Monthly Archive: May 2015

The four-party Tamil National Alliance (TNA) on Saturday insisted that it wouldn’t cooperate under any circumstance with the  electoral reforms meant to reduce the number of elected representatives from the Northern and Eastern electoral districts.

Nine members are elected from the Jaffna electoral district, whereas six enter parliament from the Vanni electoral district comprising Mannar, Vavuniya and Kilinochchi districts. Sixteen are elected from the Eastern Province comprising the electoral districts of Trincomalee (4), Digamadulla (7) and Batticaloa (5).The TNA comprised the Illankai Thamil Arasu Kadchi (ITAK), TELO, PLOTE and EPRLF.

The Nation learns that although the committee appointed to probe the controversial Bond Issue by the Central Bank recommended an inquiry into the involvement of the Bank of Ceylon (BoC), no action has been taken so far.

The Committee found that there was no direct involvement of Governor Arjun Mahendran but clearly implied the possibility of complicity indirectly. 

First of all, welcome to Sri Lanka. Don’t worry, it’s all heart and not courtesy. This country has embraced one and all. Invader, interferer, brigand, smuggler, embezzler, immigrant, condescending missionary determined to ‘save’ the heathen, marauder, city-sacker, control-freak, you name it, we got them all. 

This you must know: when we say ‘friend’ we mean it. It is not diplo-speak. We don’t refer to ‘long-standing friendly relations’ even as we plot control and extraction. We don’t advocate, insist and enforce with or without the stated or unsaid ‘this is for your own good’. We recognize all this, though. We know that power lies in the ability to make others inhibit our version of their reality as Philip Gourevitch observed in his collection of essays on Rwanda, ‘We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families’. 

Soon to arrive in Colombo the United States ambassador to Sri Lanka, Atul Keshap, has already gone on record that the United States supports a federal structure as a catalyst for national reconciliation among the Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority.

Mr. Keshap who is expected to present his credentials to President Maitripala Sirisena soon as America’s diplomatic envoy in Colombo made the authoritative declaration that this South Asian nation needs a federal structure to redress minority Tamil grievances when he was Deputy Assistant Secretary in the State Department’s South Asian Bureau – the next immediate official to Assistant Secretary Nisha Biswal. Previously, he was working very closely on Sri Lankan issues with Robert Blake when he was the assistant secretary of the South Asian Bureau. Mr. Blake was the US envoy in Colombo during the period the Sri Lanka military undertook the final assault on the Tamil Tiger movement.