Features

Black July 1983 – and some inside stories from wartime politics in Colombo and Delhi

Published

3 years ago

2023/07/16

(Excerpted from volume ii of the Sarath Amunugama autobiography)

I had undertaken a mission to South Korea on behalf of the DG of UNESCO to participate in a conference organized by the Korean Broadcasting Service [KBS] in Seoul. The South Koreans who were developing communications technology were keen to join the International Programme for Development Communication (IPDC). Due to political bickering they had been kept out of office in the UN system.

This conference was a well-planned attempt at breaking the log jam and taking their rightful place in the global community. The apotheosis of that attempt was the election of Ban Ki Moon as Secretary General of the UN several years later. After this meeting, as customary, I broke journey in Colombo on my way back to Paris. But it was not to be the pleasant holiday that I had planned for.

Following the killing of an army patrol in the North by the LTTE which had been trained by RAW, riots broke out in Colombo and spread throughout the country for over a week and I was forced to remain to witness those horrific days. I had driven to Bentota on that day and on my way back was an eyewitness to the fact that the violence was the result of a government inspired program.

Many of the looters, at least on the first day, were workers of state institutions like the Electricity Board and the Port Corporation. They were going about in Government vehicles. The first wave of rioting and looting was organized by Minister Cyril Mathew who had deployed the goons of the Corporations under him, with the seeming concurrence of the President.

This attempt to threaten the Colombo Tamils, who were no doubt surreptitiously supporting the ‘boys’, went terribly wrong and the country entered a 30 year-long armed conflict. It spelt the doom of the growth-oriented policies of the JRJ administration which was sucked into a wasteful war of attrition and a path of confrontation with our closest neighbor, India.

It helped the Tamil armed groups to gain more recruits, funding and foreign support. The first attempt to break the shackles of outdated ideologies and enter the path of economic growth – a pattern soon to be adopted worldwide – thereby got sidetracked and the country’s resources were needlessly squandered. It spelt the end of JRJ’s dreams and we began to slide towards greater violence and repression.

This unexpected self-inflicted turn of events caught the world by surprise. The western world which was supporting the new regime for its dismantling of the ineffectual socialist policies of the Bandaranaikes was taken aback when the July events led to a mass exodus of Tamils to their countries and India. These expatriates were well received at that time by the west that now has had second thoughts after mass migrations of refugees from Africa, the Middle East and Latin American countries.

The first wave of Tamil refugees was welcomed in Europe which was entering a phase of manpower shortage. Their displacement helped the migrants to benefit from the liberal policies of Europe at that time which greeted ‘Guest Arbiters’ with open arms. In Berlin for example they were found housing and jobs as the old residents were moving out to West Germany and the city was facing a shortage of manpower.

I remember visiting Berlin for a short visit and being offered an immediate working visa. The Turks and Tamils became welcome communities that helped the west in thwarting the Communist attempt to depopulate Berlin with threats to their security. Berliners who had borne the brunt of the damage at the end of Second World War were leaving the beleaguered city in droves fearing a Soviet invasion.

Indian Intervention

The killing of Sinhala troops in the North which led to the riots of 1983 was by the exploding of a land mine. The rag tag rebels of the North had been provided landmines and modern weapons training by India notwithstanding their formal denials. At first this was done surreptitiously while our intelligence services and Foreign Service remained deaf and dumb.

But while these services dithered, Indian media blew up the story and the two countries were drawn into a protracted conflict. The exposure of LTTE training camps located in Dehra Dun by ‘India Today’ magazine in a special issue set off shock waves in both Colombo and New Delhi. In the events that followed the political and psychological needs of Indira Gandhi played a pivotal role.

By this time she had achieved the popularity she craved for by marching into East Bengal and bifurcating Pakistan. Bangladesh became an independent country in 1972. The influx of refugees into Bengal from East Pakistan due to the repressive policies of Bhutto and his Punjabi Generals had created many difficulties for the Indian economy, already in the doldrums because of Indira’s quasi-socialist policies.

The world watched with horror as Bengali Muslims were slaughtered by their Punjabi countrymen. East Pakistanis had to flee ‘en masse’ over the border into Indian territory. Now another mass of refugees from Sri Lanka were pouring into Tamil Nadu raising the spectre of disrupting the already fragile economy of the south.

Coincidentally Indira and the Congress was keen to establish their presence in the South of India, particularly in Tamil Nadu to balance their fading fortune in the North. Her father Jawaharlal Nehru had been forced to accept the concept of linguistic states in the Indian Union after the South had started rioting against the imposition of Hindi as the national language.

Even the famous Tamil Nadu films industry had started to boycott Hindi films. It was this agitation that drew bigwigs of the Tamil film industry into politics, which has remained a characteristic of TN politics till today. On being rejected in the North, including the family electorate of Raibareli in Uttar Pradesh, Indira turned to the South and entered Parliament from Chikmagalur electorate in Bangalore district.

The influx of refugees from the North and East of Sri Lanka to the southern Indian states was adding to the pressure on Indira to adopt a hawkish stance and use the popular ‘Bangladesh option’. Indira had another reason for disliking the JRJ administration. She was clearly on Sirimavo’s side and unlike her father Nehru who maintained a strict neutrality, agreed to an expanded Indian role in the Sri Lankan conflict, against JRJ whom she perceived as Morarji Desai’s ‘alter ego’.

She hated Desai and the aging ex-PM hated her in return. JRJ was caught in the middle. He tried to placate Indira by using the good offices of a Congress oriented businessman to bring about a reconciliation but to no avail. Indira’s advisors who were mainly leftists criticized JRJ for his links with the US, Pakistan and Israel. Following the July riots, she sent her Foreign Minister Rao to Colombo thereby creating a precedent for later interventions.

JRJ and the UNP establishment then began to realize the gravity of the situation, but the scenario had changed perhaps irrevocably. I flew back to Paris to find the media and academia greatly agitated and turning their attention to the Tamil issue in Sri Lanka which did not earlier hold centre stage. It had become world news.

I remember journalists crowding into the Paris airport to meet returning passengers from Sri Lanka offering good money for photos and video clips of Colombo burning. It showed that this was an event that they had not anticipated, and were now searching for quick answers. From now on Sri Lanka and her ethnic conflict drew worldwide attention much to the detriment of Sri Lanka and JRJ personally.

Back in Paris

I returned to my home in Paris in late July 1983 to find friends and colleagues anxious to know about my experiences during those fatal days. DG M’bow was good enough to consider my sojourn in Colombo as leave with pay thinking that my life was in danger, thanks to the media hype that marked that ‘silly season’ meaning that it was a period when western media was hunting for news when their own news makers were on summer vacation.

The French media was ignorant of the meaning of the events in Colombo and turned to ‘Sri Lanka specialists’ in French academia for information. Our high commissioner in London and ambassador in Paris were ill informed and tongue tied adding to the confusion. Their performance before TV cameras, for which they had no training, was pathetic.

I was met by my friend and academic Eric Meyer who had been asked by ‘Le Monde’ to contribute an explanatory essay. I briefed him and Eric’s article appeared in ‘Le Monde Diplomatique’ in which he acknowledged my role in interpreting the July events. This essay is still a standard reference on the issue and has been reproduced several times, including in a collection of essays on this subject compiled by James Manor. I interacted with many French intellectuals and journalists who were now looking on Sri Lanka as a new ‘story’ which was replacing the old chestnuts of Africa and the Middle East which had been their main focus of interest till now.

While I got back to my duties in IPDC I had to interact with the Indian delegation on a regular basis on official matters after our New Delhi meeting. This meant interaction with Parathasarathy who was the head of the Indian delegation. Indira Gandhi had appointed him as the head of her foreign policy advisory team. From him I could elicit the official Indian view of the recent events in Sri Lanka at a very high level.

Indira relied on GP because he was a Tamil from Chennai [then Madras] and she wanted the South to be comfortable with her decisions on Sri Lanka. Parathasarathy became the virtual spokesman of the TULF whose leaders had fled to Delhi thanks to the July riots. The Indian central government had earlier concerned itself mainly with the fate of the ‘Indian Tamils’. It was now dragged in to creating a trilateral relationship which added the concerns of Tamil Nadu to those of Colombo and New Delhi.

The Indian Foreign Office which handled this issue earlier, with assistance from RAW, was compelled to factor in the concerns of South India in a big way. The Nehruvian assurances regarding noninterference in the internal affairs of neighboring countries was abandoned in the face of ‘real politik’, necessitated by the political and electoral changes in India. Indira Gandhi symbolized that transformation of Indian policy and she introduced a lack of warmth in our mutual relations unlike in the time of Jawaharlal Nehru. Indira’s legacy became embedded in the relationship between our two countries from then on and became a crucial part of the foreign relations problems of Sri Lanka. A warm relationship had suddenly turned very cold.

Tamil Nadu

The first need of an armed insurgency is a proximate ‘safe haven’. Without such a ‘strategic rear’, as the JVP discovered to their cost, an armed uprising will not succeed except in very special circumstances. North Korea had Red China as its sanctuary. Vietnam had Cambodia and Laos as safe havens before the US began bombing Cambodia to interdict the movements of liberation fighters and war material from the war zone.

The LTTE could fight for such a long time because the coastal villagers in Tamil Nadu became their sanctuary and a ‘No Go’ zone for our armed forces. They also could elicit much sympathy from Tamil

politicians in South India. A turning point in the defeat of the LTTE was their assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and the subsequent rapprochement of India with the Sri Lankan Government and the military.

The attacks on the IPKF by LTTE fighters removed that vital Tamil Nadu ‘sanctuary’ in the latter’s military strategy. With no safe havens and the sharing of vital intelligence between the Indian and Sri Lankan armed forces the LTTEs days were numbered. But that was to happen many years later. At this point of time the cards were stacked against Sri Lanka.

The Tamil Nadu government became a vital support group for the insurgents. Tamil Nadu politicians pressurized the central government in New Delhi largely because of the influx of refugees to their territory which was making it both a national and international issue. There was a wide disparity in the estimate of Tamil refugees in India. While Sri Lankan estimates put it at 35,000, Indian authorities proclaimed it to be 125,000.

As in the case of Bangladesh, Indian “hawks” were exaggerating the numbers of refugees to promote a more aggressive policy from Delhi towards Sri Lanka. What was a bilateral issue became a trilateral relationship. Many of Indira Gandhi’s advisors including G. Parthasarathy, Chidambaram, Venketeswaram and another senior official also named Parathsarathy became strong defenders of Tamil rights and were pushing the Indian Government to intervene forcefully on the Sri Lankan Tamil issue.

They were all lining up behind the TULF-inspired ‘Parathasarathy proposals’ that came to be referred to as ‘Annexure C’, which envisaged the setting up of a second tier of administration called Provincial Councils and the merger of the North and East. It was my experience that the somewhat ordinary Tamil Foreign Service officials tended to model themselves on Krishna Menon, the arrogant Indian Minister who was an advisor to Nehru on Foreign Affairs and a “hawk”.

Menon finally ruined his patron Nehru by tendering wrong advice on the question of “India’s China War’. The Tamil FS officers imitated Menon in dress and bad manners. It became necessary to reach beyond them to political and business interests to break the stranglehold of the ‘Tamil Brahmins’ of the FO. I conveyed the need for such an approach to JRJ and assured him, as I was to prove later, that the big Indian businessmen who had invested in Sri Lanka like the Tatas, Oberois, Hindujas and Jains were much more sympathetic to us than the South Block’s `Tamil lobby’.

All of these businessmen knew JRJ personally and were full of admiration for him and his free market policies. But they had not been brought into play by our Foreign Ministry which was obsessed with protocol, a sure sign of their incompetence. A senior FS man who was our representative, was constantly complaining that he was not being taken seriously by the Indian establishment. To make matters worse he established a direct link with Premadasa and began to indoctrinate him with a rabid anti–Indianism, little realizing that he was creating a split in the Cabinet on this issue and subverting JRJ’s initiatives. In a way JRJ brought it on himself because he treated FO officers with scant respect which sent them scurrying to Premadasa who received them with open arms. It also helped that this officer was married to a lady from the Colombo ‘Mudalali elite’ which was admired by Premadasa.

Back Channels

During Esmond’s visits to Paris he told us of a back channel he had set up to brief Indira Gandhi of our case. As referred to in passing earlier in these pages, this unlikely conduit was an American Professor of Sri Lankan origin called Ralph Buultjens. He was a teacher of political science at a New York University, who had managed to earn Indira’s confidence during their meetings in New York and New Delhi.

He was a suave operator who played on the vanity of important middle-aged ladies including many in Colombo Seven. He befriended Esmond who too was a no mean admirer of middle-aged ladies, particularly if they were white in color. This odd couple persuaded JRJ that his messages to the Indian PM were having its effect. I remember JRJ mentioning his friendship with Yunus, one of Jawarharlal’s confidantes and now an old man, who was invited to visit Colombo by him in order to influence Indira.

In spite of Buultjens’ assurances, the Northern situation was becoming worse and plans to develop the country’s economy were being sidelined much to the chagrin of Finance Minister Ronnie de Mel who advocated a conciliatory approach. While Buultjens could make no impact on our ethnic conflict he certainly created havoc in our Foreign Ministry and with the President. With the hope of being our Permanent Representative in the UN he began to bad mouth the incumbent UN Ambassador B.J. Fernando, who was a confidante of Premadasa and a long standing UNP supporter.

Letters purporting to be copies of correspondence between BJ and Premadasa denigrating JRJ were distributed among the political elite of Colombo. The Government which was already facing many difficulties was further embarrassed when BJ was summarily dismissed from his post as our representative in the UN. It was a sordid affair and Premadasa who was the ultimate target moved adroitly and overcame the crisis in which he could have suffered collateral damage.

The celebrated Buultjens ‘back channel’ brought nothing but trouble for JRJ and the country. I will later recount the `Buultjens affaire’ which shook up the UNP and created a lasting enmity between Premadasa and Gamini Dissanayake, which ended only with the tragic death of the new President. But with the accession of Rajiv Gandhi, efforts were made by Gamini and Lalith to reach out to influential friends of the Indian PM from among the `technocrats’ who were his closest friends, many of them Harvard graduates.

These overtures were more successful, and Rajiv began to hew his own line much to the consternation of the old guard and the Foreign Service officials. Rajiv replaced Parathasarathy and Venketeshwaran and brought in Foreign Secretary Romesh Bandari who struck up a cordial relationship with JRJ and was able to move the negotiations forward. Once when the negotiations were held up, I flew to New Delhi at JRJs request to meet Biki’ Oberoi with a message from him.

Oberoi was my friend from the time I was Permanent Secretary in charge of Tourism and an ex-officio member of the Board of the Hotel Colombo Oberoi. Biki and his brother-in-law, Gautam Khanna were great friends of Sri Lanka and were ready and willing to deploy their considerable clout among the business and political elite of Delhi to support our cause. Biki drove me from the Delhi airport to his magnificent farm on the outskirts of the city and invited Romesh Bandhari for lunch. We had lunch together and he suggested that JRJ should reconvene the All-party Conference and India would ensure the participation of the TULF.

JRJ agreed and the conference was reconvened. At that time the great fear of the Delhi ‘Tamil lobby’ was that we would reach out to Rajiv and exclude them. Chidambaram gave expression to this fear when he complained, referring to JRJ, “One of the difficulties was that he always tried to undermine whoever he was negotiating with by using his back channel connections to New Delhi. I was afraid that the PM [Rajiv] would be taken in by this beguiling man, and that is exactly what happened” [quoted in “J.R. Jayewardene of Sri Lanka-Biography Volume Two’; p624].

The worsening ethnic conflict was felt even by us expatriates at that time. The flights to Colombo from Charles De Gaulle and Heathrow in London had to be security checked several times before we boarded the plane. On many occasions our flight to Colombo had to be diverted to airports on the way and rechecked as there were messages, usually fake, of bombs on board. These leads had to be taken seriously as on one occasion the Air Lanka trident was blown up while on the ground at Katunayake.

The plan was to blow up the plane in the air while carrying 140 passengers. Tourism took a nosedive. Many tourism projects which we negotiated in Paris with Club Meditaranee and the Meridian group were put on hold. Fortunately UTA continued with their flights to the South Pacific via Colombo and with our friend Daniel Leferve as manager we could always get a seat at short notice.

As the LTTE grew in strength the powers of the central government in the North began to wane. The army which had not increased its strength and obtained the latest equipment was being confronted successfully by the terrorists. Even the Army top brass comprised of those drawn from privileged families in Colombo were not ready for combat duties. The President was getting increasingly frustrated as the situation both domestic and external seemed to be spinning out of control.

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Features

The NPP Government is more than a JVP offspring:

Published

3 hours ago

2026/04/12

Thilina Walpola

Rohana Wijeweera

It is also different from all past governments as it faces new and different challenges

No one knows whether the already broken ceasefire between the US and Iran, with Israel as a reluctant adjunct, will last the full 10 days, or what will come thereafter. The world’s economic woes are not over and the markets are yo-yoing in response to Trump’s twitches and Iran’s gate keeping at the Strait of Hormuz. The gloomy expert foretelling is that full economic normalcy will not return until the year is over even if the war were to end with the ceasefire. That means continuing challenges for Sri Lanka and more of the tough learning in the art of governing for the NPP.

The NPP government has been doing what most governments in Asia have been doing to cope with the current global crisis, which is also an Asian crisis insofar as oil supplies and other supply chains are concerned. What the government can and must do additionally is to be totally candid with the people and keep them informed of everything that it is doing – from monitoring import prices to the timely arranging of supplies, all the details of tender, the tracking of arrivals, and keeping the distribution flow through the market without bottlenecks. That way the government can eliminate upstream tender rackets and downstream hoarding swindles. People do not expect miracles from their government, only honest, sincere and serious effort in difficult circumstances. Backed up by clear communication and constant public engagement.

But nothing is going to stop the flow of criticisms against the NPP government. That is a fact of Sri Lankan politics. Even though the opposition forces are weak and have little traction and even less credibility, there has not been any drought in the criticisms levelled against the still fledgling government. These criticisms can be categorized as ideological, institutional and oppositional criticisms, with each category having its own constituency and/or commentators. The three categories invariably overlap and there are instances of criticisms that excite only the pundits but have no political resonance.

April 5 anniversary nostalgia

There is also a new line of criticism that might be inspired by the April 5 anniversary nostalgia for the 1971 JVP insurrection. This new line traces the NPP government to the distant roots of the JVP – its April 1965 founding “in a working-class home in Akmeemana, Galle” by a 22-year old Rohana Wijeweera and seven others; the short lived 1971 insurrection that was easily defeated; and the much longer and more devastating second (1987 to 1989) insurrection that led to the elimination of the JVP’s frontline leaders including Wijeweera, and brought about a change in the JVP’s political direction with commitment to parliamentary democracy. So far, so good, as history goes.

But where the nostalgic narrative starts to bend is in attempting a straight line connection from the 1965 Akmeemana origins of the JVP to the national electoral victories of the NPP in 2024. And the bend gets broken in trying to bridge the gap between the “founding anti-imperialist economics” of the JVP and the practical imperatives of the NPP government in “governing a debt-laden small open economy.” Yet this line of criticism differs from the other lines of criticism that I have alluded to, but more so for its moral purpose than for its analytical clarity. The search for clarity could begin with question – why is the NPP government more than a JVP offspring? The answer is not so simple, but it is also not too complicated.

For starters, the JVP was a political response to the national and global conditions of the 1960s and 1970s, piggybacking socialism on the bandwagon of ethno-nationalism in a bi-polar world that was ideologically split between status quo capitalism and the alternative of socialism. The NPP government, on the other hand, is not only a response to, but is also a product of the conditions of the 2010s and 2020s. The twain cannot be more different. Nothing is the same between then and now, locally and globally.

A pragmatic way to look at the differences between the origins of the JVP and the circumstances of the NPP government is to look at the very range of criticisms that are levelled against the NPP government. What I categorize as ideological criticisms include criticisms of the government’s pro-IMF and allegedly neo-liberal economic policies, as well as the government’s foreign policy stances – on Israel, on the current US-Israel war against Iran, the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean, and the apparent closeness to the Modi government in India. These criticisms emanate from the non-JVP left and Sinhala Buddhist nationalists.

Strands of nationalism

To digress briefly, there are several strands in the overall bundle of Sri Lankan nationalism. There is the liberal inclusive strand, the left-progressive strand, the exclusive Sinhala Buddhist Nationalist (SBN) strand, and the defensive strands of minority nationalisms. Given Sri Lanka’s historical political formations and alliances, much overlapping goes on between the different strands. The overlapping gets selective on an issue by issue basis, which in itself is not unwelcome insofar as it promotes plurality in place of exclusivity.

Historically as well, and certainly after 1956, the SBN strand has been the dominant strand of nationalism in Sri Lanka and has had the most influential say in every government until now. Past versions of the JVP frequently straddled the dominant SBN space. Currently, however, the dominant SBN strand is in one of its more dormant phases and the NPP government could be a reason for the current dormancy. This is an obvious difference between the old JVP and the new NPP.

A second set of criticisms, or institutional criticisms, emanate from political liberals and human rights activists and these are about the NPP government’s actions or non-actions in regard to constitutional changes, the future of the elected executive presidency, the status of provincial devolution and the timing of provincial council elections, progress on human rights issues, the resolution of unfinished postwar businesses including the amnesia over mass graves. These criticisms and the issues they represent are also in varying ways the primary concerns of the island’s Tamils, Muslims and the Malaiyaka (planntationn) Tamils. As with the overlapping between the left and the non-minority nationalists, there is also overlapping between the liberal activists and minority representatives.

A third category includes what might be called oppositional criticisms and they counterpose the JVP’s past against the NPP’s present, call into question the JVP’s commitment to multi-party democracy and raise alarms about a creeping constitutional dictatorship. This category also includes criticisms of the NPP government’s lack of governmental experience and competence; alleged instances of abuse of power, mismanagement and even corruption; alleged harassment of past politicians; and the failure to find the alleged mastermind behind the 2019 Easter bombings. At a policy and implementational level, there have been criticisms of the government’s educational reforms and electricity reforms, the responses to cyclone Ditwah, and the current global oil and economic crises. The purveyors of oppositional criticisms are drawn from the general political class which includes political parties, current and past parliamentarians, as well as media pundits.

Criticisms as expectations

What is common to all three categories of criticisms is that they collectively represent what were understood to be promises by the NPP before the elections, and have become expectations of the NPP government after the elections. It is the range and nature of these criticisms and the corresponding expectations that make the NPP government a lot more than a mere JVP offspring, and significantly differentiate it from every previous government.

The deliverables that are expected of the NPP government were never a part of the vocabulary of the original JVP platform and programs. The very mode of parliamentary politics was ideologically anathema to the JVP of Akmeemana. And there was no mention of or concern for minority rights, or constitutional reforms. On foreign policy, it was all India phobia without Anglo mania – a halfway variation of Sri Lanka’s mainstream foreign policy of Anglo mania and India phobia. For a party of the rural proletariat, the JVP was virulently opposed to the plantation proletariat. The JVP’s version of anti-imperialist economics would hardly have excited the Sri Lankan electorate at any time, and certainly not at the present time.

At the same time, the NPP government is also the only government that has genealogical antecedents to a political movement or organization like the JVP. That in itself makes the NPP government unique among Sri Lanka’s other governments. The formation of the NPP is the culmination of the evolution of the JVP that began after the second insurrection with the shedding of political violence, acceptance of political plurality and commitment to electoral democracy.

But the evolution was not entirely a process of internal transformation. It was also a response to a rapidly and radically changing circumstances both within Sri Lanka and beyond. This evolution has not been a rejection of the founding socialist purposes of the JVP in 1968, but their adaptation in the endless political search, under constantly changing conditions, for a non-violent, socialist and democratic framework that would facilitate the full development of the human potential of all Sri Lankans.

The burden of expectations is unmistakable, but what is also remarkable is their comprehensiveness and the NPP’s formal commitment to all of them at the same time. No previous government shouldered such an extensive burden or showed such a willing commitment to each and every one of the expectations. In the brewing global economic crisis, the criticisms, expectations and the priorities of the government will invariably be focussed on keeping the economy alive and alleviating the day-to-day difficulties of millions of Sri Lankan families. While what the NPP government can and must do may not differ much from what other Asian governments – from Pakistan to Vietnam – are doing, it could and should do better than what any and all past Sri Lankan governments did when facing economic challenges.

by Rajan Philips

Features

A Fragile Ceasefire: Pakistan’s Glory and Israel’s Sabotage

Published

3 hours ago

2026/04/12

Thilina Walpola

Smokes over Beirut: Israel’s Ceasefire Attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon

After threatening to annihilate one of the planet’s oldest civilizations, TACO* Trump chickened out again by grasping the ceasefire lifeline that Pakistan had assiduously prepared. Trump needed the ceasefire badly to stem the mounting opposition to the war in America. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu wanted the war to continue because he needed it badly for his political survival. So, he contrived a fiction and convinced Trump that Lebanon is not included in the ceasefire. Trump as usual may not have noticed that Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Shariff had clearly indicated Lebanon’s inclusion in his announcement of the ceasefire at 7:50 PM, Tuesday, on X. Ten minutes before Donald Trump’s fake deadline.

True to form on Wednesday, Israel unleashed the heaviest assault by far on Lebanon, reportedly killing over 300 people, the highest single-day death toll in the current war. Iran responded by re-closing the Strait of Hormuz and questioning the need for talks in Islamabad over the weekend. There were other incidents as well, with an oil refinery attacked in Iran, and Iranian drones and missiles slamming oil and gas infrastructure in UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar.

The US tried to insist that Lebanon is not part of the ceasefire, with the argumentative US Vice President JD Vance, who was in Budapest, Hungary, campaigning for Viktor Orban, calling the whole thing a matter of “bad faith negotiation” as well as “legitimate misunderstanding” on the part of Iran, and warning Iran that “it would be dumb to jeopardise its ceasefire with Washington over Israel’s attacks in Lebanon.”

But as the attack in Lebanon drew international condemnation – from Pope Leo to UN Secretary General António Guterres, and several world leaders, and amidst fears of Lebanon becoming another Gaza with 1,500 people including 130 children killed and more than a million people displaced, Washington got Israel to stop its “lawn mowing” in southern Lebanon.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to “open direct negotiations with Lebanon as soon as possible,”. Lebanese President Joeseph Aoun has also called for “a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, followed by direct negotiations between them.” Israel’s involvement in Lebanon remains a wild card that threatens the ceasefire and could scuttle the talks between the US and Iran scheduled for Saturday in Islamabad.

Losers and Winners

After the ceasefire, both the Trump Administration and Iran have claimed total victories while the Israeli government wants the war to continue. The truth is that after more than a month into nonstop bombing of Iran, America and Israel have won nothing. Only Iran has won something it did not have when Trump and Netanyahu started their war. Iran now has not only a say over but control of the Strait of Hormuz. The ceasefire acknowledges this. Both Trump and Netanyahu are under fire in their respective countries and have no allies in the world except one another.

The real diplomatic winner is Pakistan. Salman Rushdie’s palimpsest-country has emerged as a key player in global politics and an influential mediator in a volatile region. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Chief of Defence Field Marshal Asim Munir have both been praised by President Trump and credited for achieving the current ceasefire. The Iranian regime has also been effusive in its praise of Pakistan’s efforts.

It is Pakistan that persisted with the effort after initial attempts at backdoor diplomacy by Egypt, Pakistan and Türkiye started floundering. Sharing a 900 km border and deep cultural history with Iran, and having a skirmish of its own on the eastern front with Afghanistan, Pakistan has all the reason to contain and potentially resolve the current conflict in Iran. Although a majority Sunni Muslim country, Pakistan is home to the second largest Shia Muslim population after Iran, and is the easterly terminus of the Shia Arc that stretches from Lebanon. The country also has a mutual defense pact with Saudi Arabia that includes Pakistan’s nuclear cover for the Kingdom. An open conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia would have put Pakistan in a dangerously awkward position.

It is now known and Trump has acknowledged that China had a hand in helping Iran get to the diplomatic table. Pakistan used its connections well to get Chinese diplomatic reinforcement. Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar flew to Beijing to brief his Chinese counterpart and secured China’s public support for the diplomatic efforts. The visit produced a Five-Point Plan that became a sequel to America’s 15-point proposal and the eventual ten-point offer by Iran.

There is no consensus between parties as to which points are where and who is agreeing to what. The chaos is par for the course the way Donald Trumps conducts global affairs. So, all kudos to Pakistan for quietly persisting with old school toing and froing and producing a semblance of an agreement on a tweet without a parchment.

It is also noteworthy that Israel has been excluded from all the diplomatic efforts so far. And it is remarkable, but should not be surprising, the way Trump has sidelined Isreal from the talks. Prime Minister Netanyahu has been enjoying overwhelming support of Israelis for starting the war of his life against Iran and getting the US to spearhead it. But now the country is getting confused and is exposed to Iranian missiles and drones far more than ever before. The Israeli opposition is finally coming alive realizing what little has Netanyahu’s wars have achieved and at what cost. Israel has alienated a majority of Americans and has no ally anywhere else.

It will be a busy Saturday in Islamabad, where the US and Iranian delegations are set to meet. Iran would seem to have insisted and secured the assurance that the US delegation will be led by Vice President Vance, while including Trump’s personal diplomats – Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Iran has not announced its team but it is expected to be led, for protocol parity, by Iran’s Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, and will likely include its suave Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. Vice President Vance’s attendance will be the most senior US engagement with Iran since Secretary of State John Kerry negotiated the 2015 nuclear deal under President Obama.

The physical arrangements for the talks are still not public although Islamabad has been turned into a security fortress given the stakes and risks involved. The talks are expected to be ‘indirect’, with the two delegations in separate rooms and Pakistani officials shuttling between them. The status of Iran’s enriched uranium and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz will be the major points of contention. After Netanyahu’s overreach on Wednesday, Lebanon is also on the short list

The 2015 nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Action Plan) took months of negotiations and involved multiple parties besides the US and Iran, including China, France, Germany, UK, Russia and the EU. That served the cause of regional and world peace well until Trump tore up the deal to spite Obama. It would be too much to expect anything similar after a weekend encounter in Islamabad. But if the talks could lead to at least a permanent ceasefire and the return to diplomacy that would be a huge achievement.

(*As of 2025–2026, Donald Trump is nicknamed “TACO Trump” by Wall Street traders and investors as an acronym for “”. This term highlights a perceived pattern of him making strong tariff threats that cause market panic, only to later retreat or weaken them, causing a rebound.)

by Rajan Philips

Features

CIA’s hidden weapon in Iran

Published

3 hours ago

2026/04/12

Thilina Walpola

We are passing through the ten-day interregnum called a ceasefire over the War on Iran. The world may breathe briefly, but this pause is not reassurance—it is a deliberate interlude, a vacuum in which every actor positions for the next escalation. Iran is far from secure. Behind the veneer of calm, external powers and local forces are preparing, arming, and coordinating. The United States is unlikely to deploy conventional ground troops; the next moves will be executed through proxies whose behaviour will defy expectation. These insurgents are shaped, guided, and amplified by intelligence and technology, capable of moving silently, striking precisely, and vanishing before retaliation. The ceasefire is not peace—it is the prelude to disruption.

The Kurds, historically instruments of Tehran against Baghdad, are now vectors for the next insurgency inside Iran. This movement is neither organic nor local. It is externally orchestrated, with the CIA as the principal architect. History provides the blueprint: under Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi, Kurdish uprisings were manipulated, never supported out of sympathy. They were instruments of leverage against Iraq, a way to weaken a rival while projecting influence beyond Iran’s borders. Colonel Isa Pejman, Iranian military intelligence officer who played a role in Kurdish affairs, recalled proposing support for a military insurgency in Iraq, only for the Shah to respond coldly: “[Mustafa] Barzani killed my Army soldiers… please forget it. The zeitgeist and regional context have been completely transformed.” The Kurds were pawns, but pawns with strategic weight. Pejman later noted: “When the Shah wrote on the back of the letter ‘Accepted’ to General Pakravan, I felt I was the true leader of the Kurdish movement.” The seeds planted then are now being activated under new, technologically empowered auspices.

Iran’s geographic vulnerabilities make this possible. The Shah understood the trap: a vast territory with porous borders, squeezed by Soviet pressure from the north and radical Arab states from the west. “We are in a really terrible situation since Moscow’s twin pincers coming down through Kabul and Baghdad surround us,” he warned Asadollah Alam. From Soviet support for the Mahabad Republic to Barzani’s dream of a unified Kurdistan, Tehran knew an autonomous Kurdish bloc could destabilize both Iraq and Iran. “Since the formation of the Soviet-backed Mahabad Republic, the Shah had been considerably worried about the Kurdish threat,” a US assessment concluded.

Today, the Kurds’ significance is operational, not symbolic. The CIA’s recent rescue of a downed F-15 airman using Ghost Murmur, a quantum magnetometry system, demonstrated the reach of technology in intelligence operations. The airman survived two days on Iranian soil before extraction. This was not a simple rescue; it was proof that highly mobile, technologically augmented operations can penetrate Iranian territory with surgical precision. The same logic applies to insurgency preparation: when individuals can be tracked through electromagnetic signatures, AI-enhanced surveillance, and drones, proxy forces can be armed, guided, and coordinated with unprecedented efficiency. The Kurds are no longer pawns—they are a living network capable of fracturing Iranian cohesion while providing deniability to foreign powers.

Iran’s engagement with Iraqi Kurds was always containment, not empowerment. The Shah’s goal was never Kurdish independence. “We do not approve an independent [Iraqi] Kurdistan,” he stated explicitly. Yet their utility as instruments of regional strategy was undeniable. The CIA’s revival of these networks continues a long-standing pattern: insurgent groups integrated into the wider calculus of international power. Israel, Iran, and the Kurds formed a triangular strategic relationship that terrified Baghdad. “For Baghdad, an Iranian-Israeli-Kurdish triangular alliance was an existential threat,” contemporary reports noted. This is the template for modern manipulation: a networked insurgency, externally supported, capable of destabilizing regimes from within while giving foreign powers plausible deniability.

Iran today faces fragility. Years of sanctions, repression, and targeted strikes have weakened educational and scientific hubs; Sharif University in Tehran, one of the country’s leading scientific centres, was bombed. Leaders, scholars, and innovators have been eliminated. Military readiness is compromised. Generations-long setbacks leave Iran exposed. Against this backdrop, a Kurdish insurgency armed with drones, AI-supported surveillance, and precision munitions could do more than disrupt—it could fracture the state internally. The current ten-day ceasefire is a mirage; the next wave of revolt is already being orchestrated.

CIA involvement is deliberate. Operations are coordinated with allied intelligence agencies, leveraging Kurdish grievances, mobility, and ethnolinguistic networks. The Kurds’ spread across Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria provides operational depth—allowing insurgents to strike, vanish, and regroup with impunity. Barzani understood leverage decades ago: “We could be useful to the United States… Look at our strategic location on the flank of any possible Soviet advance into the Middle East.” Today, the calculation is inverted: Kurds are no longer instruments against Baghdad; they are potential disruptors inside Tehran itself.

Technology is central. Ghost Murmur’s ability to detect a single heartbeat remotely exemplifies how intelligence can underpin insurgent networks. Drones, satellite communications, AI predictive modeling, and battlefield sensors create an infrastructure that can transform a dispersed Kurdish insurgency into a high-precision operation. Iran can no longer rely on fortifications or loyalty alone; the external environment has been recalibrated by technology.

History provides the roadmap. The Shah’s betrayal of Barzani after the 1975 Algiers Agreement demonstrated that external actors can manipulate both Iranian ambitions and Kurdish loyalties. “The Shah sold out the Kurds,” Yitzhak Rabin told Kissinger. “We could not station our troops there and keep fighting forever,” the Shah explained to Alam. The Kurds are a pivot, not a cause. Networks once acting under Tehran’s influence are now being repurposed against it.

The insurgency exploits societal fissures. Kurdish discontent in Iran, suppressed for decades, provides fertile ground. Historical betrayal fuels modern narratives: “Barzani claimed that ‘Isa Pejman sold us out to the Shah and the Shah sold us out to the US.’” Intelligence agencies weaponize these grievances, pairing them with training, technological augmentation, and covert support.

Geopolitically, the stakes are immense. The Shah’s defensive-offensive doctrine projected Iranian influence outward to neutralize threats. Today, the logic is inverted: the same networks used to contain Iraq are being readied to contain Iran. A technologically augmented Kurdish insurgency, covertly backed, could achieve in months what decades of sanctions, diplomacy, or repression have failed to accomplish.

The operation will be asymmetric, high-tech, and dispersed. UAVs, quantum-enhanced surveillance, encrypted communications, and AI-directed logistics will dominate. Conventional Iranian forces are vulnerable to this type of warfare. As Pejman reflected decades ago, “Our Army was fighting there, rather than the Kurds who were harshly defeated… How could we keep such a place?” Today, the challenge is magnified by intelligence superiority on the insurgents’ side.

This is not a temporary flare-up. The CIA and its allies are constructing a generational network of influence. Experience from Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon proves these networks endure once operationalised. The Shah recognized this: “Iran’s non-state foreign policy under the Shah’s reign left a lasting legacy for the post-Revolution era.” Today, those instruments are being remade as vectors of foreign influence inside Iran.

The future is stark. Iran faces not simply external threats, but a carefully engineered insurgency exploiting historical grievances, technological superiority, and precise intelligence. The Kurds are central. History, technology, and geopolitical calculation converge to create a transformative threat. Tehran’s miscalculations, betrayals, and suppressed grievances now form the lattice for this insurgency. The Kurds are positioned not just as an ethnic minority, but as a vector of international strategy—Tehran may be powerless to stop it.

Iran’s containment strategies have been weaponized, fused with technology, and inverted against it. The ghosts of Barzani’s Peshmerga, the shadows of Algiers, and the Shah’s strategic vision now converge with Ghost Murmur, drones, and AI. Tehran faces a paradox: the instruments it once controlled are now calibrated to undermine its authority. The next Kurdish revolt will not only fight in the mountains but in the electromagnetic shadows where intelligence operates, consequences are lethal, and visibility is scarce.

by Nilantha Ilangamuwa