Outspoken CCP called back from North, former commander appointed as top health bureaucrat

[TamilNet, Monday, 11 May 2020, 20:25 GMT]
Consultant Community Physician (CCP) Dr Murali Vallipuranathan, who raised credible scientific questions of SL military-operated COVID-19 isolation centre in Kaangkeasan-thu'rai (KKS) in Jaffna, has been transferred away from North to South. The move comes after Vallipuranathan's case studies called into question the “dormitory” type of the military-run isolation that resulted in cross infections spreading the disease among sixteen of twenty people who were isolated by the SL military at KKS. Northern Provincial Director of Health Services, Dr A Ketheeswaran, has received instructions from Colombo's Health Ministry to transfer Dr Vallipuranathan to Colombo. In the meantime, SL President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has appointed the Director-General of SL Army Health Services, Major General Sanjeewa Munasinghe as the Secretary of the Health Ministry in Colombo.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa has appointed the top military health commander to control the communication of public health issues in a bid to hold the parliamentary elections as early as possible, political observers in Colombo said.

However, the militarisation of bureaucracy was not limited to the SL Health Ministry alone.

Mr Gotabaya has appointed retired Major General AKS Perera as the secretary to the SL Ministry of Mahaweli, Agriculture, Irrigation and Rural Development.

The so-called Mahaweli ‘Development’ Project with its Systems B and L targets Sinhalicisation of Tamil homeland in the North and East.

‘System L’ of Mahaweli project targets the fertile areas in Mullaiththeevu and ‘System B’, the largest of the current projects under the Mahaweli scheme, aims to seize the resourceful interior lands of Batticaloa district.

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