Sunday Punch 2
be launched on Parliament. And on Thursday moves were afoot to strip him of his post.
It is not the concern of the general public how Wimal runs with an iron fist his one man show within his own party of handfuls. But what must shock is that he has shown no repentance to atone for his sin in his threat to bomb parliament out of existence.
One of Wimal’s catchers, a NFF MP Jayantha Samaraweera addressed a news conference on Friday and faithfully barked his master Wimal’s decree that Parliament must be bombed if it passes the proposed Constitution Bill. He said: “If morning a few months before.
Furthermore he faces charges of financial irregularities. One is how he found the money to build his mansion. Another is the allegation made by Ocean View Development Company Private Limited, claiming that a financial irregularity had occurred via the company, during the tenure of Wimal Weerawansa when he served as the Minister of Housing; and he stands accused of giving homes at the luxury housing schemes in Mattegoda and Kahatuduwa to those closely related to him?
And to compound his problems, it must give the man nightmares when he reflects on the two cases filed by the FCID against his wife Shashi, for fraudulently obtaining two passports including a diplomatic passport by submitting forged documents to the Department of Immigration and Emigration. No rest for the wicked, is there? With all the crosses he has to bear, perhaps, Weerawansa flipped under strain when he called for Parliament to be bombed. But, though the public may well, in one of its pious, sentimental and melancholic moods, spurred by Buddhist compassion and urged by Christian charity, to extend to this Rasputin of Lanka’s politics, an ounce of mercy, a pound of sympathy along with their ton of outrage over his incorrigibility, the Speaker of Lanka’s Parliament can afford no such luxuries and indulge anymore Wimal’s outlandish behaviour and grant him grace when he threatens to bomb Parliament if its members do not do as he thinks fit or as his Master’s Voice commands.
To the Speaker’s credit, he did not take the threat lightly but viewed it gravely as he must when the House he presides over is threatened with destruction -- blown to smithereens no less, if its members do not do what Wimal wants them to do.
In a statement issued this week on Tuesday, the Speaker the Hon. Karu Jayasuriya announced that an inquiry would be initiated against MP Wimal Weerawansa for stating that a bomb should be sent to the Parliament. “MP Weerawansa’s statement has threatened the democracy and the safety of people’s representatives,” the Speaker said in his statement. He said the incident had drawn the attention of both the governing and the opposition parties and promised that measures would be taken against the errant MP.
In England when Guy Fawkes was convicted of attempting to blow up Parliament, the Attorney General Sir Edward Coke told the court that the condemned Fawkes would be drawn backwards to his death, by a horse, his head near the ground. He was to be "put to death halfway between heaven and earth as unworthy of both". His genitals would be cut off and burnt before their eyes, and his bowels and hearts removed. He would then be decapitated, and the dismembered parts of his body displayed so that he might become "prey for the fowls of the air". It would be done to set an example, to act as a deterrent, to any Guy Fawkes wannabe in the future.
Perhaps, if the report of the Speaker’s inquiry should come to a finding holding Weerawansa guilty, the punishment meted out should serve as a warning to all presumptuous parliamentary bombers in the future. And brand them not only as "prey for the fowls of the air" but as foul candidates ineligible to seek the public mandate for parliamentary membership.