Between the devil & the deep blue sea

Sri Lanka Muslim Congress leader (SLMC) and Sri Lanka's Ports minister M.H.M.Ashraff and at least 10 others were killed in a helicopter crash at Aranayake in the Kegalle district, about 60 km. east of Colombo, Saturday morning, police said.

Ashraff, a lawyer by profession, maintained good relations with the press but found himself embroiled in one controversy after another in the past five years.

Buddhists have taken him to court over a poem he wrote about the Buddha. The Buddhists argued that Ashraff's poetic dialogue with the Buddha was offensive and amounted to blasphemy. He survived a no-confidence vote in parliament over the awarding of a contract to build a port in the south of the country.

Opposition parties, as well as several government figures pounced on Ashraff recently over his attempts to retire port workers who had reached the age of 45 years so that he could give jobs to some 4,500 people ahead of the October elections.

His efforts to rehabilitate the island's embattled eastern province, his own home constituency, drew criticism from majority Sinhalese groups. Yet he steadfastly backed Kumaratunga over her controversial plan to turn the country into a de facto federal state in all but name.

M.H.M.Ashraff was one of the main sponsors of the 1976 TULF resolution asking for EELAM which was the starting point of the LTTE campaign.

Though it is bad to speak ill of the dead; few recent events need highlighting since thousand of friends and foe alike have perished in the mess created partly by power hungry opportunists like MHM Ashroff who fitted perfectly to Chandrika Kumaratunga's "balancing acts"

1. Two weeks ago, he demanded reinstatement of the his party's Puttalam Mayor from his party who had been sacked for corruption by the PA Adminstration (rare but true event). Chandrika of course agreed. The amount misappropriated was RS 40 Million (US$0.5Million ) and the Auditor General's men who went to investigate were manhandled

2. He wrote poems mocking the Buddha; when it is blasphemy for others even to refer to his god.

3. He bulldozed part of the ancient Deegavapi archeological reserve to settle 500 Muslims with the full knowledge of Chandrika Kumaratunga. Digavapi is the second biggest Anuradhapura era monestery in the East covering 1000 acres

4. He sent his men to be trained under the Indian Army as part of the infamous TNA of Varatharaja Perumal in 1990 who sought to create a separate Tamil State.

5. His main demand was a Muslim Sub state in the ancient Panam Pattu of Sri Lanka.

When he asked for this, he has conveniently forgotten that that King Rajasinghe 2 of Kandy allowed them to settle in Panam Pattu so that continue to earn a living when the Portuguese were killing them in the maritime provinces of Sri Lanka; and not to ask for a separate state 200 years later. The biggest loss to the country in all this is the loss of two highly trained airforce pilots.

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