This is what I hear. Apparently the cops tried to do a spot search for drugs and the prisoners got pissed. The place is overcrowded and open, so the cops and guards are always outnumbered. Anyways, all hell breaks loose and there’s prisoners on the roof, also throwing rocks on the road. Some journalists get onto a balcony across the street and they hear gunfire.
This is only one column, cause I think I got fired from the Leader. They weren’t happy about a critical piece (critical of The Sunday Leader) I blogged a year ago. They also weren’t happy that I was also writing for The Nation, which I have been doing for months now. The latter I guess I understand, but I think I’d rather be free to write what and where I want.
Running around all day. Raining. These are two columns for the papers this Sunday. The Ceylon Today was also out, uh, today. New paper, but I couldn’t find a copy (didn’t try very hard). The first column was on international tourism for the Nation, but they don’t seem to have included the infographic at all. You can read the text there but I recommend viewing the graph here: World Tourism Rankings.
Professor Ratnajeevan Hoole once had to flee Sri Lanka because he spoke out against the LTTE. Now he’s left again, this time because he spoke out against Douglas Devananda and the EPDP. What does that tell you about the EPDP, and the government’s support for them? “This time he had to leave, he said, because of his differences with the lone Tamil Minister in Sri Lankan Cabinet, Douglas Devananda.”
I should be on Al Jazeera this week, on The Stream. I’m a UK expert, commenting on the phone-hacking scandal. Just kidding, but isn’t it funny that Sri Lanka experts are usually sitting abroad? Not that I’m an expert, I’ve made clear my dubious nationality, but I guess I do live here and don’t have enough money to fly out, which is a sort of citizenship.
Lasantha Wickremetunga was killed in January 2009. Many thought his widow, Sonali Samarasinghe Wickrematunge, would take over his paper, The Sunday Leader, but she left the country. Now she’s reemerged with a web publication of her own – Lanka Independent. It’s pretty good. I’ve been following it through its consultant editor Uvindu Kurukulasuriya and only just realized that Sonali was behind the whole thing.
In 1956, Tamil leaders gathered on Galle Face Green in peaceful protest. They were broken up by violence and thugs. This was attributed to Sinhala chauvinism. Perhaps it was just because there was no Al Jazeera. Mediated and socially networked people from Tunisia to Yemen have been able to mount serious challenges to oppressive governments and win. This is largely because nations are more connected globally and people are more connected to each other. This begs the question, how would non-violence have affected the Tamil struggle in the past, and how could it affect it today?
The first time I met Lasantha Wickremetunge he was already dead. Like many important people in my life – Kurt Cobain, for example – I discovered him after he was dead. I first saw Lasantha in a coffin, turning the corner from Kirimandala Mawatha onto a crowded Baseline Road. I saw future MP Harsha de Silva walking near the railing and we walked together for a while, exchanging the spoken version of a dejected shrug. I remember the crowd at Kanatte Cemetary. It stretched round the block. Last Saturday, I went to his gravesite again, unfashionably late, this time as a Sunday Leader employee. I saw MP Eran Wickramaratne walking out, and the young editorial staff still around the grave. It wasn’t a massive turnout like before. I know that Lasantha is lost. Sometimes I wonder if he lost.
Behind every conspiracy, there’s a Private First Class, getting the coffee. There have always been leaks. WikiLeaks is just a digital bucket. Bradley Manning had been busted down to Private First Class for assaulting an officer. It was the latest in a series of troubles for the 22 year old blond, almost cherubic soldier. He wrote in e-mails that he felt “regularly ignored” by his superiors “except when I had something essential, then it was back to ‘Bring me coffee, then sweep the floor’” — NYTimes. This was compounded by the pressure of being gay (by many accounts) in an army where that was still grounds for discharge and discrimination. In a chat with computer hacker Adrian Lamo he confessed “ive been so isolated so long… i just wanted tobe nice, and live a normal life… but events kept forcing me to figureout ways to survive… smart enough to know whats going on, but helplessto do anything… no-one took any notice of me” (spelling errors in original).
Yesterday I wrote something in the Leader about how societies can collapse, including Sri Lanka if it follows the Chinese model, or China itself. “In his study of how complex societies collapse, anthropologist Joseph Tainter found a pattern. Civilizations from the Mayans to the Romans tended to follow a curve of development, a curve that often turns into a cliff. Essentially, they find a good resource and begin to grow. In order to manage this growth, they become more complex. As this resource runs out, that complexity becomes a burden and the society collapses.”
