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The Oldest English Newspaper in South Asia
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Colombo 10, Sri Lanka.
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Business vs ethnic fanatics

While some Opposition political parties and high-profile civic groups are nit-picking over the independence of the "independent commissions", the country's government still confronts a secessionist insurgency and big business has the task of battling ethnic chauvinist fanatics opposed to peace.

What happened to the cry by civic groups that the peace issue was the most urgent and most critical issue facing our nation? When the Sinhala extremists went berserk at Lipton's Circus yesterday it was the business leadership and their employees who were the victims and not any more those one-time peace activists.

Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, as a peace activist in her own right, has pursued the task of peace-making from the day she and her People's Alliance were first elected in August 1994. The UNP, which earlier paid a careful lip service to the peace cause, very easily shifted to raising issues of "good governance" and "democracy" as levers to weaken the PA's credibility and its hold on power. The high-profile civic groups are now busy examining the small print of the PA-JVP accord and the technicalities of the Constitutional Council proposal as if these are the most urgent issues of the day. Are they mesmerised by the 'good governance' mantras of the Western powers or, have the middle class intellectuals who lead these civic groups been simply seduced by the bourgeois charms of the UNP?

Meanwhile, the war has worsened and the LTTE's aggression has brought the country to the brink of disaster. It has been left to the business community to give the PA government's peace project the support it should be receiving from the Opposition and the once-active non-governmental 'peace movement'. And now it seems that business people, their employees and the broad mass of people, who have at last been aroused to the acute dangers of the war, have to pursue peace and deal with the ethnic chauvinist fanatics sans the expertise of the one-time peace-and-devolution lobby.

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