By Indi Samarajiva

The animal assault on tourists in Tangalle is a tragedy, but not a trend. Sri Lanka remains a safe and friendly place to visit. The lawlessness and empowerment of government thugs, however, is a trend, just not one that usually affects foreigners. Now that it has, the government has to make a choice. They can either run a successful country or a successful mafia. Not both.

Personal Risk

Blue seas and white sands under threat Courtesy: www.xrv.org.uk

In purely rational terms, being a tourist in Sri Lanka is extraordinarily safe. There is no risk of terrorism or insurrection, uprisings do not shut down the airport (like Thailand) and fundamentalists do not shut down spas (like the Maldives). People are generally nice, police are generally helpful, and foreigners are generally spared from local trouble.
One spot of trouble, however, is endemic male prostitution along the southern coast. This becomes menacing when any foreign woman (or foreign looking woman) is assumed to be beach boy territory. If a Sri Lankan is dancing with or talking to a presumed client, that can lead to trouble, fast.
Another issue is that the police presence has not matched the rise in tourist arrivals. At one guesthouse in Weligama, an owner said that rooms had been broken into the night before and that the tourist police were slow and unresponsive. Thus, it is not enough to build more resorts and roads – the security apparatus and culture have to scale to match.

Reputational Risk

While the average risk is low, a few horrifying incidents can make for a drastically different perception of the country. Plane travel is far safer than, say, car travel, but a plane crash is so horrifying that many people are (somewhat irrationally) more afraid to fly. The risk of Islamic terrorism in the US and Europe is much less than the risk of home-grown terrorism, but incidents like 9/11 are so vivid that citizens and governments devote an insane amount of resources to a small threat.
In the same way, the assault – allegedly by a local government official – on tourists in Tangalle is so vivid and horrifying that it threatens the entire tourist industry. As Sri Lankan tourism expands, there will be more violent crime, but the case of a government supporter and his thugs brutally murdering a man and possibly raping a woman is so beyond the pale as to defy statistics. If the accused in any way get preferential treatment or, God forbid, get off, that injustice would compound the harm already done to Sri Lanka’s good name.
What makes this more than an isolated incident, however, is that thugs all over will harass people – especially women – and that many of them flash government IDs, mention government connections, or seem to be connected with the police. From the top down, Sri Lanka has a class of people above the law, ranging from MPs like Duminda Silva or Mervyn Silva to catchers on the street. When they oppress people internally it does not seem to bother the government much, but they, like any toxin, are not so easily contained. Now the goons the government has supported are now threatening a much bigger interest – in this case tourism. Something has got to give.

Sri Lanka’s Honor

Sri Lanka remains a fundamentally great destination, packing an incredible amount of wonder into one island. As annoying and violent as we are to each other, Sri Lankans are usually quite hospitable and kind. I have never met a tourist that does not love it here and want to come back.
On the whole, Sri Lanka has been getting the recognition it deserves post war – features in the New York Times, Conde Nast, National Geographic, et cetera. Peter Kuruvita is airing a Sri Lankan cooking show in Australia and the country is emerging as a desirable destination. The horrifying incident in Tangalle, however, is just the sort of bad press Sri Lanka does not need and – more importantly – a shocking human tragedy that transcends statistics.
As Sri Lanka opens up to the world, we have to realize that abuse of power and violence are not dirty secrets that can be swept under the claim of ‘sovereignty’. They inevitably spill out, affecting innocents and the honor of the nation as a whole. It is not just tourism that is at risk here, it is the honor of the entire country.
At some point the government’s headlong rush towards tourism and development will run into the contradiction of the effective mafia that has pervaded many levels of government and Sri Lankan culture. This makes it clear that it’s not enough to develop property and roads, the government itself has to develop into something equally civilized to match. In short, they cannot have their cake and rape it too.

There are still a few common fears floating around Colombo and the pages of this newspaper. They are that the country will return to war, that the economy will collapse and that we will descend into a totalitarian dictatorship soon. These are the traditional rallying cries of the disenfranchised elite, but I think they simply do not apply any more. These fears are unfounded.

Will Sri Lanka Return To War?
No. People have waited almost two years to see if the war would reemerge, and it has not. Why not? For one thing, the numbers simply are not there for more insurrections. In the 1980s there was a significant youth bulge, with the vast majority of the country being under 35 years. Today’s demographics are much more balanced. The classic recipe for revolution is young people, unemployment, and oppressive governance. Sri Lanka simply does not have the ingredients to bake that cake.
Also, in the 70s and 80s start-up insurrections could take on the unprepared military and policy. The military today is much larger, more sophisticated and experienced and, thankfully, violent insurrection is not something a few kids with stolen pistols could launch.
There is also the fact that violent revolution (unless backed by NATO) is generally out of international fashion, and terrorism is the political equivalent of bell-bottom jeans. Sri Lanka could return to non-violent resistance, but outright war seems out of the question.

Will The Economy Collapse?
People still say that Sri Lanka is turning into Zimbabwe. This is simply untrue. Sri Lanka is a rapidly growing economy and visibly so. Zimbabwe and other basket cases are at best not moving and at worse regressing through insane inflation and oppression. The Sri Lankan economy is not going to crash anytime soon, though corruption and inefficiency will take their toll in 20 to 30 years.
While the Sri Lankan government is not building or borrowing optimally, there is such fertile soil after 30 years of neglect that even bad ideas can fly. People are starting new businesses, expanding old ones and better road networks and general stability are extending opportunity all over the island.
At the same time, the government is doing massive development work and – albatrosses like the Hambantota Port aside – much of it is simply dusting off old plans that were developed under multiple governments. The Southern Expressway was planned in the 80s and 90s and current plans for developing Colombo and outstation are non-political, old and generally wise. There is enough low-hanging fruit that we can all eat for at least a decade without stressing that hard.
It is vital not to forget how bad the war times were and how unpredictable that future was. Today’s economic climate, while not as good as it could be, is certainly better than it was. This is the general definition of growth, and it looks set to continue for years.

Will We Turn Into A Dictatorship?
To call Mahinda Rajapaksa a dictator is an insult, not a statement of fact. He is an autocratic and strong-willed ruler, but he remains popularly elected, atop a diverse Parliamentary coalition, and generally dependent on public support. Sri Lanka has seen worse repression in the Bandaranaike, Jayawardena and Premadasa times and still emerged intact.
The operative definition of dictator is someone like Syria’s Assad, Egypt’s Mubarak or Libya’s Gaddafi – someone destructive, unpopular and dependent on an elite to repress the majority. This simply is not Mahinda Rajapaksa at all. He is not a deeply democratic or enlightened leader, but he is productive, popular and has wide support. While Sri Lanka is not an especially free country, the levels of repression are not even on the same scale as traditional dictatorships.
Are things getting worse? People have been saying that things are getting worse for sixty years. It simply has not happened. Sri Lankan people may not vote for great leaders, but we get the leadership that we vote for. Sri Lankans still use protest for strategic ends (protecting pensions, not using vegetable crates) and Mahinda Rajapaksa still depends on popular support more than repression for his power. It is not a dictatorship and it is not trending that way. People have been crying wolf for years, but the government is really just a dog.

So
So, is the world going to end in 2012? No. The more extreme claims – return to war, economic crash, dictatorship – are, I think, false. There are, however, more nuanced problems on the horizon. Petty thuggery in government has already sullied our elections and now tourism. Corruption and waste makes growth less than it could be and has long-term costs. A general erosion of Rule of Law (from the top) makes life difficult for average Sri Lankans and in turn engenders a rise in thuggishness and corruption. Furthermore, all infrastructure investments will come to naught if they are not matched by equal attention to education and health.
These are all real problems, perhaps worth changing the government over. Due to a limp Opposition this is hardly an option, but it remains a possibility that does not require war, collapse or insurrection to achieve. Change is possible within this political system, but catching and giving shots to this dog of a government is still harder than sitting on top of a hill, crying wolf all day.

LLRC

LLRC releases its report

With the LLRC report, the government has admitted that civilians were killed, that hospitals were shelled and that people were detained and at times disappeared. They explain this as saying it was proportional (the cost of war). That is, the LTTE was hiding amongst civilians and, to end the war, this is what the military had to do.
This is actually a clear defence against a charge of war crimes and crimes against humanity. To quote Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court: “Under international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute, the death of civilians during an armed conflict, no matter how grave and regrettable, does not in itself constitute a war crime. International humanitarian law and the Rome Statute permit belligerents to carry out propor-tionate attacks against military objectives, even when it is known that some civilian deaths or injuries will occur.  A crime occurs if there is an intentional attack directed against civilians or an attack is launched on a military objective in the knowledge that the incidental civilian injuries would be clearly excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage”.
In the Sri Lankan case, they were targetting the LTTE (as evidenced by the fact that the fighting stopped, rather than culminating in an actual genocide) and there was a huge military objective (the end of a 30 year war).
Along the way the government did a lot of bad things, but nothing at all to justify decapitating the elected leadership of Sri Lanka (i.e. the Rajapaksas) and docking them in the Hague. By reaching for too much, however, elements in the Diaspora have at least produced something. An actual representation of the war from the government. The government has finally admitted that the war was not all good.

Colombo

The rapid development and beautification of Colombo is obvious to everyone. Some people, however, feel obliged to qualify it saying that it disturbs the peace or changes things too much, or somehow cannot last. So stuck are they on hating the Rajapaksas that they cannot admit when they do something right. Everything has to be returned with bitterness.
This is not to say that everything they do, is good. The character of his government and the rank favouritism are not good, but this government has done a lot to improve peoples lives, including the lives of people who do not vote for them, in Colombo. It is patently obvious that the Rajapaksas are not all bad, indeed, very few people are.
Even within this paper there are constant harangues about how everything is a mess or how it is getting there, and it is simply not. Things are getting better, the end of war has benefited everybody, and these unscrupulous men from Hambantota have had a hand in it.

Ideology

For too long people have used ideologies to frame reality. Mahinda Rajapaksa said that no civilians were killed. That may have been his ideal, but it is not what happened.
By the same token, critics have said that Mahinda is all bad and the country is turning into Zimbabwe. You may not like him, but he has delivered results.
Slowly but surely, reality is beginning to define itself. Indeed, what this country needs most is time, so once the shouting dies down, some sort of mutually agreed upon reality can emerge.

But The Beach Is A Mess

What is messed up is the beach. First, because people built on it (at high tide you would basically have to swim around Kingfisher’s deck to pass), and second because the government demolished it and left most of the mess. If they do not clean it up soon those huge rocks and stuff will wash back into the sea and people will be stubbing their toes for years to come. Which is deeply uncool.
This is a problem. I really hate stubbing my toes and so do tourists. I am really hoping the government sends bulldozers and cleans the mess up at low tide. Bill the illegal constructors, whatever. I thought they had lost their livelihoods, but they have not. They all look to be doing really well. But please clean up the beach. I swim there.

Rights And Wrongs

These structures were illegal. They were actually a bad idea, bad for the environment, tourists, etc. They made certain parts of the beach impassable at high tide and you basically should not build on the beach itself, as anyone who has made a sand castle would know. It has been the law that they should be torn down for years, and these guys were warned years and then months in advance. The thing is that the government finally did something that needed to be done.
As with the vegetable crate issue, however, they could have done it much better. First, this should have been done off season. Tourists are there now and it looks like tsunami again – though parts of the beach are fine. Try Jungle Beach if you really have a problem. They could have done this off-season, and they should have taken the time to move the rubble. Because clearing structures to preserve the environment and, in the process, destroying the environment is not what I would call a win. They still have a short window to make it not fail.

Colombo Beautification

Independence Square had not changed since Independence. Now there’s a full promenade leading to the planetarium, and more recently a bike path. I was leaving the Cinnamon Gardens police and I was like wow, an actual bike path. The place is peaceful, beautiful, and you can take families there without worrying about dog poop, cow poop, or any poop at all. It’s just lovely and garbage free space for the people. And I say this not for colour. Where I live in Dehiwela there are two parks, one is also a cow grazing ground and the other is somewhat randomly home to dead, headless crows.

Roads

For over 30 years cops have been on checkpoint duty. Now there are almost no checkpoints and they can do actual cop stuff, like policing traffic. Colombo now has a one-way system and flyovers and you can generally pipe in and out of the city. What is neglected is public transit and people moving around within the city, but it’s still better than the non-moving that was going on before.
Provincially, there are now decent roads throughout the country, and a highway. The A9 to Jaffna is open, itself a generational wonder, and they’ve even set up a dedicated (temporary) bus stand at the end of Marine Drive. The roads in the East were improved years ago, though flooding really raked them. The next expressways planned are one around Colombo, a new Kandy Road and one to Trinco in the East. There’s also an Indian funded train planned for Jaffna.

Business

I drive up and down the zoo road a lot. Seven months ago there was a plot of bare land saying for sale. Then it was bought and they dug a hole in the ground. Going by past experience, I expected this hole to remain for years. Today, however there’s a building, with a new ‘for sale or lease sign’ on it, for four floors of commercial property. You see this all over Colombo and Sri Lanka. I was in Matara and they have the biggest Arpico I’ve ever seen, plus the best kept guesthouse. In Colombo there are now like 10 coffee-shops. I remember when it was only Barista and that horrid pasty tandoori sandwich. Now you can pay Rs. 500 for a sandwich all over town.
On the lower end, I also remember seeing Burgers King in Slave Island go from a street stand to a shop to a quai-restaurant with a huge signboard and uniforms and all. Other stuff includes the Gonuts For Donuts chain and countless small home sweet shops, and in the same time I think ODEL has opened like 5 outlets.
Online,Anything.lk is promoting all these small to medium businesses. Through them I’ve learned that we have enough new hair salons for me to go someplace new every week. I got some clippers to save myself the trouble, but still. I know at least two friends who are starting businesses, a few friends who are DJing and organising parties, and there are now multiple arts events, like Pecha Kucha.

Scene

This December international acts Chicane, Basement Jaxx and Avicii are coming down. For the first time these are acts I have heard of and not in an ironic way. As a child I remember seeing Poison posters, and more recently we’ve gotten Englebert Humperdinck and Jay Sean and some sort of rash. Slowly, however, we’re getting bigger and bigger acts and, even if promoters are kinda fumbling about, a scene is coming up.

So

Online I still hear hyperbole about how Sri Lanka is a basket-case and going the wrong way and things have never been worse, which is completely disconnected from reality. Seriously, just walk or travel around. We have a new sushi nightclub/lounge,  a Ministry Of Crab and actual sidewalks on the Galle Road. I lost my ID months ago and still haven’t replaced it, nor have I had any problems. You don’t know how amazing this is. My childhood memories of Sri Lanka are almost all the same, but now I see the country changing literally every day. And for the better.
Is inequality a problem? Are some changes wasteful? Yes. But these problems I’m actually happy to deal with. For once its not like, are we killing each other again? Was there a bomb on the bus? We’re having second or first world problems now, and the papers are talking about policy and issues rather than bodycounts.
Hence, I don’t discount the problems, but I’ll be damned if I don’t see things getting better right before my eyes.

Rohana Wijeweera and Prabhakaran

While I support mourning the dead, I think it is a folly to say that they died for something more than sociopaths promoting a corrupted cause.

JVP And LTTE Heroes

Colombo was plastered with pictures of Rohana Wijeweera, with his Che cap and beard, and an authentic smile. He led a Khmer Rouge style Marxist insurrection, killing policemen, government officials, people who tried to vote, the families of security forces, etc. During that period almost everyone remembers seeing young men burning in the streets. My family member had her leg broken by JVPers looking for guns.
On the other side, a friend was beaten nearly to death by the police for wearing jeans and looking like a JVPer. His legs were hurt so badly that he could never wear shoes again. As you can tell, the government responded to a terrorist group with brutal, blanket force, crushing that largely Sinhalese insurrection at the cost of many innocent lives.

LTTE’s Heroes Day

Vellupillai Prabhakaran led a similar insurrection in the north, and now his face (or the LTTE flag at least) is plastered around Toronto and London, as Diaspora separatists (about as effective as it sounds) prepare to commemorate him and his movement. Prabhakaran killed policemen, soldiers, civilians, other Tamil groups, members of his own group, villagers, monks, people riding the bus, anybody. He was a much more creative and effective terrorist than Wijeweera, and also lived longer. In time, however, the government also brutally crushed him with, I would say, actually less innocent slaying, but still a good deal too much.
November is the time that both of these men and their ideas are ostensibly commemorated, though both the men and their ideas were bad. A Marxist dictatorship would have sucked, and a separate state based on race (with the accompanying racial cleansing, as per the LTTE’s expulsion of Muslims) would have sucked also. Killing and terrorizing the population was also a bad way to go about anything, and the men who warped the ideas and actions of a generation deserve nothing but scorn.
However, the thing is that a lot of innocent people died in those insurrections, and a lot of well-meaning people died participating in them, and those people are mourned. Which is why I think these days are popular. The JVP has evolved into a non-violent, rather ordinary political party and are able to have their day in Sri Lanka, in public. The LTTE has devolved into two warring foreign mafias, more about the money than anything else, so they hold their commemorations abroad.

Why?

Why does this happen? They are commemorating people as heroes some of whom, maliciously or misguidedly, killed innocents and damaged their countries. So why is that feeling still there?
I think it is because the government and the nation does not remember or acknowledge the dead at all, and those dead still mattered. There are actually far more moves towards inter-racial reconciliation than there were to reconcile the largely Sinhalese rebels of the JVP. Those people (and young people in general) were just killed or disappeared and no one ever really talked about it again. While Defense Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa has announced a census of war dead in the north (noting dubiously that deaths by the Army are negligible), dead LTTErs are not counted or mourned in any particular way.
These commemorations are led by mediocre acolytes, showing the faces of magnificent murderers, but beneath it all are real human beings. Not heroes necessarily, but heroic in their own way. Heroes that sacrificed their lives to accomplish a worthy goal. The people who died in the JVP and LTTE insurrections sacrificed for unworthy goals, but they sacrificed nonetheless. They should be remembered and commemorated for that.

Lord Buddha

The thing about Buddhism is that it is full of seeming opposites like this. People say that Buddhism is about doing nothing, but that appearance of nothing is actually complete awareness. Everything in a sense, but more accurately a point where those dualistic measures do not apply. In the same way, the Buddha had to actually leave his family to help them.

General Digression

Buddhism is not an especially vague religion, if you want to call it a religion at all. Its basic tenets are that there is suffering. Suffering is caused by attachment and suffering ends when you end attachment and that the eightfold path is a way out of suffering. These are the four noble truths, but in my head I have always summarised them as three. There is suffering, there is a way out of suffering, this is a way.
Even these noble truths, however, do not fit into English, or even linguistic concepts. Language is necessarily dicursive (I made that up, meaning this or that). If something is red it is not blue, even though it is really a continuous and arbitrary spectrum. I have found that while Buddhism can be understood as a coherent philosophy, it has to be experienced on a level beyond words to really understand. That is, you have to meditate.
In that sense you can experience that ending attachment is not a point of not caring about stuff, it is actually a point of caring for and being aware of things much more intensely than ever before. It is the knowledge that the feeling of possession is actually a very coarse and actually selfish attachment compared to being simply aware of it and yourself.

On Fatherhood

Everybody with a child has wondered, ‘how could I bring you into this world, to suffer?’ This is what the Buddha, then Prince Siddhartha, wondered, and what he felt he had to do something about. In a way it could be seen as selfish, but staying to raise his own son would have just continued the cycle. What the Buddha did was actually break it. In that sense perhaps he was a bad father immediately, but he was better in the end.
It is like your whole family having operable cancer and deciding not to do surgery because you do not want to hurt them. Or Luke Skywalker not training with Yoda and just fighting without skill. Throughout life we have to make short-term sacrifices to achieve long-term goals. The Buddha made a hard sacrifice (and made his family sacrifice) to achieve what I think was the most long-term goal possible. The end of the cycle. Actual peace and liberation.
He also returned and his son reached enlightenment as well. That is, his son did not suffer. His entire kingdom was by and large converted and I think lost their lands and line, but they did not suffer. Because that attachment to empire and family did not really lead out, it led further in, with the best of intentions. So in that sense, no I do not think the Buddha was a bad father. Fathers go out to work every day, to provide for their families. The Buddha left entirely to free them, and enrich millions of lives that have followed.
Indi blogs everyday at www.indi.ca.

The Rump LTTE

In 2009, the Sri Lankan government ended a brutal 30 year war with a final push, eliminating the LTTE and a considerable amount of civilians the terrorist group held as effective hostages.
At the time, thousands of Diaspora Tamils rallied for a cease-fire to save the LTTE, waving LTTE flags and carrying images of Prabhakaran. After the war ended decisively, they channeled their considerable energies into lobbying international governments for war crimes prosecutions into the successful prosecutors of the war. That is one agenda.

The Government

At the same time, the Sri Lankan government issued a statement that not a drop of civilian blood was shed and that they had mounted the greatest hostage rescue in history. After the war ended, they channeled their interests into first consolidating power and then wielding it  for personal and national development. That is another agenda.

False Posturing

Both of these sides are posturing. The hardcore LTTErs are aware of and even fond of human rights violations as a weapon of war. Indeed, that was their main strategy. They oppose them only to prey on the sympathies of decent people, just as they used terror to target innocent civilians. Their call for investigations is purely tactical, attacking the government and the idea of Sri Lanka with the only means they have left.
The government is also internally aware of the realities of war. In a leaked cable, Basil Rajapaksa is reported to have said “I am not saying we are clean; we could not abide by international law – this would have gone on for centuries, an additional 60 years.”
It is important to note that within the LTTE and the government, they know that what they are spreading is not true. It is just another tactic they use politically.  The two sides are beating each other over the heads with human rights like it is a fish and a lot of people are buying it. Who this charade dishonors is the dead, who it hurts is the living.

Beyond Cynicism

The call for war crimes investigations are driven by cynics who could not stand the LTTE government losing the war or, at the least, the Sri Lankan government winning. They want a separate, ethnic state (at most) or the end of the Rajapaksa regime (at the least). What the LTTE could not do on the battlefield, they are trying to do in international courts. What they cannot do democratically, they aretrying to do bureaucratically. This is cowardice, malice, and a shame.
The Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commision, however, is also a farce. They were tasked from the beginning with condemning the cease-fire and rubber-stamping the war. The most honest part was the testimony of average people in the north and east, but it is unclear whether their concerns (disappearances, deaths) will be acted on.
In between punitive investigations from abroad and defensive investigations at home we get nothing. It is simply a continuation of the war by other, more irrelevant and wasteful means.

Amnesty

What is really needed is a space where the government can say what actually happened (we fought a brutal war and won) and where the victims can get not vengeance but some closure. The people who testified in Vavuniya were not holding pictures of the Rajapaksas, they were holding pictures of their sons and husbands, wives and daughters. They simply want to know where those people are, if they are dead, and to know that they are not mourning alone in insanity.
Instead, calls from abroad do not listen to them, they listen to abstractions driven by former LTTErs, those who had no qualms about killing for their own purposes. Hence you get calls for accountability, which is really a thin veil around condemning Mahinda Rajapaksa. As much as that may satisfy a desire for vengeance and to condemn a dubious man, it does not help the people that need help, indeed, it makes their lives harder.
What Sri Lanka needs is amnesty from abroad and work on the ground to process our war in a non-punitive, non-confrontational way. In South Africa and other reconciliations, people were given amnesty to testify, because it was not possible to punish even murderers without completely tearing society apart. This is what western demanded investigations would do. They would wreck the Sri Lankan government and tear the country apart.
Mahinda Rajapaksa rightly defends the country from this, but tries to paper it up with denial and storybook lies. This is not right either. The cynics and rump LTTErs need to admit that the war is over and stop trying to rewrite history like the government was all bad. Ending the war was a net good. At the same time, the government needs to stop trying to rewrite history like they were all good. They did end the war by killing a lot of civilians.
What the country needs is space, and in the absence of reason, the only space available is time. This current purely foreign/English media controversy over war crimes and investigations is just a waste of it.

Indi Samarajiva blogs daily at www.indi.ca

The Request

Let us look at what the Media Ministry has requested: “The Ministry of Mass Media and Information has decided to register all the news casting websites operated within or outside Sri Lanka publishing news on Sri Lanka and its citizens.”
Taken literally this would include political sites, travel sites, any business page that publishes news, sites for community organizations, temples, churches, etc. These do, after all, certainly publish news about Sri Lanka and its citizens. I think it might also affect sites that cover the weather.
Then take the very term site. Is that a website, a hosted blog, a Facebook page, or all of the above? The vague wording seems to cover any sort of online speech regarding the island. What if I publish a bunch of comments about Sri Lanka but do not have a site? What if I am part of a public mailing list?
Another glaring weakness is that this wording seems to cover any website in the world. Which is a lot of websites, none of whom Sri Lanka has jurisdiction over. Is Al Jazeera supposed to fill out this PDF and email it to the Ministry? If a blogger in France wants to write up a kiribath  or sushi recipe should they ask the Ministry first? Can tourists write about their experiences travelling around?

The Application

I had a look at the application form and it asks for the site, a contact and IP addresses for the server and computers that access the site. Again, this is poorly thought out and makes little sense. Asking for a contact is one thing, but most sites are hosted on shared servers. There is one IP for thousands of sites. People also access sites through IP addresses shared with hundreds of users.
Furthermore, while it is admirable that government departments are getting on the net, can’t they at least implement a form that you can fill out online? Not that I am going to fill it out, but I am sure someone at the Ministry must be printing these out and filing them, which is really rather backwards. Of course, these regulations seem to have been drafted and published without any technical or even rational oversight at all. It seems that someone asked why a peon could not print out the Internet and this policy came out as a result.

The Lack Of Teeth

Which leads one to wonder why this lead balloon was even floated at all. The government gets all the bad press of engaging in censorship without really getting to do it. They can only request people to register, there is no legislation to force them to and no penalties if they do not. Like the plan to register all citizens online with mobile vans they are simply floating what they want to do without actually doing it. In the end they get all the negative press of asking for something bad and none of the pleasure of getting it.

To Register Or Not To Register?

This plan is so poorly thought out and toothless that I do not think anyone should register, nor do they really have to. If the government wants to block a site it seems that they just will. If they want an IP address of a server they can just ‘ping’ it (one line of code) or run a WHOIS search of administrative contacts. Most sites publish contact information anyways.
This latest move is not so much a threat to free speech as an embarrasment. I might be scared if they seemed to know what they were doing, but censors that know their dubious job do not tend to make requests. As it is, I actually feel sorry for the Media Ministry, trying to somehow fit the Internet into its filing cabinets.

The Real Occupy Movement

The mainstream occupy protests, by contrast, are calling for more equitable access to the system, and more access to basic material wealth and health. That movement features people struggling to maintain their mortgages, pay off student loans, get or keep a job, make car payments, etc. These are not people that want to give up their material possessions; they simply want to live in a fair and equitable society.
This broader occupy movement has a simple message, backed by solid economic data and a place in history. When they say “we are the 99%” they are basically complaining about rising inequality and governments that bail out the rich and let the poor drown. This is real.
There is also plenty of historical precedents. Scholars have long said that civilizations collapse when elites begin consuming more than their share of resources and the rest of the people finally snap and take the whole thing down. An added pressure is when governments get bloated in good times and simply cannot scale back in the lean (because of vested interests, like the US Defense Department for example). I have likened these effects to cancer. If elites grow out of control, they can kill the whole thing.
Countless times throughout history there have been protests like this when things got beyond tolerable, it is just now that things are more coordinated and therefore, I think, less violent and destructive. Hence the Occupy movement can get qualified support from Barack Obama and over 50% of the US population. They are also bumping in Spain and other places where the social contract has been effectively dumped post financial crash.
Do they have the same base in emerging nations like India or Sri Lanka? Well, I think the Occupy Yourself movement has no real base at all. Most people have not had creature comforts long enough to be discomfitted by them.
The broader occupy protests, however, do have common cause with traditional student protests (calling for employment), trade union protests (calling for better wages, etc.), and general malaise at being left out of development projects that seem to benefit the connected and foreigners more than average peeps. That type of Occupy Colombo might have legs, but the one that was attempted on Friday did not. It is actually the opposite of what average people want. Average people want into the system, they want to buy and consume and have a decent life. That is not what they protesting against. It is what they are protesting for.
Annex: Why Occupy Yourself Did Not Work (Statistically)
Broadly, because whatever they are calling on people to do, many Sri Lankans are already doing by choice, and it sucks.
Turn off electricity: While most Sri Lankans have access to electricity, the average bill is like Rs. 130, per month. The average Sri Lankan buys or gathers about Rs. 82 worth of firewood, so having steady lights to turn off is something many people aspire to. The stated goal of Occupy Yourself is to make big baddies feel the pinch, but the government actually subsidizes electricity, losing around Rs. 167 million per day. If everyone shut off the lights, Champika Ranawaka would thank them.
Abstain from TV/Radio/Internet/Phone: 23% of Sri Lankans do not own any sort of phone. 10% of Sri Lankans do not use TV, computers or radio. This is not a choice in rebellion against the global capitalist system, quite to the contrary, these are good things that most people want but cannot afford.
Abstain from purchases: The average household income is about 36,000, the average expenses are about 31,000. That leaves the average Sri Lankan with about Rs. 5,000 in disposable income, or about Rs. 160 per day. It is not like Sri Lankans are going crazy at the malls, and withdrawing this amount is not going to shut the system down.
Etc: Sri Lankans do not have a surfeit of ‘services’ and I think the majority are un or under-banked. Cannot find data on that, but I know many middle class people that do not have bank accounts. For government pensions and Army stuff I think you go through People’s Bank, and those are really rudimentary transactions. It is not like most Sri Lankans have plastic to cut up.
This data is from the 2009/10 Household Income and Expenditure Survey.
Anyway, this is not to frown on personal revolution or checking out. What they are calling for is essentially a day of living like a monk, and I am all for it. Personally, I just think it is better done by going on a meditation retreat to Nilambe or something for 10 days and then leaving a donation and coming home to a job, electricity and the works.
I am also all for people trying out something new in public, and having the courage to fail. So props to the organizers for that. Besides the bit of brand confusion, I think it is a noble effort.