Another MR1 Stooge Waiting In Line?

by Emil van der Poorten

From The Sunday Leader

Recently there has been a rumour floating around and published on at least one website that one of the chief apologists of the Mahinda Rajapaksa (MR1) regime is to be appointed as a ‘media advisor’ to Sri Lanka’s current President. Further investigation suggested that this was simply speculation.  The very fact that such an outlandish appointment might occur is, very unfortunately, indicative of the public perception of the path that the current regime has chosen to tread since its ascent to power.

The individual I am about to refer to was not only an apologist for MR1 but actively defended and promoted the worst excesses of that regime. It hasn’t ended there because he continues to be EMPLOYED by the Rajapaksa family, at their primary English print journal as its head honcho.

A little sidebar about the newspaper in question might be appropriate here.  It was losing substantial amounts of money as part of one of the largest business conglomerates in this country. Its chairman stated this fact at the last Annual General Meeting held while the broadsheet was still under their ownership. Soon after, they managed to dump this albatross from around their collective neck and the next time it hit the headlines was when its editor, for the crime of coming across as critical of the MR1, was assaulted within an inch of his life and, when he was sufficiently recovered, fled Sri Lanka for the United Kingdom where he has remained incommunicado since for fear of his life.

What is even more interesting about that anecdote is the fact that Mahinda Rajapaksa went out of his way to proclaim, on the record, that his horde could not, in any way, be responsible for this atrocity because the newspaper ‘belongs to us,’ namely the Rajapaksa Royal Family. Until then, that particular cat was not completely out of the bag because, even though the new owner was listed as a Rajapaksa, there was nothing to suggest that he belonged to the Royal Family.

Needless to add, the fortunes of that paper appear to have taken a dramatic turn for the better from the time of the take-over and one could, perhaps, be forgiven for speculating that this was because government advertising is considered the very lifeblood of the Sri Lankan media. The staffing of that journal was but a piece of some grand plan to control all the media in Sri Lanka.

I first encountered this individual during his partnership with the most abusive and boorish of journalists (even by Rajapaksa standards) at what turned out to be a relatively short-lived English language weekly better known for its roots in the gaming industry.  I had the temerity to ask in something I wrote to another journal that I needed assistance in differentiating the monkey from the organ grinder in this duo. Did all hell break loose! They went after me with all guns blazing, zeroing in on the fact that Frederica Jansz had chosen to apply the appellation to me and my column in The Sunday Leader of ‘Renaissance Man.’ A whole slew of allegedly genuine (Sinhala Buddhist) Renaissance Men were trotted out with their credentials none of whose names I can recall despite their supposed residence among the gods of multiple talents.

While I have been compelled by circumstances to be a Jack of All Trades in two totally different parts of the world, the choice of ‘Renaissance Man’ to identify me in the paper she edited was entirely Frederica Jansz’s.

I worked in a widely disparate variety of environments in the land I called home for better than three decades after being forced to leave the land of my birth. This ranged from working with farmers and ranchers in the southern reaches of Alberta to community development work with responsibility for providing tools of empowerment to aboriginal communities in the north. I must have done something right because the city in which I lived prior to my return to Sri Lanka better than a decade ago deemed it appropriate to present me with a formal letter of appreciation for the services I had provided the people of the city in which I lived.

A short while before my departure for Sri Lanka, I was, I believe, the only person of Sri Lankan origin in Canada to have been awarded a gold medal for ‘service to the community.’ This was a direct result of nomination by my political opponents in the Liberal Party against whom I had worked both in the city in which I lived and managing election campaigns in several parts of Canada, inclusive of the Yukon Territory, for their primary opponents, the New Democratic Party.

This is but a thin slice of what I have done and if it sounds like a second volume of the late Norman Mailer’s ‘Advertisement for myself,’ so be it! All of it can be substantiated and it is being inflicted on you in anticipation of yet another abusive diatribe from those self-styled arbiters who arrogate unto themselves who or what one is called or calls oneself! I wouldn’t be surprised, either, if this middle-aged (?) adult father who has demonstrated the habit of leaping to sonna boy’s defence when he figured it was necessary, comes charging out of his mouldy Trotskyist beginnings to take a swipe at me, as he was wont to do in the not too distant past when he thought the apple of his eye was at risk!

Also, it is said that the best form of defence is offence and when you are faced with the worst kind of media hack, one of whose more recent achievements was an abject apology, on the record, in one of the highest courts of law in this country for defaming an honourable and respected retired Civil Servant one can’t take too many chances! Incidentally, that apology constituted an admission that the ‘journalist’ concerned had published this calumny knowingit not to be true.