Sunday Times 2
Requiem for a State: The slicing and dicing of Sri Lanka
With its two constituents now at war, our hybrid government is terminally ill. As Sirisena himself admitted, for two years his SLFP-faction and Ranil were at loggerheads. He cruelly scolded the Ranil Cabinet (his own Cabinet) on TV. He also called Ranil associates “Samanalayo” (butterfly – implying gay). Illustrating this tension, Ranil complained that during the Easter bombings, he was not allowed to convene security meetings because of a Sirisena ruling.
This hybrid emerged with the defeat of the overconfident MR. As a guarantee of sure success, MR changed the Constitution’s term limits and held the election two years early. Ignorance of the real function of local and foreign forces by MR, and now, the current government, are key to their past and present misfortunes. The Easter bombings thrust into focus these deeper currents.
First, the present disarray.
Prior to, and after the Easter attacks, the unforgivable breakdown of decision-making came to light. Indian sources had warned the Government of an imminent attack. Non-Jihadist Muslims had alerted various authorities about Jihadist penetration. Land used for terrorist training had been found, as had Jihadist training manuals,. These complaints reached parts of the Government but were ignored, the IGP (now on-leave) saying that ‘reconciliation’ (code for foreign NGOs’ selectivity) had stalled preventive action. The breakdown in governance was clear.
In the aftermath of the bombings, Sirisena was mindlessly wriggling like a fish out of water. There were other symptoms of his panic as he took contrary positions. Examples: to prevent deforestation, ordering a ban on chainsaws and carpentry shops; insisting on the death penalty. But he had done nothing to stop the cutting down of thousands of acres of forest in ‘Bathiudeeen territory’ and he ignored numerous studies on the ineffectiveness of the death penalty.
Authority rapidly ebbing after the bombing, both the President and the PM left the country. As he travelled abroad, Sirisena was enjoying the last few months of Presidential pomp. He was in India, Singapore, China, Central Asia et cetera and was again going away to Cambodia and Laos. With elections looming, we must explore the local and the foreign forces at play in the current chaos.
The foreign media
While the local mainstream media reported on the bombings relatively accurately, the reporting in international organs were misleading, reflecting the disjuncture between local and foreign.
Our UN Representative complained about false reporting by UN special adviser Adama Dieng and by UN Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide, and Karen Smith, UN Special Advisor on the neocolonial Responsibility to Protect (‘R2P’). Our UK envoy objected to a BBC report which quoted a Tamil living in the UK as claiming Sinhala Buddhists were behind the bombings.
Other international media were interviewing foreign-funded NGOs, many of the latter Christians. Presumably because churches were attacked, they did not go to their usual one-sided anti-Buddhist rhetoric. A few initially gave in to this anti-Buddhist bias. Leaders of our foreign-funded NGOs are drawn from the colonially derived sections of Colombo. Many are drawn from those very strata displaced by the removal of colonial derived privileges and the spread of democracy. One example was the (Christian) spokesman for the ‘national piece’ outfit, who once welcomed Indian troops to the country; his organisation later marched in Geneva singing the LTTE anthem. It is these groups who had their voice in the foreign imagination, not the many locally vocal nationalist groups.
Mass media studies departments in our universities should have pointed out these distortions in international media. But unfortunately, this did not occur, as they play local party politics.
Immediately after the bombing, the TNA (earlier a proxy for the Nazi inspired LTTE) said that the bombings were due to Sri Lanka not addressing alleged ‘minority grievances’. The TNA’s deception also ignored the fact that the LTTE had summarily evicted Muslims and Sinhalese from Jaffna with 48 hours’ notice. There was also a news report after the bombing (but not confirmed later) that a lorry load of ‘Islamic’ explosives was going towards Jaffna. Tamil leaders’ refrain now changed. They (for example Sumanthiran, Anandi Sashidaran) now wanted the Army to remain in the North and East, reversing their earlier pro-LTTE demands.
In late May, this misdirection was continued in a special BBC documentary ‘Searching for Father Francis’ on a missing Tamil Christian priest during the war. This one-sided documentary forgot that Tamil Christian priests were in the forefront of supporting the LTTE with Father Emmanuel justifying suicide bombings. The documentary also had no mention of LTTE attacks on Buddhist monks and ancient places of Buddhist worship. This BBC report shortly after the Easter attacks was misdirecting global attention to past allegations on soldiers. Around this time, Sirisena had launched a book on biographies of soldiers saying that he wanted this book to counter a pro-LTTE Western book being prepared. Yet, it was his own government in cahoots with the USA that had signed the anti-Sri Lanka agreement at the UNHCR to hold our soldiers ‘accountable’.
Western double speak
Western double speak is best exemplified by Jens Stoltenberg, the former PM of Norway and ‘peacemaker’ to Sri Lanka. He is now the Secretary General of NATO. Norway intruded into our universities by sponsoring one-sided ‘peace’ studies. Local foreign-funded NGOs laid down explicit plans to brainwash us from our politicians to academics. One of those peace mongers to Peradeniya University was the Norwegian Johan Galtung, a man who has been exposed as a Nazi sympathiser. I was with him in the Philippines as one of the two Keynote Speakers at a World Futures Studies Conference where I easily saw his vacuous nature. Western peace and Western war were interchangeable. And in awe of Western money, our re-colonised minds were up for grabs.
It was the former US ambassador Blake together with former Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera who initiated the anti-Lanka action at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC). Recently Blake spoke of the ‘many positive changes’ he now sees in Sri Lanka, a far cry from the anti-Sri Lanka hysteria. But Blake’s and Samaraweera’s UNHRC anti-Sri Lankan resolution still stands. And, in the same recent event, Blake said that Sri Lanka should use technocrats as did Gotabaya Rajapaksa in the LTTE war. This about-turn from Blake was because Islamic fundamentalism had appeared as a common enemy of the US and Sri Lanka. During the war, the US had entered into a limited defence agreement with us for 10 years and was giving tracking information on LTTE ships. But today, defence agreements with the US without a time limit were being prepared as the impotent Sirisena shouts that he will not sign it.
Persecuting our soldiers has an adjunct called ‘Transitional Justice’, the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies (BCIS) having a course on it. This ‘Transitional Justice’ is a Western invention which started with the denazification programme after World War II. With denazification, the falsehoods of Nazis were eradicated. But in Sri Lanka ‘Transitional Justice’ has turned to its opposite and implies selective justice against our soldiers’ struggle against the LTTE.
The current BCIS chairperson is Chandrika Kumaratunga, under whose rule the LTTE created a mini Nazi state. The founders of BCIS would be appalled. The BCIS has today turned into the opposite of what it was at the beginning and has become an agent of the new imperialism.
And who are the people teaching this ‘transitional justice’ at BCIS? They include Radhika Coomaraswamy who had welcomed the Indian incursion and whose ICES had a director who wanted to bring foreign troops under the neocolonial R2P. One other lecturer is Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri. Dewasiri has been against the Mahavamsa, the most reliable historical document in South and Southeast Asia.
If BCIS and Media Studies do not serve us, the same situation occurs in the social sciences with almost colonial distortions. I had pointed this out through two books published by Western academic publishers. This reminds one of Western infiltration of Third World social sciences during the Cold War. Looking almost like a CIA candidate from Hollywood’s central casting is a US academic trying to rewrite our history. His organisation is now a gatekeeper to Sri Lankan academics going to the US.
If the foreign-funded sector was undermining our sovereignty, sober voices on the bombings, however, came from the affected Catholic hierarchy especially the cardinal – as well as from the major Buddhist Nikayas. Cardinal Malcolm said the attacks were part of a ‘plan of powerful nations’ implying perhaps not only the countries in the Middle East but possibly the Western nations still bent on global supremacy.
Ethnic fluidity
Sri Lanka has had ethnic fluidity over the centuries with people moving from one region to the other. A good current example is Colombo City and Western Province in which all the major groups reside with possibly Colombo city having a majority of non-Sinhalese Buddhists.
Our formal ethnic solidification began after the fiction of Tamils’ traditional homelands was thrust on Sri Lanka by Indian force of arms after she had armed all the anti-Sri Lanka groups. The earliest colonial maps show Jaffna as a ‘kinglet’ confined to the Jaffna and Mannar peninsulas, while Portuguese descriptions indicate a high percentage of Sinhalese in these two peninsulas. The Indian imposed 13th Amendment was opposed by almost all the national parties including, as he later admitted, by JR himself. JR, however, had to yield to Indian gunboats.
After the war, instead of repatriating the Muslims (and Sinhalese) expelled by the LTTE from Jaffna, Muslims were allowed to create separatist enclaves beyond Mannar and virtual cultural no-go areas in Kattankudi with its fictional date palms and Arabic gonibilla dress for women.
But the current situation in Kattankudi was preceded by earlier developments. When I inaugurated a study on the Portuguese Encounter at the Royal Asiatic Society RASSL, I gave a lecture in the South Eastern University where I invited them to join in the research. This was because it was the Muslims that were the first targets of Portuguese brutality before they attacked Buddhists and Hindus. There was no interest in this Islamic University. I subsequently gave another lecture asking South Eastern University staff and students to get involved in possible local developments related to “Islamic” science when Europe was going through its Dark Ages brought by Christianity. Again, there was no interest. In one of these trips, I visited a museum which allegedly wanted to show the history of the area but almost exclusively had Muslim household artefacts. That area is full of ancient Sinhalese sites not shown in this museum.
I once worked as an engineer to set up the Puttalam Cement Factory when the Vanathavillu area was accessible only by jeeps. Today massive illegal “Muslim-Only” settlements have appeared near the Mannar area. When four years ago, I drove to Puttalam on the rough gravel road from Mannar, there were only few freshly built Muslim houses in the once jungle. But a few months ago, doing the same drive, I could see extensive monoethnic Muslim settlements, possibly thousands of acres, courtesy allegedly of Saudi money and Rishad Batiudeen. Saudi Wahabi private sources were funding the new settlements around Mannar as well as the “Shariah University” in the East.
In the absence of strategic thinking by this government and the former MR one, the 13th Amendment was doing its slicing and dicing. Mono ethnic no-go areas were being developed in the East, beyond Mannar and in Jaffna. Coincident with the bombings, separatism has once again emerged in Jaffna University where pro-LTTE student leaders were arrested. This is hardly surprising because in today’s Jaffna University, there is a huge board declaring adherence to “PonguThamil” which “Pongu” had maps extending so-called Tamil territory deep into Sri Lanka. In the same “PonguThamil” spirit, archaeology was falsified in the North and East.
Sirisena came to power because of faults in MR, and in the process revealing Sirisena’s own faults. MR had run his government with his family and personal cronies as decision-makers, especially in his most vulnerable area of foreign relations. MR did not know what was brewing under his own feet. His own party secretary Sirisena stabbed him in the back and became his opponent. There is much indirect evidence that this conspiracy had been going on for some time and probably sponsored by the West and their local NGO proxies. Sirisena’s government brought changes to the Constitution such as introduction of the 19thAmendment. Today Sirisena says that the 19th Amendment, should be abolished. Sirisena appears more like the gatekeeper in the “Suba Saha Yasa” folk story who exchanges position with the King and wants to retain it.