by our Defence correspondent
If champagne were available in the LTTE controlled regions of the Wanni, the Tigers would have got dead drunk last Monday.That was the day when the LTTE scored a huge victory over the government, with the help of a most unexpected ally: the Road Development Authority.

On Monday, RDA workers began dismantling the Victoria Bridge which has spanned the Kelani river.

Why would this make the LTTE happy, you may ask. The reason is that the Tigers have been targetting this bridge, and the three other bridges spanning the Kelani near Colombo, for many years, but have not been able to destroy any of them.

Now the RDA is doing them a favour and demolishing one bridge.

The strategic importance of any bridge is obvious. But the bridges over the Kelani near Colombo are by far the most vital arteries in this country's economy, connecting more than sixty percent of the country's exports producing factories with the port of Colombo.

Quite simply, if these bridges could be destroyed, the country's economy would collapse. And the LTTE are more than aware of this, judging by the repeated warnings given by police and army intelligence over the last several years.

The Road Development Authority may argue that the demolition of the Victoria Bridge does not matter, since the New Kelani Bridge, the Japan-Sri Lanka Friendship Bridge, and the Biyagama Bridge can handle the existing traffic.

But if the LTTE were to attack and destroy one of these remaining bridges, there is no way that only two bridges could handle the traffic load.

Already, huge traffic jams can be seen daily stretching across the Peliyagoda areas, with bottlenecks caused at the New Kelani Bridge and the Japan-Sri Lanka Friendship Bridge by the closing of the Victoria Bridge.

In our defence column of March 11 this year, we warned exclusively that the RDA was finalizing plans to destroy the bridge. We gave a detailed account of the importance of the bridge, and the fact that the Tigers would love to see them destroyed.

In fact, we gave a detailed account of the impact on the country, and on the war, which is funded to a large extent by government earnings from industry.

We quote from that column: "....There will be no money for anything. Without money to fund the war, the government will be forced to go back to negotiations — on the Tigers' own terms. Years of campaigning on the battlefields will be thrown away. The soldiers in the north may as well pack up and come home".

Obviously, our urgent warnings fell on deaf ears. The RDA has its own little agenda, and its officials can't see the woods from the trees.

Let's take a look at the roads which go across these bridges. First of all, there's the Kandy road. Also the Kurunegala road, which connects the Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa districts with Colombo. Then there's the Negombo road, which continues on to Chilaw and Puttalam.

Apart from the areas covered by the High Level, Low Level and Galle Roads, every other region needs these four bridges.

If the bridges are destroyed, most of the country's garment factories would simply close down, unable to deliver goods or get raw materials which all go through the port.

The tea industry would undergo severe hardships. Tourism would collapse since tourists wouldn't be able to get to Colombo or the south from Katunayake.

Get the picture? Obviously, the RDA doesn't.

What is baffling is that the pundits at the Ministry of Defence have turned a Nelsonian blind eye to what the RDA is doing. After all, the ministry has the authority to prevent this, by telling the RDA that the bridge is too important to destroy.

What, we would like to know, is the use of dozens of policemen and soldiers having been assigned to guard all four bridges for years, when the RDA is allowed to come along and simply knock one down?

Our readers may ask why the RDA is pulling down the bridge. The reason is that it wants to build a new bridge in the same place.

But the bizarre aspect of it is that, while any sane person would first build a new bridge somewhere close by and then tear down the old one, the RDA is doing it in reverse. That is, they are tearing down the old one and then going to build the new one.

This new bridge, which is phase two of the Japan-Sri Lanka Friendship Bridge, will take at least two years to complete. That's two years for the LTTE to strike at the other bridges.

In case some bright spark in the government accuses us of giving the LTTE ideas, we must add here that the destruction of the bridge has already been given much publicity on state television, and the traffic police have broadcast warnings on SLBC to motorists to avoid the traffic jams. So the Tigers are well aware of this golden opportunity which has been put on their laps.

To a layman, it may seem that a bridge is a very difficult thing to blow up. But this is not correct.

Bridges are very delicately constructed, to withstand pressure from the flow of the river on one side, and the weight of vehicles from above. They are not meant to be able to take the blast of hundreds of kilograms of high explosives going off near them, either from above, or from below.

In any case, a bridge even slightly damaged by such a blast would not be one which you should run hundreds of containers over every day.

The LTTE is well experienced in blowing up bridges, as our frontline troops are well aware. The Tigers even have a group of cadres who are specially trained in this dastardly art. Blowing up a bridge is child's play to them, if there aren't sufficient guards around it.

We will not give details of the way in which the police and army are guarding the bridges, for obvious reasons. Not that it matters, since hundreds of thousands of people see the security precautions every day, as they cross the bridges.

Interestingly, the Victoria Bridge had actually been condemned as far back as 1993, and was actually closed for a short time. But it was found that the other bridges couldn't handle the traffic load, and this bridge was reopened for one-way traffic only.

Containers and other heavy vehicles were not supposed to use this bridge, but used the one next to it, allowing cars and vans to use the old one.

It speaks volumes of the incompetency of the RDA that no new bridge has been built since then, and that the country is still relying on this ancient one.

It's still not too late to stop the demolition of the Victoria Bridge, which will take several weeks to complete. We hope that someone in the government will wake up. They all seem to be fast asleep on this issue.