Thoughts from London

Tell me General, what’s all this fuss
Open letter to the SLMM head
Bon jour Mon General,
A thousand pardons for writing this "Open Letter" to you. What with all this koloppam (now, now, don't reach for your Advanced Oxford Dictionary, you won't find it there) going on over there I thought this is the quickest way to reach you.

With all this ho ha (or is it ha ho) of suspension and withdrawals, interviews and contradictions, explanations and apologies and dozens of foreigners coming to talk and for talks, we poor chaps out here have been left very much in the dark. Well, even you might be in the dark soon if Karu does not deliver the goods and the rains don't come in time.

Tell me General what is all this rush? Solheim coming, Akashi coming, Rocca coming, Bala annai coming, Nambiar coming and even some retired Indian naval man flying in. Is this all because you tried to emulate Moses and divide the sea or because Velu P, like Achilles is sulking in his bungalow or whatever the style of abode he resides in these days?

Whatever it is, the airport must be like the Maradana rail station these days. Chee, chee, chee. Imagine if Saddam suddenly drops on Velu P to exchange experiences about how to go underground or collect funds now that he has time on his hands. I mean what will he say seeing so many undesirables-from his point of view naturally- rushing hither and thither, mainly thither.

Just to get the record straight, Mon General- I know, I know French is not your language but then who has heard of Norse or Norwegian in our part of the world? When your Viking ancestors (yours excluded of course) decided to adopt plunder as a vocation and stole the riches of Western Europe they kept away from the warm waters of the Indian Ocean, for some unknown reason. Perhaps things would have become too hot for them.

That must have been one of the wisest decisions your Norwegian ancestors took and our eternal thanks to that. Otherwise our people would have been suffocating over a smorgesbord instead of enjoying steak and kidney pie and a Sunday Lampreis or whatever it is called that one of colonial masters from quite close to your shores brought along with the breudher and Roman Dutch law.

So the other day when you distributed that Initial Discussion Paper and later came up with something else called Adjusted Proposals you sought to explain what "de facto" meant.

And in case these uneducated natives did not know its meaning you had even cited the Advanced Oxford Dictionary.

I hope you did not drop the wretched thing on your foot and fracture your metatarsals. Being an army general (and a retired one at that) you could not have known that some of those who you addressed in those two utterly revealing documents have more Latin at their finger tips than all of you in the Sri Lanka Miserable Mission as some are wont to call it and others Sri Lanka Mischievous Monitors.

I am not referring to those chaps in the Wanni whose languages skills have been somewhat circumscribed due to other interests. So, as the Bard said, they have little Latin and less Greek. Mon General you failed to do a simple intelligence op before you picked up that dictionary. Those like Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and Defence Minister Tilak Marapone you addressed have been students of Roman-Dutch law and successfully overcame the Latin barrier many years ago.

I wish you had said in presenting what you call the "Adjusted Proposals" that they were applicable mutatis mutandis, such a mellifluous Latin phrase. And Major General Tellefsen(rtd), if you had spent some time in studying parliamentary practice and the passage of laws instead of marching on your stomach, which according to Emperor Napoleon is what an army does, you might have picked up some Latin without having to reach for a dictionary each time.

Which actually brings me to the reason for this letter. Well, it is true that I have taken some time to get to the crux of it and have meandered. But then Mon General (sorry I don't know the French word for retired though somebody suggested merde. But I never trust these chaps, you know) sometimes such digression and meandering have their advantages. Columbus set off to find Africa and ended up discovering America.

Just imagine. If he didn't discover America we would have not have heard of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleesa Rice and Don Rumsfeld and the rest of that rum lot.
But two things do concern me and hence this open letter. You want to demarcate a part of our territorial sea and give it to Velu P's Sea Tigers for training and exercises.
So you think that because they are a de facto naval unit- which, according to your dictionary means it exists but has no legal status, they should be apportioned a part of the sea that is Sri Lankan's territorial waters to practice blowing up vessels that have a de jure status and murder people aboard them?

Mon General, tell me what army did you serve in before you retired? If it is the Norwegian army, I am sure the people of Sri Lanka would love to know when you were last engaged in real battle? Have you ever fought in a war? As far as I know Norway has not been engaged in armed conflict since the end of the last world war. That was nearly 60 years ago.

But really, if you didn't have to fight to become a Major General what did you have to do? Be ready to defend your country's sovereignty and integrity against a threat from inside or outside, right?

That, I suppose, is the role of a soldier in peacetime. In short he will fight an enemy in computer war games if he cannot take part in real war games. Now is that not the role of the Sri Lankan navy, to patrol the country's territorial waters and ensure that any threat to the country's sovereignty is met?

Now why, my dear General, are you trying to parcel off a piece of that sea and give its exclusive use to persons you say have no de jure right to it? You must have heard of pirates in the South China seas and in the Straits of Malacca and thereabouts. They are a de facto sea-going operation, but totally illegal, attacking merchant and other vessels on legitimate business, killing people aboard and robbing the cargo. Your logic would have us believe that since such pirates exist they should be recognised in one-way or another.

One other thing. I think you should have a word with your SLMM spokesman called Teitur Talktoosoon or Talklessoften-sorry Torkelssen. In a so-called interview with a newspaper last Sunday he was full of optimism saying that the progress of the peace talks was exceptionally good. While he was saying this Velu was sulking after suspending participation in the talks, Bala annai was rushing to smooth ruffled feathers, Milinda the Magnificent was sulking on the other side and probably shedding copious tears at having been accused of failing to fulfil promises.

In answer to a question about how the SLMM is planning to avoid clashes at sea Torkelssen says and I quote "The LTTE had still not submitted their second set of suggestions on Friday (at the time of the interview)……… Then on Sunday, that is today, the SLMM Head will meet the Norwegian Ambassador…..".

Either Torkelssen has been talking for two days or so or the newspaper on which he lavishes such praise is suffering from a time warp. There is a lot more to be said for this Torkelssen fellow. But he is said to be leaving next week and so the less said of the dear departing the better. But one cannot ignore his famous words "The guiding star of SLMM is impartiality and I will never agree to the accusations saying the SLMM is biased".

Naturally he cannot agree, he's been part of this whole thing. I hope the star he is referring to is not one on your shoulder. So, until the next time, adieu Mon General. Give your enemy hell, even if it is a computer war game. Meanwhile may I suggest you read Sun Tzu's "The Art of War". It is more illuminating than the Advanced Oxford Dictionary.

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