PRA and the Intellectual Cesspit.

EDITORIAL

(May 14, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) C. A. Chandraprame, who tried to create a fairytale story of Pregeeth Ekenaliyagoda being in hiding and urging him to return, drew a sharp response from many people which demonstrated that disapproval of such a fairy tale approach. Such an attempt was seen in fact as a cover up of the cruel disappearance of Pregeeth Ekenaliyagoda, and the government’s incapacity to inquire and reveal the truth about this disappearance.

It was a hired man’s job to create some kind of attack on those who are demanding an inquiry into the disappearance. Prageeth’s wife Sandya is the person who leads that request, as is always the case in the circumstance of disappearances. It is always the person closest to the disappeared person who demands such inquiries. Therefore, C. A. Chandraprama’s was mostly a vicious attack on Sandya who he tried to portray as a person who is trying to create a fabricated story and tying to take advantage from such a story.

With the retorts he has received, C. A. Chandraprame regrets having got into a cesspit of debate. However, getting into a cesspit for C. A. Chandraprame happened long before this debate. It happened when he joined those who were engaged in the witch hunt of the JVP in the late 80s. It was the cruel period of mass disappearances that got C. A. Chandraprame into the mass murder industry in Sri Lanka.

The pretext of that industry was that the JVP, which was a barbarous organisation engaged in the most cruel kinds of repression and killings, had to be destroyed by any means. ‘By any means’ was used as the justification for the forced disappearances. Forced disappearances in Sri Lanka, as explained by many persons, meant abductions in place of arrest and then interrogation of persons in secret detention centres and the cruel torture of these persons followed by assassinations and secret disposal of bodies.

The memory of all this has once again been brought to the fore with the disappearance of Pregeeth Ekenaliyagoda in January 2010. In the earlier year when the conflict with the LTTE was intense around 600 people also disappeared in Colombo and these disappearances did not cause much uproar because of the intense antipathy that the LTTE has generated because of its own barbaric activities. However, under the pretext of suppressing the LTTE these people who were arrested were made to disappear.

There is now a debate which has brought out new information about the new techniques being used for disappearances in Sri Lanka. The way the dead bodies are dismembered to avoid them floating back to the surface of the water - as happened in the famous case of Richard de Soysa - and the disposal of bodies deep in the sea are among the things that came to the discussion relating to the disappearance of Pregeeth Ekenaliyagoda. Among the other issues that came up was that Prageeth was involved in research into the use of chemical weapons in the latter part of the struggle against the LTTE.

However, this are not the cesspit. The cesspit is the destruction of the entire fabric of the civilised life in Sri Lanka, the destruction of the constitutional and legal framework of Sri Lanka and all the protections that were available to the citizens of Sri Lanka under the pretext of control of insurgencies. The barbarities of the insurgencies gave the possibility of justifying any kind of activities under the pretext of the suppression of such insurgencies. However, the actual circumstances were that enormous change was happening in the country which used the insurgencies in order to develop the most cruel forms of suppression of the freedoms within Sri Lanka.

The creation of mass violence required those who were willing to engage in such violence. The recruitment of these persons, by both the rebels and the armed forces, is one of the factors that is experienced in Sri Lanka. The LTTE used the victims of state violence to create suicide bombers, the number of which they had to the extent that they could spare the lives of these people to cause any kind of violence.

The same way there were recruitments for the military, and the recruits came for various reasons. The pretext of a friend or family member being killed by the violence of an insurgent group became the cause of many people involved in counter-violence. Thus, this kind of counter-violence creates the need, the pretext and all kinds of theories to justify them. The theories to justify violence became the cesspit in which the intellectual life of Sri Lanka has been crippled.

Today there is a tremendous crisis in the intellectual life of the country which has been exploited in order to destroy every area of civilised life within Sri Lanka. However, being trapped within the dynamics of violence, it has not become possible for Sri Lankans to evolve their thought and the intellectual life to fight back against this kind of violence and to be able to deal with society’s problems once again on the basis of civilised forms of thought and conduct.

That is a cesspit that the nation is caught up in and in that cesspit there are those who have become intellectuals who justify violence. Two articles written in The Island to create confusion about the disappearance of Pregeeth Ekenaliyagoda by C. A. Chandraprame came from that cesspit of intellectual life in Sri Lanka.

Related Links:

Cocks, Bulls, the PRA the Island and Angulimala’s theories

On The Island news paper’s theories regarding Prageeth

The Island descends to vulgarity

Has madness any limits?