CANNOT ARGUE WITH GOTABHAYA
Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa’s detailed
analysis on how the war was won, won hearts and minds in Galle
yesterday at the Serendib Coast international festivities. Mr.
Rajapaksa was detailed as he was articulate, and speaking to an
audience of citizens, foreign residents and expatriates in equal
measure, he made Geneva feel so distant, that it would have made
Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu want to cry.
Mr. Rajapaksa told everybody how the war was won and how the
peace is being won, and this was all done with oratorical skill
which combined brisk purposefulness with precision brevity. This
has become the signature style of the man who is the main thrust
behind the implementation of the President’s policy.
The sense of self-assuredness is admirable – but what’s more
notable is the fact that there is a sense he leaves behind of
nothing being left to chance. Absolutely nothing, it appears,
was left to chance, in the last phase of the war - and at the
end of it.
Yesterday at the Eddiston in Galle, he was able to state to
the last decimal, the death rate per ten thousand individuals
when the people of the Wanni came under the sway of the LTTE,
and by contrast, after they had been liberated from the clutches
of that deceased fascist maniac, Velupillai Prabhakaran.
Finishing the war was an internally formulated effort, and
this is perhaps why it got the goat of the people who were used
to eating out of the hand of the international community. To the
last refugee that was given a cooked meal and then to the last
man that was rehabilitated, everything was done to a meticulous
plan.
The speech itself was a tour de force, because it was done to
a plan too. It is this ability to plan, execute, and then face
the resulting outcome that’s the beauty of the Defence
Secretary’s work to end the war, and now for urban renewal and
national regeneration. It has become his life’s work in essence,
and with a speech of the kind that was delivered in Galle, he
was able to shame the naysayers, the Paikiasothys and the
Amnesty vermin and all of those other assorted ghouls with one
fell swoop.
All these people seem to have are words and plans hatched in
the cover of darkness, whereas the government has results on the
ground to show. There is no NEED in fact to argue with such a
reality.
Except the perverse, nobody is impervious to the power of the
potent result. When people are able to feed themselves, stand on
their own two feet, and send their children to school after
years of being cowed at the point of a gun, there is a separate
dynamic at play that cannot be destroyed with words, concoctions
or horror stories of dubious origin.
Mr. Rajapaksa was able to say that though the war may be
over, stiff challenges abound. He was not coy about saying that
Amnesty is in the pay of the Tiger front groups -- there was in
the usual thorough-going manner, the photograph shown, of the
plum-faced Amnesty personnel receiving the cheque from the
well-known Canadian Tiger front organization that styled itself
as an innocuous NGO.
Certainly, the second war is the war to defeat the forces of
unreason championed by the Shamnesties, the European MPs with
the Tamil constituencies, and the myriad other forces led
internally by the paid NGO and INGO hands that want to ensnare
the wartime leadership, the Defence Secretary included, in war
crimes litigation.
It is a challenge but the forward moving dynamic that goes by
the power of results has a momentum of its own, and the most
insidious of perversely motivated challenges, it seems, would
wither against the power of tangible gains on the ground.
There is no better hearts and minds operation, than this one
of trouncing the naysayers through hard work. Gotabhaya
Rajapaksa is the epitome of such an ethos of collective national
regeneration. Happily, he has the words to showcase his work
with, too. |