END LTTE, TAMIL, FOREIGN BASHING – START TALKING MAID SLAVERY, MASSIVE CORRUPTION!

 One is sick and tired of the incessant barbs and nit-picking over major and minor issues pertaining to the LTTE Tigers, Tamil Diaspora, Channel 4, foreign accusers of alleged war crimes, and other related issues, even non-issues. Such a tendentious campaign by some against anything even remotely connected to the Tamil ethnic issues, often laced with plain drivel, borders on mental masturbation. It is time to end this constant drum-beat. It is high time that your readers be spared of this monotonous “broken record”, of pouring bile, non-stop, on ethnic issues and related international issues.

 Instead, it is proposed that an active and vigorous campaign be launched against the near-slavery, barbaric, and cruel treatment meted out to Sri Lanka’s genuine bread-winners, its poor and hapless maids in the Middle East, particularly in wealthy Saudi Arabia, that is the center of Islam. Sri Lankans need to highlight these gross violations of civilized conduct and lack of elementary decency and norms before the Forums of the world.

 About 24 nails were removed from LP Ariyawathie’s body after arriving in Sri Lanka in August 2010

 Through their sweat, toil and tears, maids have through their regular remittances propped up the Sri Lankan economy, which has been a basket case for decades, and at the mercy of foreign aid handouts for 60 years since Independence – with nothing to show for.

 They are not convenient dual citizens, nor Sri Lankan expatriates safely and comfortably ensconced in Western abodes, who blow their trumpets about the motherland, but do little or nothing for it in terms of hard cash or kind, unlike these maids and other Sri Lanka workers who are at the mercy of unscrupulous and cruel employers in the Middle East. 

 At least, hand it to President Rajapakse for the visible changes of progress he has realized in the last few years in the still troubled island. The remittances of maids over the decades have helped uplift their families out of dire poverty – and in turn increased the gdp/capita of Sri Lankans. Their remittances, though, are still needed to prop up the Sri Lankan economy. They deserve our sympathy. They deserve our gratitude. They deserve our help, in whatever way, shape or form.

And, corruption has reached gargantuan proportions. It has pervaded all levels of society, from top to bottom, and corrupted the very social fabric that perilously holds together a nation of different ethnicities, religions, of rich and poor.