Monday, September 30, 2013

The Al Jazeera interview with Mahinda Rajapaksa: Calling the bluff

The President’s recent and wide-ranging interview on Al Jazeera is interesting on a number of counts (download the episode in HD here).




GroundviewsFor starters, our President is clearly grossly uninformed or deliberately seeks to misinform. Take for example his assertion, around 8:50 into the interview, that European Union election monitors said the recently held Provincial Council elections in the North were free and fair. However, as far back as July this year, the EU categorically said they would not be sending any election monitors to Sri Lanka. In fact, as the Sunday Times first reported and subsequently re-affirmed, Sri Lanka’s Elections Commissioner himself had taken the position “not to entertain monitors from countries that had voted against Sri Lanka at the March UN Human Rights Council sessions in Geneva”.