Lasantha's killing places all of us in common dilemma

Lasantha's killing places all of us in common dilemma

By Rajan Hoole

When faced with someone’s violent death, the question inevitably arises, why him or her and not me? It is a question we dare not try to answer. To do so is to seek false comfort. We have to face it with humility, as a duty and debt cast on us. One day perhaps we might understand. The divine economy has no place for personal vanity -something the killers of this world have in abundance.

The murder of Lasantha is not more criminal than that of thousands of ordinary folk gunned down by the killers of several governments of this land, by the LTTE and by the JVP. Rather, it presents the ugliness of the ruling clique in its sheer nakedness. Many Sinhalese who turned a blind eye to what was happening in the north-east as what needs to be done to fight terrorism, have seen the ugly monster that has fattened itself on their money, their feelings and their passive consent

Lasantha in his damning posthumous testament makes it clear why he was killed - for his journalism articulating his commitment to a liberal democratic society, a plea to view the ethnic problem in the context of history and not through the telescope of terrorism. His paper also articulated a reality that is lost on most Sinhalese, that while the terrorism of the LTTE must be confronted, but ‘to do so by violating the rights of Tamil citizens, bombing and shooting them mercilessly, is not only wrong but shames the Sinhalese, whose claim to be custodians of the dhamma is forever called into question by this savagery, much of which is unknown to the public because of censorship.

A nation that has bombed a section of its own citizens for 20 years without ever implementing a decent political settlement opens itself to damning censure. Lasantha was not suicidal; he enjoyed life, his children and his journalism. He wrote his last testament after weighing his adversaries, and decided that it is nobler to face what confronted him full throttle, than to make conciliatory noises in the right places and lead a respectable, conformist existence from which all that ennobles man is fled. This is the corruption we, alas, invariably encounter among the great and the good of our society, and something that always tempts the best among us.

Like all of us, Lasantha no doubt had his failings and his moments of shame. These would be of interest to the biographer who sets out a balanced picture of the man and his struggles against his achievements, for the benefit of posterity. For us now, his death and the manner of it, redeem all his faults. He has thrown the gauntlet very effectively at the rulers of his land who have brought ridicule on sovereignty and the rule of law.

The president understood this. In his victory speech over the capture of Elephant Pass on 10th January, he referred to sinister international conspiracies to ‘belittle these victories, to turn the attention of the people to other directions’. He spoke of efforts to tarnish the image of the army commander with unfounded charges. To these conspiracies he added the murder of Joseph Pararajasingham MP at Christmas mass and the attack on Uthayan Newspapers on World Press Freedom Day. The president might have added that the international conspirators have prevented his police from making any headway with investigations.

All these when the president, as he said, was engaged in giving new life to the unitary status of our country through enlivening democracy. Previously in an IANS interview in September 2007, the president affirmed his position of a unitary state citing his political legacy and constraints. His legacy appears in the report of an SLFP parliamentary group meeting in the wake of the 1958 communal violence against Tamils, in Tarzie Vittachi’s Emergency ‘58, which was censored without the author being physically attacked: “The Tamils will destroy us eventually. Before that happens, I ask the Tamils be settled once and for all” (Pani Illangakoon). “The Tamils are gaining strength in all parts of the country where they are. The Sinhalese are in danger of being liquidated by them” (Sagara Palansuriya). “Destroy them” (Lakshman Rajapakse).

It is a terrible thing for the country and the president to carry the burden of this 60-year legacy, which has mired this country in violence without hope. Victories have been celebrated before over the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians and combatants. It is the glory of a moment, the opium for greater misery to come. It means attacks on civilians and the Press would increase because the truth is what the leaders dare not face.

What the president and government spokesmen have tried to diminish is Lasantha’s greatness in his conscious stand, knowing precisely the evil his honour bade him confront, even unto death. He has followed a proud tradition to which few have attained, but paid a terrible price that is a reflection on our times. Those who must live cheek by jowl with the forces of terror know exactly where the danger lies and whom it comes from and what these forces are about.

Two very legitimate items appearing in the Daily Mirror in April 2007, led to the president’s brother and Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, threatening the paper’s lady editor with some misfortune from the Karuna group and journalist Uditha Jayasinghe with a scarier prospect.

All journalists who valued their independence took the threat as dire a warning. One could see the slow erosion of standards, as papers tried to buy insurance by giving space to hacks who supported the government in an uncompromising military approach to the Tamil problem and whose forays into semantics were the counterpart of covering up crimes of the security forces through violence and intimidation. These highly accomplished persons who were taught in school to play fair on a level playing field may soon be bowling to wickets from which the batsmen have gone six feet under or were stopped at the pavillion.

Here is a quality missing from present reporting, which earned for Uditha Jayasinghe the defence secretary’s sinister rebuke when she tried to represent the plight of Tamil displaced in the piece titled, ‘Mutur IDPs: Battling a manmade tsunami in the guise of war’. She said, “Without even food in their bellies it is at best difficult to predict when these people will have a place to call home and if their lives will ever be rebuilt to include hope and happiness.” The attack on reporting on the plight of Tamil refugees did not stop there.

Journalist Tissainayagam was arrested and cast into a TID cell in March 2008 and is since detained. Justifying the incarceration, Rajiva Wijesinghe in a letter to a major human rights organisation cited the following from Tissainayagam’s writings about the siege of Vaharai as designed to embarrass the Sri Lankan government through false accusations: “Such offensives against the civilians are accompanied by attempts to starve the population by refusing them food as well as medicines and fuel, with the hope of driving out the people of Vaharai and depopulating it. As this story is being written, Vaharai is being subject to intense shelling and aerial bombardment.” The very idea of governance is thrown into ridicule when the attorney general is required to file charges against Tissainayagam on the basis of such. The country is so blinded that all this appears legitimate because the victim is Tamil.

Accurate or not, what Tissainayagam wrote was neither a crime nor an outlandish interpretation of current facts, as seen from the Non Violent Peace Force report for Batticaloa District during November 2006: “... according to figures collected by our teams, there were...between 149 and 177 civilian deaths, 85 combatant deaths, between 217 and 847 civilian injuries, and 68 combatant injuries due to violence...Violence continued to escalate with 21 days on which shelling took place, 21 incidents of aerial bombing and artillery fire.”

Lasantha put it much more strongly in his final testament, “We have also agitated against state terrorism in the so-called war against terror, and made no secret of our horror that Sri Lanka is the only country in the world routinely to bomb its own citizens. For these views we have been labelled traitors, and if this be treachery, we wear that label proudly.” In May 2008, Keith Noyahr, deputy editor of The Nation was abducted and brutally attacked. The Nation was cowed.

The Leader press situated in a high security zone too had been attacked in November 2007. The president ordered a full-scale inquiry. The paper reappeared four days later on a note of defiance, “We shall never surrender our rights to downright thuggery. The public knows whom we refer to. We will prevail and march on, unbowed and unafraid.” The Leader had evidently not sought insurance through tactical compromise.

Against this history, thinking people have a good idea where these influential, well equipped goon squads come from and ultimately under whose authority they operate. There will never be evidence or judicial hearings when the role of the police is principally to suppress evidence. Something recklessly ugly has mushroomed. In the murder of Raviraj MP, UTHR (J) Special Report No 29, also tabled in parliament, alleges that the killers from the Karuna group handled by state intelligence were housed in a Maligawatte temple by a JHU-associated monk, who deals directly with the president; and the EPDP were accessories.

As with Lasantha, proof will never see the light of day. But the people know and this knowledge will haunt the murderers. We, and the people, know that the LTTE murdered Rajani Thiranagama in 1989, but we have no proof. Well-heeled Tamils, who are the counterparts of Sinhalese spin-doctors, have gone to town about legal proof writing reams, but to no avail.

Part of the reason why we are here is the conformist nature of the elite even though we are too far down the line of disintegration to play our usual games. Most of the commissions appointed had some of the best persons in our society. They produced respectable reports, but carefully, spared those at the top, as has become the norm for commissions of inquiry. If the disappearance commissions of the 1990s had worked, several senior officers in the security forces would have gone on record as being responsible for some terrible crimes. The burden of impunity has been passed on to another generation.

Lasantha had already answered those who would cover up by hiding behind the thoroughly debased law enforcement machinery: “In the wake of my death I know you [Mr President] will make all the usual sanctimonious noises and call upon the police to hold a swift and thorough inquiry. But like all the inquiries you have ordered in the past, nothing will come of this one, too. For truth be told, we both know who will be behind my death, but dare not call his name. Not just my life, but yours too, depends on it.”

Several of us have been in our time close to those who defied killers for a principle without flinching and paid the price. Subathiran, a solid democrat killed by the LTTE in 2003 was one of them. We have swallowed the semantics of killers and their agents.

After the LTTE abducted and killed Jaffna University student Vijitharan in 1986, LTTE Jaffna leader Kittu, asked us repeatedly in the Senior Common Room, “Where is the proof?” The damning testimonies left behind by my colleague Rajani are well documented. We exposed the LTTE’s violations because it was as Tamil people our duty towards our community.

After her death when all was dark, our best hope was reform in the south paving the way to an opening in the north-east. We did then find the space to work in the south while being as critical of the government.

The killing of Lasantha firmly places us all in a common dilemma, when a government purporting to eradicate LTTE terrorism becomes instead, its clone. Rajani would not have been surprised. She was keenly aware of the fascist potential of both Sinhalese and Tamil nationalist ideologies.

(Rajan Hoole is the head of UTHR (J), University Teachers for Human Rights, an organization which has attacked both the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government for rights violations. )

Posted by transCurrents on January 17, 2009