DEFENCE Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa has urged the people of the North to reject, at the upcoming NPC polls, those who backed the LTTE’s terrorism. … However, if they were to do so, they might not be able to exercise their franchise at all; they might have to walk the streets with lamps … looking for ‘clean’ candidates to vote for!

In this country, there’s nary a political party that has not either resorted to terrorism or supported it from a safe distance or capitulated to pressure. … It is the TNA which is usually hauled over the coals for its collaboration with the LTTE. It recognised the LTTE as the sole representative of the Tamil people in spite of the latter’s … terrorism and … functioned as Prabhakaran’s mouthpiece.

The … LTTE sympathisers are of the view the TNA has let the side down by accepting what Prabhakaran rejected … [that is] the provincial council system. …

Haven’t other political parties helped further the LTTE’s interests? … The UNP has a history of not only assisting the LTTE in legitimising its cause through peace accords and talks but also giving it arms, ammunition, money, shelter and building materials. …

What about the … SLFP? True, it is an SLFP-led government which defeated the LTTE and made NPC polls possible. But, there have been instances where it also gave in to Prabhakaran.

…[P]resident Mahinda Rajapaksa, too, chose to stick to a blatantly lopsided ceasefire which the UNF government had entered into with the LTTE. …

The JVP may not have supported the LTTE … but its own terrorism which rendered the southern parts of the country ungovernable stood Prabhakaran in good stead in the late 1980s. …

In responding to LTTE terrorism, the Old Left notoriously stuck to its appeasement policy, according to which you should keep offering lambs or goats to man eaters in the hope that they might become herbivores one day. …

Northerners like their counterparts elsewhere are without a choice when it comes to electing their representatives. They have to settle for the best out of a bad lot. …— (July 28)