In it’s never ending stream of initiatives to combat the LTTE, the Government recently came up with the Civil Defence Force, or the Civil Arakshaka Balakaya. It’s something in the lines of semi-trained armed civilians.

This, whilst being in the lines of Civil Vigilance Committees, has the added (dis)advantage of being armed. This is what I term as the Tarzan effect.

During the days when the TV series Tarzan was being aired, there were numerous recorded incidents of kids trying to swing from trees either breaking their bones, or on some occasions, managing to wipeout themselves from the gene pool (AKA dying).

The CDF/CVC will have the same kind of effect. This will also be complemented by the precedent set by the Navy petty officer who managed to defuse the bomb in Auradhapura. He was a person untrained in the sciences of bomb defusal, taking things to his own hands. If the bomb exploded killing him (and his wife who was close to him), then the outcome would have been much more different.

But now the precedent have been set. If you see a bomb, defuse it. If you see a person whom you think is a member of the LTTE, catch him. If he tries to run away, shoot him. The repercussions of this kind of Tarzan effect upon our civilians who are already living in a society where the line of thinking has been transformed into a “kill the Tamil LTTE bastards” by the Governments spin doctoring efforts, will be anybody’s guess.

PS: The Tarzan effect was also visible during some of my recent travel to the south. Post tsunami, there were thousands of “counselors” trained by various NGOs, and most of them were grief counselors. My experiences of interacting with them have shown me that the Tarzan effect is also abundantly visible in this segment as well. These “counselors” have very limited experience and background knowledge, and the damage caused by them far surpasses the actual positive impact made.