Ceylon Today Editorial

The UN, Lanka and Terror in Kashmir

21 September 2016

While Sri Lanka strongly condemned the early Sunday morning deadly terrorist attack on an Indian military base in which 18 soldiers were killed and 20 others wounded, UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson condemned the attack and said the UK "stands shoulder to shoulder with India in the fight against terrorism and in bringing the perpetrators to justice".

The attack was one of the deadliest since militant attacks began in 1989. It has jerked Indo-Pakistan relations up to fever pitch once again.

India and Pakistan claim all of Muslim-majority Kashmir, but only control parts of it.

The militants had infiltrated across the Line of Control from Pakistan before attacking the base, west of Srinagar, almost straddling the China built US$ 49 billion Trans Continental Highway that passes through Pakistan occupied Kashmir. That area is under Pakistani border guard patrols, close to which a militant attack in Uri in December 2014 killed 9 Indian soldiers. The last attack of this scale on the Indian Army was in June 2015 in Manipur, north-east India, when 20 Indian soldiers were killed. Sunday's attack brings the Indo-Pak crisis to boiling point.

That the Indian Home Ministry called this a 'cross-border terrorist attack' will be interpreted by the Pakistani Government as an accusation of complicity, direct or otherwise brutal and unprovoked killing of Indian soldiers.

The terrorists/separatists are perceived the world over by observers and several governments to be 'home grown' in Pakistan, funded and armed too. When Sri Lanka condemned the attack, our government also brought all of this under that condemnation.

At that time, before the US-India-Japan, Australia-Sri Lanka Indian Ocean security platform came into being to deal with potential armed conflict situation in the region, and before the China-Pakistan Silk Road highway was built, current Premier Narendra Modi lashed out at Pakistan saying: "They did nothing. Indians died and they did nothing". He urged Singh's Government to "talk to Pakistan in Pakistan's language," he said, "because it won't learn lessons until then".

Now in power, will Modi do what he then proposed Singh should have done?

His decision will feature in UNGA sideline talks with President Maithripala Sirisena who can be expected to go further than the Foreign Ministry statement on the attack.

President Sirisena, according to top sources, is going to call for a concerted effort to stamp out terrorism and its after effects in nations such as Sri Lanka and India.

What Modi has in mind is perhaps reflected in the fact that he has immediately picked the more hawkish Ajit Doval as his National Security Adviser immediately after the attack. And Doval called top military and intelligence officials to prepare options for inflicting retaliation on jihadist groups in Pakistan.
The Indian Army could raid terror enclaves inside Pakistan or the Indian Air Force could launch strikes wherever in Pakistan it has intelligence about terror hideouts.

But Pakistan could hit back at Indian industrial infrastructure, which is much more expensive than tent-and-donkey cart training camps. India could, of course, hit back yet again — but this course is fraught with the danger of some indirect US involvement that could turn the escalation into a major conflict, especially because Pakistan a fortnight ago revealed a secret defence pact with China signed in 2014, which we referred to a fortnight ago. Modi has that to contend with but a new Indo-US Security protocol signed in Washington a fortnight ago could prove to come in handy for Modi if he decides on aggressive action.

In 1953, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru mobilized troops in Punjab to deter a Pakistani incursion into Kashmir. But the geopolitics in the region has changed since those days and India under Modi has more powerful options which the US, UK and others at the UN, INCLUDING SRI LANKA, will fully support.

The UN last Saturday reiterated its call for international actors in a war crimes accountability mechanism. The US and UK fully support this initiative.

That compromises both the US and UK who will then have to be asked to call on Pakistan to account for such aggressive war crimes committed by terrorists who shelter under the providence of the Pakistani Government. While the Kashmir remains a contested issue, the same does not apply to the North and East of Sri Lanka where terrorists were encouraged and nurtured successively by the TULF and the TNA, to persist with terrorism to bifurcate Sri Lanka.

President Sirisena therefore can't duck out of the issue at the UNGA because of the strong global condemnation about the vast number of disappearances under impunity of the previous regime in Sri Lanka.

Will the UN also condemn Islamabad for offering terrorists a similar impunity, making them in fact State terrorists?

The UN can make an effort to be more even handed.

Daily News Editorial

Foreign travel of govt. politicians

21 September 2016

President Maithripala Sirisena has ordered to all parliamentarian and government officials to curtail their foreign trips. Issuing a circular in this regard the President has noted that there was a tendency of Ministers, MPs and state officials to undertake foreign trips at enormous cost to the tax payer, with little or no return to the country. This practise was particularly seen under the former regime, where government ministers, their secretaries and public officials took wing abroad at the drop of a hat on costly unproductive missions. It was revealed that as much as Rs. 4,000 million of public funds were spent per year by the last government on these foreign trips where no cost benefit accrued to the country.

The President noted that certain Ministers in the past government under the pretext of ‘study tours’ of projects relevant to their Ministries had gone abroad taking with them their family members. Inherent in the President's observation was that these were merely foreign jaunts undertaken at the expense of the tax payer. There was once a Foreign Minister, who some journalists call wartime Foreign Minister ala a Churchill, who, of all places, took wing to Iceland, which has no known trade, economic or strategic link with Sri Lanka, with spouse and brood in tow. This Foreign Minister who had a penchant for foreign travel abused his position to go globetrotting with no known tangible benefits accruing to the country.

There were also the multiple instances where former President Mahinda Rajapaksa saw nothing wrong in taking several dozen Ministers, MPs, defeated politicians, loyalist businessmen, artistes etc. along with him on official foreign trips, with over 70 such personages in the entourage of one such trip to the UN General Assembly sessions. To this day, nobody has been told of the benefits brought to the country by this nadey from this trip. Such profligacy of course was not strange to the Rajapaksas, going by the massive financial scams now being unearthed implicating the former first family.

No doubt the taxpaying public will salute this move by the President to restrict the foreign trips of Ministers, MPs and government functionaries. Any foreign travel by government politicians should show results. No one will object to family members accompanying the Minister or MP provided the expense is borne by the politician concerned. For too long has foreign travel by politicians being taken for granted. The contagion had affected even Provincial Councillors and local government members. The broken culverts, pot holed roads, unattended garbage, blocked canals and waterways and other multifarious ills that has beset the towns, villages, tells a tale of how these foreign trips had benefited these local councillors.

In the distant past, foreign trips were undertaken by government Ministers only for the most urgent and pressing reasons. It was been reported that these Ministers and MPs returned the unspent per diem granted to them for these trips, back to the government coffers. It is unclear if the practise is still in vogue. If not, instructions should be issued that all unutilized money be handed back upon the return from foreign trips, by government ministers and officials.

Today, Ministers are only too eager to rush for events abroad connected to their ministry subjects. Of course there are events that may specifically require the Minister's presence, in which case he/she has no alternative. There are also Ministries, due to whose technical nature, the Minister concerned may have to accompany the relevant officials and experts abroad to make a final assessment of things. In addition there are also reciprocal visits where government politicians get invited abroad by visiting foreign dignitaries, or the Minister's counterpart, in which case too foreign visits undertake by the politician concerned is unavoidable. However there are also instances where our envoys can perform the function of the Minister at the other end, obviating his/ her need to be present in person. This would save the unnecessary expense of the Minister making the trip.

We are here not kill joys, frowning on the opportunity for our people's representatives and their minions to enjoy the luxury of a foreign trip or two. There are MPs hailing from not so privileged backgrounds and who had risen the hard way, who deserve a chance for overseas travel. Nobody will begrudge them this harmless indulgence. What is objectionable is Ministers, MPs and officials making this a habit, not considering the fact that they are using public money to have a good time. They all can take an example from a former Prime Minister no less. Dr. W. Dahanayake is his name. Never in his six decade long political life did he set foot on foreign soil.

Be that as it may, the main plank of the Yahapalanaya campaign was to cut down on waste, put an end to profligacy and put the tax money of the public to good use. Hence the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government has to ensure that it does not deviate from this pledge. Restricting unwanted and unproductive foreign travel by our peoples’ representatives, undertaken with taxpayers’ money, therefore is a move in the right direction.

The Island Editorial

Forgotten heavenly physician

21 September 2016

 

Millennia before President Mathripala Sirisena, upon being inaugurated, decreed that a chief justice had not existed, Babylonian star gazers did that to a doctor in the sky, as it were, NASA has revealed highlighting what may be considered a kind of historical injustice.

NASA has reported that ancient Babylonians, in a bid to ‘make a tidy match with their 12-month calendar, ignored the fact that the Sun actually moves through 13 constellations, not 12, and left out one particular constellation out of the Zodiac. It is called Ophiuchus, a ‘snake holder’, portrayed in some illustrations as a muscular man holding an anaconda in the sky.

Ophiuchus, considered a healer, is believed to symbolise the quest for education and enlightenment. People born under this zodiac sign are said to share those traits, and sadly they have been discriminated against.

NASA has stirred up a real hornets’ nest. The rectification of Babylonians’ error at long last has had a devastating impact on believers in horoscope. For, it is now clear that millions of people have got the wrong star signs for no fault of theirs.

Moreover, NASA scientists tell us that owing to a tiny wobble in the earth's axis, the position of those constellations has shifted. In other words, constellations are no longer in the same spots today as they were when the ancient Babylonians were gazing at the night skies.  They have explained this phenomenon for the benefit of the layman: "When the Babylonians first invented the 12 signs of zodiac, a birthday between about July 23 and August 22 meant being born under the constellation Leo. Now, 3,000 years later, the sky has shifted because Earth’s axis (North Pole) doesn’t point in quite the same direction."

Refuting claims that it is updating the astrological signs, NASA says it has not done so as it studies astronomy not astrology. What it has left unsaid is that it does not consider astrology worth its while.

NASA has sought to play it safe without locking horns with astrologers. (It has far more important things to do!) Denying the claim being made in some quarters that it has changed Zodiac signs, it says it has only done the math and explained how astrology is not astronomy. One is reminded of what Voltaire has famously said: ‘Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy––the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.’ Perhaps, NASA didn’t want to put it so bluntly lest it should have to fight propaganda and cyber wars with the fans of the fans of the aforesaid mad daughters.

Now that NASA has set the cat among the pigeons, it will be interesting to see what the on-going debate on issues related to Ophiuchus lead to.

There are bound to be counterarguments in justification of the discrimination against the heavenly doctor, so to speak. Astrology is multi-billion-dollar industry, besides being a very effective propaganda instrument, which even the so-called enlightened West employed during the World War II in a bid to demoralize each other.

Meanwhile, we are not short of political leaders who flaunt their ‘raja yoga’, which is said to indicate that they are destined to rule this country. They may not take kindly to the NASA revelation, which has caused them to doubt whether they have got the correct zodiac signs. Crafty astrologers, like the one who served the former President, may now be able to blame their wrong predictions on ancient Babylonians, who, in all their wisdom, left out Ophiuchus, the snake holder, from the star signs.