http://www.dailynews.lk/2013/06/14/main_Editorial.asp

THE REVIVAL
The President is on a tour of the former Tiger heartland, and on the 15th he will ceremonially open the Killinochchi-Mullathivu stretch of road, while he will prior to that participate in a string of events such as the ceremonies for the hand over of new housing units to area residents in Killinochchi. The journey from Killinochchi to Mullathivu used to take a good three hours - but now with the new road, it can be accomplished within the hour.

To all those who are inevitably bound to respond to this news with the stock rejoinder that goes on the lines of 'yes but economic development will not address other issues of reconciliation and good governance', here is a refresher on how Mullathivu and Killinochchi came to be this way.

President Rajapaksa will not neglect to remind people in these two districts about the relatively luxurious underground bunkers that housed Velupillai Prabhakaran, in Mullathivu, while the people of either Killinochchi and Mullathivu got nothing, expect the persistent demands from the LTTE to contribute to the war effort by giving up sons and daughters. It is not as if the parents had any choice.

It is a fact that the citizens in these districts are the poorest of the poor, and that they were mistreated in this way by both Prabhakaran and those who followed him in the Tamil diaspora claiming to be the saviour of the Tamil people. It is true that some of these people in these two districts had been doubly wronged.

Some of them may have fled the racial riots of 1983, and ended up in this arid terrain, only to face the fascism of Prabhakaran. But the fact remains that until now, there was nobody that cared in any way for these poorest of the poor who were treated as social dregs that due to chronic poverty were cannon fodder to the terrorist armies, and then victims to the political manipulations of the diaspora that wanted to keep these people in penury so that their circumstances may be exploited to advance their own political causes.

But for the first time in decades, what used to be considered an outcaste community relative to the rest of the Tamils and the Sinhalese, is now seeing the bounty of development -- the erection of houses, the paving of roads, and the creation of jobs and opportunities.

The bunker mentality fostered by Prabhakaran did not give rise to the kind of hope that would have made these people envisage chances of such a kind, this soon. They were typically the bedraggled type of people that came out of the fighting, scared, huddled, looking deprived and half starved, as depicted in the recent documentary, The Last Phase, for instance.

The President did not see political opportunity in these long suffering people through selling them slogans and via selling them grand political schemes, that could have been touted as 'political solutions.' Instead, he saw that these are human beings that have had a raw deal, who need to be reawakened from a long running nightmare of serial victimization.

As the Buddha preached -- do not lecture to the man that is hungry, fill his belly first! The President gave the long suffering people of Killinochchi and Mullathivu, progress, hope and a vision for the future that they can tangibly feel and relate to.

The naysayers would be claiming that this is patronizing, but then, these people must speak for themselves and should not retain the agency of others-- to be spoken on behalf of. If and when they did speak, they have spoken about opportunity and the release from long years of suppression. It will not take them long to break from the straitjacket of ethnically based politics that still is a hangover from a prolonged period of fright, paranoia and the peer pressure to conform.