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The Storm's eye by Prof.Rajiva Wijesingha

I write this at Nilaveli, which is not a pleasure I thought I was likely to experience again, for a very long time. I was last here in the early nineties, during one of those slight windows of opportunity the ongoing conflict has offered. Before that was in 1980, which was the year I first visited Trincomalee, though I found it so wonderful that I was there twice that year.

The town itself then I have visited often, especially when I coordinated the English program at a number of affiliated university colleges around the country, while also running the pre-university GELT program. The Trincomalee AUC, under a wonderfully enterprising lady called Dr. Rajaratnam also conducted the English Diploma Program, which meant I had to go up once a month. Dr. Rajaratnam, who was adept at getting work out of people, was most appreciative, since she claimed that most of the other coordinators hardly ever visited.

That this is generally the case I found when I agreed a few years back to help the Southeastern University with its English programs. My predecessor, one of the more conscientious of my former pupils in fact, who headed the English Dept at another university, had hardly ever visited. The SEU Asst Bursar, another enterprising lady, one of just two Sinhalese working there at the time, scolded me for not asking for a large fee inasmuch as I was the only Consultant to visit monthly.

Those visits unfortunately are a pleasure I have now had to give up, and I am afraid I told the Trincomalee University College too that I would not be able to visit them regularly. But this is my loss, not theirs. To see so many different places, to interact with people from so many different backgrounds, has been practically the only pleasant aspect of working for various government organizations over the past 10 years. But it has been such a pleasant experience that I cannot understand why more people do not do the same.

Of course it may now be too late. Though I deplore the idea of Eelam, I have to admit that, if I came from the Eastern Province, I would wonder what reason there was to continue as part of Sri Lanka. On Nilaveli Beach I watched a great crowd who had come from all over, including a wonderful procession of Muslim girls who lifted their burkahs to their knees and shrieked with glee as they paddled, on a bare beach to which they had had to walk half a mile. And I wondered then at the fact that nothing had been done to develop the place as a tourist attraction. And this was not because of the war. Rather, the war had begun because for a quarter of a century no Sri Lankan Government had targeted these areas for development.

Of course it could be argued that they had not bothered about the rest of the periphery either, Hambantota and Moneragala and Polonnaruwa and Puttalam for instance. But the simple answer to that is that these were governments people from those parts elected, so they could hardly complain.

But it was a bit much to expect those in the North and East to put up with such incompetence for ever. Of course I exaggerate. D.S. Senanayake did much work in those areas, and C.P. De Silva and Maithripala Senanayake did some. But almost all of this was in terms of support for colonizers and colonization. Now I do not share the view that this was unwarranted interference with traditional homelands, inasmuch as much of the area that was colonized had not been used previously. But unfortunately the people of the North and East did not benefit from this.

And in the statist mindset that was developed, in which all initiatives had to come from the center, they were not even given encouragement to develop other aspects on their own. Premadasa then absolutely had the right idea when he encouraged investment in the areas he controlled, and in particular in the East. I still remember Dr Rajaratnam, whom some of her colleagues in Colombo referred to only half jokingly as a Tiger, telling me how she hoped everyone would vote UNP in the local elections held in the East at the time. A few months later, after Premadasa's death, she was in despair, saying that the UNP seemed to have lost all interest in the East.

Gamini Dissanayake, ironically, followed Premadasa in his manifesto and mentioned the need to harness private energies to continue with development of the periphery. As he had shown with the Mahaweli, he too had the capacity to make such intentions a reality.

Perhaps that was why he was killed, as Premadasa was. And so we got Chandrika, whose intentions, at the beginning at least, were very good, but who really did not understand the slightest thing about delegation, perhaps because she was not willing to trust anyone of any competence. So there is nothing at Nilaweli, except the one hotel. So, as one army commander told me a few years back, Tigers can be killed, but next year there will be more, because there is nothing really for any enterprising youngster from those areas to do.

Whether Ranil has planned for investment in those areas I do not know. More importantly, he has also to get rid of all the regulations that prevent private sector activity that will generate employment. I think he has the courage to embark upon radical measures, but whether he will be able to move with the speed that is required given the statist bureaucracy he has to work with is another question. But unless he acts decisively, there is really no reason to cling to these areas at the cost of stultifying them further.

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