When faced with challenging human rights and humanitarian law issues who should we seek out for advice but a celebrated former Vice President of the International Court of Justice? Faced with the task of peace building after a Thirty Years war, to whom should we turn to spearhead a state-aided national effort, or at the very least, for ideas and guidance, but the sole Sri Lankan to win the UNESCO Prize for Peace Education? If the Sri Lankan state and society have done neither, what does that say about us, where we are at and where we are headed?

One of the more refined gratifications in my life is the friendship of a few renowned intellectuals like Richard Falk, Emeritus Professor …

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I must thank Asanga Welikala (‘Publius’) for a reasoned and literate critical engagement with my views.  I respond for the twin purposes of clarification where I think my views have been misunderstood, and advancing the discussion, indeed debate.

Asanga chooses to take Colin Irwin’s latest statistics as a one off, ignoring my references to the Marga survey of 2007 and numerous surveys of public opinion in Sri Lanka starting from the Research International Pvt Ltd surveys of 1997 running through the many Peace Confidence index surveys of the last decade.  Furthermore, he parleys Colin Irwin’s survey of 2008, which shows a majority in favour of radical decentralisation provided the term federalism is not used, into a real or potential endorsement of …

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Interestingly of the four best pieces I have read on the first anniversary of the war, three are by Indian analyst/commentators, of whom two are military professionals: Gen Ashok K. Mehta’s Manekshaw paper No 22 for the Centre for Land Warfare Studies (New Delhi) on ‘How Eelam war 4 was Won’ (which cannot be read by any patriot or anti-fascist without a lump in one’s throat or mist in one’s eyes), the piece by Col R Hariharan in The Hindu and by PK Balachandran in the Indian Express. The fourth is by a youthful security researcher Sergei de Silva Ranasinghe writing in the respected Australian periodical, The Diplomat.

Within Sri Lanka and among Sri Lankans, the debate on the war may …

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Fidel quotes a Cuban saying that a man is marked more by his times than his family. My times were shaped by armed conflict: wars, insurrections and counter-insurgency; successive wars in the North and East of the island, two insurrections in the South, against a backdrop of Vietnam, the Middle East, Angola, and Central America. History was driven by the dialectic of states vs. armed movements.  To simplify, my times were dominated by the long hot war in Sri Lanka and the long Cold war in the world; their endings and aftermaths.

Too many friends, comrades and acquaintances died to bear enumeration. Life was dominated, distorted and to some extent determined by the conflicts and their cumulative gravitational pull. The greater …

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As always the debate in Sri Lanka is needlessly polarised. The human rights fundamentalists do not give a damn about national sovereignty, thereby reinforcing the nationalist backlash against the human rights constituency and concept. The nationalist fundamentalists don’t give a damn about human rights, thereby undermining civil liberties, tarnishing the profile of Sri Lanka and furthering international pressures which threaten sovereignty.  This polarisation is counterproductive, furthering neither human rights nor sovereignty. The experience of South Asia shows that it need not be a zero-sum game and that there is a way in which human rights, national sovereignty and people’s sovereignty can be brought together, fought for, with remarkable success.

The concept of human rights is damaged, discredited and rendered less effective …

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What prevents the ruling coalition from unveiling a new ‘first past the post’ electoral system and going for a mid–term parliamentary election?  Judging by current trends and data of a decade, the UNP, if it remains under Ranil Wickremesinghe, would be overrun and crushed to a pulp, not even reaching double digits in terms of seats.

How can a UNP which is unable to ditch an ineffectual and effete Ranil Wickremesinghe, convince the majority of voters that it can dislodge an infinitely more popular and stronger leader, Mahinda Rajapakse or what it decries as ‘Rajapakse rule’ and the ‘Rajapakse dynasty’?

How can a UNP which cannot dislodge Ranil from Sirikotha, convince the citizenry that it can dislodge an administration which dislodged Prabhakaran …

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Some of us are born at the wrong time or in the wrong place or in both the wrong time and place.  Nietzsche said he was born posthumously. He meant that the world was yet to catch up with his thinking but would do so, in a time of great cataclysm and wars fought for ideas. With his values, ideas and style Chanaka should have come to adulthood in colonial Ceylon and joined the struggles for reform in the late 19th or early 20th century, perhaps been a member of the Ceylon League or the Ceylon National Congress.

At any time Chanaka would have done well in Britain, as a Liberal or perhaps a Tory ‘wet’.

One aspect of his tragedy was …

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Remember the “Bandaranaike yugaya” (the “Bandaranaike Era”)? Well it is now the Rajapakses’ round. The Rajapakse family now dominates the SLFP and Sri Lankan politics in much the same manner as did the Bandaranaikes (Sirima, Felix, Sunethra, Anura, Chandrika, and son in law Kumar, not to mention Mackie and Seewali Ratwatte and irate Ira). In the Gramscian sense, there has been a re-composition of the ‘power bloc’, and a shift to the Deep South which has provided the new ‘hegemonic fraction’ in what appears a stable, durable hegemony — or is potentially one, provided Sri Lanka’s Northern Question (Gramsci spoke of Italy’s ‘Southern Question’) can be amicably resolved.

President Mahinda Rajapakse has proved himself a superb politician and a successful …

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A decent enough interval has not lapsed between Dr Nihal Jayawickrama’s first expression of views on sovereignty in the Sunday Island a fortnight ago, and his more reasoned and most recent expression, for the reader to have forgotten his original stand.  In his April 4th reply to me Dr Jayawickrama states I have “rushed to challenge” his assertion that : “ the doctrine of state sovereignty, in so far as it relates to the treatment by a state of its own nationals, had been significantly eroded in the past fifty years”. He goes on to write that “what I submitted, in my article published last Sunday, was what I believe to be a universally accepted legal proposition, namely, that the …

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The government wants a two thirds majority in order to replace the Constitution, it says. The UNP opposition hopes to form a coalition with other Opposition parties. It would be unhealthy for the body politic if the electorate were to grant the wish of either side. What would be healthy is for the Opposition to have a strong enough representation in the legislature so that a two thirds majority is out of reach for the government even by means of defections.

The most authoritarian administrations we have had have been those with a two thirds majority and the worst experiences we citizens have undergone, have been at the hands of governments enjoying a two thirds majority.  Of the three Constitutions we …

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“Unarm, Eros; the long day’s task is done” – Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, 4.14

The current Sri Lankan political discourse, thin gruel though it is, contains three morsels of content:  democracy, the electoral system and national sovereignty. Some question whether the ‘mere fact of elections’ qualifies Sri Lanka, or any country for that matter, as a democracy.  The second discussion is on the electoral system. The third debate revolves around human rights and international factors, with some emphasising national sovereignty and the others, democratic rights and freedoms.

Let’s take it head-on. How did the Tamil nationalist cause, its military manifestation crushed and its propaganda arm in self exile, make such a comeback in the form of the TNA resurgence? How can it …

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Does the UNP and Opposition leader Mr Ranil Wickremesinghe suffer from a compulsion towards electoral suicide or is it a condition of political sado-masochism? Only someone who is politically suicidal or sadistic towards his own party and its supporters could have gone to Jaffna last week, in the throes of a crucial election campaign at the end of which the UNP must deprive the ruling UPFA of a two thirds majority, and made the speech that he did. If the TamilNet report of his speech is untrue he must contradict it immediately and loudly.

Mr Wickremesinghe has a millstone of his own choosing decorating his neck, namely the abiding memory of his policy of appeasement towards the LTTE.  He chooses to …

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Here we go again, or should I say here they come again, or is it here they go again?

In an opening scene in the movie 300, based on Frank Miller’s freely rendered comic book version of the battle of Thermopylae in Herodotus’ Histories, Spartan king Leonidas boots an arrogant  emissary of Persian king Xerxes into a deep well with the rejectionist exclamation ‘This is Sparta!’. My gut or shall we say knee-jerk reaction to the Global Tamil Forum, the endorsements by Gordon Brown, David Miliband and William Hague, and Tamil Diaspora expectations of a Balfour Declaration with Miliband as Balfour, would be the equivalent: ‘This is Asia – and the 21st century!’

I am hoping that will not have to be …

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The Sri Lankan discourse on war crimes, violations of international humanitarian law and human rights in general, divide into two camps, both of which demonise the other. One holds that the entire matter is a campaign by imperialism and its agents; human rights is itself a suspicious Western usage if not a concept invented millennia ago by us Asians (perhaps even the Sinhala Buddhists) which we need no lectures on– and the only response we need give is to “just say no”, which we can with a little help from our (Asian or Third World) friends.

The opposing school of thought is that Sri Lanka is a human rights hellhole and either became so during whichever the administration the critic is …

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“You never see it comin’ till it’s gone”

– ‘Falling & Flyin’, Jeff Bridges in ‘Crazy Heart’

Seeing it comin’: Will the Tamils silently celebrate and the Sinhalese secretly curse the day that Prabhakaran died? With his secessionist fundamentalism and ghastly terrorism, he was the biggest obstacle to achievable autonomy for Tamils and the best excuse for the Sinhala establishment’s tardiness in devolving power to the Tamil speaking periphery. Now the North is no longer hostage to secessionism and the South is bereft of a human shield against democratic demands for devolution.

There was an old Cold War joke about the thief who broke into the Kremlin and stole, among other things, the complete results of the next election. Well, one …

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“All my life I have been a gentleman to my adversaries, even in war situations surrounded by death. I’ve never humiliated, offended nor wreaked revenge on a single prisoner, not even in the case of the Bay of Pigs while my comrades lay mortally wounded or dead around me…One must be honourable.”

- Fidel Castro ( May 1st speech, 2002)

I leave the country for scholarly reflection and writing for (at least) two years, with a heavy heart.  I am proud to have supported President Rajapakse at the 2005 and 2010 elections and I think he is the best leader the country can have at this point of time.  However, the practice of political cannibalism must cease! A balance must …

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The Sri Lankan crisis continues, sourced in and stemming from two major flaws/factors:

(i) There is no comprehension that “justice must not only be done, but be seen to be done” and that what is legal in the narrowest sense may not be perceived as legitimate or ethical in the broader sense. The consequences for institutions, the long term health of the body politic and the larger national ethos are never considered.

(ii) None of the major political players have a correct grasp of the problem of evolving/constructing a broad, truly Sri Lankan national identity.

President Rajapakse had it right on the issue of the Tamil Tigers; the issue of fascist separatist-terrorism. He had it more correct than all his predecessors and his …

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“Prabhakaran, a textbook fascist…” - The Economist (‘Victory for the Tiger Slayer’ Jan 28th, 2010)

“Resistance to imperialism does not of course involve only armed force or bands of guerrillas. It is mainly allied with nationalism and with an aroused sense of aggrieved religious, cultural or existential identity.”- Edward Said (‘The Voyage In: Third World Intellectuals and Metropolitan Cultures’)

It is easy to be wise after the event, so I usually try to be wise before it. In a piece originally entitled ‘Crisis 2010: The post election scenario’ published over a month ago, from Dec 20th 2009 through to the 23rd, in the Sunday Lakbima, Transcurrents, Sri Lanka Guardian and Ada Derana, this is how I saw the Presidential election panning …

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“And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.”

“Daddy” by Sylvia Plath

If you can’t take my word for it, take that of Eric Hobsbawm, regarded not only as Britain’s greatest living historian but as ‘one of the outstanding historians of our age’ (Independent on Sunday). The Guardian says “Hobsbawm is one of the leading authors of the concepts and language in which all of us now discuss our situation”. It is indeed his language and concepts that help us understand why Mahinda Rajapakse is certainly my choice for president this time, given the choices available. …

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Harim Pieris, a former advisor to President Kumaratunga in the days that she had really lost touch with what was what in the country, has written the best piece so far on the strategy of the joint opposition at this Presidential election, with a clear if implicit indication that he thinks the strategy is likely to succeed (“Ranil’s Formula for the General’s success”, Daily Mirror Monday Jan 11th 2010). It’s a good article, a correct piecing together, but to my mind a bad analysis and latent prognosis. I may well be proven wrong and I shan’t go into the why of my demurral until after it is all over, in these crucial closing ten days of a most portentous election.

Speaking …

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