Rajiva Wijesinha

“ But while we can understand how much they regret their dominance slipping away, we need to make sure that there will be no further threat to the Sri Lankan state through all this sudden concern for people who were ignored for so long, people whose children were forcibly conscripted, people who were forced to build bunkers and walls and ditches, people who had to give hostages before they were allowed to leave. ”

“ Meanwhile, until belatedly the UN Coordinator said that the Sri Lankan Ministries of Health and Education deserved prizes for the work they had done under difficult circumstances, there was no recognition at all of the extraordinary efforts made by the Sri Lankan government to ensure the continuation of high level social services. ”

“ The International NGOs, who had turned a blind eye to forced recruitment while they claimed that they were all that stood between the people of the Vanni and untold horrors (untold by them, as it turned out) , declared that their workers had not been given passes to leave the Vanni, but refrained from public condemnation of this, claiming that they were worried for the safety of their workers. ”

“ So we need to be aware of possibly a more sinister purpose, albeit one full of moral self righteousness. In short, what is planned is the imposition of a halt on the operations of our forces, which will have the inevitable consequence of giving the Tigers a new lease of life, just as happened nineteen years ago. ”

“ Thus, I could not initially understand why so many statements by those who purport to be well wishers of the Sri Lankan people so sedulously avoid mention of the LTTE. The ICRC recently managed to complain about ambulances not being allowed to evacuate patients from the Vanni, in a manner that suggested it did not know who was responsible, which meant that this was immediately taken up by various news agencies so as to cast blame on the Government. ”

“ The superstition that giving him a name will somehow increase the reality of his evil influence was not of course created by J K Rowling, she merely took up an old folk superstition that naming evil things gave them greater strength. ”

“ This had not happened, instead they had issued half hearted statements, which included critiques of the arrangements the Sri Lankan government had made for the displaced. These had been highlighted and, in the storms that rose, institutions like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International using phrases such as 'internment', people seemed to lose sight of the fact that the LTTE was driving people into smaller and smaller areas. ”

“ Being a Professor of English may not seem the best training available for heading a Peace Secretariat, but it has certainly proved invaluable in trying to understand the way people function. Unfortunately I have generally had to have recourse not to the more sophisticated literature I have taught, but rather to fairly simple works. ”

“ In the absence then of any categorical condemnation, in the turning by many of blind eyes to the killing by the LTTE of people trying to get away, the LTTE could without any difficulty drive these people along with them, meanwhile trying frenetically to convince the world that the people were starving and would soon be subject to epidemics. ”