reuters.com,  Sun Feb 18 12:54:59 EST 2007

    COLOMBO, Feb 18 (Reuters) - Britain warned on Sunday it will withhold millions of pounds worth of aid to Sri Lanka if the island's government fails to provide assurances it is fulfilling agreed human rights and defence spending conditions.
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- The Academic

Dear English Man, You have created current problem for our country when you occupied our lands. Keep you money with you. Pay the crime that you have done

Hey Brits, do you think 4 mil pounds is big money? If every Sri Lankan contributes just one Rupee a day, we make Rs. 20 million a day and nearly Rs. 6000 mil a year. That around 30 mil pounds. Your 4 mil is peanuts. So, keep it to yourself and stay away from our politics. You talk about human rights in this war situation. We saw how you violated human rights when a tiny bomb went off in London. We can imagine how you might behave if commuter trains packed with people were blast into pieces by terrorists, whole villages were wiped out overnight, and your army commanders were killed by cuicide bombers. You gave this problem to us due to your dirty divide and conquer policy and now you come to teach us rubbish.

Blaming our problems on the brits is naive. They couldn't have done it without our kalu suddhas.

I agree with you that we should not be begging from them and bending over backwards to accommodate their multiple standard ideas of what they call human rights. For them invading a country, on the strength of a unsubstantiated statement in a master's thesis of some obscure student, thereby killing thousands of civilians and condeming children to death, torturing prisoners is all part of protecting human rights, as is defending a group that blows up trains and buses randomly.

Last year only about 15% of the aid available is said to have been utilized. So it is not more aid that we need.,


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loading....

Tsunami aid from UK works out to about Rs. one billion a year over 10 years. On the other hand, the loss to govt coffers due to corruption by various ministries are Rs 120 billion. If there is a serious attempt to stamp of corruption, there will be no longer any need to depend on these handouts. India refused to accept any foreign aid for tsunami rehab while Sri Lanka still stuck in a culture foreign aid dependency. It about time this changed.


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Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. - Albert Einstein

Athos wrote:

Tsunami aid from UK works out to about Rs. one billion a year over 10 years. On the other hand, the loss to govt coffers due to corruption by various ministries are Rs 120 billion. If there is a serious attempt to stamp of corruption, there will be no longer any need to depend on these handouts. India refused to accept any foreign aid for tsunami rehab while Sri Lanka still stuck in a culture foreign aid dependency. It about time this changed.

No to foreign aid is something I agree with you.  India has the same level of corruption and more poor people and they refused the aid for different reason, I believe.


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.... inspire me

Could someone explain why our politicians harp on "foreign aid" even when the "aid" is a loan? Why call a loan an aid, specially since, with the fast devaluing rupee, the repayment becomes more and more of a burden over the years.


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loading....

hardX wrote:

No to foreign aid is something I agree with you.  India has the same level of corruption and more poor people and they refused the aid for different reason, I believe.

Thailand did not accept any aid either.  Begging is the first thing that come to mind of SL politicians when they need funds. Its probably because it the easy way out. If there was any national pride, and some "out of the box" thinking, SL could have done the same as Thailand.

loading... wrote:

Could someone explain why our politicians harp on "foreign aid" even when the "aid" is a loan?

There is an aid component built into these loans through a concessionary rate. In return, the govt is generally asked make economic reforms, improve human rights situation etc. The World Bank is one institution that give these loans.  They left SL mainly because the govt did not want to make market reforms due to pressure from trade unions and other left-wing parasites.


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Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. - Albert Einstein

Many Sri Lankans have the pride, the level of that is much higher than anyone in the world.  It is based on the history and not the present.  Most think that Sri Lanka had a great civilization over 2500 years ago when the westerners in the cave.  That pride is killing us.  Perhaps that is why no shame in living on foreign aid.


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.... inspire me

hardX wrote:

Many Sri Lankans have the pride, the level of that is much higher than anyone in the world.  It is based on the history and not the present.  Most think that Sri Lanka had a great civilization over 2500 years ago when the westerners in the cave.  That pride is killing us.  Perhaps that is why no shame in living on foreign aid.

i do not blame people, because, they don't have enough information on how many percentage of their goods and services they enjoy come from foreign aid.  in other words, if a polical party tell its people that if we win we will give you free food  and free cloths for your children, most probably (3rd world country) people will choose that party (human nature). these political parties do not tell the people how they finance these services. i do not think many people (self-respected people) accept these goods if they know that these goods are coming from begged money. so, this is another fault of foreign donors (and so called demo'crazy'), giving lifeline for such political parties. Do you think, developing country governments concern their budget as much as developed countries. NO. because our politicans can beg, but developed country politicians can't. so we are a "blessed society".

loading... wrote:

Could someone explain why our politicians harp on "foreign aid" even when the "aid" is a loan? Why call a loan an aid, specially since, with the fast devaluing rupee, the repayment becomes more and more of a burden over the years.

Good question Loading,

My understanding is, especially in Sri Lanka we have a aid driven economy. We need money so the politicians do not care in which form the money comes.  So we call it a Aid because those money supposed to go to needy people. You are absolutely write these Aid/loans comes with strings attached.

For example in the aid packages for projects, the salary of Expatriate workers included, In USAIDE projects one has to go for expensive Computes like IBM because they are US made.
You can only buy these assets only the US made ones ar not available.  This is a classic example.

Loans and aid are distinct, but as loading says politicians often collate the two figures for their greater glory.

There are grants for specific projects, which may or may not be tied to purchase of material from the donor country (as deliberate policy with aid by the US, and under no circumstances with aid from the UK), and then there are soft loans for specific projects. The advantage of the soft loan is that the interest is well below market rate. Soft loans can come from multilateral organizations such as the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank or from individual donor countries such as Japan or Germany.

I agree to all of your ideas on loans and aid. its always been called aid just to make the "loan" sound sweeter. the truth is these aid programs trap us in trying to fulfill the required economic reforms/human rights etc. to continue getting aid. meanwhile though many of these free-market policies are good and should be adopted eventually, our country and its people are not yet ready to adopt them all bcos we are not yet competitive enough in all our industries to challenge most foreign players. in the end, we pay other countries back the loan, we pay them back for purchasing material (using the money from the loan), our more fragile industries collapse under the pressure of foreign competition, our domestic policies are in shambles as our policymakers work with hands tied, our anti-terror efforts are undermined by calls for protecting HR by nations that only see HR violations from their points of view, and our country continues to drag its feet in every issue.

I have strong convictions for safe-guarding Human Rights, but what were the US and UK saying when their HR violations in Guantanamo were discovered? What did they have to say about the ethnic backlashes following the bomb attacks in their country's? And what DO they have to say about Iraq? theres no need to bring up specific issue in Iraq - the WHOLE thing is a violation of human rights and the sovereignity of nations.

I laugh at their news programs talking about the need for toppling Saddam. We all know Saddam needed to be toppled, but we also know that wasnt why they first went in there. haha. Now years down the road and not ONE SINGLE WMD in sight. So much for the trillion dollar intelligence services of the US and UK!

And their excuse? "We all make mistakes!"

HAHAHA. NOT WHEN UR MISTAKE MEANS WAR!!

It was quite amusing when our PM Ratnasiri Wickramanayake roared “We will accept aid, but we will not accept money with strings attached!!!”. As if this . did not realise as soon as you accept any charity, you have already lost your dignity. This was at an opening ceremony of a multi-religious facility built using Japanese aid somewhere down south.  The Japanese who were at the ceremony would have thought, these beggars want to count the teeth of a gift horse. These outdated “Sinhala .” politicians are really an embarrassment to the country and should be kicked as soon as the opportunity arises.


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Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. - Albert Einstein

Amarakoon wrote:

For example in the aid packages for projects, the salary of Expatriate workers included, In USAIDE projects one has to go for expensive Computes like IBM because they are US made.
You can only buy these assets only the US made ones ar not available.  This is a classic example.

when you get Chinese aid it will be awarded to a chinese company (eg. Norochcholai coal power ) & you will get chinese expats.
By the way the IBM computers are not expensive. Infact IBM PCs was bought over by Chinese manufacturer Lenovo.
There is nothing called US made computers anymore, all come with made in China sticker