Known and unknown facets of Sivaram and our society
Three months since journalist D. Sivaram’s passing is good a time as any to set the record straight about some matters connected to his passing. While those who want to mourn his death are doing so in a free country, there are others who have taken on his memory in a comic posthumous challenge. To get to the point, various jack-in-the box commentators have launched an attack on Sivaram after his death, and gone to the extent of castigating those who have in various ways decried his cold-blooded assassination.

The intention here is not to launch a return attack on these various hacks and assorted merchants of bile, but to place the events connected to Sivram’s death against the social backcloth of our times.

Sivaram’s death makes it clear that even those who do not agree with the LTTE are not spared the venom of the Sinhala lunatic fringe. Dayan Jayatilleke for instance, is one among five of the severest critics of the LTTE in recent times. So is Gamini Weerakoon, who contributed a piece to the Sunday newspaper titled “Sivaran was a charismatic man.’’

But, Jayatilleke was later attacked in the public space for his condemnation of Sivaram’s murder. Gamini Weerakoon may not have been attacked by name for all of the nice things he said about Sivaram -- but he easily fell into the category of the Sinhalese who were taken to task for publicly lamenting the death of a friend or a colleague.Perhaps Weerakoon was not named in the attacks, because the commentators would rather wish away the fact that a staunch and vehement anti LTTer -- a fellow traveller --could also mourn the death of someone who was labelled a Tiger propagandist , Prabhakaran’s Goebbels, as they called him.

They couldn’t believe what they were hearing! It was something like a second tsunami hitting them -- Gamini Weerakoon, a man who publicly condemned the Tigers on a daily basis was also saying now that Sivaram was a charismatic man. In their state of sheer unbelief, they swept the whole unpleasant fact of his comment under the carpet, and pretended that Gamini Weerakoon’s appreciative obituary on Siva simply did not happen.

So what have the brave guys who called for the heads all of those who lamented Siva’s death got to say about consistent Tiger attacker Weerakoon praising Sivaram? That Weerakoon has had a momentary lapse of judgment? Or that he should be disowned by the Sinhalese for this one salute to a Tiger propagandist -- no matter that he has offered a staple diet of anti Tiger writings since from almost longer than we can remember?

Dear bravehearts, is it that difficult to come out of the woodwork, and say something for yourself on this and other inconvenient facts concerning Sivaram’s passing and the events associated with it??

So it is that Sivaram’s death and the events associated with it say something about the hilariously confused times we live in. Seems even if you don’t lie with the lunatics you invariably wake up with some of them clinging onto your sarong or pajama these days. It gives the lie to the Marx’s old line: sleep with the dogs, and you wake up with the fleas?

The general line of argument among those who saw something evil in lamenting Siva’s assassination was that he was a Tiger propagandist, who would have therefore also been a LTTE intelligence operative in Colombo.

About the latter surmise, there isn’t a shred of evidence.
This proves the fact that those who seek to hang his corpse from six feet under, are not quite sure of the fact that they can hang him for his journalism alone. So, what if they can’t quite convince themselves that he cannot be condemned for what he wrote? Do the next best thing -- invent a lie that he was the LTTE’s chief spy!

The fact is that even if he was the LTTE’s chief spy in Colombo, we don’t know it -- and it’s a rare kind of species that seeks to attack a dead man for what’s not known about him.

The fact is that legally, and morally, there is only one real charge that can be brought against Sivaram by any grandstander for the Sinhala south -- which is that his journalism was an apology for what the Liberation Tigers did.

On the same count, the British should in that event murder John Pilger, Harold Pinter and Tariq Ali. These are all people who condemned Tony Blair’s invasion of Iraq, and who went to the extent of saying that terrorism against the British was a backlash against British policy in Iraq and the Middle East in general. They were in other words, apologists for terrorism as Siva is accused of being one in our context.

But, Pinter and Pilger and Ali still walk as free men in London. They are not just free, they are celebrated critics of the Blain administration. Some say there are new laws that may prosecute them, but even if these guys fall within the ambit of such laws, they are only going to be prosecuted in the courts of law, not murdered and left for dead on the grass.

This is not to look upto Britain and say its the only tolerant society we know -- but its just to take on the moral bankruptcy of the moron mafia here which says that it was a good thing Siva was bumped off because his journalism was good for the Tigers.By bumping him off, or at least condoning the fact that he was bumped off, those elements of the Sinhala south which say so are in fact playing straight into the hands of the Tigers, giving them enough room to say that Sri Lankan society has no room for dissenting opinion.

That fact -- that its an own goal when the south cheers Siva’s murder - - should be basic as ABC even to the most dense blockhead on the block, but when we talk of the Lankan fringe -- we are talking of those who are unremittingly beyond the pale. You have to be denser than a blockhead to belong in that particular league, but there is some fun, in watching these guys choke on their own venom…

The other thing that was said about the Sivaram killing was that those who issued statements about his passing did not say anything about Major Muthalif’s murder.

Concerning some gentlemen, this may be true. They went out of their way to condemn Sivaram’s killing, but kept a studied silence when Muthalif was taken out. That’s hypocrisy, and there is no gainsaying it.
But, for most others, Muthalif’s killing was something to be condemned, and they did condemn it in the same way that they condemned Sivarams death.

Jayatilleke, Weerakoon and myself all condemned the Muthalif killing, and there are the archived newspapers to prove that fact. If we wrote more words about Sivaram and less about Muthalif however, that’s just by accident of fact that we knew Sivaram personally, while we did not know Muthalif as a friend or a colleague. Can a writer be condemned for having personal knowledge of one dead man’s life and not the others’??

Lastly, there was one queer who said that Sivaram would have respected his murders more than his mourners because his mourners did not have the courage to agree with him -- but were only liberally tolerant of his views.

Does a man respect the guys who abduct him in the dead of night when he is unarmed – gag him – and shoot him dead and leave him lying in a thicket like a dead dog? I don’t know about that, but pity Sivaram is not around to ask him!

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