Features

Lest We Forget

Published

3 years ago

2022/11/13

Thilina Walpola

By Michael Patrick O’Leary

Scouting for Boys

When I was a stroppy teenager, the epitome for me of the distastefulness of the whole charade of Remembrance Day was a man called Ralph Reader, who on an annual basis was the Master of Ceremonies of variety shows extolling the greatness of Britain (particularly England). Great prominence was given to sentimental and jingoistic songs such as “There’ll Always Be an England” sung by old troupers like Vera Lynn who had helped to win the Second World War.

Reader got started in show business producing shows for the Boy Scout movement and even had some success on Broadway. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Reader was commissioned into the RAF as an intelligence officer and was awarded an MBE in 1943. He got a CBE in 1957 for general services to the nation. Later he was mainly associated with Scout Gang Shows. In the 1970s, he was appointed to the post of Chief Scout’s Commissioner.

Poppies and a Threadbare Empire

Reader was no doubt an admirable fellow and I was being terribly unfair to detest him. Call it a clash of generations. We baby boomers had a tendency to arrogance because we had a decent education and the ability to see the tawdriness of post-imperial Britain. The Suez crisis of 1956 is often seen as a significant symbol of Britain’s post-imperial decline, and 1956 was also the year when John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger was first produced and spawned a movement of “angry young men” disaffected by the state of the nation.

In the 1950s, I was a great fan of variety shows and saw many of the old comedians performing live. In his play The Entertainer, written at the request of Laurence Olivier and first produced in 1957, Osborne personified the decay of the British Empire in Archie Rice and aging comedian whose career has faded. Tony Richardson, who directed The Entertainer’s premiere season, described Archie as “the embodiment of a national mood … Archie was the future, the decline, the sourness, the ashes of old glory, where Britain was heading”

Britain’s decline probably resulted to a great extent from the bankrupting effort required to beat Nazi Germany. In spite of that, the Attlee Labour government was able to establish a welfare state that saved many from dire poverty, provided health care free for all and enabled working class oiks like myself to get a university education and access to high culture. Successive British governments, including nominally Labour ones, have worked hard to dismantle Attlee’s noble edifice.

Reader’s shows were already an anachronism in the late 50s and early 60s and unfortunately tainted the real meaning of Remembrance Day. They reeked of fly-blown nationalism and imperialism and seemed to me to glorify militarism and war-mongering. One year, I was forced to watch Reader’s show at the house of a school friend by his patriotic parents. They were typical of respectable, conservative, working-class people. Theirs was a small house but they owned it. By this time they were surrounded by families from the West Indies. The last time I was in that area, it was full of mosques and burkhas. Even in the 1950s, the Empire had landed on the white working man’s doorstep. Nostalgia for the old Empire became inextricably entwined with racism and resentment, which to me seemed to simmer under Remembrance Day.

The Empire Has Landed

It is ironic that (as I write) the UK has a prime minister of Asian origin who is richer than the monarch and is calling on citizens to tighten their belts to bear with the austerity measures felt by the government to be necessary to deal with the recession caused in part by the disastrous budget of a Chancellor of the Exchequer who was of Ghanaian extraction. Rishi Sunak’s mother was born in Tanganyika, his father in Kenya. Both parents are of Punjabi origin. Sunak has been adamantly pro-Brexit since his teens and has often made jingoistic pro-British utterances at the same time as retaining his US green card and a luxurious home in Santa Monica.

Sunak has embroiled himself in controversy by bringing back into the government a Home Secretary who was sacked or resigned because she was more anti-immigration than was the then prime minister, Liz Truss. Suella Braverman’s parents were from Mauritius and Kenya, and, she says, came to the UK “with an admiration and gratitude for what Britain did for Mauritius and Kenya, and India”. She describes herself as “child of the British Empire”.

She was chair of the European Research Group, a pro-Leave group of Conservative MPs. The parents of Braverman’s predecessor as Home Secretary, Priti Patel, were Gujaratis from Uganda. Patel was a long-term Eurosceptic and strongly opposed to the free movement of people. It was Patel who came up with the spiffing wheeze of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda (which was not part of the British Empire but is now a member of the Commonwealth).

Suffering of Ordinary People

I see Remembrance Day differently now. With maturity, I have developed a better understanding of what my parents’ generation endured to make my life comfortable and secure. My mother worked in an aircraft factory helping to build the Gloster Meteor, the RAF’s first operational jet fighter. Her younger sister told me about running home from school during a German bombing raid. In 2006, I was at Heathrow Airport on Remembrance Sunday, returning to Sri Lanka. Waiting for my plane, I heard a call for one-minute’s silence in honour of the fallen. Tears rolled down my cheeks as everyone respectfully observed the silence.

Cynical politicians continue to exploit the poppy and patriotism. David Cameron arrived in Beijing in November 2010 wearing a Remembrance Day poppy in his buttonhole. The Chinese asked him to remove it and the English right-wing press heaped praise on him for refusing. The poppy had a different symbolism for the Chinese. It stood for a particularly brutal phase of British imperialism, the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century, during which British soldiers killed tens of thousands of Chinese, pillaged, desecrated holy sites, shot prisoners and raped women. All in the interests of Scottish drug-pushers. Even in 2022, all politicians feel the compulsion to wear the poppy, although this year it seems to have taken the form of a small red button.

Pioneer Corps

My father’s Irish patriotism did not prevent him volunteering for the Pioneer Corps. Michael Young, in The Rise of the Meritocracy, (1958) took an unflattering view of the Pioneer Corps. He claimed that the morale of these “hewers and drawers … these dull-witted men” was spectacularly increased “when the stupid were kept together… and they were no longer daunted by having superior people to compete with”. In fairness to Young, it should be noted that his intent was satirical and his book was a prescient critique of how the cult of IQ measurement would create a dangerously smug ruling class and a profoundly demoralized lower class. That is true today as the British working class has lost its identity and has austerity and insecurity forced on it by rich people who have never done a proper job.

On D-day, 6 June 1944, 13 Pioneer companies landed with the first allied wave and a further 10 companies with the second, making a total of about 6,700 men ashore by the end of the day. The first Pioneer party landed 20 minutes after Operation Overlord had started. Some were called upon to provide burial parties, for which they were given special clothing, equipment and transport. The men bivouacked in fields, in unusually bad weather, working extremely long hours with little rest. Owing to the extensive minefields, conditions were dangerous and there were casualties. Over 2,000 British personnel, serving with the Corps, and nearly 6,000 of other nationalities lost their lives.

This was when my father’s sense of smell left him. As well as triggering memories, the sense of smell has served us well as a warning of danger, for example the smell of gas, smoke suggesting that we need to take action to prevent harm by fire. The last thing my father remembered smelling was rotting corpses on the Normandy beaches. My father had no obvious wounds from the war but his anosmia was a real disability. Did Caen teach my father the flimsiness of the flesh, how fine is the mesh that binds muscle to bone, how temporary the breath? Despite his wit and humour, he lived, I now realize, with an unrelenting tinnitus of anxiety until his death. He died of cancer at the age of 56. He had no debts, but only six hundred pounds in the bank. There was insurance to pay for the funeral.

He was not complicit in the malignant forces of ideologies and systems of terror that crushed common people and swept them away. The great tides of history, of isms and empires buffet little people, hurt them, maim them, kill them, uproot them and inflict damage that lasts for years or generations. Today, in Ukraine the guiltless suffer from the delusions of the mighty.

Forgetting to Remember

We must contemplate the dangers of forgetting and also the dangers of remembering. Ernest Renan wrote that nationhood requires forgetting many things. He cited the massacre of Huguenots on St Bartholomew’s Day as a symbol of the kind of thing France needed to forget in order to be a nation. Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story Funes, the Memorious, describes a young man who, as a result of a riding accident, has lost his ability to forget. Funes has a tremendous memory, but he is so lost in the details of everything he knows that he is unable to convert the information into knowledge and unable, as a result, to grow in wisdom. Stephen Dedalus, in James Joyce’s Ulysses, said that history was a nightmare from which he was trying to awake.

There comes a time when truth and reconciliation has to take the place of endlessly rehearsing grievances from centuries back. There are still riots all over the world as one tribe or another remembers its grievances.

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Features

The Easter investigation must not become ethno-religious politics

Published

4 hours ago

2026/04/7

Sahan Weerasooriya

Zahran and other bombers

Representatives of almost all the main opposition parties were in attendance at the recent book launch by Pivithuru Hela Urumaya leader Udaya Gammanpila. The book written by the PHU leader was his analysis of the Easter bombing of April 2019 that led to the mass killing of 279 persons, caused injuries to more than 500 others and caused panic and shock in the entire country. The Easter bombing was inexplicable for a number of reasons. First, it was perpetrated by suicide bombers who were Sri Lankan Muslims, a community not known for this practice. They targeted Christian churches in particular, which led to the largest number of casualties. The bombing of Sri Lankan Christian churches by Sri Lankan Muslims was also inexplicable in a country that had no history of any serious violence between the two religions.

There were two further inexplicable features of the bombing. The six suicide bombings took place almost simultaneously in different parts of the country. The logistical complexity of this operation exceeded any previously seen in Sri Lanka. Even during the three decade long civil war that pitted the Sri Lankan military against the LTTE, which had earned international notoriety for suicide attacks, Sri Lanka had rarely witnessed such a synchronised operation. The country’s former Attorney General, Dappula de Livera, who investigated the bombing at the time it took place, later stated, upon retirement, that there was a “grand conspiracy” behind the bombings. That phrase has remained central to public debate because it suggested that the visible perpetrators may not have been the only planners behind the attack.

The other inexplicable factor was that intelligence services based in India repeatedly warned their Sri Lankan counterparts that the bombings would take place and even gave specific targets. Later investigations confirmed that warnings were transmitted days before the attacks and repeated again shortly before the explosions, yet they were not acted upon. It was these several inexplicable factors that gave rise to the surmise of a mastermind behind the students and religious fanatics led by the extremist preacher Zahran Hashim from the east of the country, who also blew himself up in the attacks. Even at the time of the bombing there was doubt that such a complex and synchronised operation could have been planned and executed by the motley band who comprised the suicide bombers.

Determined Attempt

The book by PHU leader Gammanpila is a determined attempt to make explicable the inexplicable by marshalling logic and evidence that this complex and synchronised operation was planned and executed by Zahran himself. This is a possible line of argumentation in a democratic society. Competing interpretations of public tragedies are part of political discourse. However, the timing of the intervention makes it politically more significant. The launch of the PHU leader’s book comes at a critical time when the protracted investigation into the Easter bombing appears to be moving forward under the present government.

The performance of the three previous governments at investigating the bombing was desultory at best. The Supreme Court held former President Maithripala Sirisena and several senior officials responsible for failing to act on prior intelligence and ordered compensation to victims. This judicial finding gave legal recognition to what victims had long maintained, that there was a grave dereliction of duty at the highest levels of the state. In recent weeks the investigation has taken a dramatic turn with the arrest and court production of former State Intelligence Service chief Suresh Sallay on allegations linked directly to the attacks. Whether these allegations are ultimately proven or disproven, they indicate that the present phase of the investigation is moving beyond negligence into possible complicity.

This is why the present moment requires political sobriety. There is a danger that the line of political division regarding the investigation into the Easter bombing can take on an ethnic complexion. The insistence that the suicide bombers alone were the planners and executors of the dastardly crime makes the focus invariably one of Muslim extremism, as the suicide bombers were all Muslims. This may unintentionally narrow public attention away from the unanswered questions regarding intelligence failures, possible political manipulation, and the allegations of a broader conspiracy that remain under active investigation. The minority political parties representing ethnic and religious minorities appear to have realised this danger. Their absence from the book launch was politically significant. It suggests an unwillingness to be drawn into a narrative that could once again stigmatise an entire community for the crimes of a handful of extremists and their possible handlers.

Another Tragedy

It would be another tragedy comparable in political consequence to the havoc wreaked by the Easter bombing if moderate mainstream political parties, such as the SJB to which the Leader of the Opposition belongs, were to subscribe to positions merely to score political points against the present government. They need to guard against the promotion of anti-minority sentiment and the fuelling of majority prejudice against ethnic and religious minorities. Indeed, opposition leader Sajith Premadasa in his Easter message said that justice for the victims of the 2019 Sri Lanka Easter Sunday attacks remains a fundamental responsibility of the state and noted that seven years on, both past and present governments have failed to deliver accountability. He added that building a society grounded in trust and peace, uniting all ethnicities, religions and communities, is vital to ensure such tragedies do not occur again.

Sri Lanka’s post war history offers too many examples of how unresolved security crises become vehicles for majoritarian mobilisation. The Easter tragedy itself was followed by waves of anti-Muslim suspicion and violence in some parts of the country. Responsible political leadership should seek to prevent any return to that atmosphere. There are many other legitimate issues on which the moderate and mainstream opposition parties can take the government to task. These include the lack of decisive action against government members accused of corruption, the passing of the entire burden of rising fuel prices on consumers instead of the government sharing the burden, and the failure to hold provincial council elections within the promised timeframe. These are issues that touch the daily lives of citizens and the health of democratic governance. They offer the opposition ample ground on which to build credibility as a government in waiting.

The search for truth and justice over the Easter bombing needs to continue until all those responsible are identified, whether they were direct perpetrators, negligent officials, or political actors who may have exploited the tragedy. This is what the victim families want and the country needs. But this search must not be turned into a partisan and religiously divisive matter such as by claiming that there are more potential suicide bombers lurking in the country who had been followers of Zaharan. If it is, Sri Lanka risks replacing one national tragedy with another. coming together to discredit the ongoing investigations into the Easter bombing of 2019 is an unacceptable use of ethno-religious nationalism to politically challenge the government. The opposition needs to find legitimate issues on which to challenge the government if they are to gain the respect and support of the general public and not their opprobrium.

by Jehan Perera

Features

China’s new duty-free regime for Africa: Implications for Global Trade and Sri Lanka

Published

4 hours ago

2026/04/7

Sahan Weerasooriya

Image courtesy The Global Times

* The new duty-free regime for Africa, announced by Chinese President Xi Jinping in February, is the most generous unilateral nonreciprocal trade concession offered by any country to developing countries since the beginning of the modern rule based international trading system.

* Yet, it is a clear violation of the cornerstone of the multilateral trade law, the Most-Favoured-Nation (MFN) principle.

* Hence, its implications on developing countries, without duty-free access to China, will be extremely negative. Sri Lanka is one of the few developing countries without duty-free access to China.

On 14 February, 2026, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced that China will grant zero-tariff treatment to 53 African nations, effective 01 May, 2026. Under this new unilateral policy initiative, China would eliminate all import tariffs on all goods imported from all the countries in Africa, except Eswatini. China already enforces a zero-tariff policy for 33 Least Developed Countries (LDCs) in Africa. Now this policy would be extended to non LDCs as well. This policy initiative clearly aims at reducing the continuously expanding trade deficit between China and Africa. In 2024, China’s trade surplus against Africa was recorded at US $ 61 billion.

This trade initiative, a precious gift amidst ongoing global trade tensions, is the most generous unilateral nonreciprocal trade concession given by any country to developing countries, since the beginning of the modern rule based international trading system.

Though this landmark announcement has far-reaching implications on global trade, as much as President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, it was almost overlooked by the global media.

Implications for Global Trade

This Chinese policy initiative, though very generous, is a clear violation of the Most-Favoured-Nation (MFN) principle and the “Enabling Clause” of the International Trade Law. The MFN principle is the cornerstone of the multilateral trading system under the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and is enshrined in Article I of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). It mandates that any trade advantage, privilege, or immunity granted by a WTO member to any country must be extended immediately and unconditionally to all other WTO members. Though, the GATT “Enabling Clause” allows developed nations to offer non-reciprocal preferential treatment (lower tariffs) to developing countries without extending them to all WTO members, this has to be done in a non-discriminatory manner. By extending tariff concessions only to developing countries in Africa, China has also breached this requirement.

This deliberate violation of the MFN principle by China occurs less than 12 months after the announcement of “Liberation Day” tariffs by President Trump, which breached Article I (MFN) and Article II (bound rates) of the GATT. However, it is important to underline that the objectives of the actions by the two Presidents are poles apart; the US objective was to limit imports from all its trading partners, and China’s objective is to increase imports from African countries.

Though the importance of the MFN principle of the WTO law had eroded over the years due to the proliferation of preferential trade agreements and unilateral preferential arrangements, the WTO members almost always obtained WTO waivers, whenever they breached the MFN principle. Now the leaders of the main trading powers have decided to violate the core principles of the multilateral trading system so brazenly, the impact of their decisions on the international trading system will be irrevocable.

Implications for Sri Lanka

China’s unilateral decision to provide zero-tariff treatment to African countries will have a strong adverse impact on Sri Lanka. Currently, all Asian countries, other than India and Sri Lanka, have duty-free access, for most of their exports, into the Chinese market through bilateral or regional trade agreements, or the LDC preferences. Though Sri Lanka, India and China are members of the Asia Pacific Trade Agreement (APTA), preferential margins extended by China under APTA to India and Sri Lanka are limited.

The value of China’s imports from Sri Lanka had declined from US$ 650 million in 2021 to US$ 433 million by 2025. However, China’s exports to Sri Lanka increased significantly during the period, from US$ 5,252 million to US$ 5,753 by 2025. This has resulted in a trade deficit of US$ 5,320 million. Sri Lanka’s exports to China may decline further from next month when African nations with duty-free access start to expand their market share.

Let me illustrate the challenges Sri Lanka will face in the Chinese market with one example. Tea (HS0902) is Sri Lanka’s third largest export to China, after garments and gems. Sri Lanka is the largest exporter of tea to China, followed by India, Kenya and Viet Nam. During the last five years the value of China’s imports of tea from Sri Lanka had declined significantly, from US$76 million in 2021 to US$ 57 million by 2025. Meanwhile, imports from our main competitors had increased substantially. Most importantly, imports from Kenya increased from US$ 7.9 million in 2021 to US$ 15 million in 2025. For tea, the existing tariff in China for Sri Lanka is 7.5% and for Kenya is 15%. From next month the tariff for Kenya will be reduced to 0%. What will be its impact on Sri Lanka exports? That was perhaps explained by a former Ambassador to Africa, when he urged Sri Lankan exporters to “leverage duty free access from Kenya” to expand their exports to China!

(The writer is a retired public servant and a former Chairman of WTO Committee on Trade and Development. He can be reached at senadhiragomi@gmail.com)

by Gomi Senadhira

Features

Daughter in the spotlight …

Published

4 hours ago

2026/04/7

Sahan Weerasooriya

Jeevarani Kurukulasuriya was a famous actress and her name still rings a bell with many. And now in the spotlight is her daughter Senani Wijesena – not as an actress but as a singer – and she has been singing, since the age of five!

The plus factor is that Senani, now based in Australia, is also a songwriter, plays keyboards and piano, dancer, and has filmed and edited some of her own music videos.

Says Senani: “I write the lyrics, melody and music and work with professional musicians who do the needful on my creations.”

Her latest album, ‘Music of the Mirror’, is made up of 16 songs, and her first Sinhala song, called ‘Nidahase’, is scheduled for release this month (April) in Colombo, along with a music video.

‘Nidahase’,

says Senani, is a song about Freedom … of life, movement, love and spirit. Freedom to be your authentic self, express yourself freely and Freedom from any restrictions.

In fact, ‘Nidahase’ is the Sinhala translated version of her English song ‘Free’ which made Senani a celebrity as the song was nominated for a Hollywood Music in Media Award in the RnB /Soul category and reached the Top 20 on the UK Music weekly dance charts, as well as No. 1 on the Yes Home grown Top 15, on Yes FM, for six weeks straight.

Senani went on to say that ‘Nidahase’ has been remixed to include a Sri Lankan touch, using Kandyan drums and the Thammattama drum, with extra music production by local music producer Dilshan L. Silva, and Australia-based Emmy Award winning Producer and Engineer Sean Carey … with Senani also in the scene.

The song was written (lyrics and melody) and produced by Senani and it features Australian musicians, while the music video was produced by Sri Lanka’s Sandesh Bandara and filmed in Sri Lanka.

First Sinhala song scheduled for release this month … in Colombo

Senani’s music is mostly Soul, Funk and RNB – also Fusion, using ethnic sounds such as the tabla, sitar, and sarod – as well as Jazz influenced.

“I also have Alternative Music songs with a rock edge, such as ‘New Day’, and upcoming releases ‘Fly High’ and ‘Whisper’“, says Senani, adding that she has also recorded in other languages, such as Hindi and Spanish.

“As much of my fan base are Sri Lankans, who have asked me to release a song in the Sinhala language, I decided to create and release ‘Nidahase’ and I plan to release other original Sinhala songs in the future.

Senani has a band in Australia and has appeared at festivals in Australia, on radio and TV in Australia, and Sri Lanka.

She trained as a vocalist, through Sydney-based Singing Schools, as well as private tuition, and she has 5th Grade piano music qualifications.

And this makes interesting reading:

“I graduated from the University of Newcastle in Australia with a Bachelor of Medicine and I work part time as a doctor (GP) and an Integrative Medicine practitioner, with a focus on nutrition, and spend the rest of the time dedicated to my music career.”

Senani hails from an illustrious family. In addition to her mum, Jeevarani Kurukulasuriya, who made over 40 films, including starring in the first colour movie ‘Ranmuthu Duwa’, her dad is Dr Lanka Wijesena (retired GP) and she has two sisters – all musical; one is a doctor, while the other is a dietitian/ psychotherapist.