No movies on the collective dead, ladies and gentlemen

If anyone has forgotten '88-89' because a) it happened a long time ago,
b) because no 'celebrities' were killed (except Richard De Soyza),
c) because it was the UNP government and its vigilante groups
that did most of the killing?

Bandula Gunawardena alleged in Parliament that his efforts to produce a film based on the life of Richard de Soyza had been thwarted by the yahapalana government. In response, Mangala Samaraweera, while insisting that he had not stopped any films from being made as Media Minister, is reported to have urged Gunawardena to produce a movie on the killing of journalist Lasantha Wickramatunga.

We do not know who stopped Gunawardena and we do not know why Samaraweera, given his sentiments and sway, has not thought about producing a film on Lasantha’s murder. Maybe one day, there will be films on both these individuals.

What is interesting about this parliamentary exchange is that it is a reflection of the general fascination in certain segments of society about certain kinds of killings and indeed certain kinds of victims.  

The Office of Missing Persons (OMP) has said that while a full list of those who have gone missing during the conflict is yet to be finalized, the number could be around 20,000. The relevant period is from 1983 to 2009.  

OMP Chairman Saliya Pieris made the following observation at a media briefing:

“We have data of previous reports released on missing persons. The International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC) says it is about 16,000 people including 5,100 military and police personnel. The Paranagama Commission says 21,000 people have gone missing while the government had received 13,000 complaints through Grama Niladharis on missing persons. These numbers may overlap.”

‘Missing’ is not a synonym of ‘dead’ and one presumes that the OMP has operated on the basis that these are two different things. We know that some of the ‘missing’ have in fact ‘disappeared’ to other countries which have repeatedly declined to give Sri Lanka information about ‘refugees’ that might help locate at least some of ‘missing’ (Canada for example). Even then, it is clear that a significant number have gone unaccounted for.  The OMP will release its report at the end of August and it will be interesting to note how many people went missing during different regimes, subject of course to the slants that length of time, death and other ‘slayers’ can have on memory and the will to pursue such things.  

The OMP is mandated to record complaints related to this particular conflict. However, this was not the only conflagration which took lives. In tens of thousands. We’ve come almost 50 years since 1971, but 1988-89 is not too far away. There are those who saw all that and there are those who lived through it. Many who have first hand experience of the state-run torture and killing chambers are still alive. 

The families of the dead did not all receive death certificates. Even if they did, the circumstances of their ‘disappearances’ are not recorded anywhere.

Just the other day, well known blogger and political commentator Ajith Perakum Jayasinghe launched a novel titled ‘K Point’. It’s in Sinhala. The ‘K’ of the title is for ‘killing’ and there were many torture/killing camps which had the same name. This novel is based on what went on in the Eliyakanda Vadhakaagaaraya (torture chamber), Matara, during 1988-89, a period fittingly (and sadly) referred to as ‘bheeshanaya’  (The Terror).

The book deserves the kind of discussion that lies outside the purposes of this article. However, the blurb at the back would suffice to tell us something relevant on the overall politics of memory:

‘There wasn’t a tradition of using bullets to kill people in Eliyakanda. There were gnarled and knotted clubs to beat and kill those people they wanted dead. There were water tanks in which people could be drowned but they were used only for purposes of torture because much effort had to be expended to transport water to the top of the hill in bowsers. Some of the tortured who were close to death met their fate in a dirty kitchen.  On certain nights prisoners would have to walk over dead bodies to get to the back of the store room to wash their hands or urinate after having their dinner. These bodies were taken away in the middle of the night in a dhal-colored yellow ’50 Sri’ Isuzu double cab which brought cauldrons of rice and buckets of gravy from the Gemunu Camp in the Matara Fort. Death was a simple and extremely petty matter. There were even days when it was an enjoyable sport for a drunken evening.’

We don’t need to have a novel to know about proxy arrests, billas, vigilante groups, abductions, shootings, burning and burying alive, and other gruesome things such as specific methods of torture.  It’s probably all there in the novel, though. In any case, it’s all erased from the manuscripts pertaining to rights abuse, crimes against humanity and such. 

And so we talk about Richard and Lasantha. We talk about Prageeth Ekneligoda. About Thajudeen. We talk about the dead known by the public. As we should of course.  

However, do we talk about how there are certain names remembered while the nameless are numbered? Do we ask how value is attached to certain victims while others are ‘disappeared’ into a collective, marked by a number? 

Ask 100 readers of English newspapers about those who were killed in 88-89 by the security forces, the police or state-run vigilante groups. Ask them to name victims. Check how many can come up with even a single name apart from Rohana Wijeweera and Richard de Soyza.  Therein lies a story, therein lies a narrative about selectivity, the politics of forgetting, the downsizing of guilt. 

Thajudeen was buried, exhumed and buried again. He will no doubt be exhumed again in a way in which even Richard was not. That entire exercise betrays the true character of those who weep copiously about human rights violations. They don’t seem to remember anyone worthy of exhumation when it comes to 88-89. 

It’s almost as if ’88-89’ was ‘okay’ even though the victims were largely unarmed unlike in the case of a significant number of disappearances that the OMP has been informed about. How, then, was 88-89 ‘ok’ and ‘Nandikadaal’ not? How is it that we have heard of Thajudeen but not Ranjithan Gunaratnam? How is it that people talk about Vellimullivaikkal and not Eliyakanda? 

What does Mangala know that we don’t know? Why is it that we know certain things that Mangala doesn’t seem to have a clue about today (even though he was back then ranting and raving against the UNP)? 

Well-known literary critic Chulananda Samaranayake who incidentally was also a rare survivor of the bheeshanaya in a recently published collection titled ‘Glimpses of a Shattered Island’ talks about his experiences. He recounts how he was referred to as a ‘son of a whore’. He had been asked if he had ever seen a mass grave. He was informed that he would be buried in one.  In the poem, he writes what he did not say that day:

‘Dear Sir,

no point of asking such question

from a man who has already been buried

in a mass grave.’

Chulananda has the last line on the condition of amnesia we’ve discussed here. For him, everyone is buried in a mass grave, ‘some in uniform and some in rags’. He puts it thus:

‘This is a country

buried in the silence, injustice, betrayal.’

It’s all selective and this selectivity is no accident but a deliberate product of political convenience, he would no doubt agree. Death is a leveler, they say. Remembrance also levels, in a sense. It elevates some and re-slays and buries others. No films for the collective dead. 

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Remembering Richard and forgetting Ranjithan

There were some 60,000 people killed in what is clearly the bloodiest period in post-Independence Sri Lanka, 1988-1990. Our roadsides were turned into crematoriums, our rivers, canals and such into cemeteries. I remember a day in June 1988, in Bingiriya. I remember distinctly thinking this thought: ‘I can’t do anything to stop this!’ ‘This’, then, was an inevitable hurtling of an entire nation over the edge of sanity and into an abyss made of fire and bullets, the order to assassinate and the screams of the dying. Almost twenty two years later, I have a question for everyone reading this: can you name one person who perished during that time?

I am sure that more than 90% of those who grew up speaking English and who live in Colombo (and close to 100% of those in Colombo 3 and 7), if they can come up with any name, it would be that of Richard de Zoysa. That’s one out of over 60,000 victims. Some might remember Nandalal Fernando, Harsha Abeywardena, and Stanley Wijesundera. Those who have had any association with left politics would remember Vijaya Kumaratunga, L.W. Panditha, Devabandara Senanayake, Dharmasiri, A. Jayantha, Chandrawimala and others killed by the JVP. Still, I am willing to bet that if asked to name one person who was killed during that time, nine out of 10 would say ‘Richard de Zoysa’ and that if asked to name a victim who was known, very, very few would speak up.

Is it something to do with the fact that Richard de Zoysa was an exceptional individual? He was certainly a ‘personality’, a public figure inasmuch as any non-politician could be one. He was a poet, a theatre man, a personality in literary circles. A talented and to some an exceptional one too. Richard didn’t fall from the sky. He was born of a woman’s womb, he grew up, went to school, had fun, got his knees bruised etc. He had friends. He had feelings, I am sure. Fears too. Desires. He breathed, he ate, he drank, he sweated, had a pulse etc etc. If you pricked him, he would bleed. When tortured, he would have cried out in pain.

And what of those other 59,999 plus people? Well, they would have been differently talented. They couldn’t have fallen from the sky. They too would have been held in wombs, birthed by mothers, taken care of, sent to school, formed friendships, learnt lessons; they also would have entertained dreams, felt things, breathed, loved, sweated, pulsated etc. If you pricked them, as the bard said, they too would have bled, they would have cried out in pain too when tortured. Their last moment would not have been any different to that of Richard’s in that they too would have released one last sigh as exclamation mark and as question. There are some 60,000 plus question marks and an equal number of exclamation marks, but how is it that we remember and name one but not the 59,000 plus others?

Who has heard of Senadheera from Kurunegala, a teacher and who of Dassanayake from Matale, born with a congenital defect in an eye that made it impossible for him to hide behind a disguise? Dassanayake knew his time was coming and he refused to escape: ‘I have brought too many people into this to leave now,’ he said. He was drawn and quartered, literally, and his body parts hung from a tree in Katugastota. His question/exclamation marks don’t have identity tags. Neither did those of Lalith from Kuliyapitiya, the medical student Atapattu, and countless others, including Thrimavitharana of the Colombo Medical Faculty who had nails driven into his skull, who was tied to the back of a jeep and dragged along a gravel road.

There was a massive crowd attending Thrimavitharana’s funeral. How many remember his name today? This I am asking from the comfortable and comfortably complaining, whining, dining, self-righteous people who think that ability to speak English is a sign of wisdom and a right to be snooty and condescending. Do you remember Thrimavitharana? Richard was special, yes. Talented, yes. Wasn’t Ranjithan Gunaratnam special? Was he not talented? Have you heard that name? Do you know who he was? Do you know what kinds of skills he possessed?

People who had never met Richard know of him. I have never met Ranjithan, I know of him though. He was an engineering student at Peradeniya. Born to humble, dignified and utterly civilized parents who lived in Kegalle, Ranjithan was highly conversant in all three languages. He was a poet. An artist. An orator. He was well read by all accounts, a good friend, a man of immense capacity and endowed with indefatigable energy. Arrested. Tortured. Killed. Each time I look into his mother’s eyes, I see how special each person who died was to those who knew and loved them. But Ranjithan was not Richard. He was not ‘English’. He was Tamil. He was Sinhala. He was Hindu and Buddhist. He was not ‘city’. He was ‘city and village’. His name is not remembered. Why not?

There is, I believe, a politics to remembrance. Sepulchers are not innocent. Commemoration is vile. There is erasing and ‘oblivioning’ in the matter of selective commemoration. No, I am not saying that Richard should not be remembered. I am merely asking myself and you, ‘why do we remember Richard and why have we forgotten Ranjithan, if we ever knew of him that is?’

During the UNP-JVP bheeshanaya of 1988-1990 democracy was bruised and tortured. Our sensibilities were lacerated. We acquired a certain degree of immunity to violence and crime. Death by violent means became something like pickpocketing; a few raised eyebrows, some political mileage for some, sweeping under carpets and years of forgetting. We lost something else. And this is why we can’t dwell in 1989-1990, however sad we are and however much we need to celebrate the lives of those who are not around today. There’s one thing that few acknowledge or even remember today when thinking about Richard or Ranjithan, or any of the other 59,998 plus people. That thing is called HR. Human Resources.

I told this to Werawellalage Premasiri, born Kumarigama, Ampara, my batchmate at Peradeniya, former lecturer in Political Science and now a public servant. I said ‘Aliya, (that was his ‘card’ at campus) me rate maanva sampath pilibandava deventha prashnayak thiyenava’ (there is a huge human resource problem in this country). He answered quietly: mama dannava; ape rate maanava sampath bheeshanaya kaale athurudahan karala demma (the human resources of our country were liquidated during the bheeshanaya).

We lost the best we had, didn’t we? Not all those who died were guilty of wrong doing and even if they were extra-judicial killing was the wrong way to go about sorting out the problem (those who howl about human rights violations were silent back then and those who call for truth commissions and such are conspicuously silent about such mechanisms for that particular blood-letting). I have no doubt about this: we lost our spirit, the cream, the most talented, the young people most endowed with attributes such as integrity, sacrifice, energy and ingenuity.

There were many Richards among them, but they didn’t write in English. They did not get published, they did not have the Lionel Wendt to perform in. They were born to humble parents, raised their voices against injustice and were slaughtered for this crime.

Let us remember them all. Let us remember that if we are struggling today on account of a serious lack of human resources, there are people responsible for this. Let us also remember that the conflict in the North and East saw a similar though less voluminous ‘evacuation’ (since it dragged across several generations). Let us remember that languishing in harsh circumstances in these regions and in the rehabilitation camps are young Tamil people who too are endowed with the same kinds of attributes. Let us remember that there are Richard de Zoysas among them; only, they do not write in English, have not got published and have not played at the Lionel Wendt. They must be allowed to do so.

So when we remember Richard, let us remember these others who didn’t/don’t have a Christian name, were/are quite un-English, but were/are no less talented, no less human.

msenevira@gmail.com


*First published in the Sunday Island in February 2010.

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Necessary meditations on carelessness and callousness

I haven’t seen Regi Siriwardena’s play ‘The Blinding’, directed by Haig Karunaratne.  I was not at the preview at the ICES and not at the British Council more recently.  I haven’t read the play either.  Someone else was at both performances, Comrade Aunty Nimal Breckenridge. And, as she sometimes does when something irks her, she shared a story. 

‘Last evening I was at a play pre-viewed before a group of us. It was "experimental theatre": a hard hitting commentary on how we "ordinary" people lived our ordinary lives while corpses were floating down rivers and petrol soaked tyres hung round young men's necks incinerated them. When the show ended the director/producer (a friend of thaatha's) started a discussion. I made the first comment. Then a mobile blared; and as the owner scrambled in her bag and started a conversation.  I asked, “Could the public's carelessness and callousness be displayed better?”   And walked out.’  And this, Comrade Aunty Nimal says, after Haig had specifically requested that mobile phones be turned off. 

She added a disclaimer, the gist of which I reproduce here: ‘I am told that I should guard against expressing such comments. My reactions are always spontaneous and polite; never pre-schemed.’

There is something about that time, the bheeshanaya or ‘Period of Terror’ in the Sinhala short-hand that few Sinhala-speaking Sri Lankans would be ignorant of.  It was deliberate and systemic terrorism on the part of the JVP and on the part of the UNP Government of the time. Some 60,000 people were killed over two years or so. The body count at the height of violence was around 50 per day.   Very few, if at all, were killed in gun battles. 

In stark contrast, when the LTTE was decisively crushed in May 2009, there was no lack of chest-beating, tear-shedding crusaders begging and even demanding that the terrorists be let off the hook.  And now that preferred outcome did not materialize, there is no lack of the same kinds of crusaders wanting to down those who rid the country of the terrorist menace.  Back then, in the late eighties, it was all ‘fair game’. 

Was it that in the late eighties the ‘right kind of people’ were getting slaughtered, i.e. those who were better dead?  Was it that the world didn’t have the eyes it claims to have now?  I don’t know.  What is indisputable was that back then there was a kind of callousness and silence that was apparent among certain sections of the population.  The transgressions, let me repeat, were not alleged to have taken place.  They happened.  Well documented. Facts, not allegations. 

A death is a death and each dead is consigned the same state of being, in a physical sense (the jury is out on other senses): they are out of the scene and the equation.  The manner of dying however and the circumstances too can provoke different kinds of reactions and so too the identity of the dead, apparently, where circumstance and manner are roughly similar.  

I am not talking of course of those rare beings who have cultivated the ability to exercise equanimity when encountering the vicissitudes of life.  The lady in question obviously did not belong that that category.  Callousness and carelessness cannot be stopped by way of legislation.  It is human thing; ‘inhuman’ some might correct me.  Perhaps the performance was weak, I don’t know.  Perhaps it was seen as some kind of ‘that’ which was different from the ‘this’ of being obnoxious.  These all include value-judgments at one level or another, yes.   

Still.

It seems that some deaths and killings are not newsworthy, some not worthy of respectful silence, some deserving cheering and some so irrelevant that keeping-in-touch via mobile phone is a far more important matter than being civil and civilized.  These things cannot be demanded, Comrade Aunty Nimal would not disagree, I believe.   

It is easy, someone might say, to pass judgment.  Someone else might observe that it easier and indeed too convenient not to.  It is easy to pick and choose when to engage and when to look askance.  Why bother to attend this kind of theatre, if one was adamant not to engage, not to reflect and open oneself to self-interrogation, and to change ways if way-changing made sense, all things considered? 

Comrade Aunty Nimal, as I said, was present at the British Council when ‘The Blinding’ was performed there.  She had a comment that might shed some light.

‘The discussion at the end highlighted, as the play did, the enigma of the human condition. Who were “ordinary people”? My first thought was [a question]: were we, in that room, ordinary people? [This was] sharply followed by the thought “why not? How many of us when we left, had had our brains "re-wired" .........?’

She concluded ‘I think I will stop there for now.’

I will too.  And I will proceed to reflect on these not-easy questions the inimitable Comrade Aunty Nimal raised. 

[Courtesy, Daily News, September 30, 2011]

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A preamble to a proposal for a war memorial

In June 2006 The Nation newspaper, in its ‘Eye’ section had a two page spread on war memorials.  I was at the time the Deputy Editor (Features) and I remember inserting two illustrations to decorate the pages.  The first was a cemetery set up by the LTTE.  The second was a blank space, duly boxed, to acknowledge all the 20,000 young men and women who were killed in the 1971 insurrection and the 60,000 who perished in the UNP-JVP bheeshanaya of 1988-89.   

In the first, tellingly, the birthdays and date of death had been omitted, for the LTTE had sent thousands of children to death. That’s something the pro-Eelam sections of the Tamil Diaspora don’t talk about even though it is their money that helped those innocent kids hurry into the Great Beyond.  The decision to insert that photograph was to acknowledge the fact that even those who died fighting the cause of a myth-mongering megalomaniac were nevertheless citizens of this country, needlessly sacrificed. 

Today, more than 4 years later, we are in a post-war situation.  Pro-Eelam sections of the Tamil Diaspora can rest easy that their brethren are not getting killed, even if they are upset that the end of the war also means that Sinhalese and Muslims (and yes, non-LTTE Tamils) are not dying in their hundreds. 

Yesterday was the moment of the tyrant, the rule of dread, the wails of orphans, sighs of widows, landscapes being scarred, scars being opened and re-opened, economies from household to national being devastated, temples being desecrated. Yesterday was made of waiting. It was made of wait dripping to shoulder-shrug to grin-and-bare.  Yesterday saw the consecration of helplessness, attended by the lie of invincibility. Yesterday belonged to quacks calling themselves historians and political analysts and pundits pampered by dubious dollars pontificating on all things under the sun, conferring legitimacy to a terrorist, twisting wild-claim into birth-right. 

Today we are terror-free and voices of Prabhakaran’s lackeys quickly moved from shout to whine and whine to silence.  Yesterday we held our breath, expecting an explosion any moment.  Today we are a breathing people.

Yesterday was made of wounds. Today, we must seek healing. 

Today I remembered those two photographs because there are things we should not forget.  History is written by the victor, this is true.  However, even a cursory reading of arguably the greatest and in many ways most rigorous chronicle, the Mahawamsa, would reveal that there are other ways of writing history, where blemish is called blemish and the fallen celebrated for that which is worthy of celebration. 

Today, in this moment of reconciliation, even as claim remains unsubstantiated and grievance (mis-articulated by way of exaggeration) un-redressed, there are things that need to be acknowledged.

Wars are about all kinds of things. Ideologies. Claims. Disputes.  Wars generate death. Destruction. Displacement. Wars are not happy things. They bring out the worst in human beings.  War is an excellent residence for cruelty.  Wars nevertheless bring out the best in the human being as well.  Bravery. Sacrifice. Heroism.  None of these can be monopolized by one party to the conflict.  Just as much as we cannot condone cruelty so too can we not forget heroism.

Those who fight each other are not one in objective. War’s end allow for retraction, admission of guilt and forgiveness on account of all kinds of errors, especially those that are not sourced to ideology and objective. War’s end can of course result in a putting-behind and moving ahead on account of changed circumstances, but that’s something that should not be taken as given. Still, I believe that a different kind of embrace is possible and indeed desirable.

Both victor and vanquished share the will to live and fear of death, both share the fact of indulging and suffering cruelty, both are one in heroism. Close to a hundred thousand citizens of this country perished over the past 30 years in a needless war.  They were all children of this land, sons and daughters of mothers and father who would never have envisaged the babies they cradled would suffer the fate they did.  They all died in vain. 

The true monument of reconciliation should occur in heart. The true embrace should be the clasp of heartbeat with heartbeat only made possible by recognition of common humanity.  Takes time.  Until then let us grieve our dead and mark our grievance with a monument to all our citizens who died whichever side they fought on whatever political signature was etched on the bullet that ensured dream-end. 

Let there be a war memorial etched with all names, a grand mix of identity, so we can remind ourselves that our past, bloody and tear-filled, was made of an inextricable weaving of lives, so too should our future be; made of ourselves and one another, in our common humanity and common destiny as children born on this island who will have to live and live together, breathe and breathe together, now and always.   

Courtesy: Daily News - 20 December, 2010

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