Imported solutions for local problems

Sri Lankan politicians have a penchant for trying out imported remedies for local problems. For example whenever a problem like scarcity in the field of agriculture crops up, politicians at the helm not knowing their onions, promptly place an order for imports. This is true of onions potatoes as well many industrial products such as safety pins and bicycles that the country can produce with ease given proper encouragement and assistance. While these ivory-tower theoreticians are seeking remedies in forty foot containers from overseas, onion and potato farmers are taking their own lives unable to make both ends meet.

We however don’t intend to discuss this bizarre thinking on agriculture and industry. Instead we would like to comment on their ‘import mania’ in respect of the national question as manifest in their much publicised tours abroad in search of the holy grail of sorts that a negotiated settlement of the conflict is to them.

Recently a delegation of Sri Lankan parliamentarians, their minions and Buddhist monks, we are told, had been taken to Bangladesh by an NGO on a week long ‘familiarisation tour’ to study what is going on there between the Shanti Bahini and the Bangladesh government.

So far these parliamentarians have had many such visits to various parts of the globe on similar missions. But what has been the outcome of this kind of globe trotting by way of a contribution to resolving Sri Lanka’s conflict? Nothing really. Other than boring viewers of government owned television to death with their never-ending discussions after they return, they have done but little in regard to contributing anything tangible towards settling the crisis.

It is not disputed here that they should study conflicts of other nations and exchange views with them on their experience. Ideas we believe should meet and mate and new knowledge thereby be generated so that shibboleths could be abandoned to accommodate hitherto unaccepted opposing viewpoints. Such a process contributes to progress of the world.

But what is at issue here is whether these numerous foreign trips have made the thinking of our politicians any better. Take for example the manner in which the two main political parties are conducting themselves in the NWP. They are going at each other hissing like mad bulls. The half baked Fox agreement lies torn and scattered to the four winds. The UNP wants the government to jump feet first into negotiations with the LTTE and the government is pussyfooting around the issue. The UNP also claims that it has the solution to the problem but would not part with it. That is for the solution to be made known, the UNP will have to be returned to power. Isn’t this a pointer that all those lessons the peaceniks have imparted to parliamentarians so ardently have been in vain as manifest in the intransigence on the part of the UNP and the PA?

It is clear to any discerning mind that it is not so much their ignorance of the politicians and others of the global situation that has perpetuated the conflict but the intransigence on the part of the LTTE to lay down arms and that of the UNP and the PA to reach a consensus on what to do with the LTTE.

Anyone who is familiar with the ethnic conflicts of other nations has off pat the vast difference that exists between them and the LTTE, especially between the LTTE and the IRA or Shanti Bahini. It is therefore difficult for the mawkish peaceniks purblind to reality and their political friends to relate the experience of other countries to ours. How a parliamentarian can familiarise himself with the intricacies in the peace process in Bangladesh or in the U. K. On a whistle-stop visit to those countries, on the other hand, evades rational thinking.

The energies and resources of the peaceniks can be put to better use than sending politicians on pigeon’s milk-missions abroad. The need of the hour is to bring the PA and the UNP together. Every other thing however publicised is secondary to it save the effective prosecution of the war against terrorism.