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.

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.

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 ….

“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.

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?

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”.

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.

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)

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!