Mangala Samaraweera 's Interview with Daily Telegraph's Foster:

Back to Sri Lanka today and a full interview with Sri Lanka's foreign minister Mangala Samaraweera who left the Sri Lankan government in February 2007 after falling out with the country's President, Mahinda Rajapakse.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/peter_foster

Since leaving office Mr Samaraweera, who was also Mr Rajapakse's Chief Campaign Co-ordinator during his successful 2005 presidential campaign, has become one of the most outspoken critics of a regime he was instrumental in getting elected.

With that important piece of local political background in mind, here's what he had to say about recent events in Sri Lanka, accusing President Rajapakse of seeking to create 'a Sinhala Buddhist supremacist, Burmese-style junta' in Sri Lanka and urging the US and other Western governments to consider travel bans on key
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Morgan Tsvangirai and a moment on the roadside
Posted on Feb 11, 2009 at 22:30:35
Tags: MDC , Morgan Tsvangirai , Robert Mugabe , Zimbabwe

THERE was something more than faintly chilling about seeing Comrade Robert Mugabe swearing in Morgan Tsvangirai as the prime minister of Zimbabwe.

It brought back to me a moment, ten years ago, when I was reporting on the first murders and evictions of white farmers outside Bulawayo in southern Zimbabwe and came across a burned out car on the side of the road.

The car had been driven by an old schoolfriend of Mr Tsvangirai's who was working as a local organiser in Matabeleland of the then-nascent Movement for Democratic Change led by Mr Tsvangirai.

The friend had been stopped by a Zanu-PF mob, dragged from the car, beaten half-senseless and then put back in the vehicle and burned alive.

By chance, Mr Tsvangirai was in the area campaigning and he asked to
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The forgotten spirit of China's rural entrepreneurs
Posted on Feb 10, 2009 at 06:52:51
Tags: china , financial crisis , Malcolm Moore , Yangtze River Delta , Yasheng Huang

GLORY BE! After nearly two months without rain, the skies have finally mustered a desultory drizzle which, while hardly sufficient to replenish my water tanks, might at least bring a greener tinge to the parched-brown fields of Golden Bay.

Every farmer I've been talking to has been wondering how to find enough grazing for their livestock as most of the fields are so dry that the grass literally crackles underfoot.

Of course, 'away from the Bay' my thoughts are now turning from the Kiwi countryside to that of China where I'll be arriving in a couple of weeks to start a new assignment in Beijing reporting on China with my colleague Malcolm Moore in Shanghai.

Talking to other journalists on the Chinabeat, it's clear that reporting on China is full of local difficulties,
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What will 'peace' bring to Sri Lanka?
Posted on Feb 3, 2009 at 23:02:07
Tags: BBC , Gotabaya Rajapakse , LTTE , Sarath Fonseka , Sri Lanka , Tamil tigers



THE sadness in Sri Lanka seems to deepen every day, even as Sri Lankan forces prepare to celebrate the impending extinction of the Tamil Tigers as a military force.

The inevitability of defeat seems implicitly recognized in the call by the Tokyo quartet - US, EU, Japan and Norway - for the Tigers to stop fighting in order to minimize the already dreadful situation for non-combatants in northeast Sri Lanka.

The Tokyo quartet, it is worth remembering, emerged from the post-Tsunami Tokyo conference where some USD$4.5bn was pledged to rebuild Sri Lanka.

Unfortunately the politics of enmity (on both sides) meant that all efforts to find an acceptable apparatus to spend that money in a way that would have helped heal Sri Lanka ethnic divide, came to nought.
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