

 Read More

As Others See Us: The View from Sri Lanka

As Others See Us

David Leask

Friday 19 July 2013

He's adored by breakaway movements across the globe and - publicly or privately - loathed by their enemies.

An international statesman, he has inspired demands for freedom plebiscites, most recently in Catalunya after telling Spain rulers "to let the people decide".

Meet David Cameron, world separatist pin-up.

The British prime minister may seem an unlikely nationalist hero on these shores.

But internationally his Edinburgh Agreement with Scottish counterpart Alex Salmond is often seen as Britain "allowing" Scots a vote on their destiny.

And that, in many places, is simply revolutionary.

Take Sri Lanka. Its government back in 2009 defeated a go-it-alone statelet in the Tamil-dominated north of the island after a war that lasted a quarter of a century and cost perhaps 100,000 lives.

Now the bitterly divided island state is trying to figure out some kind of long-term fix. Some have mooted devolution. This delights mainstream Tamil opinion. And horrifies some in Sinhalese-dominated government circles in the capital, Colombo.

Suren Surendiran speaks for the Global Tamil Forum, an international diaspora organisation set up after the war and describing itself as backing a "non-violent" negotiated settlement on the island.

London-based, he says educated Tamils see Scottish parallels.

"The Scottish history has many similarities to the Tamil nation's history in the island of Sri Lanka," he said. "The fact that the British government accepts that the Scottish people must be given the opportunity to vote in a free and fair referendum to choose how they want to be governed, proves that democracy is valued and practised in real life respecting the fundamental rights of every person who lives within the Scottish borders.

"The same is all that the Tamils are demanding."

The Sinhalese majority in Sri Lanka, of course, would take a different view of Scotland and what is seen as David Cameron's referendum. Especially amid clamour for a devo settlement in the north of the island.

Cue an astonishingly angry editorial in the Daily News, Colombo's state English-language newspaper that dates back to days when then Ceylon was a corner of the British Empire.

The leader column, printed earlier this month, might be better described as a rant.

Judge for yourselves: "In these parts they used to say that nobody but mad dogs and Englishmen would go out in the noonday sun," said the paper, not quite accurately quoting Noel Coward.

"It appears only eccentric English Tories and their henchmen could think of something that would have 'tragic consequences' possibly, and then proceed to promote it as a 'political solution'.

"Cameron and [his predecessor Gordon] Brown both say that Scotland opting out of the union wouldn't be good for the Scottish or the English.

"Well, if as they say the consequences are going to be tragic for everybody who's British why ask the Scots alone to decide their fate -- and that of the English? Well, that may be called democracy and the realisation of the Scots' right to self-determination, including the Scots' right to self-destruct -- tragically -- along with the British?

"Speaking of mad dogs, sorry, eccentric English politicians, it's important to remember that the Scot devolution model is what's recommended for Sri Lanka by some of the local NGO elite.

"David Cameron says that he will campaign tooth and nail to ensure that the Scots remain in the union therefore averting what he called 'the tragic consequences.'

"Why Cameron didn't save himself the trouble by not calling for the referendum in the first place is not something that seems to have crossed the minds of Cameron's like-minded and brilliant British democrats."

You'll have got the gist. But for good measure the Daily News sums up by suggesting the only thing worth importing from Scotland is whisky.

Next year's referendum is a truly global event, regardless of its outcome.

Not because it is taking place in Scotland but because it is taking place in Britain. And Westminster - and I am sorry for labouring this point in these articles - still enjoys a remarkable international brand as the mother of parliaments. Despots hate our vote.

But it is also a global event because it is being seen as a test of devolution. Far from all devolved nations or territories go on to vote for independence. Some international policy wonks worry that our indyref may scare some traditionally centrist states - such as Sri Lanka - away from trying a dose of autonomy.

"Devolution is really handy to have in our toolbox when we look for solutions to conflict situations," one an retired foreign diplomat told me recently. "The Scottish referendum may make the devolution option a harder sell in some parts of the world."

Is Cameron a "mad dog"? Is he a nationalist hero? No and No. Surely he's just a canny democrat? One, I'd gently suggest, who has avoided the astonishing backlash faced by his fellow Tories in Spain, who, by blocking a vote in Catalunya, have only flamed nationalist sentiment.