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CEB Unions call off TU action

The Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) unions yesterday decided to abandon the continuous Trade Union action scheduled from Tuesday (10) after they were given an assurance by the Government that the CEB will not be privatised.

Power and Energy Minister Susil Premjayantha, Finance Minister Sarath Amunugama and Health Minister Nimal Siripala de Silva, Power Energy MInistry Secretary P. Virahandi and thirty trade union leaders participated in the discussions at Temple Trees prisided over by Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa.

After four hours of discussion they reached a consensus. After agreeing to the final terms Union leaders urged the Government members to give a written undertaking.

Thereafter, Finance Minister Amunugama, Power and Energy Minister Premjayantha and Secretary of the Power and Energy Ministry P. Virahendi signed a document, which contained two assurances:

Cabinet paper submitted on 04/05/2005 to restructure the CEB will not be supported at the next Cabinet eeting scheduled for Wednesday May 11.

l To draft a new Reform Bill with the discussion of Unions after studying the Electricity Reform Act No 28, 2002 and CEB Act without changing the identity of the CEB but allowing provisions to establish companies and institutions under the CEB to improve the efficiency to obtain financial assistance from donor agencies.

Prime Minister Rajapaksa during the discussion reiterated that the government would not privatise state resources and would act in accordance with the wishes of all parties in the governing Alliance.

Finance Minister Sarath Amunugama thanked the Unions for their co-operation and said "all our doubts are cleared now. Certainly have no intention to privatise the CEB. The conflict between us turned to an understanding. We shall now work for low cost power generation."

CEB Unions Convener Ananda Nimalaratne speaking requested the Government members to keep to promises. He said that Unions never launched any Trade Union action to cripple the CEB or create inconvenience to the public. "Our union action was to protect the CEB going into the hands of the private mudalalis but we will support the Government for a restructuring process to improve efficiency", he added.

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Finance Minister Sarath Amunugama, Power and Energy Minister Susil Premjayantha and Secretary of the Power and Energy Ministry P. Virahandhi signing the document assuring that the CEB will not be privatised.

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Sri Lanka Tigers getting more aircraft: Indian foreign minister

NEW DELHI - India is concerned about information that a Tamil rebel group in neighbouring Sri Lanka has built an airstrip and acquired aircraft, Foreign Minister Natwar Singh said in remarks published on Saturday.

Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were believed to be getting more aircraft, the minister said in an interview with The Hindu newspaper.

“We are concerned about the LTTE having built an airstrip and having two aeroplanes and there’s news about more coming,” Singh said, but did not elaborate.

Sri Lanka told neighbouring countries recently it was worried about the guerrillas acquiring flying capability while the two sides observed an Oslo-brokered truce that has been in effect since February 23, 2002.

Colombo said it had information that the guerrillas had built an airstrip in LTTE-held Iranamadu in the country’s north and that they had acquired two light aircraft. It said this would violate the ceasefire agreement and pose a threat to national security.

New Delhi armed, trained and provided safe haven to Sri Lankan Tamil separatists in the mid-1980s, but moved to disarm them after a July 1987 bilateral peace pact with Colombo.

The LTTE repudiated the peace plan and ended up fighting Indian troops who withdrew after a 32-month acrimonious deployment that saw 1,200 of their men killed in action against the Tigers.

Since then, India has concentrated mainly on pushing trade and economic ties with its southern neighbour.

Earlier this month, top civil servants of Sri Lanka and India met in Colombo to review bilateral relations and discussed “defence matters” as well as efforts to boost trade.

Sri Lanka proposed a defence cooperation pact with India in October 2003. There has been no final agreement.

India and Sri Lanka entered into a free trade agreement in 19

Khalid

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Sri Lankan Maids' High Price for Foreign Jobs

KEGALLA, Sri Lanka - The teacher held up an electric cake mixer and told the class of wide-eyed women before her to clean it properly. If it smells, "Mama," as the aspiring maids were instructed to call their female employers, "will be angry and she will hammer and beat you."

Sriyantha Walpola for The New York Times

Some maids being trained in Kegalla, Sri Lanka, will find brutal work conditions in the Middle East.

Sriyantha Walpola for The New York Times

More than a million Sri Lankans - roughly 1 in every 19 citizens - now work abroad, and nearly 600,000 are housemaids.

"This is where you go wrong," the teacher continued. "That is how Mama beats you and burns you - when you do anything wrong."

Eighteen female hands took down every word, as if inscription could ward off ill fortune. Among the women, Rangalle Lalitha Irangame was struggling to keep up, haggard after a sleepless night in the hospital. Her 4-year-old daughter was sick with fever, a worrisome turn for any mother, but a cause for panic for one about to leave for years abroad.

After a year of thinking, 35-year-old Lalitha - who prefers that name - decided to trade her life as a Sri Lankan housewife for one as a Middle Eastern housemaid. After completing their 12-day training, she and her classmates would join a mass migration of women to the Persian Gulf's petro-lubricated economies, trading the fecundity and community of Sri Lankan villages for the aridity and high-walled homes of the Arab world.

Behind those walls the women risk exploitation so extreme that it sometimes approaches "slaverylike" conditions, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report on foreign workers in Saudi Arabia. But while attention has focused on the failure of countries like Saudi Arabia to prevent or prosecute abuses, the de facto complicity of the countries that send their women abroad has largely escaped scrutiny.

For developing countries, migration has become a safety valve, easing the pressure to employ the poor and generating more than $100 billion in remittances in 2003, according to a study by Devesh Kapur, an associate professor of government at Harvard.

More than a million Sri Lankans - roughly 1 in every 19 citizens - now work abroad, and nearly 600,000 are housemaids, according to government estimates. Migrant workers have become Sri Lanka's largest and most consistent earner of foreign exchange, out-doing all major agricultural crops.

In Saudi Arabia, the most common destination, they call Sri Lanka "the country of housemaids." In Sri Lanka they call the maids heroines.

Sri Lanka's government has become an assiduous marketer of its own people. With training programs like Lalitha's, it is helping to prepare what is by now a second generation of housemaids. It even provides a safe haven to shelter, hide and rehabilitate those women who return with broken bodies, lost minds or incipient children.

But it does little to publicize those abuses, protest against them or protect the women for fear of jeopardizing the hundreds of millions of dollars they send home each year.

The women's remittances have built homes, provided capital for businesses, and given the women themselves an enduring confidence. But those gains have come with incalculable hardships.

The women often leave indebted, work virtually indentured and have almost no legal redress against the sexual harassment, confinement or physical abuse they often suffer in the countries they adopt. With no absentee voting rights, they also have no political voice back home.

By one estimate, 15 to 20 percent of the 100,000 Sri Lankan women who leave each year for the gulf return prematurely, face abuse or nonpayment of salary, or get drawn into illicit people trafficking schemes or prostitution.

Many housemaids who run away from their employers are kept in limbo at Sri Lanka's embassies because no one wants to pay their way home. Last year, after their plight was publicized, the government airlifted home 529 maids who had been living for months, packed as tightly as in a slavehold, in the basement of the embassy in Kuwait.

Hundreds of housemaids have become pregnant, often after rapes, producing children who, until Sri Lanka's Constitution was recently amended, were stateless because their fathers were foreigners. More than 100 women come home dead each year, with most deaths labeled "natural" by the host governments, although Sri Lankan officials concede they are powerless to investigate.