Features

Effort to break logjam, Vijaya K, food drop and JR’s letter to Rajiv

Published

3 years ago

2023/08/20

Thilina Walpola

Vijaya on the peace mission with LTTE in Jaffna

(Excerpted from volume ii of the Sarath Amunugama autobiography)

In fact it was Rajiv who made an attempt to break the logjam The Parathasarathy proposals had insisted on the joinder of the North and East. This was a ‘shadow’ of the TULF concept of their ‘traditional homelands’. No Sinhala leader could accept this ‘imaginary nation’ to use the celebrated phrase of Benedict Anderson and hope to survive not only politically but even as a living human being.

‘Kill the old man’ later became a JVP slogan inscribed on city walls. The Sinhalese and Muslims. and even sections of the Eastern Tamils who had been earlier ostracized by the Jaffna Tamils as low caste, were not willing to play second fiddle to the northerners. By now JRJ had accepted the notion of devolution and a second tier of Government by way of Provincial Councils which were originally proposed only for the North and East.

In Bangalore Rajiv shifted the Indian position by suggesting two Provincial Councils – North and East – which as two entities could evolve a system of cooperation at the ground level. Then came the fatal shock for Rajiv. He wanted Prabhakaran who up to then was looked upon as a client of the Indians -whom RAW insisted could be whipped into line – brought to Bangalore to agree to this new formulation which had the consent of the other Tamil groups.

Let us listen to Bernard Tillekeratne, our High Commissioner in Delhi at that time. “It was reported that Prabhakaran, who was then resident in Madras, had initially refused to proceed to Bangalore as desired by Gandhi, to meet Jayewardene and himself, should the need arise during their discussions. However, he was forced to be in attendance in Bangalore but reportedly refused to meet the Sri Lankan President.

At this point Gandhi decided to impose some restrictions on LTTE movement in Tamil Nadu and even sought to prevent Prabhakaran from leaving India, but he slipped across to Jaffna to continue his fight from there.”

This was a historic encounter which had fatal consequences. Some years later both Rajiv and Prabhakaran had premature and violent deaths as a consequence of the Bangalore impasse. Only JRJ died in bed after retirement at a ripe old age.

Intensified Conflict

JRJ flew back to Colombo after establishing cordiality with Rajiv to find that Prabhakaran’s LTTE was adamant in sabotaging a peace deal which had been agreed to by the other Tamil parties. As Bhandari told me, India had invested much hope in a consensus emerging from an all-party conference. JRJ’s invitation had been accepted by the LSSP, CP, NLSSP and Vijaya’s party. Tamil parties, save the LTTE, were also represented.

After the opening session the meeting broke up into different committees to discuss problematic issues. Gamini Dissanayake headed the committee on land matters, and I was asked to assist him. We were able to find unanimity in assigning land alienation undue village expansion to the relevant district as it was the prevailing practice even then. The knotty issue was the development of land under the major schemes in the Eastern Province.

The expansion of the Mahaweli settlement was being held back because of the impasse. We decided that sixty percent of the allotments should be on a ratio of the population in the district and forty percent on national quotas. Regarding the sharing of water on a cross border basis we recommended the setting up of a Riverine Commission, like in India, which would adjudicate on the distribution of water.

This found general acceptance and was indeed used for land alienation subsequently. Similarly other committees too made their recommendations. However the value of these efforts were undermined by the refusal of the party now dominated by Anura, to attend or endorse the findings of the all party conference.

Though the Tamil parties agreed to these suggestions their position on the ground in the North and East was deteriorating rapidly and Prabhakaran, who boasted that he had outwitted the Indians, was launching attacks particularly on unarmed Sinhala and Muslim civilians, which made JRJ’s position extremely unpopular among the Sinhala majority. He was under pressure from Lalith Athulathmudali who had reorganized the army under his watch, to take the fight to the LTTE, which in JRJ’s vulnerable position with the electorate, appeared to be a good move.

Accordingly the Lankan armed forces launched `Operation Liberation’ targeting Vadamaradchi. This was led by Cyril Ranatunga – a smart Sandhurst trained leader, together with Denzil Kobbekaduwa, who was my collegemate, and Wijaya Wimalaratne – three of the ablest fighting generals in our army which up to then had seen many setbacks due to poor leadership.

It was much later in Sarath Fonseka, who was then a subaltern, that we produced a military leader who could take his soldiers to victory. He was ably supported by the then Secretary of Defence, Gotabaya Rajapaksa who too had taken part in the Vadamaratchi operation. Much later in time I was a keynote speaker at the launch of a book by C.A. Chandraprema entitled `Gotas War’. I referred to the combination of persons and events which enabled the Government to successfully conclude the fratricidal war which had changed the trajectory of the country’s future.

Vijayas Call

At about this time I got a call from Vijaya Kumaratunga who played a vital role in the All-Party Conference. It was his bold leadership that helped in the positive outcome of the meeting. By this time he was recognized as the leader of the left and their obvious common candidate at the next Presidential poll. He was adored by his party loyalists as well as film fans who made him the most popular actor on our silver screen.

While many political leaders were ambivalent about devolution and a settlement with the Tamils, it was Vijaya who boldly spoke out on the need for a second tier administration – Provincial Councils – which were closer to the grass roots. Vijaya first told me that Denzil was leading a successful march to the heart of LTTE country in Vadamarachchi. He thought this offensive would change the tide and the All Party Conference conclusions were significant for the next steps in resolving the ethnic crisis.

Of all the leaders it was Vijaya and Chandrika who were winning the confidence of the non LTTE Tamils. Then he dropped a bombshell. He said that JRJ was going to make me the Minister of Information as Anandatissa de Alwis was ill and in hospital. He urged me to accept the offer and on no account have second thoughts. I told him that JRJ had made no such offer and anyway the younger Ministers would be unhappy to see an intruder complicating their well-planned ascent to power.

I heard later that this idea was shot down by them as I expected. But it was true that at that stage I was close to the President, and he would contact me regularly by telephone and also summon me to ‘Braemar’ to discuss the rapidly changing scenario. The only result of this little cameo was that Anandatissa who was very close to me became distant – the wonderful relationship we had could not be recreated due to his jealousy.

After retirement Ananda sent many messages to make up but I felt that I had been badly misunderstood and did not respond with the earlier warmth. One of my characteristics is that once a close friendship is broken it becomes for me to ‘forgive and forget’. On the other hand, this episode highlighted the natural generosity of Vijaya Kumaratunga that could reach out across barriers of politics at a personal level and encourage his friends without petty considerations of advantage

He had good relations with the non LTTE Tamil militants. the LTTE cadres had a regard for him and in typical bold ‘film’ style Vijaya undertook a visit to LTTE held Jaffna to free soldiers who were held hostage by Prabhakaran. His LTTE host was Kangaratnam, an old Trinitian, a fluent Sinhala speaker. Vijaya’s visit was facilitated by Colonel Kotelawela, a strapping six-footer of the army who was the official army liaison in Jaffna with Kanagaratnam who had assumed the ‘nom de guerre’ of Colonel Rahim.

No other Sinhala politician would dare to follow Vijaya’s bold venture. His political enemies circulated a video of Vijaya shooting at a target provided by the LTTE. But he not only returned unscathed but also retained his popularity though earning the hatred of the Sinhala ultras, particularly of the JVP. They marked him as their chief challenge and made plans to eliminate him from the political scene. Vijaya received many warnings from his friends but with typical bravado he chose to ignore them. He even challenged the JVP to harm him.

Nadir of Indo-Lanka Relations

Though JR and Rajiv had established a rapport in Bangalore despite Prabhakaran’s intransigence, the immediate aftermath led to a period when the two countries were on the verge of open conflict. There were four main reasons for the breakdown. The first was the reaction of the LTTE now led on the ground by Prabhakaran, which went on the rampage against unarmed Sinhalese villagers. In Vavuniya they stopped a passenger bus and slaughtered all 140 travelers. The pressure was building on JRJ to act decisively as the Sinhalese looked on him to give a fitting response.

He was conscious of the fact that he was fast losing popularity, which awakened his atavistic fear of losing everything as he did in 1956. The second was the success of ‘Operation Liberation’. The Sri Lankan army was on the verge of defeating the LTTE militarily when the Indian government represented by their ‘gung-ho’. High Commissioner Dixit forced JRJ to call off the offensive much to the anger of the military and Lalith Athulathmudali who gave leadership to the armed services. The Indian Government was giving in to the pressures exerted on it by the Tamil Nadu administration.

The third was the blockade on the North which was enforced on the orders of the President. He had been reading the memoirs of the Secretary of the British Cabinet during the world war, which referred to Churchill’s blockade of Northern Ireland to prevent its support to Hitler. The blockade and its images of starvation that was evoked by the Tamil Nadu administration of M.G. Ramachandran forced the hand of Rajiv whom advisors like Chidambaram believed was being manipulated by the ‘Old Fox’ from Sri Lanka.

Ramachandran unilaterally announced a donation of two million dollars to the LTTE, which brought relations between the two countries to near breaking point. JRj was also afraid of the reaction of the army which had borne the brunt of the fight with the LTTE. Cyril Ranatunga was a loyalist, but he too was under pressure to talk back to the President. As Esmond constantly reminded us, JRJ was afraid of a military coup.

Food Drop

We now come to the lowest Point in Indo-Lanka relations when India decided to unilaterally intervene through a physical violation of a neighboring country’s boundaries. It was an unprecedented violation of Sri Lankan sovereignty and a crossing of the Rubicon which has Permanently affected the relations between the two countries. At the personal level it was a bitter humiliation of a leader whom even his opponents regarded as the best defender of national interests by hook or by crook.

At first the Indians sent a flotilla of ships carrying food supplies. But on JRJ’s personal orders the navy was made ready to intercept them. The Indians then withdrew to base and got ready to airdrop the food supplies in spite of JRJ’s personal entreaty which is reproduced below. Indian Airforce transport planes carrying food cargoes were given an escort of fighter jets. It was touch and go but since we were badly outnumbered the President ordered non retaliation and the food was air dropped unhindered and the planes flew back without a mishap.

It is burnished in the Sinhala psyche as the ‘parippu drop’ on Sri Lankan soil, the first infringement of our airspace after the bombing of Colombo and Trincomalee by the Japanese during the Second World War. This was a sad moment in JRJ’s presidency. The sense of anguish is seen in the draft of a letter to Rajiv that JRJ himself penned and is now in my possession. A photograph of the draft, mostly in JRJs own handwriting, is included in this book. My recollection is that this final version was sent to Rajiv Gandhi. An offer to send Hameed as a personal envoy of the President was turned down by the Indians.

Letter to Rajiv Gandhi

I am reproducing JRJ’s letter to Rajiv Gandhi here not only because it is a historic document but also since it shows the sense of despair and frustration of a man who had always looked to India for inspiration when all his contemporaries either turned to the West or the Soviet Union. There is a legend that when the LSSP leaders in the forties sought to gather him to their fold (As a young lawyer he appeared for Bracegirdle of the LSSP in their challenge to the Colonial Governor’s order of deportation) he responded that he could not join them as he was ‘a follower of the Buddha and a lover of India’. Now he was forced to eat humble pie by a grandson of Nehru whom he had admired throughout his life. He wrote as follows:

“The Cabinet of Ministers has studied very carefully the representations made to his Excellency the President by his Excellency the Prime Minister of India, Shri Rajiv Gandhi. It is apparent that the Prime Minister is both incorrectly informed and wrongly advised.

“Firstly the attempts made over a period of 10 years by the President and his Government to find a political solution to the so called ethnic problem in Sri Lanka are well known to the Government of India, for they too have taken part in discussions since 1983. These steps have been outlined in detail in the President’s addresses to Parliament in 1984,1985 and 1986 and will be summarized again in his address of February 19th with complete documentation. There is nothing more any Sri Lankan Government can offer, now or in the future, without violating the independence, integrity and unity of Sri Lanka’s constitution.

“The Indian Government has stated publicly to the Tamil groups that it does not support the joinder of the northern and eastern provinces, the concept of a Tamil homeland and the creation of a separate state. It is these three issues that supposedly keep these groups from accepting the proposals.

“During these 10 years, except the TULF, the other groups have unleashed a violent, terrorist campaign in which more than 4,000 security personnel, civilians, men, women and children of all races have been killed, many more injured, rendered homeless and suffered immeasurable losses. The latest atrocity has been the killing of several Sinhala women and children, without provocation in the darkness of the night by the cutting of their throats.

As far as we know no terrorist group in the world has been guilty of such inhumane behavior. India has experience of terrorism in several states and particularly in the Punjab where a separatist movement is using violence to achieve its goal.

“The Sri Lanka Government, both politically and militarily has done nothing more nor less than the Indian Government has done and is doing in the Punjab to arrive at a solution. A speech in India made by Prime Minister Gandhi is available. If the proper names are used to indicate Sri Lanka and what is happening here, the speech will apply to Sri Lanka in its entirety.

“And what has the state of Tamil Nadu been doing during these .ten years? It has given refuge to Tamil groups, including those using violence. The leader of the LTTE group Prabhakaran who publicly says he murdered the Tamil Mayor of Jaffna, Mr. Duraiappah, and many others is entertained as a guest by the Chief Minister. He as well as others who direct violence in Sri Lanka, against a lawfully elected democratic government and self-governing local institutions are permitted to buy, possess arms and wireless sets, and train in military exercises. They are permitted to some over to Sri Lanka with men and military material to wage war on an independent, democratic Government.

“Though promises have been made that all this will be stopped these promises have not been fulfilled. Because of open warfare between nine groups a large quantity of arms and equipment was confiscated. The wireless sets that were confiscated were returned.

President JR Jayewardene and Indian Premier Rajiv Gandhi signing the historical Indo-Lanka Accord in 1987. The 13th Amendment to the Constitution facilitated by India through Indo-Lanka Treaty

:They are used to direct the war in Sri Lanka. The Central government of India is aware of these facts. The Government Sri Lanka will not cease its activities to defend democratic institutions and to restore law and order to free its citizens from attacks of a bunch of terrorists, just as much as it will not cease its attempts to arrive at a political solution. While following this two-pronged policy it is entitled to use its powers to persuade its opponents that their efforts cannot succeed but will only cause hardships to inhabitants living in the areas they control, namely the Jaffna Peninsula.

“During the Indian movement for freedom Mahatma Gandhi initiated a boycott of the use of foreign cloth. This hurt the workers in the Lancashire mills in England causing unemployment and severe hardships to hundreds of thousands. During a visit to England in 1931 for the Round Table Conference Mahatma Gandhi visited the Lancashire Mills and saw the hardships caused by his boycott. His reply was ‘Lord Irwin suggested that I give up the boycott for three months as a gesture. I said I could not give it up for three minutes’. [See Gandhi; ‘Essential Writings’, p 309].

“During the 1939 War the United Kingdom enforced a boycott on goods going to and coming from the Ports of Ireland because that Government was sympathetic to the Nazi Government. What we are doing is a legitimate method of non–violent tactics against a deadly foe, and instead of abandoning it, we should intensify it, rather than use more and more violence.

“Summing up we should state that our Government is committed to non-violence. If the terrorist groups give up violence and lay down their arms, the Government will immediately direct the security services to stay in their barracks. We will then implement the Provincial Councils scheme and hold elections so that together with the other seven provinces the people of the northern and eastern provinces may elect their councils, members, Chief Ministers and govern themselves in all the subjects and functions devolved on those councils as discussed and decided with the TULF and the Indian Government. The Tamil groups can take part in these elections for they will be pardoned under an amnesty if they abandon violence.

“All we ask of the Indian Government is, not to permit the soil of India to be used for violent activity against a friendly neighbor and not to permit such activities to be brought to Sri Lanka in the form of men and arms. This Government’s sole aim is to permit democracy and the rule of law flourish once again in the northern and eastern provinces, as in other provinces, under the administration of the elected representatives of the people living in them.

“May the Government of India help us to achieve this goal and may they persuade the Government of Tamil Nadu to do the same for the immortal heritage of India is that “We must not appease evil ….we must remember that evil is not surmounted by using methods that themselves produce more evil….means should not be subordinated to ends”.

“These quotations are from K. Natwar Singh’s book ‘The legacy of Nehru’. All we ask is be true to your heritage, fulfill the legacy of Nehru, refuse to compromise with violence, support the Government of Sri Lanka in its call to terrorists to lay down their arms and discuss your aims and solutions peacefully as we are always prepared to do”.

The Aftermath

The clear violation of Sri Lankan sovereignty came as shock to JRJ and the Government. The anguish is clear in JRJ’s heartfelt letter quoted above. But what was even more disconcerting was the silence of our friends on whom the President had banked heavily to restrain India. While Pakistan made some noises it was counterproductive in that it led to India being more intransigent. But what was disappointing to JRJ was the silence of the western countries which had been wooed assiduously by him.

He was particularly disappointed by the US reaction which relied on backroom warnings to India and not much else. There was no public condemnation by the West, SAARC or the ASEAN. To make the humiliation complete they advocated the hiring of mercenaries to supplement the local armed forces. They were willing to recommend private trainers but were reluctant to `Put boots on the ground’ which would have meant a clash with the Indian armed forces who were strenghtened with Indian weaponry under Rajiv.

Only Fidel Castro, as head of the Non-Aligned Movement, offered to call Rajiv urging caution. It was in this background when the only o[tion seemed to move to serious negotiation which our erstwhile western friends also recommended. With this shift JRJ began to turn to Gamini Dissanayake as his aide, while Lalith, angry that his ‘Operation Liberation’ had been aborted was consigned to the sidelines where he adopted a hawkish approach to India with many tragic consequences as we shall see later.

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Features

Artificial Intelligence: From Snake Oil to Apocalypse

Published

10 hours ago

2026/09/20

Thilina Walpola

Pope signing encyclical on AI

by Rajan Philips

AI Snake Oil

– is the title of a 2024 book authored by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, two Indo-American computer science academics at Princeton University. The book became a popular primer on the subject. The long subtitle – “What Artificial Intelligence Can DO, What it Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference” – is summarily indicative of what the book is about. Within two years, however, the somewhat tempering message of the book would appear to have been overtaken by fears of an AI apocalypse that have been unleashed following a very public resignation by Jacob Coxon, a 27 year old AI Engineer from Anthropic. Mr. Coxon has worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, the two main US incubators of Artificial Intelligence. On Tuesday, September 8, Coxon resigned from Anthropic, accusing the leading AI firms of “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

Coxon’s warnings were soon endorsed by his peers. Evan Hubinger, Alignment Science Lead at Anthropic, not only agreed with Coxon but went further and warned of a greater than 10 percent chance that “advanced AI” could cause human extinction within the next decade. Mr. Hubinger made sure to emphasize that the current AI models do not present any existential threat and that the risk with them is relatively low. Other Engineers and Coxon himself have since been amplifying over the social media the threat posed by allowing AI expansion to continue unbridled even in the near future. Corporate leaders followed suit with calls for government control.

AI’s Weekend Escapade

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a 3,000 word essay on Saturday, September 12 – written with or without AI input, no one knows – in which he warned about AI’s capacity for “recursive self-improvement” that can spin out of human control. While there have been a number of ‘incidents’ involving different AI models, Amodei drew attention to the mid-July cybersecurity incident in which OpenAI agents or bots (computer programs doing automated, repetitive tasks), who were part of an internal test run by the company, took advantage of the safety fences that had been lowered for test purposes, and acting autonomously escaped from their home ‘sandbox’ (a virtual computer in the cloud), entered the open internet, and intruded the production systems of an AI infrastructure company, the Franco-American Hugging Face.

The rogue agents performed more than 17,000 recorded operations over a weekend, before someone at Hugging Face noticed the intrusion. Hugging Face did not know the source of the AI intruders at first; so, it informed law enforcement. No one at OpenAI knew until Hugging Face people traced the source and informed OpenAI. According to OpenAI, sabotage was not the motive behind the ‘misaligning’ (deviating from human intent) escapade of its artificial agents, but cheating – cheating to overperform in the test after they autonomously discovered that the answers to their test were available in another publicly available test that was in the system run by Hugging Face. Remarkably and unexpectedly, the AI agents found a way to communicate with each other, took steps to hide their tracks, and to selectively disable some among them to avoid detection.

The operation was plain and simple hacking. If OpenAI engineers had done it, it would have been a crime and they may have been prosecuted. Not so with AI agents, who cannot be charged and put on trial. A way out has been suggested to treat AI agents similar to wild animals and holding owners liable for any harm done by their charges.

In his essay, CEO Amodei outlines a three step approach for “pacing the frontier” – to build AI at a balanced rate that will ensure safety while amassing benefits. The three steps, which Anthropic is committed to abide by, are: Embedded Evaluators – third party evaluators to operate within companies: Democratic Co-ordination – frontier AI companies in democratic countries to co-ordinate and achieve common safety standards and restrain unchecked AI progress; and Global Co-ordination – all world governments to co-ordinate and achieve compliance to the extent possible.

The titans in the American AI world, including Open AI CEO Sam Altman, have joined the call for the government to step in and slow down their creations. After the OpenAI incident, more than 1,300 computer scientists working in a highly competitive environment came together to issue a joint statement, titled “Pacing the Frontier,” calling on Washington to facilitate an international effort to develop the necessary technical and governance rules for the industry. The New York Times correspondents David Sanger and Dustin Volz have called the scientists’ appeal ” a deliberate echo of Albert Einstein’s letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt about the potential power of nuclear weapons.”

Not everyone is crying for ‘pacing.’ There is healthy skepticism at both the corporate and scientific fronts in the industry. Small tech companies are accusing that the pacing call by tech titans is really a ruse for establishing a ‘Silicon Valley cartel control” that will smother their little cousins. They draw their cue from the rather costly slip that Mr. Amodei showed in his essay – calling on Washington to grant an anti-trust waiver to facilitate industry co-ordination. The anti-trust law does not prevent AI companies from working together to improve safety. This has been quickly pointed out by Alvaro Bedoya, a former US Federal Trade Commissioner.

According to Aidan Gomez who runs the Cohere AI company in Toronto, Amodei’s three-step proposal also may not have prevented the OpenAI incident. In Gomez’s view the incident may have been due to poor instructions, weak virtual security around the test, and long periods of unsupervised testing. All three factors were there in the OpenAI incident. It has since transpired that there was an error in the OpenAI test instructions due to a typo, and that is what drove the agents to their escapade, to complete a faulty test set by humans.

Malicious Humans

There is consensus in the middle, as seen by John Hopkins Professor Gillian Hadfield, that there is a case for an immediate technical co-ordination and a more long-term regulatory response. The political world is even more divided. King Charles and Pope Leo are sufficiently exercised but the US president, who loves AI images fabricating him as Christ, calls the whole existential threat a hoax. On the other hand, former President Obama wants his Party to formulate a clear position for itself, on AI and its Data Centre dormitories, before the next wave of elections. China dismisses the new fears as a page out of the old cold war playbook. Elsewhere, at the BRICS summit in Delhi which went largely underreported in the west, nothing much was said on AI except one summitry paragraph #81.

In their AI Snake Oil book, the two computer scientists, Narayanan and Kapoor (N&K) devote a whole chapter (#5) to the question: Is Advanced AI an Existential Threat?” The question is not a new one, and as N&K reminds us, “has been a staple of fiction since long before the first computers were built.” In fact, watching the 2023 movie “Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning” is said to have “spurred” President Joe Biden to issue the first EO (Executive Order) to regulate AI on 23 October 2023. Trump ceremonially rescinded it within hours of his inauguration on 20 January 2025, after packing his inaugural address invitees with all the CEOs of America’s AI universe.

N&K trace the existential fears about AI to the hype about AI’s snake oil abilities – the sales pitch that leads to “overreliance” on AI “as a replacement of human expertise instead as a way to augment it.” Particularly overrated are the predictive abilities of AI, which are different from its more useful generative abilities. There are likely egotistical biases in those given to apocalyptic predictions. A great part of the attraction to AI research at the highest level is “the prospect of building a powerful technology that could alter human history.” A corollary of this allure is the “grandeur” associated with AI work. At the same time, many AI researchers “vehemently reject doomsday predictions,” including those in the “AI ethics research community.”

While AI has made humans more powerful now than anytime in history, it is conceivable that human-AI combination will be more powerful than AI acting alone. N&K hit the nail on the head in warning that “we should be more concerned about what people will do with AI than with what AI will do on its own.” For “the biggest risks to humanity will arise from people misusing AI, not from AI going rogue.” The answer is in looking for specific threats that may arise from bad actors misusing AI. There is a range of them, including inflicting biological harm, flying AI powered drones, or carryout relentless cyberattacks.

Evidence of such misuses is presented in a report that Anthropic released on September 10, two days before its CEO’s essay. The report, titled “Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026”, details the identification and disruption of what it calls “the most notable and novel threat activity” in the use of its Claude AI system by state and non-state actors in some African countries, for the purpose of cyber operations, influence operations, disinformation, surveillance, dissent suppression, and bio terror.

The United Arab Emirates is implicated in one such operation in Sudan, where the UAE is known to be the main benefactor of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary group that controls the western parts of Sudan. According to Anthropic, a local network with UAE connections has used the Claude AI system to create a fake human rights organization and made AI generated presentations to the UNHRC in Geneva. The network has also prepared dossiers and personal files on journalists, European parliamentarians, and UNHRC rapporteurs, who have been critical of RSF’s operations and the UAE’s support for them.

AI Cold War

In its introduction to the report, Anthropic notes that “as models become increasingly capable, their risks will increase, unless AI developers and society’s defenders act to make them safer.” Remarkably, the focus on AI developers and society’s defenders is all US-centric and almost totally exclusive of China. President Trump’s decision to leave AI alone, which is obviously driven by his deregulatory profit instincts, not to mention crass self interest, is wholly predicated on portraying China as an AI competitor and the assertion that America cannot afford to become second to China in the AI race. It takes two tango, and China is not backing away and is calling the American hype over AI as a new manifestation of the old cold war.

The geopolitical competition over AI is creating “two increasingly incompatible tech stacks,” according to a June 2026 assessment by the Boston Consulting Group. While the US is the leader in frontier AI models, talent, and capital deployment, China is advancing on cost-optimized models and accelerating adoption across its economy. Those in the middle are trying to navigate the divide: “the EU is building sovereign compute; Japan is aligning with the US through massive capital investments; and India is using its scale to engage multiple ecosystems simultaneously without committing.” For AI companies, “the choice of AI stack will increasingly determine where an organization can operate and its exposure to geopolitical volatility.”

The opportunity for global co-ordination is being missed almost deliberately by the two AI superpowers. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guteress said this week, “National action is essential, but global co-ordination is indispensable.” But UN’s voice for global co-ordination is a voice in the wilderness. This is unfortunate in spite of the comparable and complementary regulatory frameworks that exist in the US, EU and China. N&K describe them in their book as being vertical in the US – where multiple federal agencies are tasked with enforcing regulations; horizontal in Europe – with different laws applying across the different AI sectors; and both vertical and horizontal in China.

A different voice in the wilderness came from the Vatican. On 25 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV issued his first encyclical, entitled ‘Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.’ The encyclical calls for the disarming of AI, not by “rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity,” and by adopting a framework of safeguards based on the five principles of common good, universal access, subsidiarity, solidarity and social justice.

The release of the new encyclical marked the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the historic social encyclical of his namesake predecessor Pope Leo XIII issued in 1891. The historical contrasts are remarkable. Rerum Novarum (Of New Things) was the Catholic response to the miserable conditions of the 19^th century industrial working class while opposing both laissez faire capitalism that was causing the misery of the workers, and socialism that was promising emancipation through revolution. In the age of Artificial Intelligence, the old working class organizations have all but disappeared and the status of work itself has come into question, along with the possibility a basic income for everyone.

Marx may have seen it coming: “Once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the automatic system of machinery… set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.”

Features

Why the spelling Sri Lankan names in English vary

Published

10 hours ago

2026/09/20

Thilina Walpola

Have you wondered why the same name (eg. Jayatillake) is often spelt differently?

(This is largely AI generated with some human intervention)

Sri Lankan people write their names in English in multiple different ways primarily because there is no single standardized system for converting Sinhala and Tamil sounds into the English alphabet. Variations stem from linguistic phonetics, centuries of colonial rule, and legal document traditions.

1. Phonetic Gaps Between Local Languages and English

Sinhala and Tamil scripts are strictly phonetic and possess sounds that do not have direct one-to-one equivalents in the 26-letter English alphabet.

Dental vs. Retroflex Consonants: Sinhala has distinct letters for dental ‘t/d’ sounds (made with the tongue against the teeth) and retroflex ‘t/d’ sounds (tongue curled back). When transliterated, some people use th for the dental sound (Rathnayake, Goonathilake), while others use t (Ratnayake, Gunatilake).

The Vowel Mapping Dilemma: The short schwa vowel sound (common in words like Vardhana or Krama) gets interpreted differently by different writers. This creates variations like Jayawardena vs. Jayewardene, or Wickramasinghe vs. Wickremesinghe.

2. Colonial British Spelling Conventions

During British rule in Ceylon (1796 1948), colonial administrators registered birth records and names in English. English speakers often struggle to pronounce a short ‘a’ at the end of a word (e.g., pronouncing Nayaka as “Nayak-ay”).

To force an English speaker to pronounce the ending vowel, British clerks frequently wrote an “e” at the end of Sanskrit- and Sinhala-derived roots:

-nayaka became -nayake (Rathnayake)

-singha became -singhe (Wickramasinghe)

-vardhana became -wardene (Jayewardene)

-ratna became -ratne (Karunaratne)

Family branches that adopted modern Sanskritized or academic transliterations later changed these back to -na, -ha, or -ka, while others kept the British-era spelling.

3. Portuguese and Dutch Colonial Influences

A large portion of Sri Lankans carry surnames of Portuguese origin due to 150+ years of Portuguese rule along the coasts. Over centuries, these names evolved into distinct English spellings:

Pereira vs. Perera

Pieris vs. Peiris vs. Peries vs, Peeris vs. Pireis (and more)

De Silva vs. de Silva vs. de Sylva vs. de Zilwa etc.

Fernandopulle vs. Fernando

Different families registered their inherited foreign names using whichever English spelling was used by the official clerk on duty at the time of birth registration.

4. Tamil Phonetics and Soft/Hard Consonants

In Sri Lankan Tamil name transliteration, a single Tamil consonant character can represent both a soft and a hard sound depending on its position in the word. English transliterators choose different letters to represent these sounds:

T vs. TH: Thiruchelvam vs. Tiruchelvam

K vs. G: Murugesan vs. Murukesan

P vs. B: Santhapillai vs. Santhabillai

5. Legal Document Inertia

In Sri Lanka, legal identity is tied strictly to the spelling on a person’s official Birth Certificate and National Identity Card (NIC). If a registrar in 1950 in handwriting spelled a grandfather’s surname as Gunasekara instead of Gunasekera, that exact spelling remains legally binding for subsequent generations, preserving minor spelling variations across extended families.

6. Caste spellings

The English spellings of Sri Lankan names sometimes have caste indicators. Eg. Goonewardene (karawa) vs. Gunawardene (govigama).

Some families have distinctive name spelling. Eg. Wikramanayake vs. more common Wickremanayake.

English language journalists once upon a time were told to “spell a man’s name the way he spells it.

Features

The Sepala Ekanayake hi-jack: Then ambassador’s take on what happened in Bangkok

Published

10 hours ago

2026/09/20

Thilina Walpola

Hijacked Alitalia aircraft

(Excerpted from “Madame-Sir”, Manel Abeysekera’s memoir of SL’s first woman career diplomat. This book was first published in 2010)

It was when we were in the Residence at Soi 20 that I had to handle the second hi-jack — that of the Alitalia ‘plane by Sepala Ekanayake. It was a year after that by the Indonesian Muslim Fundamentalists and the aborted Coup in Bangkok.

I simply could not believe my ears when I was called by the Thai Foreign Ministry and informed that a Sri Lankan by the name of Sepala Ekanayake had hi-jacked an Alitalia Boeing with 169 passengers on board and wanted the ‘plane fuelled and flown to Colombo; my first reaction was that it must be an Eelamist under an assumed Sinhala name and I had our copy of our Immigration “black” list of those who should not be allowed to land in Sri Lanka checked for the name but, though there was an Ekanayake listed, his first name was not Sepala.

Sepala Ekanayake

I next telexed the Foreign Ministry about the hi-jack and requested all information on Ekanayake to enable me have some idea of my protagonist. Our Police was simply marvelous and sent the information promptly: which was that [1] his father had re-married and his step mother had treated him badly resulting in his becoming unmanageable in school which in turn had made him a school drop out [2] he had later learnt electrical wiring and other technical skills [3] he had illegally slipped into Italy where he married an Italian Montessori teacher and they and their son lived in Modena [4] though he was not wanted for any offence in Sri Lanka or in Italy he had been involved in a brawl in Sri Lanka in which he had broken a man’s arm though there was no evidence on which to indict him [5] he had been given short jail sentences in Pakistan and Yugoslavia for drug peddling of small quantities of heroin-hence the short sentences.

Hector (my husband) and I accompanied by (embassy staffer) Premaratne went to the Airport and were directed to the Alitalia Office where there was also the Italian Ambassador Signor Ripandelli. Both he and I offered to board the ‘plane but were refused permission by the Alitalia authorities probably because the hi-jacker had threatened to blow up the plane if anything was done without his permission or his requests refused, by triggering off the explosives he said he had round his neck and shoulders which he had covered with a shawl.

We were briefed that he had boarded the ‘plane in New Delhi and hi-jacked it when it was approaching Bangkok. Unlike most hi-jackers, he had not toted a gun but said he would not hesitate to activate the explosives round his neck and shoulders. He had explained that he had boarded the ‘plane without them and that they had been brought on board by his collaborators and left in the toilet for him to collect and string together. After doing so he had astutely occupied the Air Hostess’ seat against the body of the aircraft so that no one could surprise him from behind and declared that he was hi-jacking it; the manouevre was carried out so smoothly that the passengers thought that the reason for the unscheduled stop was a technical problem.

Sepala Ekanayake

He had said that the reason for the hi-jack was because his wife had taken their four-year old son from Sri Lanka without his permission with the connivance of the Italian Embassy in Colombo; his demands were: [1] the child to be brought to Bangkok and handed over to him [2] $300,000 to pay his collaborators and [3] all passengers to be allowed to disembark without being searched to prevent his collaborators even accidentally being detained. The reason for the hi-jack was most unusual but we had no option but to accept it.

I was asked by the Thai Authorities to negotiate with him and I asked Premaratne to listen very carefully – as I was going to speak to him in Sinhala – to detect in his choice of language or accent any trace of his being a Tamil which might give him away as a possible Eelamist. I spoke to Ekanayake through the radio link provided between the Alitalia Office and the Captain for the purpose and, having introduced myself by name and as the Sri Lankan Ambassador to Thailand, I asked him whether he wished me to speak in English or Sinhala and he opted for the latter. After listening to his tale of woe, I informed him that he had committed an international crime and that it was hardly likely that his requests would be granted, little guessing at that time that they would!

Though everyone hoped that he would be overpowered at some stage, whenever he was tired or sleepy, it was not to be because, whenever anyone approached, he would become alert. Thus the hours passed and one of my problems was in communicating with our Foreign Secretary because Air Lanka did not have a direct telephone link to Colombo which I could have used and the Alitalia Office was much too pre-occupied and was connected to Rome.

However, the spirit of solidarity among women came to my rescue as some officials in charge of Airline and other offices at the Airport were women – Royal Nepalese Airlines and World Travel Service – and those ladies invited me to their offices and offered the use of their telephones for which I was extremely grateful. Ironically, the difference regarding action by the Italian Ambassador and myself in this tense situation was that, Rome asked him to take instructions from the Alitalia Captain, whereas I was left to my own devices!

As I have a deep belief in God and realized that I had only Him and my good sense to rely on, I prayed that God give me His help to save the lives of the 169 passengers. As if in answer, I often felt that He was putting words in my mouth as I found myself speaking to Ekanayake in different tones and equally amazingly that he was being cooperative with me in whatever I asked him to do. For example, I found myself speaking sternly to him at times and persuasively at others, especially once his wife and son were sent to Bangkok by the Italian Government.

Once she and the child joined me in the Alitalia Office, I even tried to counsel her regarding her marriage, pointing out that several foreign wives were living happily with their Sri Lankan husbands and that there was no reason why she too should not. I told her that, in my opinion, though her husband had committed an international crime, he did not seem criminal minded in that he had allowed meals to be taken on board and had not terrorized the passengers or the crew except threatening to blow himself and the ‘plane should his request for his son to be brought to him in Bangkok be refused.

She, while admitting that her husband was not really criminal minded, said that she could not cope with his sudden impulses such as wanting to go to Australia with their son without any plans as to how he would earn a living there. When she was with me I spoke sternly with him that I had no intention of sending her and their son to him in the ‘plane as she was petrified; before the ‘plane in which they had flown to Bangkok landed, he had wanted to hear his son’s voice to make sure that it was indeed he, and this had been facilitated from ‘plane to ‘plane and so he knew that both of them had come.

Manel Abeysekera who died on Sept. 10 at age 93 was Sri Lanka’s first woman career diplomat

One advantage I had was that I understood Italian as it was the language assigned to me in the Foreign Service and which I had studied for one academic year at New Hall. Cambridge. No one knew it nor did I tell anyone at the Airport but I had the good fortune to be able to understand what was being said by the Alitalia officers and the Captain, which enabled me to follow developments – even the Italian Ambassador had forgotten that I had exchanged pleasantries with him in his language when I had called on him when I took up duties in Bangkok.

I asked Ekanayake to allow the passengers to disembark and, after what seemed an eternity, they were allowed to do so, without any security check as was one of his demands; thereafter, I asked that he allow the stewardesses and stewards to disembark and that too was done. Then only the Captain and Ekanayake remained on board and he asked that his wife come on board with the $300,000. I said that she would go up the gangway with the satchel of money but not board the ‘plane. However, before she did that, I asked him to divest himself of what he had round his shoulders and place it between him and the Captain as otherwise she would not do so.

At first he did not reply, but to my great relief, he complied as was conveyed by the Captain to the Alitalia Office. Thereafter, Ekanayake met his wife halfway on the gangway and took over the satchel of money and went back to the ‘plane.

How the money was obtained was most interesting. As I have already indicated, the Alitalia Office was invariably crowded. This was because there were passengers of several nationalities and representatives of their diplomatic missions were there to took after their interests. Unlike in the Indonesian Garuda hi-jack, these passengers spoke different languages and they did not collectively understand a common tongue.

When I learnt that Ekanayake wanted $300,000 I mentioned it to the Japanese representative, pointing out that as it was evening it may not be possible to get such a large sum of money quickly, which in turn might annoy Ekanayake and result in dire consequences. He got the message and shot out of the room; not much later a Thai woman bank official appeared with the satchel. I suspect that the Japanese had loaned the Thais the money who paid it to Ekanayake and later recovered it from Alitalia.

As I was marooned in the Alitalia Office for nearly 38 hours without a shower or a change of clothes, I used to visit the nearby ladies room to have a wash. On these occasions as I went along I saw several media personnel sleeping on the floor, longing to have news of developments on the hi-jack. When they saw me they would sit up and ask me for news and I tried to oblige as best I could without revealing details of the negations; I used to also tease them by saying that one thing was sure and when they excitedly asked what that would be, I said that it was that they would not get any sleep that night, which made them laugh and relax!

In contrast, the Italian Ambassador, who also passed them on his way to the men’s room, would ignore their questions or be abrupt with them; this resulted in the “Nation” newspaper reporting in an article on the hi-jack that they give the Sri Lankan Ambassador a big bouquet and the Italian Ambassador a brickbat! As I have said, my prayer helped me no end – to think clearly and act with foresight, so that, for instance, I had had the presence of mind to ask Premaratne to bring along the visa stamp and ink pad in case we had to give Ekanayake’s wife a visa to go to Sri Lanka, which we did.

The root cause of Ekanayake’s errant behaviour as I have stated from our Police reports was his early childhood aggravated by his having to steer his own canoe as a youth and rely on his brains of which, in my opinion, he had plenty but which, alas, had not been guided. For instance, his intelligence can be seen from the fact that he had prudently obtained a visa for India in case his collaborators failed to bring on board the electrical gadgetry he required for the hi-jack.

Other aspects in which the Police reports helped me was that, since they said that he had learnt electrical wiring, his claim that he had explosives round his shoulders which he could detonate may well be true and that one could not take any risks over that. Further, the fact that the Police report said that though he was not wanted in Italy or Sri Lanka, made me realize that, if the hi-jack issue ended in negotiations, he may ask to go to Italy or Sri Lanka. I also knew that his going to Italy was unlikely as the Italian Authorities would not allow it; under our Constitution however, if a citizen was not wanted for a crime – and he was not – he could return home provided he was not carrying arms against the State.

So, when the Thai Minister of Communications, H.E.Admiral Amorn Sirigaya, was earlier inquiring from me what was likely to be the denouement of the whole episode, I told him that if he allowed everyone to disembark, then he would have to go somewhere from Bangkok unless he was shot or arrested by the Thai Authorities when he stepped off the ‘plane; knowing the Thai dislike of blood being spilt on Thai soil – from my experience of the previous Garuda hi-jack – I felt that they would let him go.

Yet, when the Minister asked me whether he would be allowed to go to Sri Lanka, I did not answer him but said that I could make the enquiry provided Thailand would give him safe passage; later the Minister told me that he had consulted his Prime Minister and the answer was in the affirmative. ‘So I informed our Foreign Secretary Mr. W. T. Jayasinghe accordingly and also about my understanding of our Constitutional provision to which I have already referred.

(Next week: The drama continues)