Sinhala Voice in JVP

[rapa]

 

[aye_sha90]

aneeeee........ would sum1 help mee?

 

[rapa]

aneeeee........ would sum1 help mee?

Reflections on the JVP
by Gamini Seneviratne

My acquaintance with the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna is disjointed in time, and my impressions of that party suggest an uneven growth towards maturity among its leaders. What follow are marginal comments on them.

Two meetings on crop diversification were to be held in Matale and Gatembe on April 6, 1971; not being free to attend either, I deputed Abey Vaas Gunawardena (now Chairman of the Lotteries Board), and N. V. K. K. Weragoda (sometime Secretary to the Treasury and General Secretary of the UNP) to attend them. When Vaas drove past Warakapola on his way to Matale, the Police had been out on the road keeping an eye on the traffic. An hour later, Weragoda had found the Police Station in flames and been turned back by the insurgents at Ambepussa. Neither had been harassed. Driving down from Kandy, W. Gunasekera of the Tea Control department had been stopped at Kegalle by the insurgents; they had given his stalled car a thallu-start and advised him to take a detour via Bulathkohupitiya.

It was not many days later that such young men were thrown over the ‘look-out’ point on Kadugannawa Pass, dead or alive, or sent floating down the Maha Oya to lap against the bridge in Alawwa.

It was also around that time that Dr. Rex de Costa, known throughout Deniyaya as a good Samaritan, was gunned down at his door.

Much has been written about those events, including statements by some of the leading actors, and Gananath Obeyesekera’s account of the social background of the activists, but we are yet to see a coherent account of what or who provided the motive force.

The accused/accusers were given a fair trial. The late R. Premadasa, then an M.P., followed it from the court-house.

It was all a new experience for the police and the armed forces. They were given new weapons but were not trained to face an insurgency. (what if it had been an insurrection?). They were nervous and trigger-happy, a marker of cowardice. My Minister, Colvin, being away in Rome, on April 6, after being up much of the night communicating with his Deputy, Albert Kariyawasam and attending con-fabs with Minister Felix Dias, I was by our gate at the top of Pedris Road with a ‘Doctor-friend’ from Hambantota whom the curfew had marooned in Colombo. We watched a Navy jeep come down Thurstan road and when it came up to Bagatalle road, we turned away and walked towards the house. The next moment I was surrounded, a couple of bayonets at my throat and chest. My brother (who was in the CID.) had come for a shower; he rushed out in a towel, identified himself. The Navy officer saw his mistake but as he withdrew with his men, one said, "aeyi-ehenan divuve?" Across the country, many people were murdered on that kind of fabrication. All I could say, by way of extenuation for those navy men, is that Leslie Goonewardene lived in the vicinity, and I was wearing a sarong and a long beard.

The Left leaders declined police protection. On his visit to his electorate, Agalawatte, while the insurgency was at its height in that area, Colvin had to be persuaded to accept a constable with a 303 rifle that, stuck between the poor man’s knees, made any quick action impossible.

The bheeshanaya of 1988-90 was different; it was a pogrom with young people being the target. It became an opportunity for personal enmities, not merely at village level, to be ‘settled’ in the final sense. Lionel Jayatilleke, Harsha Abeywardena and Nandalal Fernando were killed supposedly by ‘The JVP’. So was Vijaya Kumaratunga. The beneficiaries of such ‘eliminations’ were, for the most part, within the governing party itself, but, politicians of various hues took advantage of that period of semi-organised chaos, to get rid of potential rivals. Wijedasa Liyanarachchi and Kanchana Abhayapala come to mind.

Like other people who, for whatever reason, had to travel through areas where the bheeshanaya was being executed with greater intensity than in some place else, public officers who were engaged in field work had to run the gauntlet between the faceless forces that had concocted that devil’s brew of murder and mayhem. To quote one instance of many, when a friend phoned us from the USA to ask for help in securing the safety of some young people from, no longer in, Mallawapitiya, I asked for particulars. A young man (whom I knew) turned up the following day and gave vague directions: for him, everybody was suspect. Even driving by myself in an unmarked white jeep, (a green Pajero was more than suspect), it proved to be a tricky search: when I found them it was in a cottage behind an abandoned fibre mill, guarded by a relative.

We had several close encounters with that bheeshanaya: it was, overwhelmingly, one of State terrorism in which some 250,000 people, (the ‘government’ did not get to its target of 300,000), most in their late ‘teens and twenties, were killed. Not all of them had an easy death, as by a bullet in their head or heart aimed by those who had neither. The official figure of ‘deaths’ was 60,000.

When I mentioned to a Deputy Minister from that area the stench of burning bodies in Badagamuwa Mukalana, he said, "We have room there for another ten thousand."

There were no demonstrations by our ‘human rights’ activists about any of that, then or later. Maybe they were all busy putting the abduction and murder of Richard de Zoysa on centre stage, all the others being ‘bodies’, not to be carried off to the sound of trumpets but dragged away by the cleaners.

I met the JVP face-to-face when they accepted office. It was a refreshing experience for me to return, several years after retirement, to the ARTI and to interact with Minister Anura Kumara Dissanayake and his Deputy, Bimal Ratnayake. What distinguished their regime was that neither they nor their assistants threw their weight around in matters of administration in the departments and other institutions that came within their charge. They treated public servants with courtesy (as some of those who had locked themselves into senior positions that were beyond the control of Ministers had not the culture to do). Although they had much to learn, they were quick learners and showed intelligence of a quality one does not readily associate with politicians. Bimal Ratnayake, for instance, took the initiative in having Justice C. J. Weeramantry’s judgement on the dispute related to a dam across the Danube put into Sinhala; when that booklet was presented to him, Anura Kumara asked me why Justice Weeramantry has doors opened for him to speak to academics in, say, the USA.

That, I think, illustrates the dilemma of the JVP. The primary impulse seems to be that people whose response to a particular matter accords with theirs, should join them. I recall a demonstration against the deal with Freeport-McMoran on Eppawala (now apparently in the process of being smuggled in again through an Indian intermediary). It was organised by the people in and around Eppawala with the Ven. Piyaratana Thera as the leading figure. A spokesman for the JVP, I believe it was Tilvin Silva, came on stage and asked the people to support them, sort of line up behind the JVP on that matter.

Such an orientation leads, as it has led, to the JVP attacking like-minded groups who belong in other political parties or in no Party at all.

I have met Wimal Weerawansa once; he impressed me as a stable personality well able to give leadership to any form of activism, of the kind people need, political or other. I have not seen Somawansa Amarasinghe in the flesh; only on the TV screen where he may not come out at his best.

I do not know what the current dadi-bidi within the JVP is. If it has to do with India’s intervention in our affairs, we should ask India to go away, mind its own business. At a SAARC conference of writers and critics a couple of years ago, the ‘delegation’ from India included a former Foreign Secretary. He took as his theme the need for inter-dependence – by which, as I observed at that meeting, what was meant was that fellow members of SAARC should be generous with their resources and facilitate their exploitation by India. Her treatment of Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Sri Lanka has been such that it is no wonder that India has no friends among her neighbours.

As may be expected, the junior ‘rank & file’ tend to be uncompromising in the pursuit of an idealised ‘just society’. Whether they have been made conversant with such analyses as Marx et al have offered on the matter, what they and theirs have experienced in real time would have shown them that ‘justice’ is not, almost be definition, what ‘society’ is about. ‘The way out’, in their view and according to ‘the book’ (which could be a series of five lectures), is revolutionary change.

A tall order, since they are themselves, creatures of the society that has fashioned them. It has become customary to refer to them, when they have become more vocal and are heard, as ‘young Turks’, which implies that they tend to be violent or unmanageable. But the uncivil society that governs their lives, and ours, whether mediated by ‘government’ or by persons who seem hell-bent on protecting a most unjust ordering of ‘civil society’, could turn them into ‘yuppies’ of a kind not dissimilar to those who play golf and dine at 5-star hotels: yep, right now, this avurudu time, when young people rush homeward to greet their elders with the bare symbols of respect and gratitude.

For young people fed on ‘kekiri’, as the saying goes, the political system provides, to put it mildly, hand-holds for ‘advancement’ up the slippery slope to damnation, stomping on those who gave them their first leg-up. What awaits them at the top, alas, is not visible from below.

‘Maturity’, too, alas, is time-bound. It brings with it grey hair, a hankering for ‘comfort-in-old-age’, the luxury of providing for children, grand-children, thirst for a place in history.

In such a world, more often than is supposed, writers & artists have clarified matters for ‘the general public’. There have been examples of that from all over the world, in Lanka, India, Russia, Europe, Latin America & co. and at various points in time. Here, we have had tentative, sometimes misguided, interventions by such writers as W. A. Silva, Piyadasa Sirisena, S Mahinda Thera, Keyas, Magama Sekara and others. E. R. Sarachchandra looked at the lives of young people in the early insurgency, but it is Gunadasa Amarasekera who has provided us and future generations with an extended recreation of the life that this country, especially its young people, have lived through or perished living through over the past fifty years.

At this point I would like to repeat some lines from Anna Akhmatova and Zbiegniew Herbert’s "The Envoy of Mr. Cogito" that I had occasion to quote two years ago. They may be taken as my ‘envoi’ to this brief note on the JVP.

Anna Akhmatova:

"… I pity the exile’s lot.

Like a felon, like a man half-dead,

dark is your path, wanderer,

wormwood infects your foreign bread.

But here, in the murk of conflagration

where scarcely a friend is left to know

we, the survivors, do not flinch

from anything, not from a single blow.

Surely the reckoning will be made

after the passing of this cloud

We are the people without tears …"

Zbiegniew Herbert:

"Go upright among those who are on their knees

among those with their backs turned and those

toppled in the dust

you were saved not in order to live

you have too little time, you must give testimony."

 

[aye_sha90]

thnk u bro readin,. thx

 

[saliemo]

ha ha ha

davlta sinhala kata hada
rata english katahada

 

[aye_sha90]

ha ha ha

davlta sinhala kata hada
rata english katahada

sorry bt i've always been in a foreign country, never studied in SL

 

[darshana4u]

rapa daapu de sirawata hari !

 

[saliemo]

sorry bt i've always been in a foreign country, never studied in SL

ohhhhhhhhh sorry...I didnt see dat coming.....
just wanted to say,,,,, hes a person who says one thing @ a time and does something totally different.....

 

[Kalindugayan]

rapa daapu de sirawata hari !

agreed

 

[rapa]

rapa daapu de sirawata hari !

onema deyaka depeththak thiyenawane machan eka peththaka witharaka balala karanaya theruma ganna bee

 

[rapa]

ohhhhhhhhh sorry...I didnt see dat coming.....
just wanted to say,,,,, hes a person who says one thing @ a time and does something totally different.....

is he only person does like that?

 

[maleemsg]

eththa...

mama meka udin pallen beluwe mokada mam ada gedara poddak busy..!
hemin full story eka kiywanna ona hariyata..!

thanx for the post Rapa Bro!