Visit SL to know heroic efforts of people to rebuild their country - Ambassador Akashi

Senior Japanese diplomat Yasushi Akashi said ‘if you visit Sri Lanka you will come to know the heroic efforts of people to rebuild their own country, to rehabilitate, remove mines and last but not the least, to achieve genuine reconciliation among the people’, states a release from the Office of the Presidential Spokesman and International Media Adviser.

Speaking to the media in Tokyo on March 13, Akashi said that he recommend visits to Sri Lanka by all those who feel that Sri Lanka’s efforts are insufficient.

After his meeting with President Mahinda Rajapaksa, Ambassador Akashi said “the post-conflict development in Sri Lanka was phenomenal. For a modest sized developing country, Sri Lanka that faced very, very big challenges with the end of the war four years ago, coped with the overwhelming task of feeding a huge number of IDPs, the majority of them housed at Menik Farm in the North.”

“In my several visits to the North, I saw with my own eyes how the whole country coped with the challenges of housing, and giving all kinds of other care to 200,000 people, especially women and children.”

“I was simply amazed by the ability of the people in the government, starting from the leadership, to mobilize the extra effort in a very effective manner. Of course, some international help came through the United Nations, but the bulk of the efforts came from within Sri Lanka itself, by the people themselves, he added.

“I can testify that such efforts were very effective and very rewarding. I think everyone tends to judge situation from his or her own background. That is why I feel that it is rather unfair for some developed countries, who have much more resources than Sri Lanka, to express impatience with Sri Lanka and its development; but this is not fair and this is not objective.

Certainly, I am sure that the Government and people of Sri Lanka would wish to move such more rapidly, but with Sri Lanka’s limited resources what it has done by itself is amazing. “Japan was not ready to go with the human rights stands of other nations, ignoring the objective realities in Sri Lanka”, Ambassador Akashi further said.