Faraz Shauketaly’s ‘revelations’

Faraz Shauketaly suffered gunshot injuries and was rushed to hospital a little over a week ago.  Faraz, who holds dual citizenship, in Sri Lanka and Britain, is a freelance journalist.  He is also a businessman who runs a hotel in Mount Lavinia.  The way the incident was ‘picked up’ by the media and others, including those who talk of human rights and media freedom speaks volumes of related politics.  Faraz was shot at by unidentified gunmen. 

‘The Daily Mail’ privileged Faraz’ ‘British citizenship’ in the story on the incident.  Navi Pillay of the UNHRC picked up on the ‘journalist’ element of his identity.  Sri Lanka bashers salivated about media freedom.  The local media duly condemned, again because this was a member of the tribe.

Everyone jumped the gun, so to speak.  Fingers were pointed at the President and the Government.  Faraz, now on his way to recovery, has thanked the President for all the support extended immediately upon hearing of the attack. 

Those with egg on the face may very well say ‘His statement was made under duress’.   This would of course amount to someone saying ‘I know better than Faraz what goes on in Faraz’ head’. 

The point is that people wear many hats and until investigations are concluded we cannot determine the name of the hat that warranted the aim-and-shoot.   Should the media be ‘perturbed’ only when a fellow media person is attacked, treating other attacks as per the newsworthiness (for the most part)?  Is Faraz Shauketaly the businessman made of heart, blood, vein, bone, sinew etc., that are different from what makes Faraz Shauketaly the freelance journalist? 

Not too long ago, Colombo Telegraph revealed that the late Lasantha Wickramatunga, then Editor of the Sunday Leader had a professional life outside that of being a professional journalist.  Colombo Telegraph hinted that Lasantha was killed on account of those ‘professional’ activities.  Lasantha, however, received many accolades posthumously for ‘journalistic courage’ and for ‘laying down his life in the course of being a journalist’.

There are certain conclusions we can draw.

First of all, there is an unholy and scandalous readiness to interpret events in Sri Lanka in a particular matter.  Trigger-happy is a term we can use.   It points to a penchant for sentencing without trial.  There is a strange readiness to up the ‘media’ strain of a person’s identity, if that is possible.  Makes better ‘news’, one supposes.  It sounds better when you say ‘a journalist was killed’ as opposed to ‘a spy was killed’, especially if you want to point the finger at a regime you want overthrown.

More importantly, there is another element to the context that makes for such outrageous and irresponsible claims, i.e. quite apart from political hate: the fact that attacks on journalists (especially those whose ‘journalistic hat’ is more of an identity marker than anything else) have not been investigated to conclusion.  

Lasantha, for example, did not die in a shoot-out. He was murdered.  The reason for murder is irrelevant except of course to the extent that ‘motive’ helps identify murderer(s).  What is pertinent is that it is the duty of the state to ensure that all citizens are protected.  Whether or not Lasantha was involved in something shady is also irrelevant.  If he violated the law, then the law enforcement agencies should have arrested him.  There is a thing called ‘due process’.

The case remains ‘open’. That’s an indictment on the Police and other investigating agencies.  It is this ‘openness’ with respect to attacks on citizens and especially media personnel that makes people pick up ‘journalist’ over ‘businessman’ as in the case of Faraz Shauketaly.    It doesn’t of course make such privileging valid or defensible, but when we are talking politics of convenience and selectivity as such we see every year when the UN’s human rights outfit has its meetings, it is prudent not to make things easier for the spoiler. 

The attack on Faraz Shauketaly, then, once again shows up a lot of people.  It is also another wake-up call to the Government with respect to investigations into attacks on journalists.  It just cannot afford to give more ammunition to its detractors.  Faraz has undressed many people, unintentionally, perhaps more than he ever has with his journalism.

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If no one is to be left behind…

My first experience with a ‘sports meet’ was in 1970 when my older brother, then in the first grade was readied for a fancy dress parade by our mother, her sister and the sister’s boyfriend.  There was a lot of fussing around which I didn’t understand.  He was dressed as a Berec battery.  ‘Berec’ then was a household name and he looked quite a battery.  It was when I entered school that I understood what the fuss was about.  When I was in Grade 1, a classmate, Gihan Wijeratne, dressed as a bride, won the first prize.  I remember that there were races, but that’s all a blur. 

Sports meets became less frill and more competition as the years went by.  I wasn’t an athlete, only an enthusiastic spectator.  I returned to ‘sports meets’ after a lapse of several decades when my daughters entered school.  They are enthusiastic and their enthusiasm outstrips ability for the most part.  It’s a parents-must-be-there thing and so every year I go to see them run and, as they grew older, cheer. 

Each year, I’ve silently rooted for the girl who seemed most unlikely to win, and I suppose like most spectators felt for the one who tripped and fell, the one whose lime fell off the spoon many times and yet finished the race and of course for the ‘Special Needs’ kids who took part, as competitive as any other girl. 

This year, I was late and I had to leave early too, but I was there long enough to take two strong impressions away.  There was a dance item performed by two groups, one Kandyan and one Karnatic.  There was laudable synchronicity.  The music, at least part of it, sounded ‘Western’.  ‘Seamless’ is the word that came to mind.  An earlier dance item had conditioned me to accept this ‘harmony’ as an integral part of the way Ladies’ College does things. 

That item was performed by the ‘special needs’ children.  Among the trainers, I later found out, was a young girl who herself had attended the ‘special needs’ program of the school.  They were as synchronized as those who performed the more stylized dance item a few minutes later.  They received the loudest applause.    

What touched me most was what happened as they walked-skipped off the ground.  The Principal, Nirmali Wickramasinghe took the microphone and called out their names, each one of them.  Some were still basking in the after-glow of performance and applause.  Some were looking for their parents. Some had to be taken by hand and led to the Principal who distributed special certificates to them.  She hugged each of them, demonstrating affection that I’ve only seen offered the very young. 

I’ve heard the line ‘no one should be left behind’ in discourses on education.  Easy to say, I’ve often told myself.  This is ‘inclusive education’.  Inclusive, most of all, because dignity is clearly considered a cornerstone of the entire process.  The school and the rest of the student population don’t treat these students as ‘special’ or objects of curiosity and by this very fact make the process extra special. 

Most importantly, by recruiting people who are impaired in some way to help these children who need very special instruction, the school has demonstrated that it is not enough to create a wholesome environment of learning but it is equally important to find ways of making post-school life meaningful.  It is time, Mrs. Wickramasinghe said, that the corporates get creative in finding ways that those who graduate from these programs can be useful to society in some manner.  Three of the instructors are themselves impaired.  They teach art, dance and handwork.  That’s a ‘yes we can’ story right there. 

The ‘houses’ were beautifully decorated, like in any sports meet of any school, way back in the 70s and right now.  There were breathtaking performances, come-from-behind wins and wonderful athleticism overall.  A few years from now it will all be a blur, the races and the cheering, the decorated houses and the cheers.  I don’t remember the faces of the kids who slipped a few years ago (they grow so fast!) and a few years from now I might not remember the names of the houses either.  But the expression on a teacher’s face and the joy evidenced by a student’s broad smile will take some forgetting. Hopefully ‘unforgettables’ such as this would prompt all of us to think more seriously about simple things like ‘no one should be left behind’ and of course what ‘inclusivity’ really means. 

It cannot be just a momentary embrace, a tear-jerker of a photograph and a nice story to write.   To leaving no one behind, we have to hold things closer to the heart, one another too.  It’s as simple as that. 

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Remembering Vijaya 25 years later

When the United Socialist Alliance (USA) was formed in the late 1980s, it was yet another Left political formation but with a difference.  The color was no longer red.  It was red plus purple.  The old guard, namely the Communist Party (Moscow), Lanka Sama Samaja Pakshaya (LSSP) and its off-shoot and therefore comparatively ‘young’ Nava Sama Samaja Pakshaya (NSSP) were of course in the picture.  But it was less red than purple, less Left than Center, less the stalwarts of the independence struggle, the ‘betrayal’ of 1964 than the clinging to an icon, a representative of a breakaway faction of the mainstream Sri Lanka Freedom Party, namely the Sri Lanka Mahajana Pakshaya (SLMP).  It was all about Vijaya Kumaratunga.

A few years later, Vijaya’s nephew and Prof Carlo Fonseka’s son, Suranga, who was my housemate in Boston, explained the phenomenon in the following terms: ‘Vijaya was popular and the Left thought that they could, through him, push their agenda’.    Now that’s a far cry from classical Marxist conceptualization of ‘revolution’, even for what certain sections of the 4^th International would have called ‘revisionist’ or even ‘downright retrograde’ leftists (as they dubbed parties such as the CP and LSSP).  Even self-styled Marxist ideologues like Dayan Jayatilleke were swayed, which means that half-baked, confused Marxists like Kumar David must be forgiven for supporting the LTTE against the Sri Lankan security forces.

The masses viewed Vijaya in terms very different to how the Left saw him.  His relative position in the politico-ideological spectrum was hardly important to them.  Vijaya was a celluloid hero true but one whose humanity in real life was abundantly acknowledged by each and every person who had opportunity to meet him.  Wherever he went, there were crowds.  Whether these crowds were equivalent to ‘votes’ is of course another matter, Vijaya never won an election after all and even if, as alleged, he was robbed of victory no one will claim he was going to win in a landslide. 

At the time, though, it is quite understandable that Old Left saw in Vijaya a ray of hope given the state of the Left’s political fortunes.  A breakaway faction from the SLFP, after all, is something much bigger than a splinter from the splintered Left, even an SLFP in the doldrums, one might add.

And so, Vijaya was to be the ‘Left Candidate’ in 1988.  Vijaya was to spearhead the campaign for the Provincial Councils to be held a few months later.  The SLFP may or may not have been worried, but there was no reason for the UNP to be scared.  Vijaya would split the opposition vote.  This was obvious.  A Vijaya-less USA contesting in elections boycotted by the SLFP did not make any waves, even if one were to factor in election malpractices of the kind we haven’t seen since 2001. 

The JVP, then proscribed, and operating through its proxies, principally the Inter University Student Federation (IUSF) and the secretive ‘Deshapremis Janatha Vyaparaya’ (DJV), on the other hand, did have reason to worry.  Vijaya was appealing to the JVP’s political base, the rural masses probably including significant sections of the youth.  Whatever misgiving the people had of the Old Left, they loved Vijaya.  They loved him even though they may not have agreed with him on the thorny issue of the Indo-Lanka Accord and its outcome: the IPKF and the 13^th Amendment. 

It was then not about elections.  It was about the movement of political loyalties on both political and non-political grounds in a country that fast moving towards anarchy.  The regime was dictatorial and unpopular.  The JVP had chosen to go the way of armed insurrection. The SLFP was painting itself out of the picture.  Sarath Muttetuwegama, the one-man opposition, virtually, was dead. The LTTE had earned a breather courtesy India.  The Indians were here.  Vijaya emerged in this context and with a message that appealed to left-leaning youth of both the Sinhala and Tamil communities (the EPRLF and PLOTE were ‘friends’ and were ‘unofficially’ included in the Alliance). 

On February 16, 1988, Vijaya Kumaratunga was gunned down.  The JVP never accepted responsibility, but then again the JVP still operates as though its political hands are clean.  I remember meeting a staunch JVP supporter at the Galaha Junction. We walked towards the Arts Faculty together.  He referred to the poetic note penned by Sirilal Kodikara in the Communist Party newspaper, Aththa (The Truth) under the name ‘Ranchagoda Lamaya’.  The finger was pointed at two personalities: ‘Jaathivaadaye visa kiri pevu amma’ (The mother who fed the poisoned milk of racism) and to the ‘father’ who promoted political assassinations and terrorism (I forget the exact lines).  There’s truth in this, because that strange ‘couple’ (individuals or perhaps political realities) were indeed culpable.  But it was hard to swallow what was implied: the trigger-puller and the person who ordered the assassination, were somehow guiltless or that they were only marginally implicated. 

The JVP-led ‘Action Committee’ of Peradeniya did not permit any form of mourning.  Vijaya was ridiculed for crimes of omission and commission. Very few saw mirth in these insults.  Vijaya was a personality that was larger than political loyalties and antipathies.  You did not have to agree with him to like him.  You did not have to like him to mourn him. 

Had he lived?  Well, that’s conjecture but the political equation was such that he would not have stumped either the UNP or the SLFP.  He was assassinated. The USA, icon-less, floundered.  Many key activists of the SLMP were killed.  After the bheeshanaya, Vijaya’s widow went back to the SLFP and took with her key figures of the party.  From 1994 to 2005, one can argue, we had an SLMP President, but that’s taking ‘logic’ too far. 

As for the USA, it happily or unhappily joined hands with the UNP in the face of the JVP onslaught, with leader after leader being assassinated.  The SLMP split, one faction being led by Chandrika into the SLFP and the other, led by Ossie Abeygunasekara going green.  The Old Left, predictably, stood with the SLFP. 

It’s twenty five years since Vijaya was slain.  Since then we’ve had ‘stars’ take to politics.  None have had the appeal that Vijaya had.  Maybe they were smarter, less innocent, for twenty five years later, they are ‘somewhere’.  Vijaya is no more.  Whether this is good or bad, is another story.  We lost a great actor, a magnetic personality, a fledgling politician (all things considered). A good man, certainly.  

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Little one, sleep now; tomorrow you will rise

[A note on Balachandran, younger son of Velupillai Prabhakaran]

 There are those who use Balachandran’s death for political purposes.   We need not go into that very long list of names.  Then there is another long list of those mourn the shooting of a child, whose identity in terms of who is father was and what his father did, are largely irrelevant.  It’s a longer list. 

That longer list is made of people who in the moment of considering the tragedy of a little boy being shot to death forget identity and politics and draw from the reserves of humanity to sigh, to shed a tear and to write a few lines of verse. 

To my mind, no one has captured Balachandran’s fate with sensitivity, poignancy and nuance of articulation as has Anil Nishantha Lokugamarala.  He was moved to verse by the picture of the little boy lying on the ground, still and dead.  He called it ‘Bala Sanda’, playing on the boy’s name, where ‘Chandra’ refers to ‘moon’ the Sinhala word for which is ‘sanda’.  ‘Sanda’ of course has many connotations.  It is moon, it refers to ‘moment’ and ‘friend’.  ‘Baala’ means ‘young(er)’ or weak(er).    ‘Sara Sanda’ refers to the moon in its full and beauteous clarity.  The reference to ‘sun’ evokes the father’s preferred tag, ‘Suryadevan’ or ‘Sun God’. 

The nuance is such that it is hard to translate.  What’s given in English should be read as a ‘baala’  version and it is left to the imagination of the reader to extrapolate to the original. 

 

And when the mother, that ultimate and serene full moon,
lay in pieces and covered with black smoke,
in the foreboding dark of the lagoon-strip
there arose from the bloodied remnants of life,
the younger moon: Bala Sanda

The head that tore the sun lay bared and split

with brain parts scattered
besides the raucous roar of triumphant lions
and bequeathed with a life

made of living death, death after death,

how could a mind so tender bear
the weight of a pulsating heart?

One day the sun will break through the darkest clouds

one day the sun will rise after bowing low to kiss the earth
little sun, arise then, wiping away tear
embrace the earth’s bosom, little sun,
for now, little sun, sleep on thus.

This can and will be interpreted in many ways.  Some might say it is an indictment on the ‘Sinhalese’ Army, grist to the mill of the LTTE’s rump and so on.  But what of that?  It is a sentiment that transcends petty politics and the word-wars that make the world deaf to plea, blind to heartbeat and hope.   It is, to me, the heart of a Sinhala Buddhist who speaks for the majority of Sinhalese and Buddhists.  This, more than any ‘reconstruction’ or ‘concession’ has the power to heal. 

Something happened near the Nandikadaal lagoon.  It also happened in other places.  Through it all and thereafter too, humanity, bombed, shot at, crippled and dismembered, refused to die.  Anil Nishantha Lokugamarala is living proof. 

[Published in THE NATION, February 24, 2013]

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Balachandran’s killers (the long-list)

It is claimed that there is new footage about terrorist leader Prabhakaran’s younger son’s last days.  There’s nothing ‘new’ though.  A photograph of the 12 year old Balachandran ‘surfaced’ just before the UNHRC Sessions in Geneva in 2012 and now, just weeks before the 2013 Sessions, another picture has ‘surfaced’.  The ‘new’ photograph shows Balachandran alive in a bunker.  The jury is out on whether or not this was an Army bunker or an LTTE bunker.  There’s nothing to show that the man who pulled the trigger was a soldier or if the boy was captured and shot dead. 

We do know that the environs of the Nandikadaal Lagoon were certainly not a place where anyone would loiter around.  Only a fool would set up a holding-facility anywhere close to where bloodthirsty terrorists were holed up.  We do know that people died.  We know that there was a lot of gunfire.  We know that when the US targets a Taliban or Al Qaeda hideout, there is no consideration of whether there are non-combatants, children included, in the vicinity.  We know that the LTTE was holding hostage hundreds of thousands of civilians. We know that the LTTE fired at civilians who tried to flee.  We know that families get separated. We know how Balachandran died, but we don’t know where and under what exact circumstances except that this was the end-point of a 30 year struggle against a brutal, merciless terrorist outfit.

There is speculation though.  There is treatment of speculation as established fact. There is a politics of ‘revelation’, evidenced by the strange coincidence of surfacing and UNHRC sessions.  There is also the larger issue of the politics of proportionality and selectivity. The accusers (who would censure Sri Lanka in Geneva once again) are guilty of established (not speculated) crimes against humanity and in particular ‘targeted killing of children to the tune of 4000 plus!’ There is also the silence about context, especially the contribution of the LTTE to the circumstances, before ‘Nandikadaa’ and during ‘Nandikadaal’.

The following extract from a Facebook exchange would throw light on the relevant politics.  It is between Rasika Jayakody, well-known journalist, Kath Noble, a political commentator and Rifkha Roshanaara, a student of international politics.

Rasika: Clinically speaking, is there a way of substantiating that Balachandan, Prabhakaran's son, was in military custody when the leaked pictures were taken? The same picture could also have been taken at a tiger camp/bunker, prior to his death in a cross-fire during the final stage of the battle.

Rifkha: Simple logic, but some are blind, that they cannot see the 'other' side or they simply refuse to use their common sense. And my question is why do they come up with such pictures and videos only when UNHRC sessions are round the corner? Have they able to prove the credibility of the videos they have come up with on previous instances.

Kath: They say that on the basis of the claim that the two pictures were taken with the same camera.

Rasika: There are truths, half-truths and lies. In the same way, there are facts, factoids and fabrications. But any allegation should be proven beyond reasonable doubt before prosecution.

Rasika (to Kath): Claims who?  Is the person who took the pictures willing to give evidence?

Kath: Claim those journalists.

In the end, we are left without source (like the claims made by Channel 4, the International Crisis Group, the Darusman Committee and such, and regurgitated by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch regarding 40,000-80,000 having being killed in the last days of the battle). 

But a little boy did die.  A little boy was in fact shot dead.  Few would not be moved by the photograph of this chubby, cuddly, little boy with bullet holes in chest, dead.  Few fathers and mothers would not look at those eyes and that still body and not have their thoughts stray to their own children.    A little boy the photograph of whose dead body is bandied in international forums but the hundreds of little boys and girls his father kidnapped and turned into child-soldiers are un-remembered, just like the hundreds of little boys and girls slaughtered upon the same father’s directive.  Or the boy who was sent to an Army ‘Receiving Center’ loaded with explosives in order to dissuade the Army from ‘receiving’ and hostages from escaping.  That’s politics.  But that politics doesn’t make his death any less tragic.  He need not have died and need not have died in this manner.

Who killed Balachandran? 

First: The person who pulled the trigger, either directing gun at the boy or spraying a larger target (fleeing civilians or terrorist hideout).    AS YET UNIDENTIFIED, in terms of name and group.

Second: The person who have the order to shoot. AS YET UNIDENTIFIED, in terms of name and group.

Third: All those who by errors of omission and commission did not allow the terrorist menace to be eradicated by arguing that the LTTE was invincible, that ‘the economy cannot handle it’, that ‘the international community will not allow it’ and so on, and thereby sped things along to Nandikadaal by May 2009.  IDENTIFIED: India (from dropping Dhal and giving Prabharakan a lease of life in 1987 with the Indo-Lanka Accord), Norway (bending over backwards to give the LTTE parity of status vis-à-vis the Government of Sri Lanka, USA (doing their utmost to evacuate Prabhakaran even at the last minute), I/NGOs, ‘journalists’, ‘academics’, ‘priests’ and others who consistently gave the LTTE the benefit of the doubt and tried to undermine military efforts.

Fourth: All those who directly or indirectly helped the LTTE by way of providing funds, arms, training and legitimacy through comprehensive white-washing or downplaying of crimes against humanity.  IDENTIFIED:  India, first and foremost. IDENTIFIED: pro-LTTE sections of Sri Lankan Tamil expatriates, including current chest-beaters who pump ignorant/pernicious human rights outfits (AI and HRW) and unscrupulous media outfits (Channel 4) with tall stories. IDENTIFIED:  Successive Governments that believed the LTTE could be talked out of war, most significantly, the Ranil Wickremesinghe regime of 2001-2004.    

Fifth:  All those who failed to listen to Tamil leaders when they first articulated grievances and made claims regarding traditional homelands, those who could have said ‘prove what you can and we’ll redress’ but did not.  All those who did not have the heart, wisdom and guts to acknowledge that every citizen belongs to this land and vice versa.  All those who refused to treat query with respect that demands answer.  All those who responded to chauvinism with chauvinism and those who did not need chauvinism to be chauvinistic.  IDENTIFIED: That’s us, all of us, folks.  We couldn’t save Balachandran. We couldn’t save Mahinsa.  We failed.

Sixth.  This is long.

The man who deliberately dragged the boy along, when the wives and children of other terrorist leaders such as Thamilselvan and Soosai were allowed to flee into the safety of the Sri Lankan security forces.  The man who put every civilian, every man, woman and child not engaged in battle, at risk by holding them hostage as per the need for a ‘human shield’.  The man who on countless occasions refused to engage in dialogue for conflict-resolution, banking on military capability to deliver the impossible.  The man who killed so many Tamils, Sinhalese and Muslims in cold blood that it would be a tall order for any soldier who has seen comrades die and children slaughtered to show any mercy if he was chanced upon (not to mention the fact the practical stupidity of taking the risk of believing him to be unarmed).  A man who made it impossible to see any Tamil child anywhere close to LTTE fighters in anyway other than a ‘child soldier’.  IDENTIFIED: VELUPILLAI PRABHAKARAN.

 

 

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