Sri Lanka It's Happening

June 13, 2005

By a strange coincidence, just as I finished reading Spit and Polish by Carl Muller a burger friend of mine called. I have precious few friends left in Sri Lanka through no fault of my own. They have all migrated.

I can count the number of Burger friends I have with the fingures of just one hand and have a few fingures left. The friend who called has good news and bad news. He is getting married. That's the good news. The bad news (for me anyway) is that he is leaving for australia soon afterwards.

That set me thinking what the hell am I doing here when everyone else is leaving? until this week I have not seriously thought of living abroad. But deja vu, the events of the past week has left me convinced that the country is sliding back towards the kind of situation we had in the late eighties.

In the eighties para military forces, the government and the JVP went on a killing spree, they tried to concentrate on killing each other. Their preferred method of identifying their opponents were with the aid of informants. Often the informants gave their information only under duress. Since at least one person still dies each month in policy custody, you may rightly interpret duress as torture. And as you might guess the informants' information was not reliable. The end result is that most of the dead were innocent.

During this time the economy ground to a halt. Even if we don't have another insurgency the economy is already going southwards while the inflation is going upwards. Over the last month or so foreign investors have been net sellers at the stock market. All this points to one thing: this country doesn't have a future. Who do we thank for that? the patriots.

Posted by raditha at June 13, 2005 3:47 PM