Health Minister, A. H. M. Fowzie has directed that the bond signed by trainee health inspectors should be strictly enforced as many of them leave without completing the course, causing severe losses to the government.
Mr. Fowzie, addressing a passing out ceremony of Public Health Inspectors in Kalutara, suggested that the bond should be increased to reduce the number of dropouts.
He said at present the government was spending Rs. 180,000 for each trainee PHI and pointed out that of the 80 trainees only 54 had completed the course.
Mr. Fowzie said the PHIs should be punctual and sign the attendance register - a procedure to which even doctors have been asked to conform.
“In the past the major responsibility of Public Health Inspectors was to control communicable diseases but today many more complex problems have to be looked into due to industrialization, agricultural development and rapid urbanization”, the minister said.
Deputy Trade Minister and Kalutara District MP Priyanganie Abeyweera told the PHIs that they should not go after politicians seeking transfers, if they are posted to remote areas. They should not go after politicians to cancel their appointments.
Mystery still looms over the shock death of a welder at the crisis ridden Steel Corporation as the Oruwela factory tries to limp back to normalcy.
The worker Dayananda Gamage is officially reported to have died of electric shock in the factory which was under heavy police guard in the face of worker unrest in the past few weeks.
But in Gamage’s family members have doubts about the circumstances in which he died while there are also reports that it might have been suicide.
According to family members Dayananda was not a member of the union, and had gone to the factory when all workers were requested to report for duty.
His widow and two young children still in shock over the tragedy say they are also being kept in the dark about the cause of death.
Mrs. Gamage denied suggestions that her husband had committed suicide but said he was emotionally disturbed over the strike and the fear of losing his job.
“We were a happy family, there was nothing other than the strike for him to worry about. I clearly remember how shaken he was after police broke into the factory a week ago. He kept on talking about it, how the police forced the workers into the jeeps and the violence which took place” she said.
“We still do not know what exactly happened. No one seems to have seen the incident. But he was scared of the police, as he feared another attack,” she said.
Officially the family has been informed that Dayananda died when he touched the electric switch board.
The Catholic Bishops of Sri Lanka in a Christmas message have appealed for the renewal of the commitment by all people to build peace and moral integrity both in private and public life.
Identifying the ethnic conflict and child abuse as the most woeful tragedies in the country, the Bishops have called on all people of goodwill to repudiate the war before it leaves us totally bankrupt morally and spritually.
On child abuse the Bishops say they have their own information which depicts a situation totally unworthy of human kind.
Following are excerpts from the message:
“Christmas the great season of grace is once again before us. The re-enactment of the birth of Jesus brings to our minds the great mystery of God becoming man to redeem and elevate humanity to the level of the divine. Our Catholic Faith tell us that “When the time had fully come, God sent forth His son, born of a woman born under the law, to redeem those under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.” Our faith further clarifies joyfully “God has visited his people. He has fulfilled the promise he made to Abraham and his descendants. He acted beyond all expectation - he has sent his own beloved Son.”
“Such is the dignity we have received. Such is the dignity to which all men have been raised. Yet, in the context of what is happening in society today we are regretfully compelled to bemoan the fact that humanity is seen degraded to a level completely incompatible to what our faith describes.
“We would like to speak here of our own situation in Sri Lanka and pinpoint two matters which are of current relevance viz. the war situation and child abuse.
“The problem of the North-East war has been a scourge now for more than thirteen years. While almost every day people are being killed and wounded we have not seen a consciousness building up among our people, especially among the vast majority of the moderate persons, to repudiate the war and to urge for peace. We are on both sides of the devid, men of goodwill who long for peace. They see the great harm that war engenders not only physically and economically but more morally and socially. The war is killing and wounding thousands of people - our own brothers and sisters to whatever camp they belong. This itself is a woeful tragedy which no one could condone. It is killing and destroying the very fabric of our society, and the lasting effects of the war would leave us a totally impoverished people, morally and socially, irrespective of or ethnicity, caste or creed.
“We therefore urge that Christmas be made an occasion for a renewal of our commitment to God becoming man. The birth of Jesus as aforesaid was to raise man to a dignity which touches the divine. Man has truly become a child of God. He has become a brother of Jesus Christ. Therefore the celebration of the birth of Christ should be a commitment to build the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God.
“We should strive to look at our society and see how each one of us, his or her capability, could promote the richness of our Christian values. We should, together with all men of goodwill irrespective of our religious, ethnic and other differences strive to transform human consciousness free from evil to good. We should strive to promote justice, peace, love and mutual understanding and stand up for spiritual and moral values in the alarming deterioration of these values in our country.
“Unless our Christian concern extends to our brother, the words addressed to Cain in Genesis 4/10 “Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground” may well be soon addressed to us.
“Exercising our pastoral ministry we, the Bishops of Sri Lanka therefore appeal to our dearest priests, religious and lay faithful to make this Christmas meaningful by sincere prayer and commitment to the cause of building up peace and moral integrity both in private and public life.
“Our Christmas greeting for you is that the words of Jonathan to David may find fulfilment in you “Go in peace, for we have sworn friendship with each other in the name of the Lord,” saying “The Lord is witness between you and me and between your descendants and my descendants for ever.” (1 Samuel 20:42)
“May that peace descend upon Sri Lanka in the coming year and may our people begin once again to appreciate the deep spiritual and moral values embedded in our different religious and cultural traditions.
In a separate message Colombo’s Archbishop Rt,Rev Dr, Nicholas Marcus Fernando has also highlighted the child sex crisis. Excerpts from the statement:
“Children and the youth have occupied the first page and middle pages of our newspapers because of the horror caused by child prostitution by those who have the riches of this world, using them to lure the innocent poor into the wiles of human passion. Our paradise isle is advertised not for its ancient religions, history and culture and not for its God given beauty and bounty, but a paradise where the bestiality in man can be perpetrated on the helpless, the needy and the ignorant.
Where are the guardians of the law, the protectors of society values in the face of the brazen attitude of reckless drivers? To be just, a parallel question has to be asked and answered. Were the school children right in setting fire to the buses that caused the accidents? That was wrong. Taking the law into one’s own hands will destory this country. This is one of the greatest evils in the world today. Disrespect and disregard for the law, the natural law, the law of nations the laws of a country, the laws of a city, the laws of a club, have crept in under the guise of freedom which of course is the freedom of the wild ass and not of civilized society. Discipline is what is needed in our country today. This is the subject of my message for Christmas this year”.
The following are excerpts from a speech made by Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar during the budget debate
Mr. Chairman, before I commence my reply I would like to seek your indulgence to table a document for Hansard. This is a performance report for 1996 which spans the period from my last speech, which was in November 1995, to this week.
The reason for my doing that, Mr. Chairman, is that there is no prospect whatever, in the time alloted to me, of going through the matters which are contained in this report. This is merely a chronicle of what the Foreign Ministry has done in the past year under various headings such as visits, various bilateral agreements and activities of various kinds. So I seek your permission to table it in the hope that it can lie in the Library. But I do hope that Hon. members might consult it from time to time and, more than that, ask me in the course of the next month or two if there is any matter on which I can provide clarification or explanation.
I want to say a word, about what steps the Ministry is taking to adjust itself to the changing world of foreign policy. Because in the changing world, economic considerations are becoming very important in foreign policy. The Ministry, in my opinion, is not at the moment sufficiently well equipped structurally to handle that kind of development. So I have taken steps to see that the Economic Affairs Division of the Ministry is strengthened structurally that more people are brought in and that it be given a new mandate. Now for that purpose, there is a committee that has been set up - an inter-Ministerial Committee consisting of four or five line Ministries presided over by Her Excellency the President basically charged with the task of overseeing the whole economic image of Sri Lanka abroad.
Another thing that we are trying very hard is to see that some money is made available for our information services because that is also a very important aspect of what we are trying to do.
In that connection, I want to tell the House a few things about what we are doing on the information side. The question of how we handle the propaganda effort of the LTTE is of course something that naturally dominates our lives and time. A lot of hon. members and members of the public also feel that not sufficient is being done to meet LTTE propaganda abroad. I can tell you that the task of meeting their propaganda effort on a daily basis abroad is herculean, as I do not think frankly that a government would be able to match it in the same way that they are able to conduct their propaganda campaign, because they have enormous funds at their disposal and also a large army of people - I am told many of them volunteers of high quality in various European countries, who are based in universities - who have computer facilities at their command and are able on a daily basis to issue bulletins, for instance, and scatter them all over the world on a scale that the government may find it difficult to match. So what we are doing is the following.
We are in touch with Amnesty International. They have come here. We are certainly in touch in order to put right any misconceptions and items of mis-information that they may have.
Secondly, I must say that in our information related operations abroad we are at present also placing much emphasis on maintaining credibility. Conscious that there are many audiences abroad who have been for years bombarded with LTTE propaganda that has sought to demonise the Sri Lanka Government, we are seeking to make use of articles written on developments here by independent journalists to make our case. For that purpose certain pamphlets on aspects of the ethnic problem are being prepared.
A recent one is called “The Jaffna Situation; the International Media Verifies”, which was brought out by the Ministry in June 1996, which comprises entirely of journalists’ impressions of the return and resettlement of civilians in the Jaffna peninsula. This was widely distributed through our missions and also circulated among Members of Parliament. I have seen it myself and it was a very effective publication. Thirdly, we are also focussing on strengthening the institutional structures and processes devoted to information, dissemination both in Colombo and in our missions through committing more financial resources to this task, providing better staffing, as well as technological advancement.
Now in regard to another aspect of the LTTE question I would like to say this. Considerable attention was paid last year and this year to the question of informing foreign governments, mainly western governments of the need to combat terrorism internationally. I myself took this point up with a number of governments last year and this year. And the stock response to me was that there were no laws in the countries concerned which would enable them to prevent fund-raising for terrorist activity and so on.
There were recently two important meetings. One in Lyon, France at the summit level and also in Paris, where declarations were made spelling out concrete measures that should be taken to combat terrorism, including the abuse of asylum, preventing fund-raising activities, abuse of electronic communication systems and information networks, terrorist attacks on public facilities, etcetera - a whole lot of practical measures. What happened immediately after that is that certain countries, the UK, USA, France brought this whole question to the Sixth Committee of the General Assembly at this session which is still going on. In Sri Lanka we decided that it is very important that we should play a constructive, active role, right at the beginning of this international exercise to see that a good Declaration, one or more comes out.
Mediation
I would like to conclude Sir, by saying that a number of hon. members raised the question of our attitude to facilitation or mediation on the LTTE question. And I wish to make this clear. That both Her Exellency the President and I, over the last year or two, have on a number of occasions been asked this question about mediation.
And I think, quite consistently, we have said that the doors are by no means closed to the question of discussions with the LTTE with a view to achieving a lasting and durable peace. But we have said that, in view of past experience and in view of what we call the track record of the LTTE, it is felt certain conditions will have to be laid down. And those conditions were laid down.
They are primarily that there must be a substantial laying down of arms and also an agreement to be bound by a timeframe for negotiations. Now what that means, Sir, is that we will certainly continue to be open to discussions in an organized and controllable way on this question. But I wish to say this before I conclude, that it is not in my view particularly productive or helpful for public declarations to be made by countries, international groups, individuals, suggesting or asking for a response from the Government in respect of mediation. I would say that because we all know from past history, from the movements that have taken place in the last 30-40 years, that much of the work, if not all the work that has been done to satisfactorily resolve problems of this kind has been done very quietly and discreetly without much public clamour.
Mr. Hameed: Earlier having said that they must lay down arms, now you say a substantial amount of arms. Does that signify any change in your position or are both the same?
Mr. Kadirgamar: I think it means the same. The word substantial might be used on one occasion, laying down arms on the other. But I think what it is intended to convey is something more than symbolism. That is the idea.
Now there are many suggestions. For instance, that one can have discussions even while a war is going on. We accept that. That is a fact of life. But the point I wish to make is, there are many hon. members of the House who might be interested in that particular approach, that it is wise in a situation of this kind not to go public. Otherwise, you put the government into a position where it must either be silent or it must say something open. Both those causes are fraught with complications. It is much better for those who have something to offer in this area to do so very discreetly and quietly and not to make a great public show of it. That would be the wise and prudent course.
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