Burying the Hatchet IN Your Heads !

By Sena Thoradeniya

“JVP and the FSP are planning to bury the hatchet.

I hope they won’t bury it in our heads”.

(From “Jeff & Nut”; The Island, 1 June 2022)

In an earlier essay, I have identified two major groups which support the Galle Face Protesters (GFP) i.e. local players and international players. My observations enabled me to divide the local players into 18 sub-groups denoting salient features and characteristics of each sub-group. In this small piece I bring to the attention of local supporters and sympathisers of GFP an impending catastrophe that will send shock waves through their nerves. I do not intend to make a detailed analysis of the approaching events, although I have collected material sufficient enough for a complete dossier. This article contains only “warning shadows”.

Old timers may remember the 1971 insurrection launched by the unemployed, disgruntled, petti-bourgeois rural and urban youth and mass killings and destruction of property, 17 years later during 1988-89. In 2022, 24 years after, have we come to the verge of observing a repetition of history, a “3-G catastrophe”?

Galle Face Protest is no more a “peaceful” and “non-partisan” agitation of “angry young men and women”. Now it is being led by the activists and front organisations of JVP and FSP. A banner at the protest site appeared as “Sarvapakshika Aragalakaruwo” or “all-party protesters”. A JVP MP had admitted in a TV talk show, that it has become a “Sarvapakshika” and “Bahupakshika” (multi-party) struggle and it has a political leadership. JVP General Secretary said ,”our party has been there right from the beginning; we have our youth, cultural, students’ and women’s wings at the Galle Face”.

In 1971, JVP launched a one-day armed insurrection to capture state power, overnight. They were so sure of capturing power, in one night, and did not have any alternative plan if the insurrection failed; all subsequent plans were mapped out by withdrawing men and women in combat fatigue themselves as a means of survival. The 1988-89 attacks took a different shape, beginning with the very crude and unrefined slogan in Sinhala, “JR Maramu” (Let’s kill JR) as opposed to euro-centric, polysemic hashtag, “GoGota Home”. “Unidentified gunmen” started the killing spree . Learning from their past mistakes, we observe that the JVP and its ally FSP are adopting a different strategy and tactics. Initially they have succeeded in becoming the leading force at Galle Face and other protest sites. It should be noted that these two rival factions have forged an alliance and have admitted that youth activists of the two parties already work together at the Galle Face protest site. This is no more than a marriage between a populist group and a group paying lip service to Marxism.

It is noteworthy to mention that their third upheaval is acquiring a protracted nature, but it is an affront to Chairman Mao’s theory of Protracted War which emancipated millions of people in China, if someone calls the present struggle is also a “Protracted War or a ’Peoples’ War”. General Secretary of the FSP in a press interview (June 01) has told that the current public agitation should be sustained in the long run, that it should not be confined to Galle Face alone and spread across the country. Lal Kantha, the JVP bigwig, addressing a meeting at Thambuththegama, said that the date that ends the on-going struggle will soon be announced; his plan is to besiege the Parliament , closing down all roads and demanding that all MPs pass a motion to dissolve the current Parliament; he also asked to change the venue of the protest site from Galle Face to Diyawannawa. No further proof is necessary to show that they have become the force behind the Galle Face protest.

It is very clear that their aim is reenacting a Guatemalan type struggle in Sri Lanka. Anura Kumara Dissanyake’s drama at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute, the other day, presenting a set of files as documentary evidence of corruption of Rajapaksas and some other politicians, already exposed by political commentators of Sunday newspapers many years ago, and their own “Dooshana Virodhee Peramuna” during Yahapalana regime is part of that grand stratagem. Similar anti-graft activities preceded protests that took place outside the Presidential Palace in Guatemala, too.

Vijitha Herath, JVP MP, addressing a meeting at Matara, said that they have kindled the “Rajapaksa hurricane” and they will dethrone the entire Rajapaksa clan as happened in Guatemala. A 22-minute video, shared among GFP, draws parallels between Guatemalan rulers and Rajapaksas in Sri Lanka. The narrator in Sinhala says that the peaceful protest should go beyond -aiming violent overthrow of the corrupt rulers. The narrator with the aid of a visual portrays the present struggle as the tip of the iceberg, its massive mass underneath waiting for the Titanic.

May 09 was the dress rehearsal; this time arson took place with the aid of drones and Molotov cocktails, helmet wearing gangs coming to the fore.. Ordinary farmers who demand fertiliser, housewives who demand cooking gas and food items, motorists who clamour for petrol and diesel do not have these items in their shopping lists. In the coming months problems of the people will aggravate and no party will be able to provide solutions to these problems. the JVP has advised the members of their front organisation “ehera api” (we overseas) not to send remittances to Sri Lanka strangling the economy further. Strikes, Sathyagrahas will become the order of the day, crippling tourism, manufacture of readymade wear garments etc. JVP publicist Sunil Handunnetti had twittered, commenting on the on-going “grow more food campaign”, “wavanna pera peralanna” (oust them before you grow). The Aeroflot incident is only a part of the grand conspiracy aimed at suspension of Russian tourists and tea exports to Russia.

The third upheaval will be different from the first two. It can be a forcible occupation of the Parliament, declaring a new government, abrogating the existing Constitution. Events of 1988-89 will unfold on a massive scale thereafter. Already many organisations such as “Kalu Hamudawa” (Black Army), “Black Cap Movement”, etc., have emerged, ironically all from same sources. An upstart has come back abandoning his studies at Edinburgh; (a local Lenin! Lenin who was exiled in Zurich returned to Petrograd before the Great October Revolution! Eh!) l But we should not be fooled that this will bring socialism to Sri Lanka. It will be a Sri Lankan version of Talibanism. Nothing else.