Parliament

Opposition slips and grammatical slips
By Chandani Kirinde, Our Lobby Correspondent
When PA National List MP Vadivel Puthirasigamani rose to speak on Thursday during the latter part of a JVP/PA jointly sponsored adjournment motion to condemn Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe's recent address to the UN general assembly, few were aware of the bombshell he was about to drop.

But within a few minutes, his colleagues and others in the gallery were hurriedly putting their headphones eager to listen to the translations of his Tamil speech. Instead of condemning the Prime Minister's speech, Mr.Puthirasigamani was condemning the PA for going ahead with a protest rally on Deepavali day. "I am ashamed to be in this party which does not respect the feelings of another community. I am a representative of the Tamils and I am a Hindu and I cannot sit with these people any longer," Mr.Puthirasigamani said before proceeding to sit with the MP's of the TNA. He was greeted with applause by government members and welcomed with warm handshakes by the TNA members. All this on a day when the Opposition was hoping to make mincemeat of the Premier. The motion condemning the Premier's remarks at the UN was moved by the JVP's only Muslim representative, Gampaha district MP Anjan Umma and seconded by PA Gampaha district MP Anura Bandaranaike.

"We all know of Helen of Troy who with her charm and beauty launched a 1000 ships but with his preposterous and horrendous speech Mr.Wickremesinghe has turned a thousand heads," Mr.Bandaranaike said.

Much of the criticism against the Prime Minister seemed to end there and from then on it was more of an attack on the Bush administration. It fell on Power and Energy Minister Karu Jayasuriya to begin the defence on the Premier's speech. Mr.Jayasuriya said Mr.Wickremesinghe had in no way approved the invasion of Iraq nor had he tried to undermine the UN.

However when Mr.Jayasuriya read out the Sinhalese translation of the controversial part of the Prime Minister's speech where he had said "Then there are those of us who feel that the US and their allies had no choice but to intervene…" he seemed to have overlooked the "those of us" part which had the next opposition speaker JVP Wimal Weerawansa on his feet.

The Prime Minister by stating "….those of us.." put Sri Lanka specifically in the camp that supported the invasion of Iraq. When the entire world including the Americans and British are saying the war was wrong, our Prime Minister goes and endorses it," he charged.

Former Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar spoke at length on the war on Iraq and the consequences, but his criticism of the Prime Minister's speech was subtle.
"For a small country like Sri Lanka, it is imperative that we should deal as even handedly as possible with the rest of the world. There have been, and there will be no doubt in the future, occasions when our national interest demands that our foreign policy be nuanced in one direction or another - but a nuance is something quite different from a substantial deviation which seeks to place us firmly aligned with the foreign policy dictates of any one country or group of countries. What has happened over the past two years is precisely that," Mr.Kadirgamar said.

Even though the opposition brought the motion, they soon seemed to have run out of speakers while the government frontbenchers that usually shy away from speaking on other important issues seized the opportunity to speak.

A host of ministers including S.B.Dissanayake, Tyronne Fernando, A.H.M.Azwar, Rauff Hakeem, Rajitha Senaratne, M.H.Mohamed and W.J.M.Lokubandara spoke during the debate by the end of which opposition members had dwindled down to just three PA MPs and about 10 JVP members.

Veteran Muslim politician and Western Province Development Minister M.H.Mohamed came out strongly defending the Prime Minister saying it was unfair, unfounded and unbelievable that he would have said anything to hurt the feelings of Muslims and accused the opposition of quoting the speech out of context and misinterpreting it.
So when the Leader of the House W.J.M.Lokubandara repeatedly said "illagana kewa", he used the appropriate words to describe the plight the opposition had got themselves into by asking for a debate on a subject they had so little to speak about.

Prime Minister Wickremesinghe who walked into the chamber 15 minutes before the debate ended said all he had done was to speak on the inadequacies of the UN system and had taken Iraq only as an example. "We are opposed to global terrorism and war on Islam," he said. As for the controversial "those of us" part of his speech, "I think it's a question of grammar," he said.

Maybe the Prime Minister only got his grammar wrong but the opposition seemed to have fallen victim to their own trap and are likely to think twice about asking for debates on subjects which they cannot even sustain a day- long debate.

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