BY NEVILLE DE SILVA
Apublic with eyes and ears understandably focused on the climactic days of the parliamentary election might have missed media reports on the arrival of former British prime minister Tony Blair and his family for a Sri Lankan holiday.
So brief was the news item and so similar and bland that one might be excused for presuming that it came from an official source disseminating some threadbare facts so as to buy a few more days time before saying what else Mr. Blair might be doing during his two weeks sojourn besides lolling on a southern beach and savouring some lobster thermidor.
Not everybody seemed content with the bare bones of the story. The Colombo Gazette which reported the Blair arrival received many responses from readers several of whom made deprecatory remarks on Blair and the Iraq invasion, about war crimes and attempts in the UK and Hong Kong to make citizen's arrests when Mr. Blair made public appearances. One reader quite pertinently asked "what is the hidden agenda".
That is a question better addressed to the upper echelons of our foreign ministry. They have fobbed off questions for more than a month over the Blair visit and other generally innocuous queries. Meanwhile, not so subtle leaks in London were flowing down Hyde Park Gardens with hyperbolic declarations about some hidden legal prowess of our representative that had helped steer Tony Blair's spouse Cherie Booth to spend a holiday in our resplendent isle.
Interestingly, Colombo Gazette went further than other media in reporting Blair's arrival pointing to an opinion piece in the website of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation which talked of religious persecution in Sri Lanka and how the situation has improved in recent days but could well return to its earlier virulence.
Absorbed in what is surely an unusual election, the public might also have missed an unfortunate coincidence. Mr. Blair arrived here the day before a commemorative meeting at the Bandaranaike Centre on the 10th death anniversary of former foreign minister Lakshman Kadirgamar.