Out in the Wilderness – Dayan Jayatilleka on 13th Amendment and getting sacked by Boggles
Sri Lanka’s soon-to-be-ex-Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva took time off from his busy schedule of sipping martinis, getting up the American’s noses, and fighting on the Western Front, to have a little chat with us. This is his first interview since the Foreign Ministry announced that he has been recalled from Geneva, effective August 20th.
David Blacker: First off, there seem too be two opinions on your sacking. One, that you were too pushy about the 13th Amendment. Two, that you pissed off the Israelis. Which is it?
Dayan Jayatilleka: It could be either, both or neither. The editorials in The Island and the Daily Mirror on July 20th, indicate that it could have a personal aspect. Let’s unpack the other opinions. If I were ‘pushy’ about the 13th amendment I was only pushing a line that was the official stance of the government of Sri Lanka as contained in two post-war joint statements, of May 21st and 23rd. I was doing so in the English language, trying to convince the international community and the Tamil Diaspora of the sincerity of the Government’s commitment to devolution and a political solution, in a context where there was and is a powerful campaign calling for international intervention of one or other sort on the grounds that the Government will not implement such reforms. I was also waging an ideological struggle against those hard-line fringe elements who were opposed to the 13th amendment and playing into the hands of Sri Lanka’s enemies. I was not instructed to do otherwise.
As for the charge that I should not write to the papers or express my views in the media, I have always done so with the disclaimer that these are strictly my personal views. There are other diplomats who have done the same. The controversial articles in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, by Dimitri Rogozin, Russia’s serving ambassador to NATO in Brussels, and a political appointee, not a professional diplomat. The respected diplomat, Kishore Mahbubani of Singapore was a star speaker in New York’s seminar circuit where he would preface his remarks by saying ‘these are not the views of the permanent representative of Singapore but simply of Mahbubani’. In our own diplomatic history, there is the example of Ambassador Ernest Corea, the former editor of the Daily News who was posted by President Jayawardene to Washington DC, precisely so he could use his journalistic skills.
The Israeli story is old hat. That issue came and went, and I was sent a letter signed by the Secretary to the Foreign Ministry which said that H.E. the President wished me to stay on in my post until May 31st 2010. Furthermore, after I received instructions, I have stayed off the Israeli issue. Therefore, that is probably just an excuse.
DB: For months, there have been ominous warnings of your head being on the block -particularly over the Israeli issue, but these seemed to come to nothing, and you say you were personally assured of your position by The Man himself. So is this sacking in deed a personal vendetta by the Foreign Minister? The Island suggests he feels upstaged by you. What do you have to say about that?
Dayan Jayatilleka: What I have is a letter dated March 26th, signed by the Secretary to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which says that H.E. the President has decided that I should stay on until May 2010. This was after the initial controversy involving Israel. Even if some one had a personal vendetta against me, I am not naive enough to think that this sort of decision, in the wake of an earlier unsuccessful effort to remove me and in the aftermath of the successful Special Session of the Human Rights Council, would have been implemented without some semblance of a green light, however fleeting and flickering, from the top political leadership. So it was probably a confluence of factors.
DB: Many people feel you’d make a better Foreign Minister than Rohitha Bogollagama, and he knows it. Do you agree?
Dayan Jayatilleka: Is that meant to be some kind of a compliment?
DB: Maybe. Were you seen as such a threat to the Foreign Minister?
Dayan Jayatilleka: That’s insane. I am neither a cabinet minister nor even a parliamentarian, nor have I displayed any interest in contesting an election. How could I be a threat to any minister?
DB: Oh, come off it. Lakshman Kadirgama himself came in via the National List, and if they can bring Karuna in as a minister, is it such a stretch to consider Sri Lanka’s pointman in Europe as Foreign Minister?
Dayan Jayatilleka: I have never shown interest in entering parliament, or in becoming a member of one of the two major political parties. In any case, given the evolution of Sri Lanka’s political culture, isn’t this speculation irrelevant?
DB: OK, moving along, the more right wing elements in parliament such as the JVP and the JHU are rabidly against the 13th. Has your vocal defense of this amendment lost you influential friends within the GoSL?
Dayan Jayatilleka: Oh dear, you forgot the NFF -though Nandana Goonetilleke is rather more pragmatic on devolution and the ethnic question than his comrade. They and the elements you mention weren’t my friends to lose. What is a little sad is that I seem to have lost the confidence of the President.
DB: The GoSL has resolutely maintained that it is committed to the 13th Amendment, and indeed it’s probable that a lot of India’s support during the war was conditional to this. However, now that the war is over, the JVP and JHU -and the NFF -seem keen to have the 13th removed from the table. Do you think they could be successful, and is this sacking an instrumental step down that road?
Dayan Jayatilleka: I sincerely hope not. If they are successful in such an endeavour, it would automatically mean that the balance of social, political and ideological forces is such that there would be no improved or even equivalent replacement, and that would mean a renewed cycle of ethnic polarisation and conflict, though not in the form of a war. It would also mean greater political space for the Tamil separatists especially in the Diaspora, and international pressure on and erosion of support for Sri Lanka. As for my sacking, I really do not know how the minorities and the international community will interpret my removal, though I have seen some Indian newspaper reports. They know that I have a track record of staunch opposition to Prabhakaran, the LTTE and Tamil separatism, have been a critic of centrifugal ethno-federalism and Western ‘liberal humanitarian’ interventionism, but have also stood for the implementation of the limited autonomy provisions of the Sri Lankan Constitution.
DB: In addition to the right-wing, there has been some celebration in the pro-LTTE circles over your sacking. Isn’t this embarrassing for the President, and would a reinstatement or promotion seem inconceivable at this stage?
Dayan Jayatilleka: I’m not in the least surprised to hear from you that the pro-LTTE circles are celebrating. As for your question, it isn’t my call to answer, but it is clear from the decision that this is not thought to be the case.
“The atrocities committed on the innocent people of Gaza should not be permitted to be obscured, obfuscated by lies, deception, half-truths and selective reordering of facts and chronology.â€
DB: These were your words when addressing the UN Human Rights Council Special Session on Gaza. But they could very well have been used by critics of the GoSL’s anti-LTTE war. Given that the Israelis have remained a staunch ally – if not a friend – to SL over the years, don’t you think your speech was ill-timed?
Dayan Jayatilleka: They have indeed been used by critics of GOSL’s anti-LTTE war, but used unsuccessfully! Had they been successful they would have won the vote at the UNHRC, not lost it so badly. They were unsuccessful because the charge is not credible or accurate, which is why those who have strong views on Gaza and are thoroughly familiar with all its details are among our strongest political and diplomatic supporters.
What is unsaid by my critics is that in every one of my speeches, I have underscored the right of the state of Israel to exist behind secure borders and to combat terrorism. I have opposed the rocket attacks on civilian targets in Israel. I have even defended the policy of selective liquidation of terrorist leaders. I was one of the few Third World ambassadors to attend the 60th anniversary celebrations here in Geneva, of the founding of the state of Israel. Furthermore, the only time that I held a position at variance with that of Cuba as Non-Aligned Movement chair here was when I spoke up in support of the abortive effort by the Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestinian Territories, Emeritus Professor Richard Falk, to re-define his mandate to include the acts of terrorism committed against Israel!
Was my speech ill-timed? Hardly -it was within traditional pro-Palestinian GoSL -and SLFP, I might add -policy. Furthermore, I had, in the speech, pre-emptively demarcated the contrast between the wars in Sri Lanka and Israel/Gaza; I had already made the case for the battle I knew was to come, because I knew -and advocated -that we would have to go in for a military endgame, and that there would be a international campaign against us.
Israel has been a source of sales of military equipment to us. So too have they to many others, who spoke and voted against Israel in the Gaza special session at the UN HRC.
DB: Sri Lanka has often been compared to Israel of late whenever a hardline stance against terrorism is discussed. You, however, in your speeches, have often gone to great lengths to distance the two conflicts. Why?
Dayan Jayatilleka: Some try to divert attention from Gaza by pointing the finger at Sri Lanka. We must not allow ourselves to be used as a red herring. Sri Lanka has never invaded any other country and occupied the lands of others. We are not in violation of any UN Security Council resolutions. Ours is a strictly internal conflict. Under international law, Israel and Sri Lanka are two very different cases. It is also because I have successfully argued this at the UN HRC that while there is a UN HRC mandated probe headed by Justice Richard Goldstone currently holding public hearings in Gaza, there isn’t one gearing to go to Sri Lanka, which was the aim of the Special session!
DB: Was there really a single moment when world opinion turned against the LTTE? Was it really the aftermath of 9/11 or the killing of Lakshaman Kadirgama? Or was it more a collection of trickles that became a river?
Dayan Jayatilleka: No, there wasn’t a single moment. World opinion didn’t turn against the LTTE to the point that it would have opposed the evacuation option for the Tiger leadership that some seemed to have had in mind following a so-called humanitarian pause, but it had turned to the extent that there was indifference to the fate of the Tigers as distinct from the Tamils, and that those who wanted such an “honorable exit” couldn’t mainstream it. It was really a cumulative affair -one had to remind audiences of the litany of Tiger crimes and the track record of repeatedly sabotaging chances for a negotiated settlement. If you want a turning point, it was the murder of Rajiv Gandhi, which pretty much ensured that a Sonia-led Congress administration would not save the Tigers nor join the West in pressurizing to stop the final offensive. If India had been on the other side of this, we would have been in a fix.
DB: What’s your view of the IDP camps? Do you think they are the necessary evil that the GoSL claims they are?
Dayan Jayatilleka: When an 18-person Task force was set up to manage the IDPs, it was originally pan-Sinhala. There was not a single Tamil to handle the fate of a purely Tamil populace of IDPs! Later, two Tamils were inducted, but not at the very top. There should be someone in charge who can speak to the IDPs in their own language and is sensitive to their predicament as a member of the same community -someone who would be motivated at least because these are his potential constituents. This would fast-track things. The sole Tamil Minister in the Cabinet, Douglas Devananda, should be co-chair of the Task Force set up for the IDPs and the North.
DB: The LTTE’s aggression – the boycotting of elections, the throwing out of the EU members of the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission – created a lot of sympathy for the GoSL overseas. This sympathy possibly was justified with the victory against the LTTE. Is the GoSL in danger of squandering this goodwill over the IDP camps issue in a similar way that the Bush administration did by invading Iraq, creating Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib?
Dayan Jayatilleka: Any administration and any society, would do well to be mindful of the lessons of History, which is that one can win a war but lose the peace and that winning the war is different from a successful and sustainable occupation of the ground which requires the winning of hearts and minds. The Six Day War was one of the most stellar military victories of the 20th century, but look at the endless quagmire that has resulted from the policies of occupation. I have long advocated the Chechen solution -an all-out, combined arms war to destroy the terrorist militia, followed by the implementation of some form of autonomy and self-governance for the area and stabilization through the rule of an elected local ally. Our military victory has to be politically conserved and socially stabilised. That’s what my advocacy of the 13th amendment is about. As for the IDP camps, I think I made clear that our Tamil partner, Minister Devananda, Minister of Social Services, should be mandated to co-manage the problem.
DB: While INGOs and certain groups within international bodies such as the UN have been heavily critical of the GoSL, during the war and since, the latter have managed to keep the head of the UN and most heads of state more or less onside. Given this, don’t you think that the GoSL’s siege mentality over certain issues such as the IDPs is an overreaction – and even bordering on paranoia?
Dayan Jayatilleka: The world has given us six months, which is the period of time within which we said we hoped to re-settle the bulk of the IDPs, though that was, as the president said, a target rather than a pledge. We will be evaluated by how much progress we have made towards that target. Conditions are better than made out in the Western media, but I guess the real moral test is whether we would like our grandmothers, mothers or kid cousins to be in these same conditions. Even from a counter-insurgency point of view, having large numbers in camps for a prolonged period is counterproductive.
DB: The loss of Lakshman Kadirgamar was a great blow to the GoSL’s fight against pro-LTTE international opinion. However, do you think that the GoSL would have been able to conduct the war in a similar manner had Kadirgamar been the Foreign Minister?
Dayan Jayatilleka: Kadirgamar would not have interfered in the conduct of the war. What he would have done was to provide, on the international front, a diplomatic and policy leadership parallel to and as good as the defence and military leadership was this time around.
DB: Velupillai Prabakharans’s death remains shrouded in mystery. Do you agree with the GoSL’s version of events – in effect, that he was ambushed by chance and killed, or do you have your own theory?
Dayan Jayatilleka: No theory of my own. The man is dead, that’s for sure and that’s all that counts. I lost just too many friends and acquaintances because of that predator. Kethesh, Neelan, Lakshman Kadir, Pathmanabha, Ossie Abeygoonesekara, Premadasa. I’ve been for too many funerals and know more dead people than live ones because of that man.
DB: While your use of blogging and other online media has made you one of the most accessible members of the Sri Lankan administration – at least to the IT generation – it has been counterbalanced by your often archaic ‘60s revolutionary stance – quoting Lenin and Castro for example in your writings. Deep inside, do you see yourself as a Commie hippy?
Dayan Jayatilleka: Ok, I’m a modernist, not a post-modernist, but Che is never archaic, anymore than Jimi Hendrix is or will be. And hey, check out Slavoj Zizek, the trendiest of philosophers in Europe today. He’s hardly archaic and he uses Marx and Lenin extensively. Commie hippy I don’t know, but I dig Lenin and Leonard Cohen. Lenin, not as Commie ideologue but as political thinker, Mao as philosopher, but I’m heavily into Nietzsche as well, at least after my parents died within 18 months of each other and I found myself a middle-aged orphan. I am more a Social Democrat or on the liberal-progressive wing of the US Democrats than a Commie, but I used to be one and a dedicated revolutionary too. So then, an ex-Commie who is a big fan of Barack Obama and one who predicted his victory and the dawn of an Obama Age, in print, while he was still behind in the primaries. Plenty ex-revo Commies who are pro-Obama, in nationalist, progressive and leftwing Latin American governments today – most of whom voted with Sri Lanka at the UN HRC special session -but unfortunately not a mix or profile you find in Sri Lanka!
DB: It’s rumored that you wear a Che T-shirt around the house, and that your ringtone is La Marseillaise. True?
Dayan Jayatilleka: Nope, I have a Che T-shirt, a gift from Havana, but I hardly get the right occasion to wear it and my phone has a standard nondescript ring tone. If I had a moment to change my ring tone it would be either to blues guitar prodigy Derek Trucks’ So Close, So far Away or Richie Havens’ Hands of Time. Around the house I do have, let’s see, an op-art Che poster (also a gift from Havana), a Sri Lankan woodcut of Christ with a crown of thorns, both books by Barack Obama, a picture of my parents with Indira Gandhi, one of me at age seven with my dad at the second Non-Aligned Movement conference in Cairo, CDs of Stevie Ray Vaughan, Tom Waits and John Maclaughlin, and a small stack of DVDs of Ray Charles, Nina Simone, Lou Reed, Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, Carlos Santana, all in concert. I also stay up late to watch BBC 2 re-runs of my favorite TV series The Wire -It used to be The Sopranos, Millennium and NYPD Blue, and in the 1980s, Miami Vice.
So what’s next ? Some of your more vocal critics have suggested you be made ambassador to Havana. What do you see in your immediate future?
Dayan Jayatilleka: Our current ambassador to Havana, Ms Tamara Kunanayakam, is a literate, multi-lingual, well educated intellectual and researcher whose views on foreign and domestic policy I share. She is perhaps the most intelligent of our DPLs and is doing an excellent job in Havana.
DB: OK, OK, I get it. So, before I let you go, who do you think is hotter -Arundhati Roy or MIA?
Dayan Jayatilleka: Man that is easily the easiest question I have been asked in quite a while. Arundhati Roy, for sure, though her political writing has declined from a superb initial critique of the Iraq war to an all points of the compass loony left nihilism.
[Editors note: This interview was first published on David Blacker's blog. It is reproduced on Groundviews with his permission and at the request of Amb. Jayatilleka.]
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Pity that the government is dismantling its strongest diplomatic weapon. I never always agreed with what he said, though he was so eloquent in how he put it.
Dayan was very clever, and very effectively so too — but he wasn’t clever enough in just one respect: to carefully conceal how clever he is, so that the small minds around (and above) him would not go too green with sheer envy, and then feel even smaller than they really are.
As Daily Mirror’s recent editorial (July 20) put it: “…he (Dayan) had the best international contact network system. Even if one puts the links of the entire Cabinet together that would still not have matched the ties he enjoyed with the Arab nations, African Union and the Southern American states. It’s due to this fact that the UNHRC victory became a reality for Sri Lanka…”
Source: http://www.dailymirror.lk/DM_BLOG/Sections/frmNewsDetailView.aspx?ARTID=55178
Dayan joins the long and illustrious line of talented, brilliant Sri Lankans who were used and dumped by the ungrateful state.
PS: For once, David Blacker has done something useful, for which thanks!
One literally cringes when Sri Lankan diplomats in most major western capitals face the international media. They can hadly articulate a credible defence of Government policy, military action or the state of IDP camps.
Dayan Jayatilleke seems to be an exception to this rule. He appears to have exceptional diplomatic and negotiation skills, which more than offset his occasional shoot from the hip diplomatic faux pas. Moreover he can stand his ground in the most hostile forums. It is unbelievable that MR is asking him to step down.
Thanks David, for the interview.
Dayan – I was once informed by a good friend that you are incredibly knowledgeable about modern pop culture and that you’re ‘with it’. I was a bit sceptical till I read this interview.
Dr.Dayan Jayatilleka was sent as the Permanent Representative to the UN as he was one of the capable men who could handle delicate issues concerning the country and not to write articles expressing his personal views on current issues and repurcussions that would follow if the GOSL does not do things according to his way of thinking.Even at the interview with the interview with David Blacker, Dr.Jayatilleka says what would happen if the GOSL skips the 13th Amendment. These are unwnted comments that a Government of a Country does not expect from one of it’s important representatives. This I believe is his undoing.
“Even if some one had a personal vendetta against me, I am not naive enough to think that this sort of decision, in the wake of an earlier unsuccessful effort to remove me and in the aftermath of the successful Special Session of the Human Rights Council, would have been implemented without some semblance of a green light, however fleeting and flickering, from the top political leadership. ”
You got that right. You are certainly not naive. But then, despite knowing that the regime you supported has been a criminal regime that is known for its lies, evasions, abductions, beatings and assassinations, you continued to use your language skills to defend your masters. That was true of the Premadasa regime as well. And right in this interview, you promote Devananda, another man with blood on his hands who employs thugs in Jaffna. Just ask Anandasangaree.
I will get my pop corn and sit back to watch what happens to you next as Sri Lanka’s own Sopranos plays out.
@George Gunasekera
Seems like you don’t believe in living true to yourself…At least, he is consistent in his views in the past few years and after reforming himself from the his separatism views he has in his younger years (according to Dayan).
I guess that’s the difference between a politician and a diplomat!
Oh great man!
this is my humble suggestion -
if you have virtue – and if you have education, why do you work under people who have neither?
be your own master …. (I think you are very close to this anyway)
but do not forget to be humble (George G probably has a point)
Dayan is visibly clever but not very street smart. That is probably why he keeps throwing his substantial talent for the defense of the worst regimes in post-independence Sri Lanka.
First, he whitewashed the Premadasa regime, responsible for the brutal crackdown of the second JVP uprising in 1987-89. There is evidence to suggest that Dayan did more than that, and played an active role in the bheeshanaya, but we won’t get into that here.
Second, he offered himself to be an intellectual and diplomatic defender of the Rajapaksa regime, responsible for the equally brutal elimination of the LTTE and its occupation of territory and minds. In this task, he was infinitely more capable and successful than our mediocre foreign minister and his equally unremarkable bunch of career diplomats.
Dayan has partly explained this saying he is attracted to the underdog, which in his definition includes Premadasa and Rajapaksa. He is entitled to his preferences. But he must realise that in that process, he has ultimately defended the Sri Lankan state which is fundamentally oppressive, feudal and uncaring of its people.
I am always curious how the genuine socialist (or social democrat) in Dayan reconciles with this supreme contradiction.
Thanks everyone.
Dear Agnos and Ordinary Lankan,
If they were my “masters” I would hardly have kept writing as I did and wound up the way I have. I defended my country, the democratic Sri Lankan state (without which we would have been overrun by the LTTE and JVP), the anti-LTTE cause, and the elected political leadership (Ranasinghe Premadasa, Mahinda Rajapakse) without whom the second (Pol Potist) JVP insurrection and the Thirty Year Dark age of Tiger dominance could not have been ended. That was my duty as a political scientist at that point of my country’s history, as anyone familiar with the tradition of political thought would know. However, I did that while never forsaking a basic intellectual autonomy, and my refusal to defend anything against my conscience.
I have no regrets. The urban “civil society”, Westernised liberal refusal to support the national-patriotic cause, and the tilt towards or appeasement of the Tigers, opened the floodgates for the cultural and policy Taliban. This is true the world over: No abdication by the modernists, no rise of fundamentalism.
Grim hope, I didn’t say I supported separatism in my youth. In my youth (early 20s) I read and interpreted Lenin’s writings on self determination in a mechanistic manner. As writer Saliya CA will confirm, by the mid 1980s, the Independent Student Union leader Daya Pathirana (martyred by the JVP assassins), who had been affiliated with our group the Vikapala Kandayama, had developed political differences with us and been drawn into the radical Trotkyist orbit, because I neither supported separatism or full federalism. When I was indicted as First accused with 23 others, inclduing EPRLF leader Pahtmanabha under the Prevention of Terrorism Act and the Emergency, on 14 charges, NONE of them even remotely related to separatism, but to “overthgrow of the state through violence”.
Humility or its lack have nothing to do with the issue at hand. Mr George Gunasekara is obviously unaware that one of the most important policy interventions of the postwar era, that which inaugurated the famous doctrine of containment, originated in an article written by George Kennan under the pseudonym Mr X, in the Foreign Affairs quarterly in 1947, while Kennan was a serving American DPL in Moscow. This was itself a reworking of a “long telegram” he had sent his bosses in Washington DC. Then again, just a few years ago, we had Francis Fukuyama’s controversial “The End of History”, which was firstly a journal article and then a book, published while Dr Fukuyama was a member of the policy planning staff of the US State Department.
Dear Rukmankan,
When Philip Gourevitch, author of the famous book on Rwanda, and now the editor of The Paris Review, interviwed me on the Leonard Lopate show on New York public radio (having written about me in an article in The New Yorker), he broke for the intermission, describing me half jokingly as “political scientist, journalist and Rock historian”.
Dayan,
Could it be that you were being “used” by the current regime to achieve a certain purpose, but now that you served your purpose you are being discarded? Might this be an indication of things to come?
Hello Dayan:
“That was my duty as a political scientist at that point of my country’s history, as anyone familiar with the tradition of political thought would know. However, I did that while never forsaking a basic intellectual autonomy, and my refusal to defend anything against my conscience.”
You have repeated this argument throughout the last few years. But it is utterly unconvincing. While agreeing with you on the fascistic nature of both the JVP and the LTTE, your emphasis on supporting “elected political leadership” to the exclusion of all other principles is not something any man of principles can support.
The problem with Sri Lanka’s claim to be ‘democratic’ is that it doesn’t have any of the institutional checks and balances needed to make democracy work; indeed, at the risk of seeming elitist, I would say Sri Lanka doesn’t yet have an enlightend, civilized, informed polity that is necessary to make democracy work. The constituion is deeply flawed; it is not secular; respect for individual rights, particularly those of minorities, is largely absent. Even where it is present, often racism is instituionalized so much so that an innocent Tamil man wronged by the State cannot expect impartial treatment from the police, the legislature, the executive branch; even the judiciary is often biased. One particularly chilling example can be seen in how the Supreme Court handled the Bindunuwewa massacre case. I am sure you have read the report by Alan Keenan, who later worked with the ICG.
The JVP youth must have had similar problems on the economic front.
If one was truly ‘patriotic,’ he/she would have looked at these issues objectively and recognized that the JVP and the LTTE were symptoms of a deep malaise in Sri Lankan society. Both would have faced a natural death, through isolation, if enough people from all communities had worked to strengthen democratic institutions and provided workable solutions to real problems while the military took defensive actions.
Alternatives like Vijaya Kumaratunga/Ossie Abeygoonesekara should have been pushed to the maximum possible. For that purpose, people like you should have continued to work at the grass roots level for systemic change, without supporting criminal regimes and their all-out military solutions to JVP and the LTTE.
I don’t recall the precise year, but in the late eighties, at a Presidential election that Ossie also contested, my parents in Jaffna voted (I wasn’t of voting age then) for Ossie, despite Kumar Ponnambalam being on the ballot. They thought Ossie/Vijaya represented a refreshing change. Though some others I knew voted for Vasudeva, by that time he had contested and lost many elections by large margins and was hardly a new wave. Vijaya could have been a new wave, much like Obama is now.
You have said that the JVP killed Vijaya because of his support for the Indo-Lanka accord, and you made a big issue out of that, saying Sinhalese society had people willing to die defending principles, contrasting that with the absence of similar people standing against the LTTE among Tamils. But I doubt that was the reason the JVP killed Vijaya. Like VP, the JVP eliminated leaders on the left who could be a challenege to them in their space. They also eliminated others like Professor Wijesundara of Colombo University, and I don’t think he was particularly political. Being fascistic as well as chauvinistic, they would have done such things at their whim.
However, I have remained critical of the manner in which the Premadasa regime handled the JVP then, and even more critical of the way the Rajapaksa regime handled the LTTE. Both caused so much bloodshed unnecessarily. The relative ease with the military was able to advance into the Vanni showed that the problem could have been handled in ways without killing so many innocent people and keeping so many IDPs in internment camps.
I once did some research with a professor from the deep south. He was known to be very kind, well-educated in his field of engineering and all that, but he followed Nalin de Silva and Gunadasa Amarasekara, so much so that, once in a conversation he said that we, Tamils of the North-East, had been brought by the British from India to work in Jaffna’s tobacco plantations. Such ignorance! And if such a well-educated man could hold such views, what about the large number of average Sinhalese people who cannot reach the academic heights he had attained?
I remain unconvinced by your arguments and still think people like you should have worked for fundamental change in the SInhala society at the grass roots level without supporting criminal regimes and their military solutions to Sri Lankan society’s “un-readiness” for a meaningful democracy; without hiding behind arguments referring to ‘elected’ political leadership.
I could agree with a lot but NEVER the idea that the personal value of humility could EVER be irrelevant.
And this has something to do with what Agnos says about the need to work on the consciousness of the masses – a gradual but ultimately effective and sustainable process.
But some of our best intellects opted to back external power for what we all know is a limited solution –
But that limited solution has also yielded some incredible positives – like decolonisation and a sense of national pride and adequacy – the idea that we can achieve goals by working together
but those things need to built upon before our societal tendency to self-destruct is re-established again
So can we turn inwards now – work on the inside – we had projections – we fought a war based on those projections – now we should work on the projector – the minds that created the conflict
Every human being is a philosopher who puts his theory of life into practice – and there is a philosophy that can give us the wisdom to tackle our problems – politics is not the only factor that goes into that philosophy – there are personal values like humility and simplicity that we must turn to ….
We have great individuals in this country – lets turn them into great values that can build a whole nation ….
Dear Agnos, Avanka and Suguna,
You are making essentially the same point. Agnos, you say that the Vijaya/Ossie option should have been pusrued to the maximum, which is precisely what i did. In one of his last addresses tho his Central Committee, Vijaya announced that after the amnesty for our Vikapala kandayama comrades which h was agitating for, we would ( he mentioned my name) join his party. I did, though he was dead by then, and was an Asst Secretary of the SLMP, then led by Ossie.
The blood soaked fact is this: Vijaya was murdered by the JVL, Ossie by the LTTE. That was the end, and what remained is that those who shattered that dream should be defeated, and they were. The JVP offensive could be defeated only by and with the administration of the day, that of Premadasa, who had many other progressive aspects as well, which is why Ossie and I supported him.
So too the LTTE, which could be defeated only by the State and its political leadership. I was part of an administration (Premadasa) and from outside, partially supported an administration (CBK from the elections of late 1999) that made some progress in this regard. The present administration demonstrated the political will on this issue that the majority of our people wished for and that I had publicly advocated and sweated for since the late 80s. And it — we — won. What happens now, happens the morning after, and is secondary.
There is no contradiction between what you call my genuine socialist/social democratic convictions and my actions. The JVP and the Tigers were the closest we have come to fascism. The socialism, Leftism or Communism that I know, calls for the most resolute opposition to fascism, which is what the left intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s did in Europe and the world over (except for the LSSP!). What happened the morning after, i.e. the Cold war, did not make the Popular front and the broad wartime global alliance incorrect. In fact, Fidel among others have argued that it should have been formed earlier!
In the underdeveloped world, Leftists stand resolutely for national independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity, in oppisition to neocolonial interference and intervention. This I too did.
Dayan:
I am sorry to learn of your sudden departure from the international scene. We have crossed “swords” so to speak a number of times but I have to admit and respect your statesmanship and professionalism. After all, how many in the diplomatic circle “come down to the ground” to personally answer or clarify views, opposed to or otherwise. If it is true that being vocal over the 13th Amendment may have cost you your position, it is indeed very sad as that was one window of opportunity to move forward.
Anyway, I wish you well and hope that you would continue to lend your voice on matters of interest.
Thanks, Concerned Humanitarian.