When a terrorist act is too blatant to ignore, the Cartel expresses ‘concern’, but never condemns the LTTE by name. Consider the CMEV’s even handed communiqu`E9 on the killing of Mr.Sunderampillai. Before he was killed he made a statement to the police accusing the LTTE of attacking his home and wounding him. According to a Batticaloa correspondent, he had refused police protection. After he was killed, his cousin repeated the charge. CMEV states that the LTTE when contacted rejected the accusation. It then goes on to roundly condemn the police for not providing security to the victim!**********************************
by Nalin Swaris
(March 15, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) "The Charade Comes Apart" is the heading of the first section of the latest report of the UTHR(J). Seeing it, a very graphic Sinhala expression came to mind - neva happuwa - rammed the ship. Karuna rammed the peace ship and derailed the gravy train, which he says ran only up to Vavuniya. Pirabhakaran is worshipped by his devotees inside and outside the LTTE, as the Suriya Thevan - Sun God. Karuna said he still regarded Pirabhakaran as his god, but, Karuna is Pirabhakaran’s creation. It’s the Pygmalion myth all over again, except that Karuna is not Galatea or Eliza Doolittle. He is the warrior son of the Sun God. A modern day solar myth. But as George Bernard Shaw wrote in the postscript to his play, Karuna, like Galatea, has realized that his relationship to his Pygmalion, has been "too godlike to be altogether agreeable". So Karuna rammed the ship. The Tiger monolith has cracked. Now Karuna is talking of a "Southern Eelam".
Everything had been neatly sewed up. The spin-doctors had spun a resplendent mantle for the Sun God. Then Karuna broke ranks. The Emperor is naked! The Norwegians pulled out but kept their monitoring mission behind. Wait, Wait, the time will come. There were threats that if the Sri Lankan government did not deliver the demanded peace, the LTTE would make a unilateral declaration of independence and appeal to the ‘international community’ for recognition of the State of Eelam. The ‘international community’ was putting things in place for just such an eventuality. The British, the Germans (the European Community) were exploring the possibility of directly pumping money into Pirabhakaran’s coffer’s. In an exclusive interview with TamilNet, the LTTE web journal datelined August 09, 2003 Jayadeva Uyangoda was advising the Liberation Tigers: "Either the LTTE will have to join the global ruling class or continue to negotiate some autonomous space within the global system ... The LTTE’s biggest problem in the future would be not in dealing with the Sri Lankan army or the Sri Lankan state, but the global state. It is the real challenge before them now". Uyangoda felt confident that the LTTE will not be as foolhardy as Saddam Hussein or the Taliban, but will play its cards right, vis a vis the global state - and the failing state. By ‘global state’ Uyangoda means the will to global hegemony asserted by the ‘pre-emptive war’ against Iraq led by the Bush-Blair-Asnar Triad. He has failed to notice the growing resistance to the global state and globalization worldwide - a mass movement of people demanding authentic peace and humane economic development. With every passing day the signs are that the American people will vote George W. out of office. The problem with positivist bourgeois political science is that it assumes the given state of affairs as a static alignment of forces and takes this reality as the starting point for analysis and prescription. Jettisoning the Marxist method makes one incapable of seeing or understanding social contradictions, which are never static but are a dynamic pattern of ever changing articulations. The Peace Cartel along with the UNP government and ‘the international community’ embraced and promoted the infallible dogma that the LTTE under the divine sovereignty of Pirabhakaran is "the sole representative of the Tamil speaking people". Because of their ideological blinkers they were incapable of seeing the obvious, and in that process effectively trod under a jackboot the human and civil rights that the Tamil people had to a plurality of political ideas and choices. "The current split in the LTTE illustrates how fragile the enterprise has been. - something Tamil dissidents had long talked about. This belief was largely ignored by others who were overwhelmed by its apparent success. Thousands of dissidents paid with their lives for the right to question the authority of LTTE" (UTHR-J). The ground under the monolith was shaking, but self complacent certitudes underwritten by ungrudging flow of Euros, Dollars and Yen, blinded perception.
Reading the bulletin of the UTHR(J) and D.B.S. Jeyaraj’s searing criticism of the LTTE, its ruthless repression of any form of dissent within its ranks and the craven subservience of TNA politicians to the LTTE (Sunday Leader 14 March 2004), I was filled with exasperation. One could count on the fingers of one hand the number of intellectuals of the Left tradition who dared to criticize the LTTE and expose its fascist character. Almost from the day the Ceasefire Agreement was signed, tensions and violence erupted in the Eastern Province. In report after report the UTHR(J) listed cases of gross human rights violations (and of the ceasefire agreement) by the LTTE: cold blooded killings, abduction of children for the Baby Brigade, extortions, harassment of Muslims, and the plight of people burdened by double taxation. The Peace Cartel takes pride in the fact that they and their field workers are in touch with the realities of the North East. Were they wearing blinkers when touring the NorthEast? If the UTHR(J) has been disseminating disinformation, why has the Peace Cartel not refuted the evidence produced? Didn’t they give a damn when dissident Tamils were ruthlessly gunned down by he LTTE? Was it to maintain the authority of the ‘sole representative’? The UTHR(J) reports like pleas of Tamil dissidents, were generally ignored and where possible attempts were made to discredit the organization. During a TV debate Sunanda Deshapriya, a senior official of the Centre for Policy Analysis (CPA), was confronted by Dayan Jayetileke with the reports of the UTHR(J). Dayan challenged Sunanda whether he regards the incidents enumerated therein as fabrications. The pravina madhyavedhi -’eminent media man’ balked, then fudged: "My objection is that they [the UTHR (J)] have no moral right (sadhacharathmaka ayithiya) to use the affix ‘Jaffna’ because they do not live and work there any more. They are hiding in Colombo, with Green Cards ready, to scoot off to America". The eminent journalist seems to have forgotten what happened to Rajini Thiranagama and how some of his lady friends, who now seem embarrassed by her memory, once went to market celebrating her as a feminist heroine. He knows bloody well what would happen to this courageous band of men and women if they try to operate from Jaffna. What is amazing is that people have found channels to get detailed information across to the UTHR(J). They do not trust the Cartel enough, to turn to them for help. What this self-declared champion of press freedom should be doing is fighting for the right of the UTHR(J) to do their work in Tiger terrorised areas, without being gunned down as Rajini was. That would be the moral thing to do.
Genuine Peace and Peace Merchandising
What this country lacks is an authentic people based peace movement. Certain self created peace and anti-war NGO’s have for several years been on the payroll of foreign donor agencies., but this country has yet to see a people based peace movement which could mobilise the masses as peace activists did against the USA-UK led invasion of Iraq, in those very donor countries. In fact, one practical result if not object, of the activities of the elitist Sri Lankan Peace Cartel has been to de-activate the people, reducing them to mere objects of their condescending pedagogics. When a terrorist act is too blatant to ignore, the Cartel expresses ‘concern’, but never condemns the LTTE by name. Consider the CMEV’s even handed communiqu`E9 on the killing of Mr.Sunderampillai. Before he was killed he made a statement to the police accusing the LTTE of attacking his home and wounding him. According to a Batticaloa correspondent, he had refused police protection. After he was killed, his cousin repeated the charge. CMEV states that the LTTE when contacted rejected the accusation. It then goes on to roundly condemn the police for not providing security to the victim! Why this attempt at white washing the LTTE? Sunderampillai was a UNP candidate.The communiqu`E9 did not mention the LTTE killing of an EPDP party worker. By hitching their peace wagon to the UNP-LTTE ‘peace process’, the Peace Cartel has compromised its moral duty to speak up courageously whenever gross violations of human rights and of the Ceasefire Agreement takes place. After all they are experienced ‘monitoring’ specialist. This is what any authentic people-based peace group would have done; remain non-partisan and take an independent stand. If only the many wretched victims of war knew much luxury their misery has brought to a privileged few with the right connections. Since their wealth is not self generated, these peace pipers must inevitably play the tune of those who pay them.
Events in Spain have given the lie to the Cartel’s contention that unequivocal condemnation of terrorism would precipitate a return to war. Terrorist attacks on passenger trains in Madrid killed more than 200 innocent civilians and injured hundreds of others. An estimated one and a half million Basques and Spaniards came out onto the streets in Madrid to condemn these barbaric acts. Three days later the Spaniards voted out of power the Prime Minister who led the country into an illegal war against Iraq. Despite the years they have been in business, the highly elitist Peace Cartel members have not been capable of mobilizing the Sinhala and Tamil masses for peace. The Anglo-Americanised leadership has drawn into their circle of affluence vernacular educated activists who have never had it so good, judging by their ‘casual smart’ clothing. While operating as seemingly independent organizations, a stratagem indispensable for separate funding, these peace elites have interlocking directorates and a kaleidoscopic leadership so that it is difficult to know which cap a given person is wearing at a given time. Not all the grass roots peace groups would agree with the Cartel’s recipe for peace. To catch these groups, an umbrella organization called the Anti-War Front was formed. Leading lights of the Centre for Policy Analysis (CPA) together with some foraging-nomadic ‘professionally civil society’ individuals, regrouped under the name Peace Support Group (PSG). They held a workshop sometime ago in provincial Galewela. One of them, Sunila Abesekera introduced as a "well-known social worker" argued that the institutions (police, courts of law, banks) being set up and expanded by the LTTE in areas under their control are "illegal but useful". Useful because, the lady explained, somebody has to administer these areas. The argument also rationalized the heavy burden of double taxation the Tamil people have to bear in Tiger controlled territory. This is the type of specious argument that is being used to back the LTTE by hook or by crook. If the lady concerned had any inkling of basic juridical principles, the proper distinction is between ‘legal’ and ‘legitimate’. During the war, the legality of these institutions was under contestation. Putting up solid buildings for running these institutions would have been ill-advised because the armed forces could attack and destroy them. Anyone with even a basic knowledge of conflict resolution principles would know that the ground situation at the time a ceasefire agreement is signed, has to be frozen. ‘Lines of control’ established after a ceasefire are not national boundaries. Any action that would change the status quo ante, in favour of one party or the other, would be setting in motion a course of action that would strengthen the negotiating hand of that party and confront the other party with a fait accompli with regard to the final settlement. The PSG was touring the countryside to legitimize the illegal in the eyes of ill-informed people. Now we have a stark example of how these ‘legitimized’ LTTE institutions work. Pirabhakaran has issued a fatwah ordering the execution of Karuna. What does the Cartel have to say about that? ‘Illegal but useful’? Or, ‘quasi justice’ in a ‘quasi state’? When violent clashes erupted between Tamils and Muslims, Jayadeva Uyangoda came up with the ‘break through’ concept of ‘Spoilers’. The Eastern Province is becoming the playground of ‘spoilers’, he lamented. Now it appears that the spoiler Nr.1 is a Big Cat and not, as it was then insinuated, radical Muslim youth or Devananda’s provocateurs.
The Sun is Setting- in the East!
At the zenith of its power the Sun God has begun to set - in the East. They burnt his effigy there. The mystical veil of the Temple of Doom has been rent, exposing the truth within. The Idol has fallen. Things won’t be the same again. It is time that the Peace Cartel who are also the market leaders of the multi million rupee election monitoring business, stop pretending to play the Sleeping Beauty. The carefully choreographed charade they have been enacting on behalf of their ‘Regaining Sri Lanka’ donor nations has come apart. If they are honest about ‘free and fair elections’ and genuinely revulsed by ‘election violence’, they should protest against the ‘sole representative’ claim or take moral responsibility for the killing of every Tamil politician who refutes that claim, in practice. This not a one party state. No more hit and run killings under ‘civil society’ cover.
(The article originally published in 2004 after Col. Karuna Amman broke away from the LTTE)
- Sri Lanka Guardian
by Nalin Swaris
(March 15, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) "The Charade Comes Apart" is the heading of the first section of the latest report of the UTHR(J). Seeing it, a very graphic Sinhala expression came to mind - neva happuwa - rammed the ship. Karuna rammed the peace ship and derailed the gravy train, which he says ran only up to Vavuniya. Pirabhakaran is worshipped by his devotees inside and outside the LTTE, as the Suriya Thevan - Sun God. Karuna said he still regarded Pirabhakaran as his god, but, Karuna is Pirabhakaran’s creation. It’s the Pygmalion myth all over again, except that Karuna is not Galatea or Eliza Doolittle. He is the warrior son of the Sun God. A modern day solar myth. But as George Bernard Shaw wrote in the postscript to his play, Karuna, like Galatea, has realized that his relationship to his Pygmalion, has been "too godlike to be altogether agreeable". So Karuna rammed the ship. The Tiger monolith has cracked. Now Karuna is talking of a "Southern Eelam".
Everything had been neatly sewed up. The spin-doctors had spun a resplendent mantle for the Sun God. Then Karuna broke ranks. The Emperor is naked! The Norwegians pulled out but kept their monitoring mission behind. Wait, Wait, the time will come. There were threats that if the Sri Lankan government did not deliver the demanded peace, the LTTE would make a unilateral declaration of independence and appeal to the ‘international community’ for recognition of the State of Eelam. The ‘international community’ was putting things in place for just such an eventuality. The British, the Germans (the European Community) were exploring the possibility of directly pumping money into Pirabhakaran’s coffer’s. In an exclusive interview with TamilNet, the LTTE web journal datelined August 09, 2003 Jayadeva Uyangoda was advising the Liberation Tigers: "Either the LTTE will have to join the global ruling class or continue to negotiate some autonomous space within the global system ... The LTTE’s biggest problem in the future would be not in dealing with the Sri Lankan army or the Sri Lankan state, but the global state. It is the real challenge before them now". Uyangoda felt confident that the LTTE will not be as foolhardy as Saddam Hussein or the Taliban, but will play its cards right, vis a vis the global state - and the failing state. By ‘global state’ Uyangoda means the will to global hegemony asserted by the ‘pre-emptive war’ against Iraq led by the Bush-Blair-Asnar Triad. He has failed to notice the growing resistance to the global state and globalization worldwide - a mass movement of people demanding authentic peace and humane economic development. With every passing day the signs are that the American people will vote George W. out of office. The problem with positivist bourgeois political science is that it assumes the given state of affairs as a static alignment of forces and takes this reality as the starting point for analysis and prescription. Jettisoning the Marxist method makes one incapable of seeing or understanding social contradictions, which are never static but are a dynamic pattern of ever changing articulations. The Peace Cartel along with the UNP government and ‘the international community’ embraced and promoted the infallible dogma that the LTTE under the divine sovereignty of Pirabhakaran is "the sole representative of the Tamil speaking people". Because of their ideological blinkers they were incapable of seeing the obvious, and in that process effectively trod under a jackboot the human and civil rights that the Tamil people had to a plurality of political ideas and choices. "The current split in the LTTE illustrates how fragile the enterprise has been. - something Tamil dissidents had long talked about. This belief was largely ignored by others who were overwhelmed by its apparent success. Thousands of dissidents paid with their lives for the right to question the authority of LTTE" (UTHR-J). The ground under the monolith was shaking, but self complacent certitudes underwritten by ungrudging flow of Euros, Dollars and Yen, blinded perception.
Reading the bulletin of the UTHR(J) and D.B.S. Jeyaraj’s searing criticism of the LTTE, its ruthless repression of any form of dissent within its ranks and the craven subservience of TNA politicians to the LTTE (Sunday Leader 14 March 2004), I was filled with exasperation. One could count on the fingers of one hand the number of intellectuals of the Left tradition who dared to criticize the LTTE and expose its fascist character. Almost from the day the Ceasefire Agreement was signed, tensions and violence erupted in the Eastern Province. In report after report the UTHR(J) listed cases of gross human rights violations (and of the ceasefire agreement) by the LTTE: cold blooded killings, abduction of children for the Baby Brigade, extortions, harassment of Muslims, and the plight of people burdened by double taxation. The Peace Cartel takes pride in the fact that they and their field workers are in touch with the realities of the North East. Were they wearing blinkers when touring the NorthEast? If the UTHR(J) has been disseminating disinformation, why has the Peace Cartel not refuted the evidence produced? Didn’t they give a damn when dissident Tamils were ruthlessly gunned down by he LTTE? Was it to maintain the authority of the ‘sole representative’? The UTHR(J) reports like pleas of Tamil dissidents, were generally ignored and where possible attempts were made to discredit the organization. During a TV debate Sunanda Deshapriya, a senior official of the Centre for Policy Analysis (CPA), was confronted by Dayan Jayetileke with the reports of the UTHR(J). Dayan challenged Sunanda whether he regards the incidents enumerated therein as fabrications. The pravina madhyavedhi -’eminent media man’ balked, then fudged: "My objection is that they [the UTHR (J)] have no moral right (sadhacharathmaka ayithiya) to use the affix ‘Jaffna’ because they do not live and work there any more. They are hiding in Colombo, with Green Cards ready, to scoot off to America". The eminent journalist seems to have forgotten what happened to Rajini Thiranagama and how some of his lady friends, who now seem embarrassed by her memory, once went to market celebrating her as a feminist heroine. He knows bloody well what would happen to this courageous band of men and women if they try to operate from Jaffna. What is amazing is that people have found channels to get detailed information across to the UTHR(J). They do not trust the Cartel enough, to turn to them for help. What this self-declared champion of press freedom should be doing is fighting for the right of the UTHR(J) to do their work in Tiger terrorised areas, without being gunned down as Rajini was. That would be the moral thing to do.
Genuine Peace and Peace Merchandising
What this country lacks is an authentic people based peace movement. Certain self created peace and anti-war NGO’s have for several years been on the payroll of foreign donor agencies., but this country has yet to see a people based peace movement which could mobilise the masses as peace activists did against the USA-UK led invasion of Iraq, in those very donor countries. In fact, one practical result if not object, of the activities of the elitist Sri Lankan Peace Cartel has been to de-activate the people, reducing them to mere objects of their condescending pedagogics. When a terrorist act is too blatant to ignore, the Cartel expresses ‘concern’, but never condemns the LTTE by name. Consider the CMEV’s even handed communiqu`E9 on the killing of Mr.Sunderampillai. Before he was killed he made a statement to the police accusing the LTTE of attacking his home and wounding him. According to a Batticaloa correspondent, he had refused police protection. After he was killed, his cousin repeated the charge. CMEV states that the LTTE when contacted rejected the accusation. It then goes on to roundly condemn the police for not providing security to the victim! Why this attempt at white washing the LTTE? Sunderampillai was a UNP candidate.The communiqu`E9 did not mention the LTTE killing of an EPDP party worker. By hitching their peace wagon to the UNP-LTTE ‘peace process’, the Peace Cartel has compromised its moral duty to speak up courageously whenever gross violations of human rights and of the Ceasefire Agreement takes place. After all they are experienced ‘monitoring’ specialist. This is what any authentic people-based peace group would have done; remain non-partisan and take an independent stand. If only the many wretched victims of war knew much luxury their misery has brought to a privileged few with the right connections. Since their wealth is not self generated, these peace pipers must inevitably play the tune of those who pay them.
Events in Spain have given the lie to the Cartel’s contention that unequivocal condemnation of terrorism would precipitate a return to war. Terrorist attacks on passenger trains in Madrid killed more than 200 innocent civilians and injured hundreds of others. An estimated one and a half million Basques and Spaniards came out onto the streets in Madrid to condemn these barbaric acts. Three days later the Spaniards voted out of power the Prime Minister who led the country into an illegal war against Iraq. Despite the years they have been in business, the highly elitist Peace Cartel members have not been capable of mobilizing the Sinhala and Tamil masses for peace. The Anglo-Americanised leadership has drawn into their circle of affluence vernacular educated activists who have never had it so good, judging by their ‘casual smart’ clothing. While operating as seemingly independent organizations, a stratagem indispensable for separate funding, these peace elites have interlocking directorates and a kaleidoscopic leadership so that it is difficult to know which cap a given person is wearing at a given time. Not all the grass roots peace groups would agree with the Cartel’s recipe for peace. To catch these groups, an umbrella organization called the Anti-War Front was formed. Leading lights of the Centre for Policy Analysis (CPA) together with some foraging-nomadic ‘professionally civil society’ individuals, regrouped under the name Peace Support Group (PSG). They held a workshop sometime ago in provincial Galewela. One of them, Sunila Abesekera introduced as a "well-known social worker" argued that the institutions (police, courts of law, banks) being set up and expanded by the LTTE in areas under their control are "illegal but useful". Useful because, the lady explained, somebody has to administer these areas. The argument also rationalized the heavy burden of double taxation the Tamil people have to bear in Tiger controlled territory. This is the type of specious argument that is being used to back the LTTE by hook or by crook. If the lady concerned had any inkling of basic juridical principles, the proper distinction is between ‘legal’ and ‘legitimate’. During the war, the legality of these institutions was under contestation. Putting up solid buildings for running these institutions would have been ill-advised because the armed forces could attack and destroy them. Anyone with even a basic knowledge of conflict resolution principles would know that the ground situation at the time a ceasefire agreement is signed, has to be frozen. ‘Lines of control’ established after a ceasefire are not national boundaries. Any action that would change the status quo ante, in favour of one party or the other, would be setting in motion a course of action that would strengthen the negotiating hand of that party and confront the other party with a fait accompli with regard to the final settlement. The PSG was touring the countryside to legitimize the illegal in the eyes of ill-informed people. Now we have a stark example of how these ‘legitimized’ LTTE institutions work. Pirabhakaran has issued a fatwah ordering the execution of Karuna. What does the Cartel have to say about that? ‘Illegal but useful’? Or, ‘quasi justice’ in a ‘quasi state’? When violent clashes erupted between Tamils and Muslims, Jayadeva Uyangoda came up with the ‘break through’ concept of ‘Spoilers’. The Eastern Province is becoming the playground of ‘spoilers’, he lamented. Now it appears that the spoiler Nr.1 is a Big Cat and not, as it was then insinuated, radical Muslim youth or Devananda’s provocateurs.
The Sun is Setting- in the East!
At the zenith of its power the Sun God has begun to set - in the East. They burnt his effigy there. The mystical veil of the Temple of Doom has been rent, exposing the truth within. The Idol has fallen. Things won’t be the same again. It is time that the Peace Cartel who are also the market leaders of the multi million rupee election monitoring business, stop pretending to play the Sleeping Beauty. The carefully choreographed charade they have been enacting on behalf of their ‘Regaining Sri Lanka’ donor nations has come apart. If they are honest about ‘free and fair elections’ and genuinely revulsed by ‘election violence’, they should protest against the ‘sole representative’ claim or take moral responsibility for the killing of every Tamil politician who refutes that claim, in practice. This not a one party state. No more hit and run killings under ‘civil society’ cover.
(The article originally published in 2004 after Col. Karuna Amman broke away from the LTTE)
- Sri Lanka Guardian
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