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ASEAN agrees to let Sri Lanka participate in Asia-Pacific security meet

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations will let Sri Lanka take part in future meetings of Asia's largest security conference, Malaysia's foreign minister said Tuesday.

``ASEAN (has) agreed to admit Sri Lanka as a new participant'' in the ASEAN Regional Forum, or ARF, Malaysian Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar said, adding that it was subject to consensus approval from ARF members.

If ARF members agree during their two-day annual meeting in Kuala Lumpur starting Thursday, Sri Lanka would be the group's 27th member, he said.

Bangladesh will be participating in the ARF for the first time in this week's meeting, Syed Hamid said.

The 10 ASEAN countries are Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Its other dialogue partners in the ARF are Australia, Canada, China, East Timor, European Union, India, Japan, Mongolia, New Zealand, North Korea, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Russia, South Korea, United States.

Petroleum strike ends; Sri Lankan government buys two-week grace period

The Sri Lankan government bought two weeks grace period from petroleum sector trade unions late Tuesday, with fuel stocks expected to hit Colombo city by midnight.

Unions struck work demanding Asantha de Mel, the head of a key petroleum facility is removed, as they feared his appointment was the first step towards privatising petroleum assets.

President Mahinda Rajapakse’s trade union advisor Bharatha Lakshman Premachandra stepped in to resolve the crisis, after petroleum minister A H M Fowzie walked out of heated talks with trade unions earlier in the day.

“Mr. Premachandra promised us in writing that president Rajapakse will look into our grievances within two weeks time. With that assurance we are asking our members to return to work,” A L Ananda, Chairman of the CPC Joint Trade Union Front said.

Union demands agreed to include asking de Mel to stay away from his office and removing his executive powers, Ananda said.

On Monday De Mel took over as chairman of the Common Petroleum Storage Terminal (CPSTL), which is a joint venture between state-run Ceylon Petroleum Corp, Lanka IOC and the government treasury.

Fuel sheds usually hold stocks of diesel for about three days and petrol for about five days, but panic buying could deplete stocks faster.

A prolonged strike would also affect supplies at both Ceypetco and Lanka IOC sheds.

Fears of shortages triggered panic buying in filling stations around Colombo, with most sheds in the city running out of stocks on Tuesday.

Public transport was also on a low key, with some companies allowing staff to leave early.

Ceypetco runs over 600 sheds, including dealer owned filling stations, while Lanka IOC owns 100 sheds with 58 dealer owned stations in its network.

Forgotten and forsaken Sri Lankans in Lebanon

THE absolute raw and brutal misery of the Middle East fills us with despair, depression, revulsion and anxiety. Watching the hellish carnage on television is unbearable, but at times it is hard to take our eyes away.

The spectacle of human beings willfully beheading one another like savages is a melancholy reminder that in the absence of universal respect, hatred will spring up in inevitable evil spasms of destruction.

The current misery in Israel and Lebanon was triggered by Arab provocations but the Israeli war machine went into full battle-dress holy-war vengeance. Having a long time ago wandered in the desert themselves, the Israelis are now in the position of making others into today’s wanderers.

Miles underneath the precision aerial bombing and just below the whistling of the rockets from all sides are all manner of human beings struggling to survive — leaving aside the evil terrorists regrouping for the next kill — who deserve a significantly better fate than the hell that’s surrounding them now.

High on the list of the most miserable are the abandoned colony of Sri Lankans — trapped inside Lebanon as of this writing. To be sure, they are hardly the only ethnic group under the gun — consider the broader misery of the innocent, un-terror-affiliated Lebanese themselves. But their plight is especially poignant nonetheless: They are abject and luckless political and economic refugees from the once-idyllic island nation of Sri Lanka, and they are now apparently sliding as irrevocably towards civil-war hell as perhaps now Iraq — not to mention their own home country.

They fled their small native island, off the southeast coast of gigantic India, to escape the violence perpetrated by minority-rebel Tamil extremists and the Sinhalese government majority, and to find such menial jobs as they could in order to survive.

Of the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, who have fled over the decades, an astonishing 80,000 appear to have clustered around besieged Beirut, mostly women, finding work as maids, as washer-women, as day labours, as the lumpen-proletariat of this large Lebanese metropolis. They have been arriving in waves of about 10,000 a year, over time creating one of the most intense concentrations of the Lebanese diaspora on earth.

The life they were to inherit in Lebanon was hardly more favorable to them than the one they abandoned in their homeless. Their treatment by their employers was often little better than master to slave. Various human-rights group tried to come to the rescue of these homeless and stateless refugees, but it wasn’t until the well-known Sri Lankan actor Ranjan Ramanayka visited Lebanon and drew the media’s attention to the intense abuse of domestic workers in homes and prisons that their plight began to receive official attention.

Now their statelessness and homelessness has been heightened by the general panic in the Middle East that’s generated the sagas of flight that’s all over the world media. European foreigners were among the first to get out, then the Americans. But the 80,000 Sri Lankans — many without proper visa or passports — cower together, many in mountain hide-ways, praying simply that errant Israel bombs — the "dumb bombs," as it were — will not hit them.

The government of Sri Lanka, at this writing, is asking the government of India for help in evacuating at least some of its citizens, and India’s ships have indeed set sail. Whether the fleet will safely arrive and how many Sri Lankans they will choose to take back to South Asia and what will happen to them once they are back in either India or war-torn Sri Lanka, this is a complex puzzle that cannot be solved right now.

The fact is that dilemma may never arise; they may never escape the hell. Surely, the fate of these poor people somehow inspires pity and caring above and beyond all that we feel about the situation in the Middle East in general. These people simply wandered in search of a little tiny piece of life — a job, a shelter, a relief from war. Destiny, as it happened, took them to one of the places on earth that turned out to be as violent as the hell they left.

They wandered in search of a new home and a better future. If there is anyone on earth that should most sympathise with the Sri Lankans caught in the vile vortex of Lebanon, it must be the Jews in Israel. As if only for them — and for them alone — the government of Israel must find a way to stop this bombing and end this hell.