The Chinese Think Liu Xiaobo Was Asking For It

Blaming the victim is the easiest way for people to sleep at night in a country where the government could crush you at any moment.

BY JAMES PALMER-JULY 11, 2017

Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Chinese dissident writer, is dying of liver cancer. He’s been in prison since 2009, his “crime” being the publication of a charter calling for political reform. But he’s not a hero to his countrymen. Most Chinese have only vaguely heard of Liu if they’re aware of him at all; those who know about him, in my experience, speak of him with distaste. “He should be grateful that the government is giving him medical care for free!” one acquaintance posted online.

There was a time when I was shocked by the disdain middle-class Chinese, even those with relatively liberal views, showed toward dissidents. The first impulse always seemed to be to find a way to blame them. All the agency was placed on the victims, not on the people who arrested, tortured, and imprisoned them; the system was just the system, after all.

In time, though, I came to see it as a psychological survival measure, an authoritarian-adapted version of something that prevails everywhere; the just-world hypothesis. That’s the belief, consciously or otherwise, that when things go wrong for people there must be a sensible reason behind it. He got cancer because he didn’t pray enough. She got raped because she went to a neighborhood where she should have known better. He should have been more deferential to that police officer.

People believe in a just world as a psychic defense mechanism against the obvious and monstrous injustice of the universe. In reality, none of us are God’s favorite children, and at any moment disease, accident, or disaster could snatch everything we love away from us. But we pretend that we are not spiders hanging by a thread over the fire, and look for ways to justify the suffering of others to maintain our own blithe conviction that we’ll be OK.

In China, it’s not just an unjust universe that people need to explain away, but an even more immediate unjust government.

In China, it’s not just an unjust universe that people need to explain away, but an even more immediate unjust government. This isn’t the argument that a few Chinese intellectuals make — that China has to put stability and the social order above justice and freedom. (Even then, they tend to frame it in abstract terms, not in the realities of broken fingers and imprisoned journalists.) It’s an attempt to turn an unpalatable event into a psychologically acceptable narrative — not so much to deny the injustice, as to shrug it away as the fault of the victim. It turns the state into a force of nature, not a moral actor; going up against it is as foolish and pointless as waving an umbrella in a thunderstorm.

Many Chinese, like other residents of authoritarian states, don’t want to confront what officialdom could do to them at any moment. When the government crushes people, then, it must be the victim’s fault. They should have known what would happen. They shouldn’t have been so arrogant. They should have realized who they were up against.

That’s why the government has always been relatively comfortable with talking about Liu and others who directly and forthrightly challenge the system. Indeed, Liu’s Nobel Peace Prize saw a concerted blast of Chinese media coverage (after a week of silence where the system processed the news). People like Liu are potential object lessons; cross the line and we will destroy you — and it’ll be your own fault.

The government gives the impression, and much of the public seems to believe, the lines in question are clearly drawn. The problem is they’re often invisible until you accidentally blunder across them. My friend Jimmy’s uncle didn’t know that his construction company was bidding against a mafia run by local officials and gangsters — until they kidnapped him, took him to the top of an unfinished building, chopped off his legs and left him to bleed to death, while their official counterparts arrested his brother on false charges.

The vast bulk of the damage done by the Chinese state is to people who did nothing except be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And these are by far the most dangerous injustices, from the government’s perspective.

If the public is ever stirred from its apathy, it will be because of ordinary victims, not outspoken dissidents.

If the public is ever stirred from its apathy, it will be because of ordinary victims, not outspoken dissidents. That’s why the many prosaic encounters with the Chinese government that result in tragedy are permitted only a mayfly lifespan in the Chinese media; a brief burst of attention in the aftermath, followed by a swift closure of discussion of the topic.

Political persecution, on the other hand, is given a proud public place. When the government decided to crush China’s flickering, hopeful online life in 2013, prominent blogger Charles Xue was made to confess to his crimes as a Weibo activist on live television. Talking with an intelligent and liberal colleague after the televised confession, she seemed unfazed by the crudity and echoes of the Cultural Revolution. “He must have had warnings,” she said.

Or take Falun Gong. In the initial stages of persecution, there was a lot of public sympathy for the group; why were the police harassing nice Mrs. Liu, who did tai chi in the park? But when Falun Gong’s leaders pushed the group toward direct confrontation with the state, surrounding the central palace of Zhongnanhai, where the leadership resides, and setting themselves on fire in protest, that sympathy evaporated.

It’s tempting to see some deeper cultural current in this. The doctrine of karma has a long history in China; the idea that your fate has ultimately been determined by past sins, if not present ones. (When British football coach Glenn Hoddle was sacked for saying that disability was the fault of previous existences, he was expressing a perfectly common — if loathsome — religious view.) But it’s not as if Christianity doesn’t have its own perverse theologies of suffering, from original sin and the fallen world to the sociopathic smugness of the modern U.S. prosperity gospel.

Westerners in China aren’t immune to it either. I remember conversations in the expat world when Peter Dahlin, a Swedish human rights activist, was arrested, deprived of his medicine, and forced to confess on live television. He’d been too intemperate. He’d crossed a line he should have known about. Surely the same thing couldn’t happen to us, who stayed within limits we were sure would be respected? (In fairness, Dahlin was given to playing Bob Dylan loudly in the small hours of the morning, which in a just world surely would be severely punished.)

In Liu’s case, his past writings were dragged out to use against him. He’d written that it would take “300 years of colonialism” for China to become as civilized as Hong Kong, been an enthusiastic supporter of the U.S. war on terror, and sometimes been willfully blind about the West’s failings.

 That was dragged out as an excuse by many Chinese intellectuals — and some Western apologists. At no point did they explain how intemperate speech or naivety justified decades of persecution and imprisonment — it was enough to point the finger, to come up with an excuse, and to sleep comfortably at night.

One of the strangest ways that people talked about Liu and other dissidents like the ebullient Ai Weiwei, I found, was as though their actions were really some kind of cunning career move, made to get them attention or money from the West. Editorials in the state-operated Global Times described the democrats as “having made a failed bet.” In part, this was because of government propaganda that did everything it could to link internal dissent to the ever-present “foreign forces.”

But it was also a way of reducing everything to the same cynicism with which the rest of Chinese society operates. Pretend that taking on the system was done for Western gold, rather than principle, and you could justify the compromises and corruption that you took part in every day. It was especially prevalent among those who had been young and once idealistic in the 1980s. They’d compromised, so why the hell couldn’t those stiff-necked bastards? Everybody else — or at least, the people in their class: urban, educated professionals — had done so well in the years afterward, after all.

One day, I hope, Liu will be remembered as one of many martyrs over the centuries for a better, fairer, kinder China. But that’s a long way off. Right now, when he dies, most of his compatriots will shrug. What, after all, did he expect was going to happen?

Photo credit: BERIT ROALD/AFP/Getty Images

How a Tiny Bacterium Called Wolbachia Could Defeat Dengue

Scientists are immunizing mosquitoes against disease with the help of a common microbe

Credit: Illustration by Bill Mayer

• By Scott O'Neill on June 1, 2015

The best time of day to release mosquitoes in northern Australia is midmorning. Later in the day, winds might sweep the insects away and dash any hope that they will find a mate. Earlier than that, the workers who drive around and release containers full of mosquitoes would have to get overtime pay. And so, on a sweltering January morning at the height of the Australian summer, I climbed into my white van with thousands of mosquitoes stowed in Tupperware cups on the backseat.

Once a week, for about three months in 2011, we made trips like this to release mosquitoes. We concentrated on two communities in the city of Cairns, a popular tourism spot near the Great Barrier Reef. At every fourth house, where residents had agreed to participate in our study, we would grab a cup of mosquitoes from the van, peel off the lid, and set 50 or so insects free.

These were not your garden-variety mosquitoes. Each one was infected with a microbe called Wolbachia, a common bacterium that lives in insect cells. For our purposes, the most interesting characteristic of Wolbachia is that it appears to block the dengue virus from replicating in the tissues of mosquitoes. Because the virus cannot replicate, the insects do not transmit it to their victims, and the disease does not spread.

Infecting mosquitoes with a bacterium is a roundabout way to fight dengue, but we do it because otherwise the options are few. Dengue, nicknamed “breakbone fever” for the crippling pain it causes, infects 390 million people every year. Because there is no cure or treatment, the chief strategy has been to attack Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that transmits the virus. Yet common insecticides such as temephos have lost much of their effectiveness as mosquitoes have developed resistance. Bed nets are almost useless, too, because A. aegypti typically feed during the day. At present, one of the most promising tools for halting the spread of dengue—and perhaps malaria and other mosquito-borne illnesses—appears to be spreading Wolbachia among wild mosquitoes.

Wolbachia is not an obvious choice as a dengue fighter. It does not naturally occur in the mosquitoes that most often transmit dengue. We actually have had to infect those mosquitoes artificially, in the laboratory. In other words, we use Wolbachia to immunize the mosquitoes against dengue and then set them loose in the wild, where (we hope) those mosquitoes will pass the bacterium to their offspring. Wolbachia is largely benign for mosquitoes and the environment, although it may reduce the insects' egg production. But the potential benefits for humans are clear: if mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia become predominant in the wild, we expect dengue infection rates among people to drop.

Pest control

Mosquitoes are among the deadliest creatures on earth. Yellow fever, also transmitted by A. aegypti, took out more U.S. troops than enemy fire during the Spanish-American War in 1898. Malaria, transmitted by a parasite harbored in mosquitoes, killed approximately 627,000 people in 2012 alone. Now A. aegypti is rapidly spreading dengue around the globe. About half of the world's population is at risk of contracting the disease, according to the World Health Organization. A. aegypti, which is recognizable by the white stripes on its legs and the lyre pattern on its thorax, can breed in any pool of standing water, which makes it particularly hard to control. The mosquito is found in tropical and subtropical climates around the world—in Africa, the Americas, the Eastern Mediterranean, Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific. Dengue, however, does not naturally occur in these creatures: the mosquitoes get dengue from us.

The mechanism of dengue infection is simple. Female mosquitoes bite humans because they need the protein found in our blood to produce eggs. (Male mosquitoes do not bite.) If the mosquito bites someone with dengue—and then, after the virus's roughly eight- to 12-day replication period, bites someone else—it passes dengue into its next victim's bloodstream. Wolbachia, however, disrupts this process by preventing replication from ever taking place.

Wolbachia was first identified in 1924 during dissections of household mosquitoes. Interest in the bacterium waned until the 1970s, when researchers noticed that under certain circumstances, it could prevent mosquito eggs from hatching, which suggested the bacterium could be used for insect control. In the 1990s scientists learned that some strains of Wolbachia could also shorten insect life span, which presented another way to limit disease transmission by insects.

I was introduced to Wolbachia as a Ph.D. student in the mid-1980s. Back then I wondered if we could use it to stop mosquitoes from transmitting human diseases. If we could reduce the life spans of mosquitoes by even a modest amount, it could seriously reduce the ability of the insects to spread disease among humans.

The catch, of course, was Wolbachia's lack of affinity for A. aegypti. The bacterium is common in up to 60 percent of insect species—including some mosquitoes that bite humans—but the infection does not easily pass between species. The challenge was finding a way to transfer different strains of Wolbachia from another insect—the fruit fly—into this dengue-carrying mosquito. It was a tedious process that took us more than a decade.

How to infect mosquitoes

Imagine taking a knitting needle and poking it into a balloon. Next, you have to remove the needle without popping the balloon. That pretty well sums up the process of infecting mosquito eggs with Wolbachia. In the lab, my team uses microscopic needles to take the microbe from the fruit fly and inject it directly into young mosquito eggs. At first, like balloons pierced with knitting needles, the eggs would burst. We tried with many thousands of eggs before we were successful.
Once we managed to infect mosquito eggs without destroying them, we had other problems to solve. Wolbachia would often disappear after a generation or two of mosquito breeding, which meant there was no way the bacterium would spread in the wild the way we wanted it to. We eventually found that we had to condition the microbes before injecting them into mosquitoes—to get these bacteria, which were used to living in fruit flies, accustomed to their new hosts. To do so, we extracted Wolbachia from fruit flies and then grew it in mosquito cell lines. In 2005 we finally prevailed: we infected mosquitoes with Wolbachia and watched them pass the bacterium from generation to generation—13 in all. Since then, Wolbachia has flourished in all subsequent generations. As we expected, at least one strain of Wolbachia shortens the life of A. aegypti.
Yet it turns out that Wolbachia is even better at fighting dengue than we thought. For reasons we do not fully understand, the dengue virus has trouble growing in Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes. We figured this out a few years after successfully transplanting Wolbachia into A. aegypti, when separate work I had been part of revealed that in fruit flies the bacterium also blocks replication of the Drosophila C virus, which is deadly to flies. My team injected dengue directly into our Wolbachiamosquitoes, and to our delight, dengue no longer replicated in their bodies. We repeated the experiment a number of times—each time with dozens of mosquitoes—and discovered that our results were consistent.

These days we use a strain of Wolbachia that blocks dengue transmission but does nothing to shorten the mosquitoes' lives. After all, we want our mosquitoes to live as long as possible and lay as many Wolbachia-infected eggs as they can. We have known since my time as a graduate student that female mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia pass the bacterium on to nearly all of their offspring. It takes only a few generations after the introduction of Wolbachia before almost every mosquito in a population carries the bacterium.

One of our experiments in northern Australia showed that after releasing approximately 10 mosquitoes per house per week for 10 weeks, more than 80 percent of the wild mosquitoes in the area had Wolbachia—and they still had it when we tested them two months after we had stopped releasing mosquitoes. Because Wolbachia passes so well through successive generations, we should not have to do any repeat releases. Wolbachia should spread on its own.

Into the wild

Before we could release Wolbachia mosquitoes into the wild, we had to address a lot of concerns in the community. We spent months going door-to-door to ask permission to release mosquitoes near people's homes. We conducted formal informational meetings as well as impromptu chats outside shopping centers. Australian federal officials also checked our method for safety before approving the release of the infected mosquitoes.

To humans, Wolbachia poses no apparent threat. Our own lab experiments have found that the bacterium cannot be passed on to humans, because it is too big to travel down the mosquitoes' salivary duct and into the human bloodstream. We have also conducted safety tests looking for antibodies in human volunteers, but after three years of letting mosquitoes bite volunteers, the humans still have no sign of the microbe. Our lab staff and volunteers have frequently rolled up their sleeves and spent 15 minutes in the mosquito cages, allowing the insects to drink their fill.
There has been no sign that Wolbachia harms the environment, either. Since we started releasing mosquitoes with Wolbachia in 2011, we have been studying the animals and insects that encounter them, and our work has reaffirmed that the bacterium resides solely within the cells of insects and other arthropods. Moreover, we do not think that Wolbachia would survive even if it were to find a way into the bloodstream of humans or other mammals. Indeed, Wolbachia is already found in many other mosquito species, including a number that regularly bite people. Tests conducted on spiders and geckos that have eaten Wolbachia mosquitoes showed no ill effects from the exposure and no sign of the bacterium in the tissues of those animals.

Before the first Wolbachia mosquito releases in 2011, we commissioned an independent risk assessment by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO),
Australia's national science agency. Teams of experts identified and evaluated potential hazards associated with the release of Wolbachia mosquitoes, ranging from possible ecological impacts to effects on communities. That agency scrutinized existing studies and interviewed experts in evolutionary biology. Tough issues were involved: changes in mosquito density, the possibility of evolution of the dengue virus, the nuisance of increasing numbers of biting mosquitoes and changes in the community's perceptions of the risks associated with dengue. But CSIRO's final report concluded that the release of Wolbachia mosquitoes would have negligible risk to people and the environment—the lowest possible rating.

Wolbachia goes global

In addition to the field trials we have been doing in Australia for the past four years, trials are under way in Vietnam and Indonesia. Last September we also started releasing the mosquitoes in Brazil. We have found that Wolbachia can establish itself in wild mosquito populations within small communities. Now we are going to attempt to do the same over larger areas. Scaling up our operations may require some tweaks in our methods. Rearing enough adult Wolbachia mosquitoes, for example, will be too labor-intensive. In Cairns, we are instead testing the effectiveness of putting Wolbachia mosquito eggs into the environment.

Meanwhile other researchers are developing alternative approaches to mosquito control. One entails releasing male mosquitoes that have been genetically modified so that the sperm cells of males carry a lethal gene. When those mosquitoes mate with females in the wild, their offspring die. This approach is innovative and potentially powerful, but it could also be costly. To be effective on a large scale, it could be necessary to constantly release modified mosquitoes; otherwise, unmodified mosquitoes from surrounding areas would move into the area and replenish the population. The use of transgenic mosquitoes also faces strong opposition from critics of genetic modification.

In contrast, the costs of Wolbachia-based dengue control are front-loaded: after the initial investment in bacterium-infected mosquitoes, the process takes care of itself. It could be a relatively inexpensive way to tackle dengue, which is especially important in the poor tropical countries where the disease is most prevalent. Another benefit of our approach is that it involves no gene modification—although it still took years to get off the ground because of the work necessary to assure communities of its safety.

We still have a significant hurdle ahead of us: measuring the reduction in dengue that occurs when we introduce Wolbachia into communities. This step will be difficult for several reasons. In the areas where we work, reliable data on dengue cases are largely nonexistent, and infection rates can vary widely from year to year. To firmly establish the effectiveness of our method, we will need to compare dengue rates in areas where we have released Wolbachia mosquitoes against those where we have not. Doing so will require taking lots of blood samples, which will be laborious.

Yet we believe the work will be worthwhile and not only for fighting dengue. These mosquitoes—or rather the microbes inside them—show promise against other diseases as well. We have seen evidence that Wolbachia may also reduce the ability of mosquitoes to transmit chikungunya, which first appeared in the mainland U.S. last July, and yellow fever. Researchers are also attempting to use Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes to slow the transmission of malaria and lymphatic filariasis, a profoundly disfiguring disease caused by worms.

The new observations are exciting. For the time being, however, our group will remain focused on evaluating the method against dengue. It is where we first started our research and where we are closest to seeing a real-world impact. One day, we hope, a mosquito bite will leave nothing more consequential than an itchy bump.

Dozens of naturally preserved brains found in Spanish Civil War-era mass grave

Fernando Serrulla, a forensic anthropologist of the Aranzadi Science Society, shows one of the 45 brains saponified of those killed by forces of the dictator Francisco Franco which were found in 2010 in a mass grave around the area known as La Pedraja, at a laboratory in Verin, Spain, June 9, 2017. Picture taken June 9, 2017.

JULY 12, 2017

MADRID (Reuters) - Archaeologists excavating a mass grave from Spain's 1936 to 1939 Civil War have found the naturally preserved brains of 45 people eight decades after they were shot and buried on a hillside in the northern province of Burgos.

Spain has hundreds of mass graves from the war and from ensuing decades of dictatorship under General Francisco Franco. Very few have been dug up due to a lack of funding and Spain's "pact of forgetting" on its return to democracy in the 1970s.

The brains from some of the bodies in the La Pedraja grave were preserved by very specific environmental conditions after heavy rains seeped into bullet holes in their skulls. This "saponification" process turned them into a soap-like substance.

A preserved heart has also been unearthed, an unprecedented finding, says forensic scientist Fernando Serrulla who worked on the dig and has published a study with details of the discovery.

Fernando Serrulla, a forensic anthropologist of the Aranzadi Science Society, shows one of the 45 brains saponified of those killed by forces of the dictator Francisco Franco which were found in 2010 in a mass grave around the area known as La Pedraja, at a laboratory in Verin, Spain, June 9, 2017. Picture taken June 9, 2017.Juan Medina

"Naturally preserved brains are very rare," Serrulla said. "There are only around 100 documented cases in the world."

The brains are being kept in a laboratory in Galicia, northwestern Spain, where Serrulla works. 

Shrivelled, brown and with the ridges still showing, they form the largest collection of naturally preserved human brains in the world, he says.

None of the preserved organs and only 16 of the 104 bodies dug up from the grave have been identified.

Rafael Martinez, the president of a socialist association killed by Franco's supporters in 1936, was recently identified as one of the bodies in La Pedraja.

"If only those brains could tell of what happened there," his grandson, Miguel Angel Martinez, said.

Reporting by Alba Asenjo; Editing by Sonya Dowsett and Louise Ireland

Do you live in the world's laziest country?

Image copyrightTIM ALTHOFF

By James Gallagher-12 July 2017

US scientists have amassed "planetary-scale" data from people's smartphones to see how active we really are.

The Stanford University analysis of 68 million days' worth of minute-by-minute data showed the average number of daily steps was 4,961.

Hong Kong was top averaging 6,880 a day, while Indonesia was bottom of the rankings with just 3,513.

But the findings also uncovered intriguing details that could help tackle obesity.

Most smartphones have a built-in accelerometer that can record steps and the researchers used anonymous data from more than 700,000 people who used the Argus activity monitoring app.

Scott Delp, a professor of bioengineering and one of the researchers, said: "The study is 1,000 times larger than any previous study on human movement.

"There have been wonderful health surveys done, but our new study provides data from more countries, many more subjects, and tracks people's activity on an ongoing basis.

"This opens the door to new ways of doing science at a much larger scale than we have been able to do before."

Source: Stanford University

Activity inequality

The findings have been published in the journal Nature and the study authors say the results give important insights for improving people's health.

The average number of steps in a country appears to be less important for obesity levels, for example.
The key ingredient was "activity inequality" - it's like wealth inequality, except instead of the difference between rich and poor, it's the difference between the fittest and laziest.

The bigger the activity inequality, the higher the rates of obesity.

Tim Althoff, one of the researchers, said: "For instance, Sweden had one of the smallest gaps between activity rich and activity poor... it also had one of the lowest rates of obesity."

The United States and Mexico both have similar average steps, but the US has higher activity inequality and obesity levels.

Global sleeping patterns revealed by app data

Has wearable tech had its day?

Is that fitness tracker you're using a waste of money?

The researchers were surprised that activity inequality was largely driven by differences between men and women.

In countries like Japan - with low obesity and low inequality - men and women exercised to similar degrees.

But in countries with high inequality, like the US and Saudi Arabia, it was women spending less time being active.

Jure Leskovec, also part of the research team, said: "When activity inequality is greatest, women's activity is reduced much more dramatically than men's activity, and thus the negative connections to obesity can affect women more greatly."

The Stanford team say the findings help explain global patterns of obesity and give new ideas for tackling it.

For example, they rated 69 US cities for how easy they were to get about on foot.

The smartphone data showed that cities like New York and San Francisco were pedestrian friendly and had "high walkability".

Whereas you really need a car to get around "low walkability" cities including Houston and Memphis.

Unsurprisingly, people walked more in places where it was easier to walk.

Image copyrightTIM ALTHOFF

The researchers say this could help design town and cities that promote greater physical activity.
Follow James on Twitter.

Reporter conflict of interest: I made 10,590 steps yesterday but clocked up only 129 on Sunday, I left my phone on the kitchen table all day - that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

Maha Sangha should be banned from politics. Period.

President Maithripala Sirisena and Minister Wijedasa Rajapakshe are seen at a recent discussion with the  Mahanayake Theras of the three Nikayas

“An honest man in politics shines more there than he would elsewhere.”
-Mark Twain  

2017-07-12

Ivor Jennings, who was primarily responsible for drafting our Constitution upon gaining Independence from the British, handed us a secular constitution. Multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-cultural as Ceylon was then and now is, the Jennings Constitution safeguarded certain rights of the country’s minorities in no uncertain fashion. It was commonly known as Soulbury Constitution and consisted of The Ceylon Independence Act, 1947 and The Ceylon (Constitution and Independence) Orders in Council 1947, Sri Lanka was then known as Ceylon. The Soulbury Constitution provided a parliamentary form of Government for Ceylon and for a Judicial Service Commission and a Public Service Commission.   

Maha Sangha should be banned from politics. Period..docx by Thavam Ratna on Scribd

Sri Lankan government appeases Buddhist hierarchy

By K. Ratnayake -11 July 2017

Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena met with the country’s chief Buddhist priests in Kandy last Friday to assure them no constitutional changes would be made without their consent. The top priests, from all the Buddhist groupings, had issued a series of demands last Tuesday aimed at whipping up Sinhala Buddhist supremacism.

Their demands included: a delay in submitting a bill to parliament on the “International Convention for the protection of all persons from enforced disappearance;” no new changes to the country’s constitution except the electoral system; the protection of Buddhist cultural and archaeological sites in the north and east of the island; and a special committee to look into the grievances of Buddhists.
Sirisena’s meeting took place against the backdrop of an intensifying political crisis, stemming from the growing struggles of workers, farmers and youth against the government’s austerity program. The government itself is seeking to promote communalism to split the growing mass opposition.

For decades, the ruling class has again and again exploited Sinhala communalism and anti-Tamil chauvinism in periods of crisis as the ideological means to defend capitalist rule in the name of defending the Sinhala nation. One of the chief tools has been the reactionary Buddhist establishment, which derives considerable privileges from the entrenchment of Buddhism as the state religion in the constitution.

Before Sirisena’s meeting with the monks, the government postponed submitting to parliament a bill on enforced disappearances. The draft legislation declared that any public officer or person acting with the authority or support of the state, who arrests or abducts someone and fails to acknowledge it or disclose the person’s whereabouts will be guilty of the crime of enforced disappearance.

The military, para-militaries and police arrested or abducted thousands of people during the 26-year communal war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Many of those who disappeared were tortured and killed.

The government proposed the cosmetic legislation to posture as democratic and try to deflect the anger among Tamils in the north and east, who have been campaigning for information about their disappeared relatives. At the same time, Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe have insisted the government will not allow war crime charges to be brought against the military.

Opposing the bill, former president Mahinda Rajapakse accused the government of trying to punish the military that won the war against the LTTE. Finance Minister Mangala Samaraweera, however, issued a statement yesterday that “the bill only affects the future and no impact on past events.”
Rajapakse and his parliamentary grouping are stirring up Sinhala communalism, including by defending the military “war heroes” against any war crimes charges, in a bid to topple the government and retake office. Rajapakse was ousted in the January 8, 2015 presidential election via a regime-change operation backed by the US, which was hostile to his close relations with China.
During the election, Sirisena posed as a democratic alternative to Rajapakse, promising to abolish the autocratic executive presidency and empower parliament. He also pledged to devolve powers to the country’s Tamils as part of any constitutional change. While the constitutional redrafting started in January 2016, no document has been produced.

Following last Friday’s meeting, Sirisena tweeted that he assured the Maha Sangha, or great Buddhist prelates, they would be consulted about any new constitutional draft. He insisted that the government would not alter the unitary state or the foremost place for Buddhism in the constitution. In other words, there will be no significant devolution of powers and no alteration to the clause making Buddhism the state religion.

Sirisena’s comment was also aimed at countering the Rajapakse grouping. Speaking at Trincomalee, Rajapakse again accused the government of seeking to divide the country by caving in to the demands for the devolution of powers. He claimed it was planning to remove the constitutional clause guaranteeing the foremost place to Buddhism.

The government’s decision to appease the Buddhist establishment comes amid deepening economic and social problems. Exports are declining and debt is increasing. Remittances of overseas workers, a major source of government income, declined by 6.3 percent in the first quarter of this year compared to last year. Inflation increased to 7.1 percent in April, eroding the living conditions of workers and the poor.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) postponed the final installment of its bailout loan, which was due in March, and is demanding revised tax laws. Last week the government tabled in parliament the new laws, which will sharply impact on the wages of working people. This follows other austerity measures dictated by the IMF, including privatisations and cuts to price subsidies.

The government is terrified about the developing opposition of the working class. On June 25, thousands of power workers marched in Colombo demanding a pay increase. On June 28, 22,000 postal workers began an indefinite strike against privatisation moves, but the trade unions shut down the strike after two days. Last week, unemployed graduates marched in Colombo demanding jobs. Medical students, supported by doctors and other students, have boycotted lectures for five months demanding the closure of a private medical college.

Trade unions, backed by pseudo-left groups such as the Frontline Socialist Party and United Socialist Party, and also the Sinhala chauvinist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, confined and sabotaged these struggles. The Nava Sama Samaja Party is directly backing the government’s repression of the protests.

The government’s promotion of chauvinism goes hand in hand with intensifying attacks on the democratic rights of working people. The government ordered the June 21 riot police attack on students who occupied the health ministry. The police injured around 60 students and later arrested six activists as a broader warning to the working class.

Police-state measures are being used against any opposition or protest. Teams of soldiers and police have been mobilised to crack down on people opposed to the dumping of garbage by state authorities, which is polluting the environment.

The whipping up of reactionary chauvinism by all factions of the political establishment is a warning to the working class that the government and ruling class as a whole is turning to autocratic and dictatorial methods to suppress opposition to the mounting austerity drive and attacks on living conditions.

Towards Sri Lankan Queer Liberation: A Global-Sri Lankan Reflection For Pride 2017

By Chamindra Weerawardhana –JULY 11, 2017

Dr. Chamindra Weerawardhana

In this festive period of Pride celebrations across the world, a peculiar incident takes place in Sri Lanka, with increased mobilisation of the Buddhist monks, who are apparently opposed to the proposed new Constitution. The multitude of disagreements on the Constitution, and especially on what goes in the Constitution within the Joint Government itself have repeatedly come to light. Debates that are necessary and somewhat intriguing are taking place, which is just about the only positive sign.

On 4th July 2017, academic and diplomat Dr Dayan Jayatilleka published an article in defence of the Justice Minister (given the Justice Minister’s publicly expressed hatred of Sri Lanka’s LGBTIQA community – yes, let that sink in – LGBTQIA people who are Sri Lankan nationals, including this writer, his name will not be mentioned in this article). The following passage provides for an interesting reading:

[I quote]

These rootless cosmopolitan civil society caucuses have a disproportionate influence not only on but in the Government and government policy. Their heroes and heroines are Prime Minister Wickremesinghe, ex-Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera and ex-President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga. It is these NGO networks, their expatriate backup and their handlers in foreign capitals near and far, and Colombo based Embassies and High Commissions, who have cheered on a so-called “reform agenda” which has caused a situation in which this deadlocked government is sinking in a quagmire, assailed on every front every day, by semi-spontaneous public agitation. Individual Ministers are besieged by increasingly angry crowds.      

These caucuses, whether they know it or not, objectively serve foreign and anti-Sri Lankan interests. They have given the Government a profile similar to that which the UNP was depicted as possessing in the famous ‘Mara Yuddha’ cartoon of 1956. In its updated version, the public perception is of a UNP dominated, driven or disproportionately influenced by non-national, foreign interventionist, LGBTIQ and Evangelical elites or lobbies. President Sirisena’s SLFP is therefore seen as a mere tail of such a UNP (emphasis mine).

[unquote]

This statement carries tremendous significance. The point made here is a fundamental factor that every single human rights advocate, and supporter of the Joint Government (especially those in the LGBTQIA community) ought to come to terms with. This statement is also suggestive of many of the ills, problems and challenges in present-day Sri Lankan politics.

Two opposed sides in collision?

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President represents litmus test for political reform

By Jehan Perera-July 10, 2017, 8:40 pm 

President Maithripala Sirisena’s visit to meet with the Mahanayakes of the Buddhist Sangha in Kandy may turn out to be the pivotal move in a constitutional reform process. A week earlier they had publicly announced in a joint statement that there was no need to bring in new Constitution and that a new Constitution will create more conflicts in the country. As the Buddhist clergy is very influential with the 70 percent who are Sinhalese Buddhist especially on issues pertaining to identity, this threatened to be a major setback to the government’s constitutional reform process. Whether it is in tackling the issues connected with providing a facilitative environment for economic development, taking action against corruption or dealing with post-war accountability, the government has been faltering. It is unable to deliver on what it has promised. This has enabled the opposition to take the upper hand in the political debate.

At the last presidential and general elections held in 2015 all parties promised some form of constitutional reform. At those elections Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and the UNP he leads were the most specific about the constitutional reform that they proposed. They specified a new constitution in which the executive presidential system, the devolution of power and the electoral system would be changed. With the change of government in 2015, it seemed that the new government would take expedited action to both draft and implement the new constitution. It passed a resolution in parliament that converted parliament into a constitutional assembly. A 20 member steering committee on constitutional reform was formed and which was headed by the Prime Minister. Six parliamentary sub committees were also appointed to prepare drafts of different sections of the new constitution.

The government also embarked upon a hitherto unprecedented process of public consultations in order to obtain the views of the people on the proposed reforms of the constitution. It appointed a 19 member Public Representations Committee to hold consultations throughout the country and ascertain the views of the people in order to submit them to the drafters of the new constitution and also to parliament. This led to a six month process of intense consultations that took place with logistical support provided by governmental agencies. The committee then came out with a balanced and fair report that gave the main themes or headlines of public opinion on constitutional reform along with the difference recommendations from civil society. However, the subsequent failure of the government to launch a major educational and advocacy campaign on the report has cost it dearly.

NON PARTICIPATORY

Unfortunately, the transparency with which the Public Representations Committee met its obligations has not been matched by the rest of the constitution drafting process. Technical committee reports were drafted by experts with participation of the parliamentarians in the six parliamentary sub committees. But members of those sub committees have publicly complained that the process was outside their control and they did not know what was being drafted and how they were being drafted. As a result most of the parliamentarians who were members of the constitutional assembly do not demonstrate a sense of ownership of the constitution drafting process. This has enabled the opposition to take the lead in going to the people and engaging in scaremongering without being challenged by government members.

The President’s meeting with the Mahanayakes revealed that the absence of ownership of the constitution making process extends beyond the parliamentarians who have failed to champion the constitution reform process. It includes the religious clergy and others in civil society. In their meeting with the President the Buddhist prelates had complained that the constitution being drafted by the government was in collaboration with NGOs while it excluded them. However, most NGOs and civil society groups also feel excluded from the constitution making process. After they submitted their report members of the Public Representations Committee do not appear to be playing a role in the constitution making process either.

The JVP, although in the opposition, has been taking a constructive approach to constitutional reform. JVP Parliamentarian Bimal Ratnayake has observed that President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe should have educated the Mahanayakes on this topic. MP Ratnayake said the Buddhist prelates were influenced by facts and figures presented by racist groups who assume the government would pass a constitution harmful to the people of the country. The opposition has been claiming that the government intends to divide the country in accordance with the wishes of the Tamil Diaspora and the international community. Recently both President Sirisena and Prime Minister Wickremesinghe have been giving public assurances that the constitutional reforms will not lead to the removal of Buddhism from its foremost place in the constitution and that the unitary state would remain intact.

PRESIDENT’S ROLE

During a nearly two-hour long discussion held between him and the Mahanayaka Theras, in which a company of 22 bhikkhus were present with the Mahanayakes, President Sirisena had reassured them that the draft constitution would be shown to them prior to its presentation to parliament and their views would be incorporated. He pledged that the government will not bring any constitutional reforms that will undo the country’s unitary state or the foremost place for Buddhism that is provided in the constitution. The President also informed the Mahanayakes that there has been no new constitution drafted yet and that if there will be a draft constitution it will be presented to the Mahanayakes and the leaders of the clergy of other religions for review before it will go to parliament.

The role that President Sirisena has played in coping with the Buddhist religious opposition to the constitutional reform process is indicative of his importance to the government. The president’s political strength lies in his ability to connect with the ethos of the Sinhalese majority. It is this affinity that enables the president to be trusted by the Buddhist prelates and by the majority Sinhalese population. On the other hand, the president also needs to recognize that he was elected not only by Sinhalese voters but also by Tamil and Muslim voters and he needs to be the president of a multi ethnic, multi religious and plural society.

At the present time the constitutional reform process is being driven by the UNP component of the government that is headed by Prime Minister Wickremesinghe who has announced his resolve to go ahead with a new constitution. The prime minister has the wide learning and cosmopolitan outlook to appreciate the constitutional mechanisms and compromises needed to govern a multi ethnic multi religious and plural society. President Sirisena’s committed support to take the message to the people is necessary to get it accepted. What the president believes in, and is prepared to speak up for, is likely to be accepted by the majority community. It will also ensure the support of the SLFP group in parliament that accepts his leadership. This is why the president is the litmus test for political reform and why the president and prime minister and their respective parties need to continue to work together in the future rather than go their separate ways.

Enforced Disappearances Bill should be enacted forthwith as a step for reconciliation

 

2017-07-12

The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) MP for the Jaffna District M.A. Sumanthiran, in an interview with the Daily Mirror stressed the point that the bill to give effect to the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance should be enacted.
He said enforced disappearance of persons is a crime to be dealt with locally.   
Excerpts:  

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• Those responsible for disappearances even at command level should be dealt with locally 
• There is no provision to extradite them to another country for prosecution  
• What is obnoxious is opposing action against disappearances 
• New Constitution needed for reconciliation in full
• Not against Buddhism being given foremost place  
• Yet, it is against principles of equality
• Buddhism should be given foremost place without compromising equal rights of other faiths 
• Ready to engage with all once Interim report on new constitution is released  
• Sri Lanka should be ashamed that there are 100,000 disappearances
• TNA disappointed that Govt. has no political will to do some of the things  

Enforced Disappearances Bill should be enacted forthwith as a step for reconciliation.docx by Thavam Ratna on Scribd

Sri Lanka: A rebel’s redemption

by Asanka Athapaththu-Jul 11, 2017

( July 11, 2017, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Do not look back, your job is to look forward, that was the advice given to us by the movement, said Kanapathi Pulle Selvam, his voice heavy with sadness, yet determined to speak.

Selvam joined the LTTE at the age of 14, but today, he has taken on the role of a Christian priest and teaches the path of the holy bible to 600 families in the village of Illippedi Munmari.

As we investigated into the difficulties the people in the East faced due to the current dry spell in the region, we met Father Selvam, around 100 km from the road to Toppigala, past the Kiran Bridge, in the village of Thikiliwedi-Illippedi Munmari village.

The village is a tourist paradise, but to the people of Illippedi Munmari, their lives remain devoid of hope as little enterprise takes place and villagers point out that the lack of activity is due to the Kiran Bridge—the main access point to the village—not being built properly.

The area suffers long periods of drought and when it rains, even a little can completely inundate the bridge, making it impossible for people to leave or enter the village.

The villagers explained that since the surrounding areas around the bridge was vacant, the extension of the bridge by a kilometre or so would solve the issue and make it easier for the people to travel.

Promises to improve the bridge, however, were plenty at the last election and since then, neither their area politicians; Ameer Ali, Yogeshwaran nor Sathasivam, have visited the place or fulfilled their promises.

Empty houses

As we embarked on a path towards the village of Toppigala, we saw houses the sizes of tents and the majority of them were unoccupied, and thus, we stopped in the shade of the tree in front of Father Selvam’s church.

Father Selvam welcomed us with open arms and sat down to relate to us the hardships of his people,

“Sir, the people here struggle a great deal to make a living every day. Most depend on fishing, but even for that, they have to walk at least two to three kilometres to Eluwankulam, Korawelikulam, Theevelikulam or to the Upparu lagoon.

This land does not yield any water and we have to walk at least two and a half kilometres every day to fetch drinking water from the Theevelikulam well,” said Pastor Selvam.

The villagers of Ilippedi Munmari also engage in small-scale dairy farming apart from fishing, but this adds a greater burden on them as forage for the cows and goats they rear become scarce with dwindling water resources.

This explained why most of the villagers were not to be seen at home. As most basic necessities were located miles from home, many were out fetching their daily needs. Schools too, were located at least seven to eight kilometres from the village, which meant that the children spent most of their time walking.

The boy from Toppigala

Toppigala, located at the border of the Batticaloa and Ampara Districts, is situated 534 metres above sea level and the Toppigala mountain range encompasses the mountains of Toppigala, Lindagala, Hengala, Wessibendagala, Kalawagala, Kokgala, Walmandiyagala, Athagala, Narakamullagala and Hatharawakkulama.

This forms a land mass of 800 kilometres and extends to the border between the Batticaloa and Polonnaruwa districts, near the Madurioya National Park. Close to 125,000 people live scattered in this area.

Toppigala was the turning point in the humanitarian operation to liberate the people from the clutches of the LTTE on April 25, 2007. The battle for Toppigala, which commenced under the leadership of Major General Parakrama Pannipitiyage, was complete by July 12, 2007 and Toppigala which had been under LTTE control for over a decade was finally free and came under government control.

Pastor Selvam, who is facing many challenges today, began his story as a prisoner of a tragic history. “The year was 1996, and I was just 14 then. I was living happily with my mother, father and four sisters when the battle between the LTTE and the government forces worsened.

At the time, there was a lot of pressure for every family to give up at least one member to the movement and I wanted to save my sisters. And though I was not in favour of it, I volunteered to join,” he said.

Selvam was sent to the LTTE camp in Tharavikulam, received training in arms for three months and was stationed under Jayanthan who was known as Colonel Ram.

“On the last day of our training, Colonel Ram made a stirring speech. He said, do not look back, your only task is to look forward. That speech motivated me immensely at the time, but today, when I look back, I am full of regret as we had to resort to arms to achieve a political want. As a result of that speech, countless people, property and the hopes of many people in our country, were destroyed. At the same time, all material and physical needs of our people were buried under a bullet,” said Selvam.

Father Kanapathi Pulle Selvam

His group left the LTTE camp in Tharavikulam and fought their way through countless kilometres until the final battlefield of the war in 2009, “I have forgotten the miles we walked for battle. If I remember right, it was not only in the East, but on several occasions, we ended up walking to fight in Jaffna, Kilinochchi, Mullaitivu, Pesale and Pudukudiruppu. But the end result was that every day we lost a member of our team. We did not feel the loss at the time, because for every member we lost, the movement was determined to recruit a new member,” he continued.
Selvam recalled that they were able to score many a victory during the battles at the time.

“The one which really stands out, is the attack we launched on a bus in Buttala. The incident is too painful to relate here,” he said.

“As time passed, I was specially trained in multi-barrel attacks and thereafter, I was made the leader of a team of twelve. The East was under the control of Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan, alias Karuna Amman. It was under his second in command, Ramesh, that my superior, Colonel Ram, worked.

Colonel Ram was humane as well as tough. He was constantly motivating us and I feel that if he had used his talents for good, our area would have developed greatly,” he added.

While Selvam fought on the frontlines, his mother passed away, but he only found out about her death after the war ended and was released from the rehabilitation camp.

Rehabilitation

“When I was at the Settikulam Rehabilitation Camp, the army provided us with various skills to help earn a livelihood. As the training went on, one day, we received visit from a Father called Selvanayagamfrom Wellawatte. Many of the detainees at the camp were depressed due to their past and the incidents in our past made us live a horrible present; every day was like a new death. After the war, all we inherited was either escape, to simple exist or to suffer the pain of death,” said Selvam.

“As I awoke from the rubble of my past, I decided that if I was to do something for the betterment of the next generation, I could seek the assistance of religion and faith. In the end, I came to the decision to join the Father and become his disciple.

As a result, today I stand for the spiritual enrichment of the people here,” Selvam added.

“I would like to make a request from all. Do not simply accept whatever someone says. You need to think about what that person says and understand whether that person is speaking sense or not. Because the result of actions we take without much thinking causes great harm to our nation,” he said.

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Asanka Athapaththu writes for the Daily News, Colombo, where this piece first appeared