{"id":190758,"date":"2018-05-22T12:40:43","date_gmt":"2018-05-22T07:10:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=190758"},"modified":"2018-05-25T13:19:16","modified_gmt":"2018-05-25T07:49:16","slug":"this-is-not-a-third-force-initiative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/this-is-not-a-third-force-initiative\/","title":{"rendered":"This Is Not A \u201cThird Force\u201d Initiative"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Emil van der Poorten<\/a> \u2013<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Emil van der Poorten<\/p><\/div>\n

The recent attention paid to an event designed to promote the Presidential candidacy of the man constantly accused of orchestrating the violence of the Rajapaksa Regime is fascinating, to say the least. An extensive description of the event titled \u201cThe Shindig at the Shangri-La<\/a>\u201d by the much-respected journalist Sarath de Alwis<\/a> has appeared both in the print and electronic media to wide acclamation and hardly needs embellishment here, being an excellent piece of commentary.<\/p>\n

That Tamasha, <\/i>if it has done nothing else, appears to have paved the way for various individuals to crawl out of the woodwork.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t take a crystal-gazer to explain why \u201cDirty\u201d Harry Jayawardena<\/a> was there. By the looks of it he had not had adequate (in his book) access to the goodies of the Yahapalanaya <\/i>lot and didn\u2019t have anything to lose by running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. After all, isn\u2019t that the time \u2013honoured strategy of businessmen all over the world? As for the multi-millionaire tea-magnate in attendance, one need hardly go beyond the motivation of \u201cDirty\u201d Harry to explain his presence.<\/p>\n

Out of the shadows of Singapore emerged the ersatz academic, Rohan Gunaratne<\/a>, whose \u201cfronting\u201d for the last regime ceased for a while, when the Sri Lankan populace dislodged his Rajapaksa patrons. Back he is, though, having picked up the scent of the goodies of power and one can expect a stream of pronouncements from that quarter given front-page prominence by the servile Sri Lankan media because, going on their track record in the past when they let him off the hook every time he talked rubbish on behalf of his patrons, they will do so again.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Seemingly conspicuous by his absence was Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span>If that absence was in fact the case, it could be attributable to the fact that the son of Mervyn de Silva hardly had to prove fealty to a regime when he had licked his wounds and returned to the ranks of the Rajapaksa horde after Mahinda had unceremoniously demoted him from a high profile posting that offered him all sorts of opportunities for puffing and preening and dropping Fidel Castro\u2019s name at every opportunity.<\/p>\n

Then there is the sycophant from the \u201cfree lap-top and interest free loan time\u201d who ended up at the apex of the journalistic dung-heap by virtue of being the head honcho of a newspaper.\u00a0<\/span>To put that particular rag in context, it was owned and operated by a man who provided the conduit for funds transferred to the late Mr. Prabhakaran to, successfully, prevent those under his control from voting for Ranil Wickremesinghe in the only Presidential election which that worthy would have won. This guy has emerged out of temporary retirement with his journalistic six-guns blazing! The bullets include calling anyone who disagrees with his sycophancy \u201cidiots\u201d and \u201cmorons\u201d and insinuating that their births were \u201cillegitimate\u201d. Such delightful people we have writing and receiving awards for their literary efforts in this country!<\/p>\n

The JVP\u2019s claim that \u201cThey are all the same\u201d (Unuth ekai, munuth ekai<\/i>) appeared to be confirmed by the fact that one from the upper echelon of the current regime has (proudly?) proclaimed that the keynote address constituted a ringing endorsement of the current Yahapalanaya<\/i> government\u2019s economic policies.\u00a0\u201cOut of the mouths of babes and sucklings (and UNP movers-and-shakers) come forth words of wisdom!\u201d because, unwittingly or otherwise, it has confirmed the fact that the proposed policies of the new Third Force were the same as those of the ruling coalition! Two peas in the same pod, don\u2019t you think?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It has been very apparent over recent months, that all the loud proclamations notwithstanding, there has been no real effort to bring to book those who pillaged this nation\u2019s treasury. The reason is very simple: they are all in this together and there is a very obvious pact which requires merely going through the motions of being on the side of the angels while pursuing the same satanic agenda of embezzling the Sri Lankan people\u2019s wealth or looking the other way when their buddies do so.<\/p>\n

To refer to all of this as the emergence of a \u201cThird Force,\u201d given the behaviour of its purported leader, as czar of all he surveyed when Mahinda Rajapaksa ruled the roost, is beyond ludicrous.\u00a0 <\/span>Does one have to detail the MiG purchase<\/a>, the Avante Garde<\/a> scandal, the White Vans<\/a> (minus licence plates) that had free rein\u00a0 <\/span>on the roads of this nation, the assault of Keith Noyahr, the death of Lasantha Wickrematunge, and the response to it in the public media, the fact that one newspaper editor, Frederica Jansz, had to seek political asylum overseas to avoid persecution by a so-called legal system that was controlled by the Rajapksa cabal, the\u00a0 <\/span>unresolved mystery of the 300-body mass grave found in Matale dating back to the time that the icon of the Third Force had military command of that area during the second Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna insurrection and other actions that would never<\/b> have been countenanced by any other democratic jurisdiction?<\/p>\n

Conspicuous by their absence at The Shindig at the Shangri La were Ranil Wickremesinghe and our President. Given what is happening in Sri Lankan politics at the moment, let\u2019s say that such absences could well have been described as inexplicable, because not only are they reading from the same script but are, in fact, ln the same staged production. Also, perhaps Sirisena\u2019s meeting with Mahinda Rajapaksa a short while ago at Basil \u201cMr 10%\u201d Rajapaksa\u2019s lodgings, made his presence at The Shindig redundant, matters of substance, probably, having been settled on the earlier occasion.<\/p>\n

The true significance of the gathering was that it served to confirm the direction in which this country is being inexorably steered. It seems fated to become the Philippines of South East Asia where, in the name of eradicating such evils as Federalism, drug-dealing, and child rape, your opponents can be liquidated and, since the vast majority of the population wouldn\u2019t even have known of their existence in the first place, would leave scarcely a ripple on the waters of Sri Lankan history. The only crime of those who will be \u201ctaken care of\u201d will have been opposition to a violent and corrupt regime. This is not some wild and woolly theory.\u00a0 <\/span>It is a simple statement of logical fact borne out by what has happened and is happening in other jurisdictions and was already here when \u201ctire-ing\u201d people who had seen neither hide nor hair of anything resembling a judge and jury was accepted as a means of dealing with \u201cthe enemy.\u201d Since 1971 we have cultivated a readiness to allow extra-judicial executions and to accept them as \u201cnormal.\u201d If what began at The Shindig at The Shangri-La reaches fruition you are going to see what is not supposed to happen \u2013 history repeating itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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