It's just not cricket

On a 43 degree day I didn’t feel like doing much except keeping cool and sitting in front of the tv to watch the cricket (a rare feat) and some reading in between. As Sri Lanka beat Australia I watched the trumpeter and a few drummers kick off what looked like a baila tune or two. However, a similar attempt to keep a band playing at the previous match at the Melbourne’s Telstra Dome was apparently thwarted, after crowd complains, by the ever reliable boys in blue. According to a Sri Lankan – Australian, Laknath Jayasinghe, who wrote in The Age op-eds during the week.

….this, and other far more cutting and racially motivated language, is what confronted me and my friends - all Australians from migrant Sri Lankan backgrounds - when we decided to sing traditional, festive Sinhalese songs to amuse ourselves during what was a very one-sided cricket match.

There was dancing, and some from the broader Anglo-Australian community joined in. To me, this was multiculturalism in its truest and most joyful sense.

So it was incredibly sad to hear a collective grunt of displeasure from a large body of spectators seated nearby, sneering suspiciously at our "foreign" activities. This was followed by a collective sigh of relief from this same section of the crowd when the boys in blue, whom they had complained to, asked us to stop singing and dancing …

This is nothing new. In the past I’ve been to a few AL vs OZ games in Melbourne and invariably when the baila starts playing and people get together the boys in blue materialise as if an alarm has gone off in their deterrence detection meter. More about that later. The next day a friend forwarded the following email ( edited for minor cleansing) which was written by a mate who was at the match providing context for the above cited article. It provides an insiders view.

What happened at the Dome was this. The first half I really enjoyed the banter because there were a few Aussie guys with the beer in their hands who were countering our cheering with Murali taunts ( and we were 10 guys who started shouting in Sinhalese (native language) and then turned to English when we started copping it - so that people can understand). Anyway that was good fun and both parties enjoyed it and we even had a bit of a chat during the 40 minute interval. Then came Part 2.

Part 2 happened when the band started playing and the about 150 or more Sri Lankans got together on one part of Level 3 at the Dome and started singing sinhalese songs/ This is when the crowd around us got apparently uncomfortable (or maybe offended) and asked the cops to make us stop. In between some Aussies teenagers got between the singing group and started to yell in English. So the cops came and they asked us to leave and told that if we want to sing that we should take it outside the stadium. So most of us did a lap around the Dome and watched the remaining 30 odd overs at the big screen outside the Dome .Honestly, I thought we copped a bit ( and there were some very minor scuffles !) but I didn’t relate any of the events seriously to 'other more broader issues' until I saw this article and looking at a lot of things, I do agree with a lot of the content.

My response in another post…TBC.

Take a bow Dr.Gunatunga you are an individual

Living overseas it's hard to guage the day to day violence and death in the North and East of Sri Lanka and finding the truth is itself a challenge as each of the antagonists are out to create illusions of it. I usually await the UTHR(J) publications (last report) to clear the air. However, in this particular criminal act the truth appears to be a lot easier and transparent thanks primarily to one individual.

By all accounts 5 innocent students were intentionally killed in Trincomalee on the 2nd of January 2006 and attempts were made to frame these murders.

This was followed soon after by the killing on 2 January of five high school students from Sri Koneswara Hindu College and St Joseph's College in Trincomalee. Although the army first claimed they were killed by a grenade that the students were carrying, following a post mortem it was revealed that the students had been shot, three of them in the head. The President has ordered an inquiry into the killings. [link Amnesty]

As narrated by DBS Jeyaraj one individual stands out in his actions for the truth.

The truth however became known when the post - mortem and judicial inquiry was conducted. The Trincomalee Judicial Medical Officer Dr.Gamini Gunatunga conducted the post - mortem and ruled that all five dead victims had died due to gunshot injuries. Three had died of head injuries while the other two had succumbed to abdomen and chest injuries. The JMO however observed that some of the victims had injuries other than gunshot wounds too. But the fatal ones were from gunshots. [link via theacademic]

I for one would like to offer my thanks to Dr.Gunatunga for his actions and not caving in to any pressure applied by the criminal elements who comitted these acts in the name of the state. To me this is an ideal example of the difference an individual can make in times of overwhelming odds as well as the power of the truth when the judiciary is transparent. Now the question is, having ordered an inquiry into this incident will Mr.Rajapaskse stand up to seek justice.