LankaBuzz

By AMY WALDMAN
Published: May 8, 2005
KEGALLA, Sri Lanka - The teacher held up an electric cake mixer and told the class of wide-eyed women before her to clean it properly. If it smells, “Mama,” as the aspiring maids were instructed to call their female employers, “will be angry and she will hammer and beat you.”

“This is where you go wrong,” the teacher continued. “That is how Mama beats you and burns you - when you do anything wrong.”
Eighteen female hands took down every word, as if inscription could ward off ill fortune. Among the women, Rangalle Lalitha Irangame was struggling to keep up, haggard after a sleepless night in the hospital. Her 4-year-old daughter was sick with fever, a worrisome turn for any mother, but a cause for panic for one about to leave for years abroad.

After a year of thinking, 35-year-old Lalitha - who prefers that name - decided to trade her life as a Sri Lankan housewife for one as a Middle Eastern housemaid. After completing their 12-day training, she and her classmates would join a mass migration of women to the Persian Gulf’s petro-lubricated economies, trading the fecundity and community of Sri Lankan villages for the aridity and high-walled homes of the Arab world.

Behind those walls the women risk exploitation so extreme that it sometimes approaches “slaverylike” conditions, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report on foreign workers in Saudi Arabia. But while attention has focused on the failure of countries like Saudi Arabia to prevent or prosecute abuses, the de facto complicity of the countries that send their women abroad has largely escaped scrutiny.

For developing countries, migration has become a safety valve, easing the pressure to employ the poor and generating more than $100 billion in remittances in 2003, according to a study by Devesh Kapur, an associate professor of government at Harvard.

More than a million Sri Lankans - roughly 1 in every 19 citizens - now work abroad, and nearly 600,000 are housemaids, according to government estimates. Migrant workers have become Sri Lanka’s largest and most consistent earner of foreign exchange, out-doing all major agricultural crops.

In Saudi Arabia, the most common destination, they call Sri Lanka “the country of housemaids.” In Sri Lanka they call the maids heroines.

Sri Lanka’s government has become an assiduous marketer of its own people. With training programs like Lalitha’s, it is helping to prepare what is by now a second generation of housemaids. It even provides a safe haven to shelter, hide and rehabilitate those women who return with broken bodies, lost minds or incipient children.

But it does little to publicize those abuses, protest against them or protect the women for fear of jeopardizing the hundreds of millions of dollars they send home each year.

The women’s remittances have built homes, provided capital for businesses, and given the women themselves an enduring confidence. But those gains have come with incalculable hardships.

The women often leave indebted, work virtually indentured and have almost no legal redress against the sexual harassment, confinement or physical abuse they often suffer in the countries they adopt. With no absentee voting rights, they also have no political voice back home.

By one estimate, 15 to 20 percent of the 100,000 Sri Lankan women who leave each year for the gulf return prematurely, face abuse or nonpayment of salary, or get drawn into illicit people trafficking schemes or prostitution.

Many housemaids who run away from their employers are kept in limbo at Sri Lanka’s embassies because no one wants to pay their way home. Last year, after their plight was publicized, the government airlifted home 529 maids who had been living for months, packed as tightly as in a slavehold, in the basement of the embassy in Kuwait.

Hundreds of housemaids have become pregnant, often after rapes, producing children who, until Sri Lanka’s Constitution was recently amended, were stateless because their fathers were foreigners. More than 100 women come home dead each year, with most deaths labeled “natural” by the host governments, although Sri Lankan officials concede they are powerless to investigate.

Courtesy: New York Times

Now’s the chance for you to stop the deadly buses on our roads.

If you see recklessly driven buses on the road, please call the police hotline on 118 or 119 and give the bus No. and route No. You can call this number from the mobile phones also.

Nissanka

Well, it looks like our own “Iron Lady” is on course to cut the ribbon for the JM with one hand and fire the starter pistol with the other hand to breakup Sri Lanka. CBK is only an “Iron Lady” in a dictatorial sense and not in the sense such term was attributed to Margaret Thatcher, for her political shrewdness, steadfastness, and bravery shown throughout her political career.
Let us briefly examine her failures that are closely related the outright lies, and dishonesty, that we have come to expect from her - especially since she kicked out Ranil and his band of shortsighted idiots from power:

Failure #1: Security of Trincomalee
During Ranil’s rule she complained about the build up of LTTE in the environs of Trinco harbor and the surrounding military installations and used that concern as a reason for sacking him and his cooky bunch. Yes, she promised to set things right. What did she do since taking over the reins? NOTHING! In fact, the LTTE has built up even a more stronger network of fortifications, including concrete bunkers for their 120mm artillery guns aimed at SL Navy docks, and she has done squat about it. Every time the issue comes up, she conveniently sweeps it under her saree pota (no, not saree P-TOMS)

Failure #2: Security of non-LTTE political activists
This is a joke! Since she assumed the national security executive powers, LTTE even accelerated its pace of killing political opponents. Although she complained about the lack of security under Ranil’s government, what was her reaction to the continued killings? NOTHING! She conveniently hides behind the SLMM which does absolutely nothing about the continuing gruesome murders. LTTE pistol gangs not only started to move about the island more vigorously, CBK personally helped their “directors” by providing SL Air Force helicopters to move from one theatre to another!!! Even after her own cabinet ministers, Devananda, was targeted (unsuccessfully only by breadth of a whisker!) by a woman LTTE suicide killer, she did not have to wisdom to take a stronger hand in national security issues. Her attitude was “take a teaspoon of SLMM and the cough will go away!”

Failure #3: LTTE recruitment of Children
Which started at a pace after Ranil’s MOU with LTTE murder king VP, it continued at even a greater pace under her presidency. Last year’s Tsunami gave the LTTE a bountiful recruiting pool in the various Tsunami refugee camps and she, the Head of State of Sri Lanka, did NOTHING to stop it. She did not even have the fortitude to strongly protest to the West about it, leave along trying to stop the LTTE by force!

Failure #4: LTTE has air power and ability to carryout suicide attacks from air
Once her own military intelligence had alerted her to it, she buried her head in the sand for a long time, refusing to dwell into it as an urgent national security issue. Finally once the media published their reports, she had to admit to it and only then sent Kadirgamar on a “whining” mission to a few western capitals. What a gallant way to run a country’s national security issues!! The LTTE has now admitted to it as well, and despite some words of concerns from foreign governments, nothing has been done about it. She has now conveniently forgotten about this top-most national security threat.

Failure #4: To keep the UPFA as a strong force against Ranil’s plan to give the LTTE the ISGA (Tamil Eelam)
Although she protested vehemently against the ISGA and struck a partnership with the JVP to rout Ranil at the last GE, she has failed dismally to keep the alliance intact. From the very beginning, she behaved no different to Josef Stalin and treated her coalition partner, JVP, as an adolescent. Often the JVP was not consulted on important issues and her secret agreement on the JM with the LTTE+Norwegians was the icing on the cake! Intrinsically, there is nothing different about the ISGA and the JM. Both are meant to give political legitimacy and international recognition to one of the world’s most deadly terrorist groups that has a lethal arsenal of weaponry and will not hesitate to use it! Where is the sense of decency? Why do we practice democracy if the gun and the bomb are what it all comes down to? Agreeing to bow down to these horrific killers, what crass dishonest behavior this woman has exhibited! Today she is using teargas and water cannons on the JVP supporters and the national bhikku front who are protesting against the JM. Apparently, she only respects if you have a gun and a suicide jacket and if you are bold enough to kill and maim tens of thousands to promote your viewpoint!

She fails to see that all the concessions LTTE has got thus far has made it even bolder (as evidenced by the daily killings of opponents and unabated child recruitment) in its pursuit of Tamil Eelam. Since Ranil commenced on these “confidence building” measures, the LTTE has progressively build its military strength to the point of matching or surpassing SL military capability in certain areas.

The JM is the prize catch the LTTE has been waiting for. As already seen, building material provided will be hijacked for LTTE’s own infrastructure rebuilding, including expanding its already vast bunker network. Even if no funds are directly given to the LTTE, the material not needed for their own infrastructure rebuilding will be laundered back into cash, to buy weapons from their agents abroad.

Finally in light of the foregoing, do you not think that this woman is simply mad when she says…”This Joint Mechanism does not threaten Sri Lanka’s national security or territorial integrity, as perceived by some” !!! ???
Courtesy: Lankaweb

Hello and Welcome, this would probably be the only happy note from this blog.

The description of the blog says it all. Let’s just find out what is happening to our country. Anyone is invited to post or comment on any thing posted here. You can be anonymous, for something like this it would be important, as we all know what has happened to journalists who voice their thoughts.

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If you need any information on being anonymous comment to this post.

With all that sorted if you have any news of wrong doings, corruptions, ways to improve our country, or anythin put it here and lets see what happens.

It can be anything, lets encourage freedom of speech or freedom of posting your thougts.

Our one wish, on vision is for our country and our people to be back on top !!

NOTE - A lot of what is posted by us, will be from forwards or news articles. The rest will be our own thoughts.