An elephant 'torture chamber' has been discovered
in Pannipitiya. Apparently the creatures are held in horrifying
conditions. This is strange news considering that the entire country is a
veritable torture chamber as far as jumbos go. There's been so much
wincing-in-pain for years and years. Each time elections are called, it's akin
to being jabbed with the henduwa in some tender part of the
body. Each time results are announced, jumbos groan with agony. So
what's this about Pannipitiya? That's just a small part of a large
torture chamber, isn't it?
Elephants are hogging the headlines, it
seems. Another man has been fined for illegally rearing four baby
elephants. It's a Rs. 100,000 fine. That's Rs. 25,000 per
elephant. Cheap. After all, some jumbos claim that their
fellow-pachyderms have been purchased and kept for millions and millions of
rupees. Indeed, if 'keeping elephants' is a violation of the law, the
relevant judge ought to slam hefty fines on the United People's Freedom
Alliance. That's if the AG's Dept can be persuaded file charges of
course. That's an elephantine process, we hear.
'India sure to vote for UNHRC resolution,' Suresh Premachandra
says. That's 'news'? Maybe Suresh actually believes the courtesies
mouthed by Indian politicians and diplomats about Sri Lanka been India's
friend and vice versa. People may have believed that some
time ago...well, a few decades ago, let's say in the 1960s, but not anymore.
Can you wake us up when you have something to tell us that we don't
already know Suresh?
Around 10,000 ahiguntikas or
gypsies are to be offered the option of obtaining special identity cards.
What's funny about this is that it is the Ministry of Wildlife Resources
Conservation that is making the offer. So they are 'wild', like wild
boar, wild buffalo, wild elephants etc? Animals, then? Would the ministry
proceed to give the same option to the val aliya, kulu meema, val oora,
mee minna, diviya, thith-muva etc., etc? And how about
politicians who operate as though they've just come out of the jungle?
Would they also be offered 'Special ID Cards?
President Mahinda Rajapaksa, in a not-so-veiled
reference to India, has said that Sri Lanka's foreign policy cannot be a 'parippu policy',
where foreign forces are brought into the country and the country's security
forces restricted to barracks. The parippu of course is
a reference to India dropping dhal when the Army was about to capture
Velupillai Prabhakaran. President Rajapaksa, like the people of Sri
Lanka, know the costs the country had to incur on account of that
'dumping'. So he's right. We can't have a 'parippu foreign
policy'. On the other hand we can't have a pol-mallum or
fruit-salad foreign policy either. Especially when it comes to
appointments in diplomatic missions abroad. It's one thing to pick people
outside the foreign service because of a human resource problem in the
ministry, but quite another to treat the Ministry of External Affairs as a
Retirement Option for 'friends of the regime'.
Balendran Jayakumari has been arrested for 'harbouring
a terrorist'. We know that few countries if any would think twice about
arresting anyone harbouring a terrorist in these days of terror. We hear
even high ranking officials in the UN system talking about 'zero-tolerance of
terrorism'. So when is Ban ki-Moon going to move for the arrest of a lady
called Navi Pillay? She's being harbouring terrorists for years
now. The LTTE kind, that is.
2 comments:
haha Elephant Torture Chamber story is really funny. Great cartoon too. And Navi Pillai one excellent.
For some time I have been trying to figure out why Chandrika Kumaratunge was going out of the way to denigrate the present government. It struck me when I read your comments about Navi Pillay. CK too is collecting Brownie Points singing off the same song sheet as the US perhaps for a job in the UN.
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