The last dance

While President Kumaratunga is making a tremendous effort to restore peace in this strife torn country, the UNP is engaged in dancing and feasting on the southern highway.

The Uncle Nephew Party is as usual engaged in an exercise of deep deception promising the people the good life when during all their previous administrations the rural population were totally ignored and left in the lurch, with the Treasury not releasing funds to lighten their burdens.

In the 1999 Presidential Elections Ranil Wickremesinghe, naive as he, is offered rural youth not jobs but jeans, chewing gum and bracelets, clearly showing his naivete, his total ignorance of the pressing needs of the have nots. Today Ranil Wickremesinghe in his unquenchable thirst for power after suffering 14 consecutive defeats but one is a desperate man.

He has seen the writing on the wall and is like an inveterate gambler making his last fling. In so doing he is like his late uncle Junius Richard Jayewardene in 1983 trying to set the country ablaze with communal violence which resulted in death and destruction as we witnessed earlier, and a further ruination of the country.

The peace in the North-East has suddenly been forgotten in his quest for power. Instead, he is promoting a renewal of the war with the LTTE by inciting the South.

Let us not forget that at the last general elections the UNP received a sound drubbing and its representation in Parliament would have been minuscule but for the cunningly contrived Constitution of the Old Fox who unfortunately Mr. Wickremesinghe is trying to emulate.

Instead, if he is a truly national leader Mr. Wickremesinghe will give his unstinted and wholehearted support to President Kumaratunga to succeed in her efforts at settling the North-East conflict and the ethnic problem as a whole.

By this selfish attitude of the UNP leader he is destroying the Ceasefire which he signed with the LTTE obviously with the motive of attempting to renew the war. His volte-face is a disgrace. Shouldn't he love his country more and himself less? Why this sudden haste to pressure for a Presidential Election which given all independent assessments show it will be his Swan Song in politics.

It is very clear as stated by Minister of Constitutional Affairs D.E.W.Gunasekera that according to Section 31(3) of the Constitution the Elections Commissioner should act on this clause. One month before the term of the President ends the Elections Commissioner should call for a Presidential Election.

According to the Constitution President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga's term of office ends only in November 2006. It is only then that the Elections Commissioner should call a Presidential Election.

The erudite Constitutional expert Minister D.E.W.Gunasekera said that if the UNP was unsatisfied with this constitutional interpretation it can seek legal recourse.

The Elections Commissioner has no right to violate the Constitution, Minister Gunasekera at the last Cabinet press briefing said. Therefore the Jana Bala Meheyuma was entirely unconstitutional.

In fact the Jana Bala Meheyuma is a joke. It is a carnival as are other UNP processions well funded with participants attracted by Bachalian feasts and uninhibited character assassination and raw filth directed at the President.

We appeal to the UNP and Mr. Wickremesinghe to place the country before self and give all his support and that of his party to President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, a brave woman who has fought relentlessly for the last decade and more to bring about peace and harmony in Sri Lanka, this once demi paradise which nature has endowed so richly.

Here, it is apt to quote Bishop Hebber who said of Sri Lanka "where every prospect pleases, but only man is vile".

How true!

Meanwhile JVP leader Somawansa Amarasinghe, that man with a deep criminal past, who after bolting from the island to escape Justice and finally made his way to Paris and London has returned to Sri Lanka and has become the biggest joke in local politics, what with his vaudeville antics.

His facade as a leader has been shattered and he has become the laughing stock of the country, red shirt cap and all. The sooner he returns to London and takes with him his band of cohorts, including the foul mouth Weerawansa, it will rid the country of a poisonous party which has committed two insurrections, almost crippled democracy, murdering and maiming thousands of civilians, some of them babes in arms suckling their fond mothers breasts. Holding the country to ransom.