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Tuesday, 6 November 2012

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OF MAD DOGS, AND …

John Rankin UK High Commissioner in Sri Lanka, can maintain a stiff upper lip but how he or his country’s representative at the UNHRC can show a straight face and say that there are continuing assaults on the media in Sri Lanka is, well, rather comic if not absolutely uproarious. There haven’t been any assaults on media personnel in Sri Lanka in the last year or so and since the war on the LTTE was terminated, so is Rankin and his posse of global policemen hallucinating, or have they recently smoked something they haven’t yet exhaled? (If so what are they on – and can we please have some of it …?)

That within parenthesis above, was obviously in lighter vein, but the other issue taken up by the British government at the UPR is about the ‘assaults on members of the judiciary’ in our country. How one assault on the Judicial Services Commission secretary, now being investigated, can translate as ‘continuing attacks on legal personnel’ is rather puzzling, but then, with regular tales of misbehaviour by British army personnel in Afghanistan for instance reverberating in their ears, Rankin and his men on the global beat must be finding it difficult to focus their minds on anything real, we wager?

We here in Sri Lanka have heard of one assault recently on a key member of the judicial hierarchy, but we do not hear of Lankan troops misbehaving in other countries, requiring regular inquiries such as those conducted by the British army -- which have not been of any help to victims of such misbehaving British troops in countries far apart as Afghanistan or Iraq.

What’s also hilarious is the British tendency towards hyperbole.

A local daily reported yesterday that ‘While noting that Sri Lankans were now free from what the British government called scourges of terrorism and war, the permanent mission for Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Geneva, accused the government of attacks and intimidation of journalists, human rights defenders and legal professionals.’

There have been no attacks of any significance on journalists at least in the last one year period in Sri Lanka, and human rights defenders have largely had carte blanche to do as they please. For instance, none of the human rights activists who participated in the UNHRC sessions in Geneva in March this year, were subject to any kind of intimidation though most of them voiced their loudly held ‘apprehensions’ that they will be attacked when they return home!

As for attacks on legal professionals, there were some goon tactics – short of actual physical injury --- used on the Puttalam magistrate, for which a Minister was hauled up on contempt of court charges. On the other hand, the recent assault on the JSC secretary is a one-off incident, which is now being investigated. A weekend private newspaper of repute has editorialized that there is some apprehension that an interested third party had been behind the attack, due to some sort of private concern, and therefore the least that can be said is that this is a crime that’s so far unresolved.

The Englishmen’s proclivity to exaggerate therefore is telling, and it appears that the witch hunt against this country never ended after the sessions closed in Geneva, at the UNHRC in March.

What has been set out in the preceding paragraphs shows that there are obvious mala fides in the British government’s singling out Sri Lanka for human rights violations with regard to ‘journalists, legal professionals and human rights workers.’

All these charges are so trumped up that it is almost needless for us to point out here and say that there is no basis for them. The Paikiasothys and the Nimalkas and the Pereras operate here with impunity, unfairly at most times, targeting the state apparatus, but there is nobody that has laid a finger on these people.

One local daily rather cynically observes that the UK team at the current UPR sessions in Geneva made the allegations of ‘continuing attacks’ on these above mentioned categories of people in the wake of the impeachment motion against the Chief Justice that is due any time to be taken up by a Parliamentary Select Committee here in Colombo!

Going by these words, are the impeachment proceedings also to be regarded as some sort of a physical assault on judicial personnel?! Well, unlike the British, we have a written constitution here in this country, and what is constitutional here is almost written in stone, and therefore it is not difficult to see that there is nothing illegal about the impeachment motion now before the legislature. So therefore for anybody, be it in Sri Lankan newspapers or at the UNHRC sessions to conflate alleged ‘continuing attacks on legal professionals’ with the move to impeach the Chief Justice is such a flight of fancy that one wonders whether all these people, like the mad dogs and Englishmen of colonial lore, have been out too many times lately, in our scorching noonday sun?!
 

GENTLEMAN politician from Ruhuna - From a LSSP perspective

It is with great pleasure that I have accepted the invitation of the D A Rajapaksa Commemoration Committee to write this article to mark his 45th death anniversary. The nationalist trail that started with D M Rajapaksa, during the period of oppressive British rule, was nurtured and given direction during the period of transition to independence by D A Rajapaksa, and it has now assumed massive proportions, like the Southern Expressway, under the leadership of Mahinda Rajapaksa, with the potential to decisively influence the destiny of Sri Lanka itself. I shall endeavour to evaluate the significance to our country of this kurakkan nationalist trail, highlighting the role of D A Rajapaksa.

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Judge Human Rights relative to ground reality - Part III :

Post-war reconciliation and PEACE DIVIDENDS TO ALL

A further 1,089 date back to the 1991 to 2005 period. The remaining number lays to rest the canard of an increasing trend in disappearance in the recent past. We are working to establish a cross agency national mechanism to clear this backlog. A working committee has been established to respond to cases of disappearances and a Deputy Inspector General of Police appointed to conduct ground verifications of such cases to ascertain the present status. A special piece of legislation to enable the issuance of death certificates to next of kin was put in place and next of kin can claim monies due to them and obtain secure a substantial degree of closure.

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Reminiscences of Gold

Me at Grants? Nothing taken for granted

Neela Marikkar, is the personification of efficiency. A woman who has scaled the summit of success, she is a complete package: a wife, mother and a canny business woman. This week Reminiscences of Gold features this remarkable lady who is head of Grant McCann Erickson, a leading advertising agency in Sri Lanka.

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