Ireland in the sun
Richard West Colombo, Sri Lanka The visit here of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh was anticipated with pleasure — and not only by motorists who believed that the roads would be repaired for the first time since the 1976 conference of the nonaligned nations. Here, in contrast with India, the movement to independence went forward without much bitterness, or indeed much enthusiasm. Portraits of the royal couple were put up in private shops as well as public places like railway stations.
Not so agreeable were two other portraits observed here in Colombo. On the first day, I noticed the Castle Hotel, with imposing stairway and colonnades. Its former grandeur has withered however, the walls are not clean; and some of the customers, fierce-looking Singhalese intellectuals, far from sober. But the great hall retains its former portraits.
These include Mahatma Gandhi; an Indian god, Krishna, I think; a French girl circa 1900 waving a handkerchief to her sweetheart; and finally, in the far corner, a man whose portrait I had not seen or wanted to see in 25 years, with peaked cap, big moustache and army tunic buttoned up at the neck — yes unmistakably Joseph Vissarionovitch Stalin. Rather startled by this (though I was later told that Stalin's portrait can still be seen in Peking and Hanoi) I went to the Galle Face Hotel, opened in 1864, to find a portrait or rather a blown-up photograph of our own Edward Heath, who did not establish a Gulag but still must be reckoned our worst political ruler since Henry VIII.
What has Sri Lanka done to deserve this? I looked at the printed matter under Heath's picture and found it to be a letter to the manager of the Galle Face: 'I had heard so much about your hotel that I was delighted to be able to sit on the balcony watching the moonlight on the sea and listening to the waves while we discussed the problems of the international situations'. These 'situations' were no doubt something to do with the North-South dialogue, the Third World or the Brandt report, in which things Mr Heath takes so much interest. Sri Lanka is not only one of the poor Third World nations but even makes an advantage of it. Air Lanka's in-flight magazine, called A Taste of Paradise, carries an article on the investment opportunities of its free .trade zone.
Among the inducements offered to foreign investors are tax holidays, duty-free import of raw materials and 'as labour wages average around 38 US dollars a month(the lowest in the region), foreign manufacturers have found that goods can be produced at very competitive rates for any market'. But even these rates are higher than those of some Third World countries; and at least Sri Lanka does attract some investment. Certain left-wing journalists have attacked this country because of the low wages paid to its workers, especially the teapickers. But the pickers would probably work for even less; the prosperity of the plantations has gone down since they were nationalised; and if the pickers were paid more, the price of tea would go up, which would upset Britain's pampered workers.
Of course there are Third World countries which, thanks to enterprise and hard work, may now be called 'first world' countries: Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Malaysia, for example. Unfortunately most Third World countries have not the ability to make good, or have spoiled their chance by misguided political ventures. Here in Sri Lanka it seems that the most successful efforts to raise the local economy have been made by other Asian countries like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. Their joint ventures have proved beneficial to Sri Lanka as well as themselves. (Come to think of it, Japan and Taiwan have managed to run successful factories even in places like Merseyside.) Great Britain, which has so strikingly failed to rescue its own economy, has not been much more successful here. The main aid project is a hydro-electric dam on a river near Kandy. One of the British workers on this Victoria Project told me: 'It's scheduled to be finished in 1982 but I think it will be more like 1986. There are three million unemployed in England but you still couldn't get enough people to work here unless you opened the prisons and forced them to come. It's not the country. The climate's good and you can drink. It's the site and the aggravations.' Things like a bad site and aggravations do not disturb Japanese, Taiwanese or Korean construction workers but seem to have daunted the men on the Victoria Project. However, the Queen will no doubt be told only the best of this British Third World enterprise.
The Kandy region has also suffered some of the worst of the country's communal problems. It is the heartland of Sri Lanka's ancient Buddhist civilisation. But this has suffered from thousands of years of attack from the Indian mainland. Today the majority of the country are Singhalese Buddhists but 20 per cent are Indian Tamils, some immigrant workers, but some the descendants of ancient invaders. The Tamils are found on the north of the island, and also the south central highlands where they are tea-pickers. The old hostility between the Singhalese and the Tamils flared once again this summer, with many stories of murder and of torture used by Buddhist police against Hindus.
The Buddhists resent the success of the Tamils: 'They've got the whole of a big country, India. Why don't they go back there? All the jewel shops are run by Tamils. Three out of five of the top government jobs are theirs,' I was told in Kandy. The Tamils in turn claim that most policemen are Buddhist even in Jaffna, a Tamil city; to which the Buddhists in turn reply that Tamils who join the police are shot by terrorists of their own side. The arguments have a drear familiarity: a small island close to its bigger neighbour; a majority proud of their old culture and freedom; a dour, hard-working minority -most of them in the north of the island. The Irish analogy could well be pursued even further. Sri, Lanka is now as Ireland might have been had it gained both unitY and independence in 1923, with Protestant terrorists now seeking secession. This is what the Tamils want: their own little northern state in an island the same size as Ireland. If they had won such a state before, there would now no doubt be Buddhist terrorists in the north seeking reunification. There is another more cheerful resemblance between the islands of Ireland and Sri Lanka: the peoples of both are verY fond of their liquor. Considering that the average wage is supposed to be 38 dollars.a month, a quite amazing proportion of this must be spent on beer, local whisky, toddy or palm wine and its distilled version, arak., Drink seems to result in carelessness 01. life. Drunken driving is not peculiar to Sri Lanka but where else does one see people imbibing on the railway tracks? It is .a favourite place for the toddy drinkers in spite of the many trains. And what does one make of the death of Udugama Gamage Saraneris, aged 58, who fell to his death_ when 'having returned after work at abota, 6 pm he climbed the kitul tree in front Ft the house to drink toddy' (Ceylon Da .IIY News 23 September)? Apparently it is cluite a custom in Sri Lanka to climb a tree for a drink.
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