TNA’s proposal on a ‘common’ candidate
Posted on May 18th, 2014
S. Akurugoda
According to media reports TNA has proposed to make Northern Provincial Chief Minister C.V Wigneswaran the common candidate at the next Presidential Election.
All the Presidential elections we had since its inception, other than the last Presidential election conducted in 2010, were direct contests between the UNP (as a single party) and the SLFP (supported by smaller parties). The candidates, except those led by UNP and SLFP were merely contenders by name. Since the last Presidential election was conducted soon after the defeat of LTTE amidst maximum popularity of the incumbent President, while that of the UNP leader was its opposite, the contest was that between the leader of the SLFP and the candidate shared by those who were in the common opposition to the war against terrorism with the belief that war against LTTE is unwinnable or due to the political or personal grudge leading to a regime change. The so-called ‘Common’ candidate was not only the candidate of the above groups but also the candidate of the so-called international community who were discontented due the defeat of terrorism on our soil due to political and economic reasons.
Since the major opposition party UNP is in disarray, its current leadership may not be considered as its own candidate even within the party itself. It is very unlikely that the DNA and JVP will support the current UNP leader as their so-called Common Candidate. Hence, there become a necessity for the same group of disgruntled elements (both in and outside the country) to have a so-called common candidate, similar to last time, other than the UNP leadership who could split the majority Sinhala Buddhist votes. That is why we hear the name of Ven Moduluwe Sobhitha, as a possible candidate. Although Ven Sobhitha is now a favourite among the above disgruntled groups, leaving no room any more among Sinhala Buddhists who respected him highly as their saviour prior to his change of camp, those who are behind the move must be thinking of aiming two targets with one stone. One is to split the majority Sinhala Buddhist votes with the aim of regime change and the other is to make use of a Buddhist monk to do the maximum possible harm to the image of the religion at the same time by dragging a Buddhist monk to contest the country’s highest executive post.
The only interest of the so-called Common Candidate was to defeat the incumbent President. Since the possibility of defeating the President is not a reality, due to lack of an alternative political figure acceptable to the majority , those who are interested in destabilising the country may try their best to achieve their goal by hook or crook. The most possible way is to raise the communal or the religious tension. If the TNA’s nominee is not acceptable, one TNA MP living comfortably among Sinhala people in Colombo while promoting racial separation, wants to know the reason why. The reason is very simple.
The writer remembers the days when C.A.S Marikkar of SLFP /MEP (people used to call him Sinhala Marikkar) was elected as the MP of Kadugannawa lectorate in 1956, M. Abusali of UNP was elected as the MP of Balangoda on several elections and many more of such representations where the Sinhala population within those areas were around 80%. The monument erected by T. Thambirajah, who was elected Mayor of Matale City Council in early 1960s by the majority Sinhala voters, to commemorate our national heroes Gongalegoda Banda and Pruan Appu, can still be seen where the two heroes were executed by the British imperialists. None of the above elected representatives appeared for their ethnicity. They represented the common interests of the majority who voted them to power. Majority Sinhala Buddhist people vote according to the party they prefer and not according to the race, religion or the cast they belonging to. This was indicative when candidates with other faiths are still being elected where the Sinhala Buddhist are in majority. Unfortunately, this feature is not visible in areas where the other ethnic or religious communities are in majority.
TNA is the parliamentary wing of the LTTE and we have not forgotten their role during the LTTE terrorism. C.V. Wigneswaran is now a TNA leading member holding the position of NPC’s Chief ministerial post and according to his latest statements he is not even happy with the PC system and asking more ethnic divisions. TNA politicians , who lives comfortably in Colombo while doing everything possible to create a mono-ethnic state or a region for Tamils and/or Tamil speaking people, are opposing the resettlement of 21,000 displaced Sinhala people who lived in the Jaffna district in 1971. Any political party agreeing to nominate a candidate from TNA is agreeing to racial separatism.
Under representative democracy, although the sovereign power said to be remains with the eligible citizens, the political power is exercised through the elected representatives. Thus it is dangerous to elect a President with executive powers, to rule a country, who is the nominee of a political party representing only the racial interests with a background of supporting armed separatists in many ways.
S. Akurugoda
May 18th, 2014 at 1:38 pm
MR will be laughing.
He will have the EASIEST ride to his third term if this OSAMA BIN LADIN becomes the common candidate.
Very easy to link him to LTTE and discredit the loser. He cannot win even 20% of the vote. Bring him on!
May 18th, 2014 at 2:14 pm
Hope my comment will stay.
There is a NEW story created by pro-LTTE groups. It says MR was SHOCKED when he came to know LTTE Baby Brigade leader Balachandran was “killed”. He had said, “This should not have happened.”
IF true, he cannot be considered a TRUE patriot. Terrorists are terrorists irrespective of their age.
Osama Bin Ladin’s children, Saddam Hussein’s children and Goebbels’ children were either killed or caused to be killed for a good cause.
Sympathy, etc. have a place – AFTER the death of a terrorist. NOT before. King Dutugemunui fought and KILLED Ellalan. NO respect or sympathy stopped him. But respected AFTER he died, not before. He had NO regrets.
I hope the story about MR is NOT true.
May 18th, 2014 at 2:56 pm
If TNA proposes Vigneswaran to be the “Common Candidate” at the next Presidential election, it will be the most hilarious and definitely MR will be “laughing” as Lorenzo stated above. Yet, if Mr. Vigneswaran remained neutral and did not succumbed to TNL trap, but displayed responsible political vision for the entire country, I would think, he would have proved to be a candidate to be considered. Unfortunately he performed “Hara-Kiri” in joining the TNL and he is not even worthy of being called a “Chief Minister”. By joining the TNL camp that lives for a “Separate State with Tamil Nation” agenda and becoming its Chief Minister of the Northern Province, he has already proved to be “Professional Bastard” in the naming of such people by Plato.
If on the other hand, UNP put forward Ranil Wickramasinghe, I do not think any other self respecting political party in the Opposition will bat an eye lid to reject it . In that scenario too MR will have a “Gala Kiribath” breakfast at Temple Trees, the very next morning of that announcement. Then comes Rev. Sobitha’s show; (Prathiharya) of going for a “Common Candidate”. At one stage he himself declared to be the “Common Candidate” and as if “Realization” has dawned on him ,he has decided to step down. We also saw very recently how he carried on a campaign with other religious leaders against the “Casinos” and after the very initial meeting left out the non Buddhist Leaders and took along with him the rest of the High Ranking Buddhist Priestly Leaders to attend a “Dane” at the hotel belonging to the very partner (present license holder of Casino) of James Packer of Australia. Now he is embarked on a “Mission” of finding a candidate. Witnessing all this “Drama” we Sri Lankans are wondering whether it is yet again “Madmulana Gil Marts” that are playing around. The way “HE” kept the mouths shut of all the “Religious Dignitaries” including Malwatta and Asgiriya, who signed a “Joined Petition” against the “Casinos” move; anything he is capable of and will also makes possible. The next is DNF of Sarath Fonseka. He must by now realize, he is not the “Man To Do Politics” in Sri Lanka. He has a long, long way to travel.
The only other remaining contender is JVP. As at present this party under the new leadership of a young and upcoming man viz. Anura Kumara Dissanayake holds some promise and it looks he and the party are making some progress on a disciplined level. Yet we have to watch how “soon” that progress could make an “indelible” mark on the political field as against; again the “Madmulana Tactics” and “Gil Marts”.
We are watching a good ” Tele Drama”.
May 18th, 2014 at 3:25 pm
Lorenzo,
You imply that outsiders kiiled the Goebbels children; that is WRONG.
Magda Goebbels, the wife of Joseph Goebbels, killed their six children with cyanide in a suicide pact with her husband. They did not want to survive the demise of Nazi Germany. There are eyewitness accounts of the event on record.
May 18th, 2014 at 3:28 pm
Lorenzo,
More about Magda Goebbels last days, from Wikipedia.com:
………………………….
She appears to have contemplated and talked about killing her children a month in advance.[35] According to her friend and sister-in-law (from first marriage) Ello Quandt, she told her that they were all going to take poison.
“We have demanded monstrous things from the German people, treated other nations with pitiless cruelty. For this the victors will exact their full revenge…we can’t let them think we are cowards. Everybody else has the right to live. We haven’t got this right—we have forfeited it. I make myself responsible. I belonged. I believed in Hitler and for long enough in Joseph Goebbels…Suppose I remain alive, I should immediately be arrested and interrogated about Joseph. If I tell the truth I must reveal what sort of man he was–must describe all that happened behind the scenes. Then any respectable person would turn from me in disgust. It would be equally impossible to do the opposite–that is to defend what he has done, to justify him to his enemies, to speak up for him out of true conviction…That would go against my conscience. So you see, Ello, it would be quite impossible for me to go on living. We will take the children with us, they are too good, too lovely for the world which lies ahead. In the days to come Joseph will be regarded as one of the greatest criminals that Germany has ever produced. His children would hear that said daily, people would torment them, despise and humiliate them…. It has all happened before. You know how I told you at the time quite frankly what the Führer said in the Café Anast in Munich when he saw the little Jewish boy, you remember? That he would like to squash him flat like a a bug on the wall…I couldn’t believe it and thought it was just provocative talk. But he really did it later. It was all so unspeakably gruesome…” [36][37] …
She appears to have refused several offers from others, such as Albert Speer, to have the children smuggled out of Berlin and insisted that the family must stay at her husband’s side. In the Führerbunker she confided to Traudl Junge, that “I would rather have my children die, than live in disgrace, jeered at. My children stand no chance in Germany after the war”.[38]
The last survivor of Hitler’s bunker, Rochus Misch, gave this eyewitness account of the events to the BBC:[39]
“Straight after Hitler’s death, Mrs. Goebbels came down to the bunker with her children,” Mr Misch recalls. “She started preparing to kill them. She couldn’t have done that above ground—there were other people there who would have stopped her. That’s why she came downstairs—because no-one else was allowed in the bunker. She came down on purpose to kill them.
“The kids were right next to me and behind me. We all knew what was going to happen. It was clear. I saw Hitler’s doctor, Dr Stumpfegger give the children something to drink. Some kind of sugary drink. Then Stumpfegger went and helped to kill them. All of us knew what was going on. An hour or two later, Mrs Goebbels came out crying. She sat down at a table and began playing patience. This is exactly how it was.”
After their children were dead, Magda and Joseph Goebbels walked upstairs to the bombed-out garden, avoiding the need for anyone to carry their bodies. By some accounts, she was shaking uncontrollably. The details of their suicides are uncertain. One SS officer said they each took cyanide and were shot by an SS trooper. According to another account, Joseph Goebbels shot his wife, then himself. The latter version is presented in the films The Bunker and Downfall. Their bodies were doused in petrol, only partially burned and not buried. The charred corpses were found on the afternoon of 2 May 1945 by Russian troops who stormed the bunker. The children were dressed in their nightclothes, with ribbons tied in the girls’ hair. A photograph of Goebbels’ burned face was widely published. Thereafter, the remains of the Goebbels family were repeatedly buried and exhumed, along with the remains of Hitler, Eva Braun, General Hans Krebs and Hitler’s dogs.[40] The last burial had been at the SMERSH facility in Magdeburg on 21 February 1946. In 1970, KGB director Yuri Andropov authorised an operation to destroy the remains.[41] On 4 April 1970, a Soviet KGB team with detailed burial charts secretly exhumed five wooden boxes. The remains from the boxes were thoroughly burned and crushed, after which the ashes were thrown into the Biederitz river, a tributary of the nearby Elbe.[42]
May 18th, 2014 at 4:27 pm
Ananda,
“You imply that outsiders kiiled the Goebbels children.”
No.
I said, “Osama Bin Ladin’s children, Saddam Hussein’s children and Goebbels’ children were either killed or caused to be killed for a good cause.”
Advancing Russians FORCED Magda poison them. Not just them, even (S)Hitler was FORCED to get rid of his partner (after marrying her) and HIMSELF.
They should have done these things when Nazis started killing innocents in 1939; not in 1945 when DEFEAT was on laughing on their FACE.
Anyway the Goebbels and (S)Hitler had what is called in Tamil “Maanam” (DIGNITY). UNFORTUNATELY Tamils don’t have dignity! They EAT from SL and destroy SL. When the time comes for saving their sorry asses they FAKE a surrender, pretend to eat the enemy’s cookies, ETC., ETC. and die.
May be Baby Brigade leader Baluchandran sat in a well kept, NEAT, long established LTTE bunker, ate the chocolate given by his MOTHER MAGDA MATHIVATHANI GOEBBELS PIRAPAHARAN coated in CYANIDE and died.
May 18th, 2014 at 4:32 pm
What is more worrying is MR’s justice minister Hack-Him has brought a bill (SOON to be presented to parliament) that gives protection to “witnesses” to alleged war crimes.
That is a LICENCE to terrorists to discredit SL without the law getting them.
Yesterday Ananthi the child soldier recruiting agent’s wife begged and cried to security forces at Keerimalai asking for permission to hold a LTTE Mahaveer commomoration event. Her howling was videoed and now in circulation to show how LTTE war widows are harassed by the army, forcing them to cry, howl and beg and how they remember their dead!!
Bloody cunning bastards.
May 18th, 2014 at 6:18 pm
Lorenzo,
How can you say that Magda Goebbels killing her children amounts to “caused to be killed” for a good cause? That does not fit the facts of the case.
She killed them because
1. She feared a worse retribution for what her husband, and herself, had done to others, and
2. Magda was faithful to the Nazi ideal to the very end, and did not want her treasured children to “dishonor it” by surviving its destruction and failure to triumph.
Magda Goebbels action was at least a realist in her assessment, and faithful to her cause. I wish Velupillai Prabhakaran had the same strength of mind to rid the world of himself and his family without dragging down his people to their destruction. I say Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish! Live by the Sword, Die by the Sword!
Joseph and Magda Gobbels were just like Hitler, who in the end wanted all Germans to die with him because they had not fought hard enough and therefore did not deserve to survive the failure of the grand dream he had set for them.
To that end he commanded Albert Speer to destroy all infrastructure and means of production and livelihood in Germany before the Russians occupied it. This is known as the Nero Decree the most pertinent section of which reads as follows (from Wikipedia.com):
“It is a mistake to think that transport and communication facilities, industrial establishments and supply depots, which have not been destroyed, or have only been temporarily put out of action, can be used again for our own ends when the lost territory has been recovered. The enemy will leave us nothing but scorched earth when he withdraws, without paying the slightest regard to the population. I therefore order:
“1) All military transport and communication facilities, industrial establishments and supply depots, as well as anything else of value within Reich territory, which could in any way be used by the enemy immediately or within the foreseeable future for the prosecution of the war, will be destroyed.”[3]
The decree was in vain. The responsibility for carrying it out fell on Albert Speer, Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and War Production. Speer was appalled by the order and lost faith in the dictator. Just as von Choltitz had several months earlier, Speer deliberately failed to carry out the order. Upon receiving it, he requested to be given exclusive power to implement the plan, instead using his power to convince the generals and Gauleiters to ignore the order. Hitler remained unaware of this until the very end of the war, when Speer admitted to him that he deliberately disobeyed. Hitler, then confined to his bunker in Berlin, was angry with his minister, but there was little he could do at that point. Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945, 42 days after issuing the order. Shortly afterwards, on May 7, 1945, General Alfred Jodl signed the German military surrender, and on May 23 Speer was arrested on the orders of U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, together with the rest of the provisional German government led by Admiral Karl Dönitz, Hitler’s successor as head of state.
Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer, born March 19, 1905 served 20 years imprisonment in Spandau prison from 1947 to 1967. He died aged 76 as a free man on September 1, 1981.
May 18th, 2014 at 7:47 pm
Ananda,
I agree with facts you say but you have missed one CRUCIAL FACT.
“She killed them because
1. She feared a worse retribution for what her husband, and herself, had done to others, and
2. Magda was faithful to the Nazi ideal to the very end, and did not want her treasured children to “dishonor it” by surviving its destruction and failure to triumph.”
Retribution from whom?
The g~ds? NO!
The Jews? NO!
The Poles? NO!
From ADVANCING RUSSIANS AND OTHER ALLIES who had earned a FABULOUSLY HORRIBLE REPUTATION by then in handling Nazis. (Some of them lived up to this reputation!)
That is why she killed them in 1945 and not 1939, etc.
Had the Russians and other allies NOT advanced towards Germany, she would NOT have killed them. Their advance CAUSED the mad woman to do her FINAL killing. They are NOT responsible for it though their actions caused it to happen in 1945.
I’m not complaining it was bad. In fact it was EXCELLENT that these terrorists died without leaving traces of terrorism behind. Dying from their own hand in FEAR of enemies, even better!
May 18th, 2014 at 8:47 pm
Lorenzo,
You are taking the chain of CAUSE-and-EFFECT too far, and attributing the effect to secondary and tertiary causes ignoring the primary cause, until it dilutes the issue so much that no one can be held directly responsible for their own acts.
I see this kind of argument everyday in the newspapers where murderers plead for clemency on the basis that they were abused,for example, by their parents, and that their parents should be held responsible for their murders. They are, in effect, not perpetrators but victims now!
This is the same argument that Tamil Eelamists are using now to accuse the GOSL for war crimes, while those who committed war crimes over 30 years slicing and dicing and blowing to bits innocents by the thousand, are now all VICTIMS!
So I urge you to keep it simple, Lorenzo: Joseph and Magda Gobbels killed their children to escape impending retribution, and because they could not face the reality that all they had believed in lay in ruins. Even at the end they failed to grasp that the real cruelty lay in misleading so many millions of brainwashed people to their deaths, just like the Surya Deva of the Sri Lankan Tamil Separatists.
Be honest and stop denying that what you implied was that OTHERS had killed the children. No one else had; their own fanatical parents killed them.
There is no harm in admitting an error for we are not omniscient infallible Gods; the harm is in continuing to defend the indefensible!
May 18th, 2014 at 10:16 pm
Ananda,
I have explained in detail why they were killed in 1945 and NOT 1939. Their parents should have foreseen RETRIBUTION in 1939. But they DIDN’T. They waited and waited until allies came for them!
You should think of repurcussions, punishment WHEN YOU DO SIN/CRIME. Not near the JUDGEMENT DAY!!
Had the allies NOT advanced, those barbarians would continue to live like barbarians. When they advanced to Germany in mid 1945 the barbarians turned to CANIBALS.
NOT otherwise. So they caused the barbarians to turn on themselves (canibals). RATIONAL humans would NOT do this. But barbarians do. And the allies DID know that.
Coming back to my original point Baluchandran’s death is NO BIG DEAL. Children of Saddam, Osama and the Goebbels also suffered the same fate either killed by the good guys or the good guys caused them to be killed by FELLOW CANIBALS of victims.
We may agree to disagree.