A brief note on the attack on J.C. Weliamuna
Repost This Articleby R.M.B. Senanayake
The attack on the human rights lawyer Weliamuna in the night where he is living with two small children show that danger is not far away from all citizens who uphold human rights and democratic norms. We the educated and influential in society have been silent when white vans abducted Tamils who ended up in police cells for questioning by the Terrorist Investigation Unit of the Police.
The President has appointed incompetent cronies to important posts in violation of the 17th Amendment. The Inspector General of Police is perhaps one of them if we go by his record of successive failures to enforce the law against influential criminals who have political patronage and protection. So the public cannot expect any effective action by him or his assistants. It may not be as bad as Caligula who put his horse in the Senate. But then Caligula’s horse had a track record.
We like to remind all decent human beings who believe in truth and justice what Pastor Niemoller said when the Gestapo came to arrest him in Nazi Germany when he was no longer protected by influential persons.
When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.
We want to tell all professional men and all educated men of reason to wake up before it is too late. Let us not be driven to the position reminded by Ralph Chaplin:
“Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie, but rather mourn the apathetic, throng the coward and the meek who see the world’s great anguish and its wrong, and dare not speak”
George Bernard Shaw once said, “Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.” One is also reminded of words of the 19th century poet Heinrich Heine who said, “Whenever books are burnt, men also, in the end are burnt.”
The Government of Sri Lanka today is only the latest in a long line of governments worldwide who have tried to snuff out unpalatable ideas and comments by abducting, intimidating, beating and killing its journalists. J.S.Tissainayagam is one of the many such journalists who has been imprisoned for over 160 days without being charged.
The first recorded victim of censorship was Socrates who, in 399 BC was forced to drink poison for ‘denying the gods and introducing new divinities.’ In China, in 213 BC, Emperor Shih Huang-Ti had all writing not pertaining to agriculture or medicine burnt. His target: Confucius’ thoughts. Present day China is no better.
During the last century, it was the communists who most systematically censored books and hounded their authors. Writers in every communist country from East Germany to Vietnam were forced into concentration camps. Boris Pasternak, Joseph Brodsky, Milan Kundera, Czeslaw Milosz and Alexander Solzhenitsyn were just a few. Hitler’s Germany burnt the books of Jewish authors and liberals, exterminating thousands in their notorious gas chambers and forcing others to flee. In Mahinda’s Sri Lanka, over 12 journalist’s, the majority of them tamils have been killed in the past 2 years. Many more journalist’s have been abducted, beaten and intimidated to keep them from writing the truth.
A few month’s back the Government blocked access to the Tamilnet, but what the Government does not understand is that with the advance of technology, censorship has become obsolete. The truth is only a click away. All you need to do to read the Tamilnet is to go online and click on this link http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=www.tamilnet.com
In today’s day and age it is no longer possible to stop the message or the truth getting out by killing or imprisoning the messenger.
If this sorry state of affaires continues, this country will be known the world over as, “The Autocratic, Dictatorial Oligarchy of Sri Lanka!”
Alas, the majority of the public does not care. All is fair in love and war…and we are at war. It blankets all of the evils that are perpetrated in the ‘greater interest’ of our society. I am reminded all too often in the last two years of the biblical saying: “what you do to the least of us, you do to me.” Let’s hope the Gods protect Mr. Weliamuna…for no one else will.
The current government has bartered the principles of good governance to the primodial desires of the majority to wipe out the Tigers by any-and-all means possible. Objective assessment of Tamils desire to determine their own destiny, and to live in amity has been irreversibly jettisoned. The pliant South, the silent intellectuals, and International apathy have emboldened the Rajapakse’s to use the treasury, the State’s apparatus, and the armed forces to take Sri Lanka in a path, where turning towards its own people is the logical next step to safeguard the fiefdom, and to sustain power. Weliamuna’s predicament mirrors the fate of Sivaram, Uthayan editors, Nirmalarajan, and Athas. Unless, there is a shocking event that results in reconfiguration of Sri Lanka’s polity, further deterioration towards lawlessness and autocracy is inevitable. The question is what could be that paradigm-shifting event? and when can that happen?
Weliamuna is a lawyer with a lucretive practice, vey powerful Executive director Transperant International who has lot of enemies as he is handling controversal cases and a controversal personality. I condemn the attack on him which is an isolated incident in the seige capital due to the inflitration of terror. In 1989 25 lawyers were gunned down and 30 are still in exile in London including well respectred and known elderly lawyer politicial Prince Gunasekara. No hum todate on these incidents. It is the worst perion for lawyers not today, but today all NGOs are behind the dispproporatnate publicity. Please give publicity to this matter as well. Lawyers are powerful and this is an isolated one incident dispropertionatly exploded by politicians, NGOs and LTTE support groups with ulterer motives Robert
Robert
There are too many liberators in Sri Lanka. They are:
-The government wants to liberate the Tamils from the Tiger terrorist.
-The LTTE wants to liberate the Tamils and the north and east from the oppressive state.
- The Bhuddist monks wants to liberate the island nation as a exclusive Sinhala/ Buddhist nation.
- The leftists wants to liberate the people of Sri Lanka from the capitalist control.
The list is endless.
These liberators must first liberate themselves before thinking of liberating the others.
Sri Lanka is a cursed nation. It is progressively decaying.
R.M.B. Senanayake’s thoughts are well meant. But will the President, Opposition Leader and all the goons playing a part to rot our state will understand the real meaning of liberation of the people of Sri Lanka.
The God is producing enough numbers of prejudiced and hate minded people in Sri Lanka. They are multiplying since our independence and will progressively multiply until we distroy ourselves as a nation of people.
Only thing we can do is prey! Prey!! Prey!!!
Prey the Almighty Buddha!
Prey the Almighty Shiva!!
Prey the Almighty Alah!!!
Prey the Almighty Jesus!!!!
To salvage our nation from the baboons who have decayed our past and decaying the present and the future.
In short, it is a Terrorist Regime which rules over sri lanka.
Those who “do not toe the official line” &’ those who complain and/or speak out against injustice are terrorised and even eliminated.
Nazi Germony was like this.
We are beginning to see that state horror and crime is committed against the truth and anyone who stand for the truth. And thus we have a great evil that is trying hard to suppress the truth in every form. But we know this nation will only come to freedom by “Truth”. let’s continue to fight against so that truth will prevail. Lord Jesus said “If you know the Truth, Truth shall set you free”. And if we want our nation to be free, our nation should know the Truth. So my dear fellow writers let’s continue to write on behalf of the “Truth”.
Conversations in a Failing State, Patrick Lawrence(2008): Had Sri Lankan judges and lawyers taken the path that their counterparts in Pakistan were to adopt, particularly in 2007, the independence of the judiciary and the larger history of Sri Lanka may have taken a different turn. The judiciary may have retained its capacity to intervene in important national issues and thereby reduce the extreme polarizations and disintegration that was to come in subsequent years.
I’m outraged and petrified to learn that Sinhalese lawyers were mowed down in late 80s by the UNP government thugs and Tamil lawyers have been threatened, attacked, arrested and tortured in the last three years alone if they attempt to take up cases of ”disappearances” and the very means of torturing is too demonic and ”beyond dark ages” to put in words here.
POWER SHARING AS PEACE STRUCTURE: THE CASE OF SRI LANKA, IICP Working Paper, No. 2, 2005, JOHAN GALTANG, Professor of Peace Studies, Director, TRANSCEND
Punitham, can you please anchor your Galtung’s paper to this debate? What are its salient features relevant to the original post on the attack against Weli?
Sanjana
I’m in a terrible state of mind and unable to make a precis of the article. But I very strongly believe that it is a like an antibiotic to the chauvinists to defuse their hatred for the ‘other’ – perhaps one of your friends could take it a s a separate topic and spread the message in it.
Sanjana
I believe Galtang’s article should be translated into Sinhala and distributed to all groups of teachers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, businessmen, govet officials, … and all sorts of civil groups all over the South and preferably in Tamil too.
1970 Federal Party election manifesto:
“It is our firm conviction that the division of the country in any form
would be beneficial neither to the country nor to the Tamil-speaking people.
Hence we appeal to the Tamil-speaking people not to lend their support to
any political movement that advocates the bifurcation of the country.”
The FP got overwhelming votes from Tamils in 1970.9(after the utter humiliation of 50s and 60s).
I admire the guts of my colleague for having said what he has said but I am afraid I cannot endorse his caustic comment on the incumbent IGP who incidentally, is a total stranger to me.
It is not as if the IGP has been parachuted to the post from some Junta. He was next in the line of appointment. In the absence of a Constitutional Council to comment on a suitable nominee to the post, appointment of the next in line would appear to be the least objectionable.
It is true that there have been ‘successive failures to enforce the law against influential criminals, who have political patronage and protection’. But can we blame that on an individual public servant in the face of the staggering pressures to which the Public Service is exposed today? Of course I am not thinking here, of the turn-coat, black-guards who would barter their souls for the plums of office
Both my colleague and I lost our jobs in the Civil Service prematurely, for the sin of standing up to questionable authority. But the situation today is far more complicated. We lost only our livelihood for our defiance but today’s defiance may result in the loss of life itself.
Besides, the debilitating economic and political pressures on the present day public servant, are far too overwhelming to admit of professional independence, unless he has developed the selflessness of a Vessantara to sacrifice his wife and children and the magnanimity of a Sirisangabo to donate his own head.
The fault dear Brutus, is not in ourselves but in our STARS!
The tamil people, and any others who wish it in other parts of Sri Lanka, should be given a degree of autonomy to run their affairs to the maximum possible extent short of breaking up the Country ( see the example of the UK). This will also ensure that power is not dangerously concentrated in the centre. This will be supported by most Sinhalese except for the extreme fringes and perhaps by those already in power and who hate to give up any of it.
Are Prabakhakaran or the LTTE in anyway helping towards this goal? On the other hand, are they not a liability to the tamil people in achieving this goal? In other words, isnt it time that he stepped down for the sake of his people? What do the Tamil people, here and abroad, think?