Let us exhume, ladies and gentlemen!

When the koha calls we know it is avurudu. When certain names are mentioned over and over again, we know elections are around the corner. Yes, Thajudeen, Lasantha and Ekneligoda. Throw in Keith Noyahr and Upali Tennekoon if you like. And of course white vans.  The first two were killed. The third disappeared. Keith and Upali were attacked; Keith in fact might well have been killed had not it been for the untiring efforts of the CEO of the newspaper house he worked for at the time. They both live in other countries now.

All of these things happened when Mahinda Rajapaksa was the President, his brother Gotabhaya was the Secretary, Ministry of Defence and Sarath Fonseka was the Army Commander.  It was natural that they became poster boys of all political campaigns of the United National Party (UNP) and its allies. 

There’s a problem though. Well, two problems certainly (and probably more). First, in the case of the first three, they are all dead. There’s a need to bring to justice their killers. There’s a need for truth to triumph over deceit, lies, foot-dragging and duplicity. There is a need for ‘exhumation’ literally and of course metaphorically. And yet, there’s a certain indecency that borders on or moves into the despicable in exhumation and burial followed by re-exhumation and re-burial ad nauseam. 

There’s a second issue that also demonstrates disrespect for the dead. Selectivity.  

It is not unnatural, just as the Rajapaksa-haters do, for those who are against this regime to dig up the past. They too can talk of abductions. They too can talk of extra judicial killings. They can talk of proxy arrests, torture, the operative equivalent of ’white-vans’ in the late eighties, the tyre pyres’ and the numerous vigilante groups. Then there was censorship. 

It’s all old hat. Right? Wrong. For two reasons (and possibly more). First, the perpetrators of those crimes, their approvers or staunch loyalists of the relevant parties, are all still around. Secondly, THAT time has been invoked by a would-be presidential candidate of the United National Party (UNP), Sajith Premadasa. 

So let’s get some perspective here. 

There’s ‘concern’ over Lt Gen Shavendra Silva being appointed as Army Commander. Who is upset? Well, officially, the USA, Canada, the EU and the UNHRC. Two thing (and possibly more). First, that’s our business. Second, the cause of concern that they’ve stated, ‘accused of war crimes,’ is as of now just an allegation. We assume innocence until guilt is proven. That’s what the Book of the West (aka ‘Book of the White Man’) says. 

Second, these ladies and gentlemen had no issues whatsoever when Barack Obama literally ‘oversaw’ the capture and murder of Osama bin Laden. Extra-judicial killing. Same goes for Col Gaddafi. 

Ok, here’s a third. Ranil Wickremesinghe is accused of overseeing terrible events in 88-89. Did any of these people or rather their predecessors in the relevant country or UN agency ever express similar concern? 

No. Ok?

Censorship? There was a name that was known to all journalists. Ariya Rubasinghe. He facilitated the production of the strangest newspapers in the world: full of entire columns, boxed off in black. Censored. That however hardly warranted ‘concern’. There was much worse. 

Right. Let’s talk exhumation.  For that, there has to be burial, but let’s take liberties and extend it to incineration. Cremation, if you want to be cute about it. Yes, all this has to be preceded by ‘death’. And so, there are names. 

Wimal Surendra. Photojournalist of the ‘Divaina’. Abducted, murdered. His helmet was found in the house of a prominent UNPer and a minister in the present cabinet. He took a photograph of a ‘lady’ playing netball. Was that his ‘crime’?

H.E. Dayananda, a freelance contributor for the ‘Divaina’ who wrote a column titled ‘vame kathava’ (The story of the Left). Killed outside the petrol shed on Union Place. 

Richard De Zoysa. Poet. TV presenter. Dramatist. Abducted. Killed. 

Rohana Wijeweera was captured, allegedly tortured, tossed into the incinerator at the Borella Cemetary AND BURNT ALIVE. 

Add to all this, 10,000 Thajudeens, 10,000 Ekneligodas, Noyahrs and Tennekoons, but let us not forget Rohana Wijeweera.

No issue there? No concern? All ok? Alright! 

Then we have what the ‘revolutionaries’ did, i.e. the uncles of Anura Kumara Dissanayake and the brothers of Tilvin Silva. They showed the way to their long lost but later found cousins in the UNP.  Here's a very, very short list: Nandalal Fernando, Harsha Abeywardena, Premakeerthi De Alwis, Sagarika Gomes, Prof Stanley Wijesundera, Lionel Jayatilleka, Vijaya Kumaratunga, Thevis Guruge, Prof Chandraratne Patuvatavithana, Daya Pathirana, A. Jayantha, Chandrawimala, Devabandara Senanayake. 

Was Chandrika Kumaratunga 'clean'? Ask Rohana Kumara. Wait. He was 'done in' during her tenure. Dead men don't talk. 

But that’s the story of abduction, torture, murder, burial/cremation and ‘exhumation’ ladies and gentlemen. You either want the entire sordid story or else you want none of it. If you want some of it, then you are indulging in political humbuggery. Seriously. Thajudeen, Lasantha, Ekneligoda, Richard, Wimal, Rohana and of course the 10,000 plus Thajudeens, 10,000 plus Lasanthas and 10,000 plus Ekneligodas who are just numbers and not names and whose memories deserve something better than this burying-exhuming circus that we are seeing come election time.

malindasenevi@gmail.com, www.malindawords.blogspot.com

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Oh! Lasantha!

Rauff Hakeem, the current leader of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC) commenting on the death of an LTTE leader (I cannot remember if it was V Prabhakaran, A Balasingham or S.P. Thamilselvan), quoted John Donne, ‘Any man’s death diminishes me.’

That’s an easy and oft-used ploy to dodge difficult questions. Death is a serious matter. Regardless of how the dead person conducted him/herself, one tends to think of the aggrieved, the family and friends. Track record is shelved for later perusal.

Then we have commemoration. The first death anniversary tends to be remembered. Then it becomes less and less grand. Then we come to round numbers. The tenth, the fiftieth, the centenary etc.  On such occasions, depending on who died, who is lamenting and whether or not lamentation can yield political mileage (in certain cases), memory is dusted of cobweb and the deceased is resurrected. 

Let’s begin with the last.  A few questions would illustrate the issue. What’s special about Wasim Thajudeen? Ekneligoda has gone missing, is assumed to have been disappeared; what’s special about him? Why is it that they are remembered at moments that are politically useful to those who do the remembering? Is it because politics and politicians are implicated in the murder and disappearance, respectively? That’s defensible, certainly.  Then, however, we have to ask further questions. Are they the only individuals whose disappearances and deaths were politics-related? Why are they remembered and others forgotten?

We haven’t heard of these two individuals in some time. Perhaps, when the next elections come around, we might. We heard instead of Lasantha Wickramatunga. 

January 8, 2019 was the 10th anniversary of Lasantha’s murder. It’s one of those ‘nice numbers,’ or a ‘commemoration-demanding number’. Fair enough.  

Those who were close to him, i.e. family, friends and colleagues at the Sunday Leader, wrote about  Lasantha. There were personal recollections and there was, naturally, political comment as well. The Sunday Observer dedicated almost the entire newspaper of January 10, 2019 to Lasantha. That itself tells a story about the politics of commemoration and selective memory.  

Laasantha was, clearly, a very good news reporter. He had contacts, he had skills and he had courage. He had a good notion about who to target. The ‘why’ of it tells us his political preferences. Lasantha went hammer and tongs at Thilanga Sumathipala when the latter was with the UPFA, but went dead silent when Thilanga crossed over briefly to the UNP. During the time the UNP was in power (2001-2004) he picked and chose which corrupt ministers to attack. 

He was entitled to his political convictions, but they did mar his credibility. For example, in Celigny, Switzerland in late February 2006, at the end of a short media moment just prior to the commencement of negotiations between the Government and the LTTE, Lasantha gave the chief negotiator of the LTTE, Anton Balasingham, a thumbs-up sign. This doesn’t mean he was partial to the LTTE of course; it probably meant that he operated on the premise ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. At that moment, that is.  

Let’s get to his murder. Nothing was proven, then or now. The jury is out regarding the murderer(s). However, as I pointed out on several occasions, the onus was (and is!) on the government to ensure that Lasantha’s murder(s) is (are) brought to book. Lasantha’s politics, his preferences, his vocation and conduct are all immaterial to matter of justice. There was vilification and there was sloth, both pointing to guilt or complicity on the part of the political leadership of that time, namely Mahinda Rajapaksa. His killers are still unknown although names have been mentioned. To be fair, it was not only the Rajapaksas that Lasantha attacked in his newspaper. He came down hard on the then Army Commander. There are theories that the Rajapaksas had to protect Fonseka because he was spearheading operations against the LTTE at the time. All that must be considered conjecture until the truth is out.

Now let’s move to the aftermath. There was the widely circulated ‘Editorial from the Grave’ purportedly written by Lasantha. Even a cursory glance at Lasantha’s writing would reveal the huge gap in style (between his writing and the said editorial). That was politics. That politics has not abated. He was used as poster-boy by groups, local and foreign, who had axes to grind with the Rajapaksa regime. He is still being used, in this sense. 

This brings us to the next question: why Lasantha and why only Lasantha? 

The scribes at Lake House as well as others such as Rasika Jayakody have called the period ‘the darkest hour for the media’. It’s as though the entire decade of the eighties has been blocked and deleted from memory. Those were days when newspapers came with large swathes in black (sections censored by the ‘Competent Authority’). Of course it was not just media personnel who were targeted. Playwrights had to use Russian names for their scripts to get by the Censor. Not a single newspaper dared censure the UNP regime of the time.

This does not give license to anyone who came after to do what the UNP-JVP combine did of course. However, in the matter of commemoration, how is it that those who are ‘political’ in their remembrance of Lasantha are quiet about the horrendous crimes against humanity committed by the UNP regime? Have they not heard about the death squads, the billas, the K-Points (Killing Points), the vigilante groups such as PRRA, Green Tigers, Ukussa, Black Cats, Yellow Cats etc., whose work makes the whole White Van Syndrome seem like mild excesses on the part of state agencies? Have they not heard of arbitrary arrests, proxy arrests, torture, people being burnt alive etc? 

There were, even at the time, names that got mentioned and thousands (well, some 60,000) that were relegated to statistics. At that time, even those few who belong to the same social strata that has been using Lasantha as a poster boy for political projects, spoke only about Richard De Zoysa. They didn’t talk of Ranjithan Gunaratnam, not of the Geography student Dissanayake of Peradeniya University who was literally drawn and quartered and whose body parts were hung on a tree in Katugastota. Thrimavitharana, the medical student, had nails driven into his head and while still alive tied to the back of a jeep and dragged around.  

[Read, 'Remembering Richard and forgetting Ranjithan...']

Forget the names, for when massacres take place, enumeration is hard. However, the massacre itself demands mention. But no, not for the majority of those who made and still make political capital out of Lasantha’s murder. 

Just after Lasantha’s murder, Sanjana Hattotuwa, who was in charge of the website Groundviews, asked people to express in poetic forms their sentiments. I responded immediately and I believe Vivimarie Vander Poorten also wrote a few days later. I titled my poem, ‘For Lasantha and others’. Here are some excerpts:

Speaking of Lasantha now,

he was not the just-another-guy

not because he was right

(he was wrong a lot of times;

hard to agree with too),

but he wrote his politics regardless

he made his allegiances clear

protected friends

(and some of them were unsavoury creatures too);

it does not matter, though.

He was flawed as the next person

but was more a citizen than many of us,

he spoke his mind,

he screamed.

I saluted him then. I said, ‘There is a finger that is itching to point, let us point it at ourselves.’ I asked, ‘Who are we, who am I in these times of omission and commission?’

That’s one way to talk about Lasantha (and others). It doesn’t seem to be very popular though.

malindasenevi@gmail.com 

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Remembering Lasantha three years later

Lasantha Wickramatunga was clearly among the most colourful media personalities of his generation.  He was in fact so colourful in his typically uni-colour-political way that he was more than a media person.  The test of fast-colour, however, is a post-death thing and as much as many would want him to paint ‘The After’ he left behind, it really didn’t happen.  That itself is an indicator of impact.

He was not only the Editor-in-Chief of the Sunday Leader, he WAS the Sunday Leader and clearly much loved by his staff.  I’ve even heard of people who worked under him considering him as a father figure.  It was however not for fathering or leadership that he was best known.  Lasantha was political but less in an ideological sense than as a party man, and this is true of his time with the Sri Lanka Freedom Party and with the United National Party.  He wore colour and symbol with pride and without apology; that his newspaper consequently acquired party branding is another matter altogether. 

He was clearly fearless whenever he attacked individual or collective, party or institution.  He knew how to get a story, how to gather facts and how to lay it all out so that there was a greater likelihood of realizing the objective that spurred him.  He was among the best investigative journalists the country has seen in the last two decades.  It is tragic that he consistently allowed political allegiances (to party and to individuals within parties) inform editorial direction.  There were numerous times when this selectivity detracted from his overall journalistic skill, especially when he toned down or even stopped critique altogether when a particular individual switched political loyalties. 

In his defence, however, it must be kept in mind that Lasantha was not one of those journalists who feign neutrality but are in reality diehard foot soldiers for this or that political party. Unfortunately, this particular fixation forced him to fashion and refashion editorial policy in according to ideological, political and policy shifts of the UNP.   He went ‘soft’ during the time Ranil Wickremesinghe was Prime Minister, with hardly a word of criticism leveled against the Ceasefire Agreement with the LTTE.  He was rabidly anti-government after the SLFD-led UPFA came to power and especially after Mahinda Rajapaksa became President.

I met him once in 1984, i.e. a few weeks after the Sunday Leader was launched, to submit an article but my better memories are of his performance in Geneva during the Government-LTTE talks in February 2006.  Attending a media conference called by Rohitha Bogollagama, who led the Government delegation, Lasantha was only interested in seeking to establish that the very fact of ‘talking’ was an endorsement of UNP policy, i.e. negotiations with the LTTE (see 'Facets of one-upmanship in Switzerland' for an interesting exchange between Lasantha and H.L.D. Mahindapala). 

Events proved that unlike in the Ranil-LTTE talks, the Government did not end up co-signing Balasingham’s agenda but used the moment to maneuver to positions of advantage, on the ground and in the political debate.  The Government had no illusions about the LTTE and events showed that nothing was lost when the inevitable that Lasantha was never ready to entertain happened, the resumption of hostilities courtesy LTTE belligerence and intractability.  In fact when it all came back to guns, bullets, bombs and suicide attacks, it was that very CFA that proved to have helped the LTTE most.  Lasantha was a day-to-day political activist and was not too worried about ‘later-fallout’.  He operated on the dictum ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend’ and this is perhaps why he gave Anton Balasingham a thumbs-up signal just before talks began in Celigny, Switzerland (See 'Revenge as an article of faith').  I was there, I saw it and I wrote about it and Lasantha never countered.

That kind of misplaced loyalty which put party before nation and people was never Lasantha’s preserve, however.  There are many who were blue and red in colour who did worse and whose failings on this account were not compensated for by the kind of journalism that Lasantha was capable of.  Speaking strictly for myself, it is sad that Lasantha, who had all the attributes to be larger than party chose to be framed by such loyalties.  It is in fact this party-fixation that rendered ineffective even the legitimate criticisms he leveled at his political opponents.  Divested of colour and embellishment, he did come up with a lot of stories that the public needed to know.  Unfortunately, he was too politically tainted to be taken notice of by sections of the readership that were not politically inclined either way.  As such his missives did little more than titillate the like-minded and offer temporary relief to the politically depressed.

Nothing of this made Lasantha deserve the death he suffered.  Indeed, if any of this was fault enough to be punished by murder then there would be a long list of journalists and others on someone’s list of targets.  When he was murdered three years ago, naturally the accusing finger was directed at the Government and especially those he had attacked venomously.  It was only later that it came to be known that Lasantha, for all his fierce attacks on the Government, remained a close friend of the President.  Lasantha was political and it was natural for his murder to lend itself into quick transformation into political capital.  Even today the incident is used as case-in-point by those who claim there’s a war on media freedom.  No one has been found guilty, though, and even making allowance for the fact that murder-clues do not materialize with finger-snap (it took 2 years to find a suspect in the attempt to assassinate the Defence Secretary, after all), the unresolved nature of the investigation will continue to haunt the Government.

Lasantha was not the only journalist who can be said to have irked people in high places.  While I would count out spies for foreign countries and cheerleaders for terrorists among those of our tribe who suffered threats and bodily harm, people like Keith Noyhr and Upali Tennekoon were never accused of being thus integrity-deficient.  They were moreover not even like Lasanths in that they didn’t turn newspapers into party rags.  They were both attacked and the attackers in both cases are yet to be apprehended and brought before the law.  The longer it takes to find out what really happened the greater the likelihood of blame being directed at the Government, even if such finger-pointing is unwarranted. 

Lasantha and I exchanged pleasantries in Geneva.  We didn’t see eye to eye obviously.  He was high-profile back then and I was new to newspapers.  I doubt he knew of me, but I certainly read his paper.  I kept notes.    I wouldn’t run a paper the way he did but then again I doubt I ever could.  He was one of a kind.   Even though all things considered he bit himself much more than he bit others, he entertained, he gave some zip to the media industry and splashed a lot of colour too.  It is a pity that we have to talk about what he could have achieved, less because he’s no more than because of who he was.  Perhaps this is why he is now largely forgotten (while Ajith Samaranayake is not, for example).  Still, I think we are poorer as a tribe for his absence.

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