“The Sri Lankan armed forces must be swiftly
strengthened. President Rajapakse’s impending visit to China
must be used for the purpose, sealing a weapons agreement and/or
securing an outright grant which will enable us to buy the
weapons on the open market. The president should follow this up
with a visit to Russia, which must also focus on security and
struggle against ethnic separatist terrorism. Both Russia and
China (especially Russia) manufacture excellent ship-to-ship
missiles, which can give an edge to the badly battered Sri
Lankan navy.” Dayan Jayatilleka –
“Death Of A Thousand Cuts” in Lanka Academic – April 23, 2006
“President Rajapakse should appoint the TULF leader Mr
Anandasangaree as special representative, assisted by SCOPP’s
Kethesh Loganathan, to hammer out a devolution deal in
consultation with the non-Tiger Tamil parties, the politicians
of Tamil Nadu (known to Mr Sangaree), and New Delhi(where he
will be welcome), as well as the Sri Lankan parties in
Parliament.
Mr Anandasangaree belongs to the old Federal Party tradition,
and therefore has longstanding Tamil nationalist credentials. He
is also a veteran parliamentarian, and is untainted by
association with any kind of violence, unlike the other
non-Tiger Tamil groups. He has good relations with JVP and JHU,
who would shoot down his devolution proposals at the cost of
exposing themselves as extremists.” Dayan Jayatilleka –
“War Clowds, Silver Lining” in Asian Tribune – May 5, 2006
“We need devolution of such magnitude,
delivered through the legislature with such speed, as to (a)
neutralise/pre-empt Tamil Nadu (b) shift India off the fence to
a posture of active support for Sri Lanka (interdiction of sea
Tiger supply ships) and (c) motivate the US into giving us
satellite intelligence, dedicated ground attack aircraft and
attack helicopters.”
Dayan Jayatilleka – “Getting The Message” in Lanka Academic –
June 7, 2006
Introduction
Sri Lanka is at cross roads at the moment, wondering whether to
choose war or peace. President Mahinda Rajapaksa has to choose one
or the other, sooner rather than than later, to decide his political
future. The cease-fire signed in February 2002 between the Sri
Lankan Government (GoSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
(LTTE), and the peace process that followed this cease-fire
facilitated by Norway and backed by the EU, US and Japan, recognise
the LTTE as the representatives of the Tamils in Sri Lanka and an
equal partner with the GoSL for this purpose.
Although the whole peace process came to a standstill during
President Chandrika’s time due to her political rivalry with the
former Prime Minister Ranil Wickramasinghe, after Rajapakse became
the president (with the help of the Marxist and Singhalese extremist
parties such as JVP and JHU), the country plunged into a state of
violence and low intensity war. This is mainly because of the
pressure put on Rajapakse by his allies, the JVP& JHU, and by the
hawks who surround him as advisers to annihilate the LTTE militarily
and then impose a solution to the Tamil demand for their right to
self-determination.
Dayan Jayatilleka is a senior lecturer in political science at the
University of Colombo. He writes about this conflict often in
over-heated and forceful terms. NGOs based in Colombo promoting
peace believe Jayatilleka is very influential in Rajapakse’s
decision-making process and is one of those guiding Rajapakse
towards the path of what was once unfortunately termed “war for
peace.” The head of one such NGO expressed this opinion recently
when this author met him in Europe and he was highly concerned.
This brings us to the question whether Jayatilleka is a real adviser
to Rajapakse or whether the NGOs are imagining this because of his
high rhetoric writings on the conflict.
To decide whether or not to take seriously what Jayatilleke says,
one needs to know more about Jayatilleke’s past, rather than just
the high profile he has earned by the political noise he has been
constantly making. This author met Jayatilleke on almost a daily
basis for a few years, when he was an undergraduate student at the
University of Peradeniya in Kandy at a time this author had just
started lecturing in the Agriculture Faculty of the same University.
During his student days Jayatilleke was a strong JVP supporter
and played a leading role in all the students’ demonstrations
organised by the JVP at the university. Jayatilleke was an admirer
of the Tamil rebel leaders at that time, particularly the then
prominent leader the late Mr. Umamaheswaran of PLOTE (People’s
Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam). LTTE leader Velupillai
Prabakaran was not in the limelight at that time. Those were the
days when posters carrying the photographs of the most wanted Tamil
rebels were displayed in public places. Jayatilleke had lengthy
discussions with this author admiring these Tamil militants and
their struggle for independence. When this author left Sri Lanka for
his post-graduate studies in 1978 he lost direct contact with
Jayatilleke.
Jayatilleke appeared on this author’s radar screen again only when
he became a Cabinet Minister in the now-defunct North-East
Provincial Council (NEPC), a regional council created to give more
say to the Tamils in government through the infamous 13th Amendment
to the constitution under the Indo-Lanka Accord. This accord was
signed between the then Indian Prime Minister Late Rajeev Gandhi and
the then Sri Lankan President Late J.R. Jayawardena. Before this,
for a period, Jayatilleke had to leave Sri Lanka clandestinely with
the help of the Tamil militants to escape from the JVP that was
hunting for his head. After this short stint at the NEPC,
Jayatilleke was an adviser to the then President late Premadasa.
President Premadasa not only could not prosecute the war against the
LTTE successfully, stop the war, or find a peaceful solution, but
also could not save his life from his adversaries.
After migrating to Australia in 1989, this author has been following
Jayatilleke's media contributions to finding a solution to the
conflict in Sri Lanka closely because this author also started his
own contributions. As a result, this author has appeared in two
Australian TV documentaries on the Sri Lankan national conflict
alongside Jayatilleke. The latest was just after Karuna defected
from the LTTE and it was a debate on this subject between this
author and Jayatilleke.
Jayatilleke’s past and his political opportunism
In Sri Lankan universities student unions are dominated by leftist
oriented students, mainly from the arts faculties. Many leftist
political leaders in Sri Lanka have their origin in these unions.
Following the footstep of prominent leftist leaders, Jayatilleke,
who was a revolutionary in the 1970s, used the then popular JVP
bandwagon amongst the students to project himself as a potential
future leader. I have seen Jayatilleke leading student protest
marches on campus and addressing student rallies.
Jayatilleke, holder of a First Class Honours Degree in Political
Science and winner of a Fulbright scholarship, was once a doctoral
student in Political Sociology at the State University of New York.
Jayatilleke believed in revolutionary politics at that time strongly
enough that he dropped out of graduate school in favour of activism,
returned to Sri Lanka and engaged himself in full time revolutionary
politics.
He was part of an underground group called “Vikalpa Kandayama”
and Jayatilleke and his comrades got armed and trained. According to
Jayatilleke, the idea was that the non-LTTE groups among the Tamils
and the non-JVP groups among the Singhalese could link up and
prevent what they thought of as the terrible polarisation of
fundamentalism on both sides. Unfortunately, as the dynamics of
ethnic conflict were too entrenched for this utopian idea to allow
the two groups to work together, this idea did not work. Some of
them got killed at the hands of either the JVP or the State armed
forces.
Others had to go underground. Last year Jayatilleke confessed to
Philip Gourevitch of “The New Yorker” magazine that he received arms
training from the EPDP leader - and a Cabinet Minister in the
present government - Mr. Douglas Devananda. Jayatilleke spent a good
part of his underground period as an exile in India with the help of
the non-LTTE Tamil militant groups he was associated with and,
during this time, he made friends in the Indian Intelligence Agency
that was using these Tamil militant groups to keep the Sri Lankan
government under their control. In 1987 he was indicted, in
absentia, in the Colombo High Court as the first accused on 14
counts, including conspiracy to overthrow the State through
violence. The then EPRLF leader Late Mr. Pathmanaba was also
indicted with him.
When Jayatilleke was living underground he must have seen a
political future in the Sri Lanka Mahajana Party (SLMP) that was
founded in 1984 by the former President Chandrika Bandaranayake
Kumarathunga (CBK) and her husband Vijaya Kumarathunga (VK), a
charismatic movie star. The Kumarathungas left the Sri Lanka Freedom
Party (SLFP), the party of the Bandaranayakes, to form the SLMP and
Vijaya entered politics to promote a multi-ethnic, federalist policy
for Sri Lanka. Jayatilleke later became a Central Committee member
of the SLMP. Vijaya was murdered by the JVP in early 1988 and with
that the future of the SLMP was sealed.
Under the Indo-Lanka Accord of 1987 Jayatilleke received an amnesty
and, when his allies in the EPRLF was installed by the Indians as
the governors of the then newly-created North-East Provincial
Council (NEPC) in late 1988 to give more political autonomy for the
Tamils, Jayatilleke was nominated as one of the 5 Cabinet Minsters
of the Council to represent the Singhalese, as a Central Committee
Member of the SLMP. Thus he became the Minister of Planning in this
regional government. Jayatilleke's title as Cabinet Minister was
very short lived. He had to resign this position 6 months after he
assumed office, due to a conflict in policy with the rest of the
Cabinet.
By this time President late Mr Ranasinge Premadasa had replaced his
own rightist UNP party predecessor, President late Mr. J.R.
Jayawardene, who was behind the Indo-Lanka Accord. President
Premadasa campaigned during the presidential election promising to
send back the Indian Peace Keeping Forces (IPKF) deployed in the
North-East of the country under the Indo-Lanka Accord. The JVP, that
had become the arch enemy of Jayatilleke by this time, started a
violent campaign in the south of the country against the government
demanding to send the IPKF out of the country. The JVP, using this
opportunity, was involved in mass murders of their rivals,
especially UNP supporters.
Jayatilleke, being back in Sri Lanka and having identified himself
with mainstream politics after accepting the Cabinet post in the
NEPC, had to worry about his safety and his political future.
Therefore, Jayatilleke decided to make the huge political somersault
to abandon his revolutionary comrades and support the Colombo-based
Singhalese political elite. Jayatilleke approached Late President
Premadasa, who was dealing at that time with the JVP rebellion
against his party supporters, readily embraced Jayatilleke as
President Premadasa knew that Jayatilleke had insider knowledge of
the NEPC and Indian affairs and, hence, might know how to get rid of
the IPKF quickly. Jayatilleke quickly won President Premadasa’s
confidence and became an important adviser. President Premadsa
managed to send the IPKF home and quell the JVP rebellion, but his
advisers could not save his life from his adversaries. President
Premadasa was assassinated by a suicide bomber at the 1993 May Day
Rally in the heart of Colombo.
The 1994 presidential election was won by President Chandrika as a
SLFP candidate, one of the founders of the SLMP in which Jayatilleke
had been a Central Committee member, and she had seen Jayatilleke’s
political somersault during her predecessor’s regime, so she could
not entertain Jayatilleke advising her. Therefore, Jayatilleke’s
presidential advisory role started with President Premadasa and also
ended with him. However, Jayatilleke’s regular political analysis
columns in various media make some people to think that he is still
a presidential adviser. Someone may have to ask President Rajapaksa
to confirm this.
What is DJ’s contribution to Sri Lanka now?
Apart from teaching Political Science at the University of Colombo
(one needs to ask his students to verify whether he still imparts
Marxism and Leninism, which he strongly believed in, at least in the
past) Jayatilleke writes political analysis very regularly about the
conflict in newspapers such as The Island and web-sites like the
Asian Tribune. When one follows what he writes now on a regular
basis, a few observations will become obvious:
A) Jayatilleke is concerned that things are not happening and
decisions are not being made by the government in the way he would
like. One might therefore infer that either he is no longer an
adviser to the President, or the current President does not listen
to his advice.
B) Jayatilleke has two old enemies, the JVP and the LTTE. He wanted
to exterminate them when he joined the revolutionary movement, the
Vikulpa Kandayama. Both have grown in enormously more than he
expected and therefore he is a frustrated man and would like to take
revenge.
C) Jayetilleka relishes using his flowery English vocabulary in
criticising these enemies in whatever he writes, even if what he
writes is out of context.
D) Admirably, for personal or political reasons, Jayetilleka does
not like human rights violations committed against innocent
civilians.
E) Jayetilleka has this dream that any political solution to the
conflict should be found by annihilating the LTTE. To achieve this
aim, he would like to convince the international community that the
Tigers are international terrorists and he wants to have the Indians
and Americans come to the aid of Sri Lanka.
F) Jayetilleka agrees that there should be maximum devolution to the
North-East region to satisfy the aspirations of the Tamil-speaking
people. But whether it should be under a Unitary State or United
State, he cannot decide - or does not want to decide - so that he
could switch back and forth between the two options, depending on
the mood of the Singhalese people and their political parties.
If one reads the three papers I have quoted from at the top and
another paper titled “How to beat the Tigers” published in the Asian
Tribune on 25.06.06, observations I have mentioned above will become
obvious.
Through these papers:
In April, he advised that Sri Lanka should not go to war now, but
when Sri Lankan Security Forces are better prepared and with the
world on the Sri Lankan side. He advocated Sri Lanka to use
anti-LTTE Tamil forces to weaken the LTTE. He said Federalism is
simply not on and devolution only under a Unitary set up is
acceptable. “The issue is not whether federalism is desirable or not
(personally, I think some form of it is); it is whether it is
feasible, given public opinion. Sri Lanka is a democracy and the
electorate has clearly indicated its preference for a unitary, not a
federal system.”
In May, Jayetilleka said “So the Sri Lankan forces are no longer
paralysed, and are giving battle. Every time they do so, and inflict
casualties on the Tigers, it is an act of liberation, in the
psychological sense...”. He justified why India and US should act
against LTTE terrorism and help the Sri Lankan security forces. He
also suggested that the President should use a Tamil leader who was
rejected by the Tamil electorate, Mr. Anandasangaree, to hammer out
a devolution deal in consultation with non-Tiger Tamil parties. Mr.
Anandasangaree has not turned up on President Rajapaksa’s radar and,
therefore, this President is not taking Jayatilleka’s advice
yet.
In early June, in the aftermath of the EU message after they imposed
restrictions on the LTTE and the message of the Co-Chairs to both
sides, Jayetilleka lamented that both sides have been equally warned
and Sri Lanka needs the international community, but the LTTE is not
dependant on them. He complained that the international community
has asked for maximum devolution from the Sri Lankan government, but
the government has nothing on the table and he worriedly emphasised
that the international community has asked for a solution within a
united (not unitary) Sri Lanka. He concluded, “As far as world
opinion goes, we are all in the dock.”
In late June, Jayetilleke, in promoting University of Chicago’s
Professor Robert A. Pape’s idea of “killing as many of this
generation of terrorists as possible while simultaneously beginning
to terminate the …policies and presence that motivate our present
enemies and, if continued, will motivate greater numbers in the next
generation” to defeat the Tigers, he again was a worried man that,
even the short-lived media spotlight on the indictment of the Tigers
over the Kebitigollawe bus bombing shifted to stinging condemnations
of the Sri Lankan armed forces from quarters as diverse as the
UTHR-J, AI, the website of the US Catholic Bishop’s Conference, the
BBC and the mainstream political leaders of Tamil Nadu. Jayetilleka
has also expressed his worries about the developing changes in the
Indian political system, now seen as sympathetic towards the plight
of Tamils in Sri Lanka similar to what prevailed in the 1980s.
Realising that under this changing scenario, federalism or
quasi-federalism is unavoidable in Sri Lanka in the future,
Jayetilleka says that “However India for its part must understand
that to be implementable and sustainable, there must be a ‘nexus’
(Delhi-speak of the 1980s) between federalism or quasi-federalism
and US and Indian security guarantees for the Sri Lankan state.” In
another way of putting it, he says that, “federalism of any sort
must be under an Indo-US strategic umbrella, and embedded in
security partnership between our three countries.” Jayetilleka
thinks that only this partnership can assuage historic fears,
provide incentives for the Sri Lankan military, and contain the
extremists of the North and South.
From being a revolutionary, Jayetilleka has evolved through being a
Provincial Cabinet Minister and a Presidential Adviser into an
academic and a political commentator. But all his present writings
and the inconsistency one finds in what he suggests as solutions,
obviously Jayatilleka at the moment is a confused and
politically frustrated individual.
When I stop and think of my friend during my undergraduate days,
Dayan Jayetilleka, it reminds me to compare him with the famous
Englishman and space fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke who opted
to retire in Sri Lanka and continue his writing. But most of what
Sir Arthur C. Clarke writes as fiction has either becomes reality or
been used by moviemakers. It is a pity that what Jayetilleka writes
these days is not only ignored by the President, politicians and
even his former comrades-in-arms, but remains printed on paper or
appear computer screens to be used as casual reading by those who
browse for reading material on the Sri Lankan conflict.
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