Terror and counter terror:upsetting a rubbish mountain

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.