| by Pearl Thevanaygam
(February 07, 2013, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) Shame on you professor. Until I read your piece on the Burning of Jaffna Library in Sri Lanka Guardian, I held you in high esteem. How blind can you be to rely on a DIG’s account whose very sustenance depends on the government which appointed him rather than eye-witness accounts?
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"Time was when judges and academics could not be bought with perks and privileges. Not anymore, dear Prof. Fonseka, as you have proved beyond reasonable doubt. You have sold your intellectual soul to a myth created by the present government to dupe innocent Sinhalese."
DIG Jagath Gunawardene may be literate and you undoubtedly have many laurels. But to apologise for Gamini Dissanayake’s family exonerating the minister is tantamount to boot-licking. Are you going the way of another learned man Prof. G.L.Peiris who is now Foreign Minister.
Giving you the benefit of a doubt, could you be an innocent victim of propaganda and disinformation successive governments resorted to by barring media from war zones and which kept communication between the North and South to a zero in the name of national security?
Are there any independent thinkers anymore? Have the Rajapaksas managed to even subvert intellectuals with their cry for a Sinhala nation for Sinhalese only? Even a blind man can see the rule of Rajapaksas has nothing to do with patriotism. It has everything to do with creating a nouveau dynasty. The Rajapaksas never had it so good thanks to intellectuals like you.
Time was when judges and academics could not be bought with perks and privileges. Not anymore, dear Prof. Fonseka, as you have proved beyond reasonable doubt. You have sold your intellectual soul to a myth created by the present government to dupe innocent Sinhalese.
Let us forget for one moment about Tamils from North and East who have inalienable right to call this island of ours their homeland. The systemic injustices perpetrated on them is written in the annals of history but it was the majority Sinhalese many of whom who had no part in the ethnic war who suffered equally. It was the illiterate soldiers from villages at the promise of a few thousand bucks who foolishly went to war and came back in body bags. Did they fight a war so their families were left fatherless and mothers and fathers weeping?
As I write this piece, once more, Jaffna students are discriminated against university admissions in the standardisation scheme perpetrated in the early 1970’s by an illiterate woman prime minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike who until her husband PM SWRD was slain by no less than a Buddhist monk - Buddha Rakkita Thero – who was seen by many journalists sprawling in the Bandaranaike’s sitting room saffron shawl askew and a whiskey glass in hand - was relegated to the Bandaranaikes’ kitchen supervising family meals.
I pity you Prof. Carlo Fonseka for thee doth not know what thou are doing in thine advancing years. You seem to have selective amnesia and you are so blinded to the vast knowledge and learning you acquired that you think a few selective memoirs by a colleague such as DIG Gunawardena suffice to distort the course of history.
Dammit, Jaffna Library was burnt on the direct instructions of Gamini Dissanayake and Cyril Matthew, a Tamil by descent no matter how much he claims to be a Sinhalese.
While we have friends like you Carlo who needs enemies?
(The writer has been a journalist for 23 years and worked at Weekend, The Daily News, Sunday Leader and Weekend Express in Sri Lanka as sub-editor, news reporter and news editor. She was Colombo Correspondent for Times of India and has contributed to Wall Street Journal; Washington Bureau, where she was on work experience from The Graduate School of Journalism, UC Berkeley, California. Currently residing in UK she is also co-founder of EJN (Exiled Journalists Network) UK in 2005 the membership of which is 200 from 40 countries. She can be reached at pearltheva@hotmail.com)
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