| Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese radicals being led by a man from Australia - Kumar Gunaratnam in Melbourne |
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Ironically enough, the leader of the radicals in a Sri Lankan party which espouses the cause of the island’s Sinhalese community is a Tamil. According to the Daily Mirror, the recent attacks on the moderates in the Sinhalese-Marxist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) were inspired by a senior Tamil leader of the party who had just arrived from Australia after a long exile.The paper did not name the leader, but quoted a dissident MP to say that it was this person who had swung the JVP’s alliance with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 1988, when both the JVP and the LTTE were fighting Indian intervention in the island’s ethnic conflict through the controversial India-Sri Lanka Accord of July 1987.
According to Victor Ivan, Editor of Ravaya and a former JVP activist, Gunaratnam is a shadowy person. He is not a member of the politburo or the central committee of the JVP. He returned to Sri Lanka very recently from a long exile abroad. Gunaratnam has had the last word on every critical issue that the party has grappled with. He is the lone Tamil leader in the top echelons of a party, which is almost completely dominated by the Sinhalese. “Kumara is listened to with reverence by the party top brass. The basis of his power puzzles me,” Ivan told NIE. Earlier this week, the JVP’s parliamentary party split, with 10 of the 37 MPs defying the leadership and joining the suspended parliamentary group leader and propaganda secretary, Wimal Weerawansa. The two groups made serious charges against each other, dissidents’ vehicles were hijacked, and according to “The Island” daily, Weerawansa went into hiding following death threats. It is said that the radical party establishment led by Somawansa Amarasinghe had proceeded against Weerawansa under the influence of Gunaratnam. The radicals had been urging the party to totally oppose any devolution of power to the Tamil minority; take a radical Marxist-Leninist approach on economic issues; and whip up xenophobia with regard to foreign and Indian influences. Weerawansa, on the other hand, had taken a softer line, saying Sri Lanka would be harmed if the JVP’s anti-government campaigns weakened President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s focus on fighting Tamil Tiger terrorism and separatism. While Amarasinghe and his radical colleagues went hammer and tongs against alleged political and economic domination of Sri Lanka by India, Weerawansa, the party propaganda secretary, was quiet. According to Friday’s editorial in The Island the radical revivalism in the JVP stems from an anxiety that the party may lose its relevance if it allows Rajapaksa’s moderate Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) to remain popular. The paper feared that a section of the JVP could be toying with the idea of unleashing an armed Marxist insurrection, like it did in 1971 and 1988. In this connection JVP watchers point out that Gunaratnam and Amarasinghe are but vestiges of the 1988-1991 insurrection which claimed an estimated 60,000 lives. http://www.newindpress.com/NewsItems.asp?ID=IEH20080411034950&Page=H&Title=Top+Stories&Topic=0 |
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