Thursday 17th April, 2025

Much publicity has been given to a recent incident where President Anura Kumara Dissanayake ‘acted swiftly to rescue a small girl’ lost in a large, milling crowd at an NPP election rally in Sammanthurai. A viral video shows the President lifting the bewildered girl and placing her beside him to ensure her safety. What would have happened to her but for his timely intervention? One may recall that Dissanayake did something similar during his presidential election campaign as well; he helped a small boy who could not find his parents at an NPP propaganda rally.

Why should children be brought to political rallies? Curiously, this question has gone unasked.

Children and political propaganda are inseparable in Sri Lanka. Election posters featuring politicians with children, and public relations stunts such as hugging, kissing and caressing children at political events are common in this country; they are intended to help project politicians as warm, caring and relatable leaders.

Mahinda Rajapaksa, during his presidency, had hugging and caressing small children down to a fine art. His love for children may be genuine, but such public gestures were obviously intended to resonate with voters. Many mothers were seen jostling and shoving at political rallies and other events to have their babies kissed and cuddled by President Rajapaksa, who never disappointed them. His political opponents derided such gestures as cheap propaganda gimmicks.

It is heartening that the JVP has undergone a remarkable change since the late 1980s, when it had no qualms about furthering its politico-military interests at the expense of children, whom it exposed to danger by making them deliver ‘chits’ containing threats and warnings to those who defied its illegal orders, put up its anti-government posters and attend the protests it instigated. Children were among the victims of brutal counterterror unleashed by vigilantes and some rogue elements in the armed forces and the police. During its terror campaign against the Indo-Lanka Accord, and the establishment of the Provincial Councils, the JVP even forced students in primary grades to stage protests; they were so confused that they were heard shouting, “Pala baba apita epa” instead of “Palath sabha apita epa” (“We don’t want Provincial Councils”); they were too small to know the difference between Palath (Provincial) Sabha (councils) and Pala (green leaves) and baba (baby)! Traders may recall that the JVP’s ‘chits’ ordering them to close their shops or face death were delivered mostly by preteens. Today, the JVP leader is receiving much publicity for having rescued a child lost in a crowd!

Ironically, no amount of propaganda could prevent Mahinda Rajapaksa’s ignominious defeat in the 2015 presidential race; worse, in 2022, when he was the Prime Minister, mothers took to the streets, in their thousands, together with their children, including toddlers, demanding his ouster. Among those protesters were pregnant women. They accused Rajapaksa and other government leaders of ruining their children’s future! This is a lesson that other political leaders must learn if they do not want to find themselves in a situation where they are left with no alternative but to head for the hills, with angry crowds in close pursuit. Propaganda cannot save political leaders who antagonise the public.

Worryingly, the story about the Sammanthurai girl did not prompt anyone to take up the issue of parents taking part in political rallies and parades, together with their small children. A ban has been imposed on using children under the age of 12 in commercial advertisements because they lack the ability to evaluate information in advertisements critically. This is a welcome move that will go a long way towards preventing greedy corporate fat cats from exploiting children to mislead the public and promote their products and services. Similarly, parents must not be allowed to take their children to political events, where violence or stampedes could occur. This issue warrants the attention of the National Child Protection Authority.

One can only hope that action will be taken against the parents or the guardians of the girl who was left struggling in a milling crowd at the aforesaid NPP propaganda rally in Sammanthurai.

This comment is being written ahead of the normal Friday deadline for printing the Sunday Island due to the forthcoming New Year holidays – that is before sittings of Parliament commenced on Thursday to debate the Batalanda Commission report. But it has also drawn on some of what was said in the early stages of that debate. This widely anticipated discussion will continue for a second day next month after parliament adjourned for the New Year on Thursday evening.

Batalanda and the torture chamber run there in the wake of the JVP’s second adventure between 1987 and 1989 has received a great deal of publicity, particularly in the electronic media, in recent weeks. As readers are well aware, former President Ranil Wckremesinghe, who began his parliamentary career in 1977 from the Biyagama electorate where Batalanda is located, is specifically targeted.

Earlier this year, Wicremesinghe fared disastrously in Al Jazeera’s Head to Head program, modeled on BBC’s Hard Talk, which famously interrogates interviewees with rapidly fired questions, where a very hard time is given to whoever is interviewed in what are often unequal exchanges. We have in this space previously said that it was clearly apparent during the program, which attracted global publicity, that the former president seemed to have knowingly walked into a trap for reasons that are not easily fathomable. Knowingly because the line of questioning was to be expected and the program host’s strategy of embarrassing the guest would have been obvious. But RW accepted an invitation to appear on a show that put him through a mincing machine. The Sinhala idiom illagena parippu kanawa neatly sums up what eventually happened to our former president.

RW was interviewed in London before a hostile audience dominated by LTTE supporters from the Tamil diaspora. The so-called “expert panel” whose comments were invited during the program was loaded two to one against the former president. Only Mr. Niranjan Deva Additiya, commonly known as Nirj Deva, a former British MP who also sat in the European Parliament could be regarded as not anti-Ranil, having served as a special envoy during the Wickremesinghe presidency. The other two panelists were extremely hostile to Wickremesinghe. Interviewer Mehdi Hasan, gave RW barely a chance to answer his questions fired with machine-gun rapidity, intervening and interrupting most unfairly.

Anybody with an inkling of Sri Lanka’s contemporary history beginning from 1971 when the JVP, which had only a year previously supported the United Front coalition led by Mrs. Sirima Bandaranaike to roundly defeat the Dudley Senanayake-led UNP, would know that Rohana Wijeweera’s ‘new left’ unexpectedly attempted via a youth insurgency to topple a government it had helped elect months earlier. The rebels were mostly armed with home made bombs and commandeered shotguns supplemented with weapons captured from the armories of several police stations they overran.

The then government brutally reacted to crush the rebellion and dead bodies by the roadside and floating down rivers were a common sight at that time. The official death toll was 1,200 including 37 police officers killed and 195 wounded. Wikepedia citing “reliable sources” estimated 4,000 dead. India and Pakistan were among neighboring countries that assisted with men and material to help the beleaguered government at that time. The US sold us six Bell 47G helicopters which were put into combat after minimal pilot training. Britain and the USSR also provided assistance. The North Korean Embassy in Colombo was closed and it’s personnel expelled. China was suspect although there was no evidence whatever to implicate her.

Wijeweera, who had a scholarship to study medicine at Moscow’s Lumumba University had been taking a pro-Chinese line in the USSR and was not permitted to re-enter Russia after he came here on holiday. He flirted briefly with the China wing Communist Party here led by Mr. N. Sanmugathasan (nicknamed Mao Tse-Shan) and sported a tunic suit, beret and a Mao badge at the Criminal Justice Commission that tried him and other JVP leaders following the 1971 insurrection. The JVP’s second adventure between 1987-89 made 1971 pale into insignificance with the country driven to the brink of anarchy with numerous assassinations of politicians, union leaders and sundry others.

Predictably, the opposition and principally the SJB, that was once very much a part of the UNP at that time, while not defending state terror countering JVP terror then credibly made the point that Batalanda was not the only detention center where third degree methods were used during the northern and southern insurgencies. “Why are you merely looking at Batalanda? What about the other places commanded by ex-servicemen who are now part of your government where these things happened? Are you not going to investigate those places too?,” SJB frontbencher Mujibur Rahman asked opening the debate on behalf of the opposition.

He opened his speech describing the whole issue as one of digging up a rubbish mountain several decades after the events. Countering what Deputy Minister Sunil Watagala who quoted a chunk of the commission report, Rahman did likewise with a lengthy quotation from the end of the report saying that in no way could what the JVP and its armed vigilante squads did in that period be countenanced. The commission had reported on its findings of what happened at Batalanda and not, it was implied, on the context in which such extra legal measures were taken.

President JR Jayewardene expressed a truism saying that “in times of war, laws are silent.” As it happened during the 30-year civil war and the JVP’s 1987-89 insurgency, the state responded to terror with counter terror and there was no serious public opinion among ordinary people against what happened. The JVP which was part of governments and with political alignmnts with the rulers at different times had not, as Mujibur Rahuman pointed out, not bothered to even find out who liquidated Rohana Wijeweera. He alleged that somebody who had been accused as being the killer was recently rubbing shoulders with a high up in the government.

Saturday 12th April, 2025

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake will appoint a committee to decide on instituting legal action against those named in the report of the Batalanda Commission, which probed extrajudicial killings, torture, etc., in the Batalanda detention centre, in the late 1980s, Leader of the House and Minister Bimal Ratnayake has said. The commission report has also been referred to the Attorney General for action, according to media reports quoting Ratnayake.

Parliament had a debate on the Batalanda Commission report on Thursday. The government MPs and their Opposition counterparts, true to form, traded allegations and abuse liberally, and it is doubtful whether their debate left the public any the wiser.

The Executive President is vested with powers to appoint committees like the aforesaid one, but such presidential action in respect of the Batalanda Commission report will be seen to be tainted with prejudice, for President Dissanayake is the leader of the JVP, which has prejudged those named in the commission report, especially their erstwhile chum, former President Ranil Wickremesinghe, and is calling for punitive action against them.

There is no guarantee that the presidential committee to be appointed will be different from the Parliamentary Select Committee that probed Chief Justice Dr. Shirani Bandaranayake and prepared the grounds for her wrongful impeachment in 2013. After all, the JVP/NPP has rejected out of hand the findings and recommendations of the Alwis committee, which has held two former high-ranking police officers accountable for their serious lapses which, among other things, led to the Easter Sunday carnage. So, matters concerning the Batalanda Commission recommendations should be left to the Attorney General although he is not completely independent of the Executive.

It will not be possible to build a strong case against Wickremesinghe on the basis of the Batalanda Commission report, whose recommendations lack specificity, according to legal experts. However, one cannot but agree with the JVP/NPP that all those who committed savage excesses in the name of counterterror operations to crush the JVP’s second uprising in the late 1980s must be brought to justice. Similarly, the heinous crimes the JVP committed must also be probed, and the perpetrators thereof must be made to face the consequences of their actions.

The Batalanda Commission report itself has revealed the JVP’s crimes. The JVP carried out hundreds of political assassinations, committed a large number of armed robberies including bank heists, destroyed state assets worth billions of rupees, such as Agrarian Service Centres, tea factories, Paddy Marketing Board storage facilities, buses, trains and countless CEB transformers, attacked military camps and police stations and grabbed a large number of firearms, most of which have not been recovered. The JVP unleashed mindless terror purportedly to extricate Sri Lanka from what it described as the tentacles of India, which it likened to an evil, giant octopus. Its reign of terror crippled the economy so much so that the then President Ranasinghe Premadasa offered to negotiate with it unconditionally. Today, the JVP leaders are eating out of the Indian leaders’ hands and entering into undisclosed MoUs with the ‘evil, giant octopus’, as it were.

All those who were involved in JVP terror in the late 1980s must be held accountable for their crimes, as former JVP presidential candidate and General Secretary Nandana Gunathilake has rightly said. Justice must not be lopsided, and both sides that unleashed mindless terror and committed brutal crimes in the name of counterterror, plunging this country into a bloodbath, must be made to face the full force of the law.