What’s happening in the Maldives looks like the Arab Spring in reverse. Maldivian Winter if you will. The police and security forces have overthrown an elected President and are now beating people in the streets. Anni (former President Nasheed) is calling for elections but no response from the government, as it is. From a friend there I hear that there’s been a warrant issued for Anni and that many people have fled rather than face the police.

Alas, Anni has resigned. The former democracy campaigner against an implacable dictator implausibly became President. Then, almost as quickly, he fell, largely to forces of the former dictator, and his own fractured opposition. Anni actually used to hang out in Colombo talking about regime change and we kinda laughed at him. Then he somehow won the 2008 election. Now, just as surprising, he’s been forced out in what looks like a soft coup.

Apparently Presidential Secretary Lalith Weeratunga has said that the name Ministry Of Crab violates the Constitution and possibly the company registrars act. This is all based on an off-hand joke Mahinda made about how many Ministries he has. I’m going to go with a no.

The Sri Lankan Prime Minister is (unofficially) a ceremonial post. Mahinda just parks old stalwarts there, like DM Jayaratne. I don’t know what he does, but every now and then he comes up with some statement that confounds and/or offends.

Some captions need to be rewritten. Here is the Daily Mirror on the photo above… This might be more interesting: “Here MP Ruwan Wijeyawardene hands over a cheque to his cousin, the UNP Leader Ranil Wickremesinghe at his office yesterday. As a full disclosure, Ruwan Wijewardena is also the son of the owner of this newspaper. The cheque is intended for repairs following an intra-party dispute over Ranil’s continued leadership of the UNP.”

The 13th amendment is viewed as part of political reconciliation in Sri Lanka. It (devolution of power to the provinces) has been ignored since day one. In that sense it just hasn’t worked, and isn’t working. I’m also beginning to think it’s not even a good idea. What changed my mind was the words of a Tamil politician, Arun Tambimuttu:

This is just a whole academy of fail. The UNP launched a website today which the Daily Mirror did a story about. The banner in the photo read what I thought was xnews.com, which is a UFO site. The Daily Mirror transcribed the URL as www.xnesws.com, which is not anything, and they didn’t hyperlink either. After really thinking about it I figured out that the URL is srilankaxnews.com. Also, it sucks.

Governments are almost uniformly disliked, because they suck. Their main selling point is that they suck significantly less than no government, or really bad government, but that’s a hard sell.

Word is that dog culling will not resume (previously here, here and here). Apparently that was just some shit Minister Maithripala Sirisena said.

A lot of people are protesting online that no stray dogs in Sri Lanka should be killed. But some should. It is not healthy to have stray, mangy, bitey dogs running around a city, not healthy for anyone. Normal policy is you put them in pounds, make them possible for adoption and euthanize them if they’re not. Vaccinating or sterilizing them and sending them back out isn’t a good option.