Columns

The plot thickens or rather the plots thicken. My long-time friend and fellow journalist Humphrey Hawksley should have been in the land like no other. This is certainly no joke at this time when sleuths of all sorts are said to be scouring the country to arrest some and serve summons on others.

The widely circulated Battle of the Maroons picture shows former Navy Commander Wasantha Karannagoda with the Defence Secretary. The authenticity of the picture has not yet been confirmed.

Hawksley knows Sri Lanka well enough having served as BBC correspondent in the 1980s — if I remember the years correctly. He has written his second political-spy-crime thriller in the “Rake Ozenna” series that might have read better had it been set in modern Sri Lanka which has everything but the icy climes of the Norway-Russia artic border that is the locale for “Man on Edge”.

He would not have had to create an altogether new plot. It is all there in wonderful Sri Lanka where you could buy plots over the counter at supermarkets. They are available in plenty and are certainly not measured in perches unless somebody wants to grab another’s land with falsified deeds.

As Shakespeare might have said, had he been around in those parts, “so shine false deeds in a corrupt world”.

As though these deeds are not bad enough to be crafted into any suitable plot even resident ambassadors and lower-ranking diplomutts have taken a hand in throwing the dice and laying a few false trails just to test the intelligence and the dog-like instincts of those who have a propensity to stick their noses into other peoples’ business like local blood hounds.

Whether what has gone on in this blessed isle in recent weeks and months was just a dry run to test the alertness of Lanka’s regurgitated sleuths or not will only be known when our own spy masters donning cloak and dagger costumes emerge from the woodwork into which their predecessors of recent years have been despatched.

Some might pretend to be able to even outsmart that one-time spy chief of the East German Stasi, Marcus Wolfe, who ran rings round his western counterparts in divided Berlin and near and far from the infamous Berlin Wall.

I suppose there is nothing wrong in dreaming dreams of invincibility and derring-do. But then I read in some Sri Lanka news site that quoted an unnamed CID officer saying that 25 teams are looking for Ravi Karunanayake.

But then maybe the former Finance Minister and short-time Foreign Minister does not remember that there is a warrant out for his arrest. After all he does suffer from shocking memory loss as he showed with clarity during some inquiry (there have been many so I cannot remember which or when) into this Treasury bond business.

If Ravi K has gone AWOL — to use a military acronym these days would not be out of place –there is an old sea dog wanted by a High Court Trial-at-Bar who appears to have been missing the action in the courtroom.

I received a twitter from another former BBC correspondent who was based in Colombo during the dying days — if you will pardon the phrase — of the anti-terrorist war. Frances Harrison was circulating a photograph of retired Navy Commander Wasantha Karannagoda at last weekend’s Ananda-Nalanda cricket match dubbed the “Battle of the Maroons” though he did not seem particularly marooned.

What startled me — and surely hundreds and perhaps thousands of others who saw it — was Karannagoda seated next to the Defence Secretary, a retired military officer.

I cannot swear to the genuineness of this picture. Technology being what it is today it could very well have been cooked up. After all even pictures of alleged torture surrenderees and civilians during and after the war have turned up in UK media and elsewhere and even in courts of law.

Why, even that “America First” sloganiser called Donald Trump has been trumpeting over the years about fake news. But then some of his statement, be they on twitter or other means, have been replete with falsehoods, misinformation and cooked-up statements as proved by media analyses that he would have made “fake news” seem like an exercise by novices.

So only those who attended the match and actually saw the two together can swear to the authenticity of the photograph. Also, maybe some CID officers if they actually spotted the two. But then they were busy chasing Ravi K who is not an easy man to creep into the shrubbery, and probably disappear from the scene.

This is laying no blame on Hawksley who I last met in London a few months back when he chaired a “Democracy Forum” discussion and talked of many things including Hong Kong in the good old days and his venturing into writing political thrillers with spies, military mugs and other assorted characters thrown in making even the witches broth in Macbeth seem like a heavily watered parippu.

Why I wish dear Humphrey was once more in Sri Lanka is because times have changed so rapidly and drastically from the days when he found the island nation a happy hunting ground for foreign journalists what with a war on, terrorism on the up, Indian troops foraging in the north trying to latch on to the elusive Mr P and human rights activists searching under every rock for evidence that would nail some bastards.

Now had Humphrey Hawksley been in this Paradise isle which another old friend Lord Naseby who himself has just published a new book which he prefers to call “Paradise Lost Paradise Regained” (but that’s another story!) Humphrey would have been spared the trouble of digging around in that Arctic waste which appears to be quickly disappearing — not the waste but the Arctic snows.

Humphrey titles this latest book of his “Man on Edge”. Had he gone to Colombo, if only to get away from the recent floods in the south of England and coronavirus for which the Brits seemed not entirely prepared — at least that’s what I have heard — he would have found not one man but countless numbers on edge.

And what an edge — or so I am told! This is supposed to make World’s End at Horton Plains, which I am sure Humphrey would well remember a more pleasant and safer jumping off point if anybody wants to try.

If the whole island nation seems to be on edge it is not because their friends the Chinese have added something new to their financial and other contributions and despatched some unwelcome gifts which have made the locals avoid Chinese restaurants and stop eating their favourite noodles.

With the famous Thambili nut better known to visitors as King Coconut said to be selling at Rs 140 a nut when it was Rs 35 last year according to my friends it would be nuts if the public had the money to be drinking thambili every day to quench their thirst unless  people were living on bribes and graft.

But then we are a nation of nuts as Humphrey well knows. Still he would not have dreamt of the recent goings on with clever investigators said to be taking to the air with secret and confidential case files and family, some Swiss embassy local staffer claiming to have been abducted and bundled into a white vehicle reviving public memories of the white van days and great detectives chasing all sorts of ‘missing’ persons who are not exactly missing if you get what I mean, why dear Humphrey would have a holiday in warmer climes and made to measure plots. All he had to do was parachute Rake Odenna to the thick of it while own chaps went looking for the bad guys.

(Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lanka journalist who was Assistant Editor, Diplomatic Editor and Political Columnist of the Hong Kong Standard before moving to London and working for Gemini News Service. Later he was Sri Lanka’s deputy-in-chief in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London before returning to journalism.)