unavoidable and necessary
oh ho, once again, there are those that believe that the expulsion of tamils from colombo was ‘unavoidable’ and ‘necessary’. you have to love it, those are always the excuses that those that have no idea what’s truly going on and have no actual policies or opinions on the matter use; oh sorry sir, it is bad, but unavoidable and necessary. oh sorry, i know it sucks, but it’s unavoidable and necessary.
well here’s some news for you, there were a whole bunch of people, including george bush, that felt the completely immoral and unjust war in iraq was unavoidable and necessary. there were a whole bunch of people, including adolf hitler, who thought cleansing the german ‘empire’ of jews was unavoidable and necessary, so much so that they went to the extent of brutally murdering 11 million people to achieve this goal. yeah, the holocaust. beat that. unavoidable and necessary, eh?
hah, unavoidable and necessary; what rubbish. it makes me want to laugh and throw up at the same time, all these rich yuppies, living in their comfortable flats in foreign cities going to prestigious universities, creating nationalist groups on facebook, trying to seem as if they know, caving into the ‘it was unavoidable and necessary’ mentality just because it’s so easy, talking their way through with their pseudo-liberal ideals. ‘oh i’m very liberal, but that’s just a facade, i’m actually a bigot; you see i believe that not only is it ok, but that it is unavoidable and necessary to send hundreds of people based on their race back to where they came from.’
oh please, feed me another. as if this ‘back to where they came from’ rot isn’t the last thing this country needs. as if we cant see that just by promoting the notion that these tamils must go back to where they came from, we’re strengthening the idea that this is not their country to begin with.
hello?! they are ‘informants’, ’spies’, sent here on ’suicide missions’. sure, because of those few that the system does not have the resources nor the intelligence to pick out and find, every single tamil person needs to be penalized for the actions of LTTE. sure, every single tamil person supports and works for the LTTE, haven’t you heard? oh it’s ok. they’re poor, they’re tamil, who gives? it’s not racist, it’s simply unavoidable and necessary! the government is simply ensuring the safety of the general public in colombo (oh no, not by any means their own asses), and of course the tamil people aren’t a part of this ‘general public’! the government has no responsibility towards them, or their safety.
listen up, folks. the law cannot, and does not, forbid anyone that is a citizen of this country from residing anywhere in this country. you cannot simply pounce on people one morning, and giving them no time, no rhyme nor reason, pack them away like sardines in a can onto a bus and send them on their way to a place in which their safety is so under threat that they might as well be dead.
more than this being an extreme act of racism, an insensitive violation of the most fundamental human rights, a move that is bound to make things ten times worse, a move that further proves to the tamil community is sri lanka that the gosl does not care for them, and that they will always remain a minority that isn’t cared about and does not have the protection of the state nor its law, more than being immoral, unjust or wrong, it was ILLEGAL. it was illegal, and yet it could not have been done without the involvement of a superior authority given the extent of military involvement. corruption, much? injustice, much?
the protest at the lipton circus on wednesday beckoned to more than 700 people. and for once, protestors saw results. a big heads up to everyone that came, it is evidence to the fact that really, a difference can be made.
some people live in an alternate reality in which this was unavoidable and necessary. for them, i have only pity.
well said!
Comment by galleblogger — June 11, 2007 @ 10:25 am
electra, why we cannot protect this country and wipe out the Tiger terror is because dual-faced sinhalese like you [you people do not worth to be called part of that great nation which built sri lanka since thousands of years]. tamils are never like that, that’s the reason tiger terror is so much rooted in this country. I bet my life on the fact that any one of those pettah tamil lodgers would’ve provided cover to a LTTE suicide carder. these places were the “dressing rooms” for suicide bombers. if someone said evicting tamils was discrimination, well that’s the handiwork of LTTE. they have taken the state to the point that “every Tamil is a Tiger”. And it’s true, although you peacenicks don’t agree. All Tamils support LTTE. they are united, unlike sinhalese.
sinhalese become foreigners when they’re born in another country or hold dual passports. that’s because they’re so selfish to the point that they don’t care what happens to the sinhalese nation cause they can catch the next plane and get the hell out.
what actually was an operation to evict tamils who were loitering in colombo suspiciously and without reason is a chance for you people to shout and disgrace the country. perhaps then you’d get some more cash to your peacenick NGOs from some separatist scandinavian nation.
why don’t you ever speak up when LTTE craps up the peace process? murders our forces in colombo in broad daylight? are you only sympathetic towards LTTE suspects? you people try to give the world the image that sri lanka consists of sinhalese who daily abduct and kill tamils, and don’t let them live in colombo and suburbs etc. but the real situation is something else. it is sinhalese rights which are being grossly violated. can sinhalese live among tamils in north as tamils who live here? within 24hours you’ll get massacred. you people never shout about that. cause no one gives money to voice the sinhala buddhist rights violations. the scandoinavians and other western countries [which you represent] never want peace in SL. that’s why they fund the LTTE and the bogus minority rights cause. they never want us to prosper cause they only want them as the prosperous nations in the world.
Tamils have more than enough rights here in SL now, rights that no other minority of their percentage has anywhere. they have nothing to fight, but the west finds them to keep the war and unrest situation in countries like SL. and what you’re doing is to support them.
anyways people like you, who weren’t even born here will never understand. cause you wouldn’t feel for this country and have no national identity as such. that explains the situation plain enough.
Comment by patriot — June 11, 2007 @ 10:27 am
“All Tamils support LTTE”
Try telling that to the Tamils who have had members of their families shot by the LTTE.
Ethnic conflicts are never black and white as some of you war-mongering dumbasses (from both sides) like to think.
Fuck you and your generalization. Asshole.
Comment by Theena — June 11, 2007 @ 10:55 am
being able to protest as the above photo shows how “discriminated” tamil rights are. try doing that somewhere above anuradhapura, about sinhalese right violated in the north and east [like which tamil rights are nowhere violated in SL] duh.
pretend to be blind. none of you peacenick fancy stuff there, eh?
Comment by patriot — June 11, 2007 @ 11:00 am
bbruahahahahaha! patriot, what an idiot! hahahhahha
scandinavian? hahhahhahha
ngos? bruahhahhaha
LOSER. hahaha!
Comment by galleblogger — June 11, 2007 @ 11:09 am
i hold no dual passport and have no plans, nor means, of running off to any other country. i am sri lankan through and through, i have lived here all my life, i went to a private turned semi government school here and sat the local syllabus’ through to the end of my school career. i represent no one other than myself, my opinions are no one’s other than my own.
patriot: ‘why don’t you ever speak up when LTTE craps up the peace process?’ this is a failing on my part. it is true i am not a very loyal nor a very reliable political blogger. i blog when i feel like it, when something inspires me, or on the other hand, provokes me. this post was written after i read something written by someone i know on the wall of a facebook group called “stop the goverment of sri lanka from ethnic cleansing”. i was deeply disheartened, disappointed and shocked by some of the uninformed and ignorant opinions formed there, especially those of the people that i know.
perhaps i am never provoked to comment on the LTTE’s wrongdoings because there are already so many voices expressing their distaste for the LTTE so very loudly and articulately. perhaps i only become provoked enough to blog about it everytime the gosl does something infuriating, because then, in contrast, there aren’t that many people willing to make the same kind of hoo haa as they do when the LTTE is found violating the process. both sides are equally responsible for the mess, and i will never deny that.
but it is people like you that are responsible for the bigoted and racist mindset that the younger masses thrive on today; this false sense of nationalism. it is fake and insubstantial, you want a sinhalese nation which is HARDLY nationalistic of you, it shows you have no pride in the cultural diversity of our country, in which our traditions and history are so deeply rooted. it shows you have no shame in admitting you are a racist living in a multi ethnic country.
please stop questioning my national identity. i was born abroad purely out of coincidence, because my mother was studying there at the time. i was brought back as a baby of 6 months, and have never travelled to any country overseas, including that of my birth, for more than 2 weeks since.
your remarks get increasingly personal and hostile because you have no other means by which to attack me.
shame on you.
theena, galleblogger, thanks for comments.
Comment by electra — June 11, 2007 @ 11:27 am
Good post Electra. I skimmed “the patriot”’s comment cos there’s no point arguing with idiots who can’t even use capital letters to make their writing clearer and have no idea which way is up.
Comment by ravana — June 11, 2007 @ 11:50 am
Sri Lanka does not need to take its moral standards from the LTTE. I don’t know how many times that ‘but the LTTE did it first’ argument has been repeated, but it doesn’t get any less childish. Sri Lanka is better than that. We have a higher moral standard than the LTTE and we must live up to it.
Comment by indi — June 11, 2007 @ 11:57 am
Well said, Indi.
Its sad when apologists of the government keep referencing similar events carried out by the LTTE. The LTTE is a terrorist organization - nothing more, nothing less; screw those who think they are the “rightful representatives of the Tamil people” - and their actions are those of terrorists.
Terrorists are not accountable.
Terrorists have no morals.
Nothing.
A democratically elected government - which the Rajapakse government barely is - should be accountable and should not be morally corrupt.
By subscribing to this “Tit for tat” excuse, you are basically equating the government we voted in to a bunch of brainwashed lunatics running around with bombs strapped to their bodies.
That is the warped logic of our so-called patriots.
How incredibly tragic.
Comment by Theena — June 11, 2007 @ 1:32 pm
Ravana, I disagree that the Patriot’s comments should be ignored. These are the very sentiments that need to be addressed. It was such sentiments that were ultimately behind the pseudo ethnic cleansing that took place last week. The sad truth is, many Sinhalese people are frightened. And fear often causes us to do very irrational and counter-productive things.
The question remains, how does one try to influence people such as the Patriot against holding such unpatriotic views? For those of us who believe in inalienable rights for all citizens of this country…let me remind you, we are not the majority.
Sri Lanka is NOT better than that!! We have to eat humble pie and agree that Sri Lanka is just a hop, step and a jump away from total authoritarianism. Accepting this is a good place to start if we REALLY want to reform this country.
Thank God that the political dynamics were such that the Supreme Court came to our rescue and saved us from further embarrassment.
Patriot, I do not agree with you, but I understand where you are coming from. You probably have your story to tell. Everyone does. But the moment you start treating these issues subjectively, then everything can be easily justified. i.e. a boy who loses his family to an Army massacre grows up to be a black tiger. If we can’t justify that, then we must not justify opinions such as yours.
Thank you for reading.
Comment by Agradevaduta — June 11, 2007 @ 1:35 pm
undemocratic suggestion:
there are ppl who are supporting the “removal” (that’s putting it blandly) of the tamils in cmb, and much more. why doesnt this local blogosphere do the same to them?!?! REMOVE their comments? bruahhahahhahah! how would they like that? they could only write in their own blogs, howling at the moon and basically masturbate in front of a picture of a battlefield coz apparently that’s their pathetic turn on. (necrophiliacs?). hahhahaha! they deny rights to others, we deny “rights” to them!!! simple hu? hahhaha!
EXCLUDE them, hahahhhha! there’s nothing to learn from listenong to these ppl, and u cant change their flea sized brain (sorry fleas…didnt mean to offend you….it’s just your size…..hahhahah!)
Comment by galleblogger — June 11, 2007 @ 5:39 pm
may i ask why you feel the need to exaggerate? is that bc your thesis falls apart with out those exaggerations? or purely for stylistic reasons?
expulsion of tamils from colombo
really ? don’t you think that is an exaggeration? don’t you think it is absurd to believe that selection of 376 persons out of hundreds of thousand of tamils in colombo, and 15000+ tamils in lodges, and 5000 in lodges examined that day was done on an ethnic basis ? may be you have not heard of the other criteria such lack of identification and reason for staying, even though they were widely reported ?
you ignore them i will not argue about them.
the law cannot, and does not, forbid anyone that is a citizen of this country from residing anywhere in this country.
that is the ideal but that is not the truth anywhere in the world. in fact all laws curtail rights.the courts determine the limits on applicability of laws. not you. and when the situation is new you cannot say which side is right until court decides ( as it did ) .that is one of the reasons why supreme court is there .
-
i see it has come to the different moral standards for ltte and government argument.
yes government should not adapt terrorist moral standards.
my problem is with ppl who use it ( mostly to escape criticism that they have not condemned ltte as they do gosl ) . most ppl who say this ( except theena here perhaps) also advocate peace with ltte and that would inevitably involve giving it power, unreformed, and armed. isn’t that …errr ‘wrong’( we talking of moral after all) ? shouldn’t they actually be advocating defeat of ltte ( with legitimate military force if needs be ) ? precisely bc we do not have the same moral standards as ltte ? in addition to our duty to the plaight of sri lankans who are, will, and were, victims of ltte.
in other words shouldn’t we defend our moral values so clearly under threat from ltte ?
what say you ?
Comment by sittingnut — June 12, 2007 @ 1:26 am
i get what your saying and i agree with you. i did however have a problem with this paragraph:
all these rich yuppies, living in their comfortable flats in foreign cities going to prestigious universities, creating nationalist groups on facebook, trying to seem as if they know, caving into the ‘it was unavoidable and necessary’ mentality just because it’s so easy, talking their way through with their pseudo-liberal ideals. ‘oh i’m very liberal, but that’s just a facade, i’m actually a bigot; you see i believe that not only is it ok, but that it is unavoidable and necessary to send hundreds of people based on their race back to where they came from.’
and here is why- you’ve stereotyped all those who’ve assented to the govt policy into rich pseudo/ wannabe liberals who really don’t give a shit. this could be true in some cases but you must remember that the chintaya appeal was to the lower middle classes. Profiling is what we are condemning, why are you bringing yourself down to the level of the govt? That is not the spirit of liberalism…
Comment by saber — June 12, 2007 @ 4:04 am
thanks for putting this up electra. well said.
Comment by brandix — June 12, 2007 @ 6:55 am
Hey.. I haven’t looked at your blog for a while and just saw you’d written this, which I wish I’d read earlier. I had to write an essay the other day for this sort of 6th form discussion group, and I chose the very same topic. It was something that really made me angry and ashamed and I wanted to provoke some these feelings in my classmates. In writing the essay I felt that I should try to see things from the government’s perspective too, and how they might possibly have been able to justify it… and that was very hard to do so. Evicting people almost randomly from their lodgings was hardly going to yield any real results, and would only widen the gap. Any idiot could have seen that.
I also found it so hard to believe that so many different justifications and answers were coming from all the different areas of government and administration… it’s just insane. The thing I find scariest is that they would not have stopped it if not for international outcry, showing they didn’t really see it was wrong at all.
Hmmm… here I sit in my chair not doing anything about it, just like everyone else..
Great post E.
Comment by char — June 17, 2007 @ 6:11 pm
It all depends on who is at the driving seat at any given moment and how the person at the driving seat can help you. We are all selfish sods, aren’t we? :p
Comment by Nobody — July 21, 2007 @ 11:59 pm