| Alleged Sri Lankan Criminal JVP Top Guy Somawansha Amarasinghe in Sydney, Australia |
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 The leader of the JVP and alleged Sri Lankan Criminal JVP Top Guy Somawansha Amarasinghe managed to get his VISA from Australian Immigration Officials and will tour Australia. He is planning to be in Sydney and Melbourne this September 2007. He is also planning to hold public meetings on 15th of September at 4.30pm at the AMWU Auditorium, corner of Parramatta Road & Good Street, Granville. The meeting is organized by JVP core Australian members, Jagath 0419 404 997, Gamini 02 9980 5684 and Tissa 03 9799 8016. A Sri Lankan web forum allege him as a Criminal and says, " I as a citizen of Sri Lanka urge the government to arrest and take the necessary action against the CRIMINAL SOMAWANSA AMARASINGHE, who has violated the criminal law in Sri Lanka, immigration law in Sri Lanka and in the wanted list for several murders."
Who is this Somawansa ? Welcome back Somawansa: Here’s your charge sheet by: Malinda Seneviratne Courtesy: TamilCanadian, 2001 Returning to one’s homeland is always sweet. Returning after more than a decade, sweeter. Returning from exile, self-imposed or otherwise, has to be exquisite. It would not be right to begrudge Somawansa Amarasinghe the obvious joys of retuning home, especially since his party embraced the notion of the "motherland" with such fervour in the late eighties, so much so that Karl Marx and the issue of class was placed in the backseat of the high-speed vehicle that the JVP chose to drive, and so recklessly too. Meeting old friends, relatives and political associates, would have been nice. In these days of high-tech communication, Somanawansa does not have to come to Sri Lanka to get updates of the political situation, the progress of the party, the configuration of political forces, the key issues etc. Still, getting a real pulse for things requires that you walk among live people. This will take time, but I am sure he will soon obtain a more nuanced reading of our society and its major concerns. For now, he can enjoy his "return" and the party can celebrate the arrival of the new "great leader". I wish him and the party a good time and good luck. The arrival aura, however, does not last forever. Even the most polished and most publicised exhibit loses its lustre after a while. With time the appearance becomes less important than efficacy. The problem of Somawansa’s arrival, hero though he is for some, is that he is not just returning home, he is simultaneously revisiting a crime-scene. In his maiden and lengthy campaign speech in Kalutara, Somawansa had dwelled long on the last JVP "insurrection". For the first time, a JVP leader had admitted that the party had actually killed people. He admitted that the JVP and the DJV (Deshapremi Janatha Vyaparaya) were one and the same, although for the last ten years the party had maintained that they were innocent of all killings attributed to the latter organisation. I am willing to ignore the fact that the JVP has lied to the people for the last ten years about the nature of its contribution to the bheeshanaya. What is important is that their leadership has had the courage to admit its mistakes. Better late than never, I suppose. The accolades, however, stop there. Somawansa has said that the JVP is responsible for 6000 deaths. He has argued that since there were a total of 60,000 deaths during that period, if he is sent to jail once, those responsible for all the other killings should serve ten jail sentences. This is skewed logic. If someone who kills sixty people is sentenced to sixty years in prison, would it follow that someone who killed a tenth of that number ought to be out and laughing in six years? No. Every life is precious and if you do not appreciate this you better not call yourself a revolutionary. Somawansa has come up with a new theory to justify the brutality of his party’s past: "Wars are not fought while sipping tea; there are no wars where people don’t get killed." Quite right! Unfortunately, I don’t know which country Somawansa is talking about, and which "war". People dying, people being tortured and killed does not necessarily imply a war. Let me explain. I remember a day in December 1986 when members of the JVP’s student wing abducted the leader of the Independent Students Union, Daya Pathirana, took him to Kindelpitiya and slashed his throat. Pathirana was not carrying a gun. He had not declared war on the JVP, he had not taken up arms. That was the beginning of the JVP’s killing spree. It is called individual terrorism or pudgala thrasthavadaya. There were assasinations, yes. No war. He might remember a much loved and humane individual by the name of Viyaja Kumaratunga. Come to think of it, even Chandrika Bandaranaike, a key figure in the JVP-PA parivasa government, might remember him. When JVP hit squads unleashed a barrage of bullets at him, Vijaya was armed. He was not a casualty in an exchange of fire typical in war situations. He was assasinated. Deva Bandara Senanayake, ex-JVP and eloquent critic of the JVP was killed along with two others during a political rally. Left leaders, trade unionists and supporters were routinely exterminated by the JVP. The JVP pushed these people into the lap of the UNP and from then on it was dog eat dog and the UNP/USA dogs won out in the end. But until then, all that the JVP did in their T-56 war was murdering unarmed people. The victims included local level UNP supporters who were forced to put up signs saying they had resigned from the party. The JVP had an entire handbook of punishments for those who disagreed with their politics. They were a law unto their own. Those in the kamkaru panthiya, bus drivers, conductors, workers, were threatened with death if they did not abide by the party dictates. They knew how to kill. They also knew how to humiliate. Many such people "disappeared". None of them had the money and the contacts to flee the country. All this is not to say that the UNP were blameless. Violence in our society had already been set in motion when the JVP started smelling blood. The UNP fine-tuned the state’s capacity to unleash terror on the people. What the JVP did was to give a "come-on" to the UNP. They invited the bheeshanaya. In some places they "led" by example in the mad rush to be the most ruthless butcher. Six thousand deaths, "Comrade", is nothing to brush aside. It amounts to genocide. These six thousand victims had 12,000 parents and probably several hundred thousand friends and relatives. Their grief would translate into several million tears. The empty spaces left in their lives would be larger than entire continents. The JVP may have killed only 6000. They can’t be charged for all the other killings, sure. But in the case of each and every other murder, each item or torture, they are at least accesories after the fact of mass human slaughter. The JVP admits that we lost the cream of our youth during the bheeshanaya. They ought to admit that they are partly responsible for this national tragedy. Somawansa especially, as the sole surviving members of the JVP leadership, has a lot to answer to. He was the financial secretary of the party beginning from the early eighties, according to an affidavit submitted by former JVP politburo member Vaas Tilakaratne. During the Iran-Iraq war, the JVP received Rs. 2.8 million from the Baath Party of Iraq for supporting their cause. This support included the blowing up of an Iranian ship in the Colombo harbour. What Somawansa did with that money is anybody’s guess, and I supposed that is none of our business, unless of course it was spent on guns and grenades. I remember the JVP’s rabidly anti-Indian stance after the Indo-Lanka Accord was signed in 1987. The people were banned from eating Mysore Dhal. When Somawansa fled the country, as he himself admits, India was his first port of disembarkation. He owes the people of this country an explanation. Was it the EPRLF, the PLOTE or the LTTE that helped him escape? Was the RAW involved? Did his connection to a key minister in the then UNP government, Sirisena Cooray, help? Fleeing an oppressive regime is not wrong. But when you have been party to bringing about the rule of terror, when you have brought in thousands and thousands of people into your movement to fight this terror that you yourself invited, I think there is a moral problem in escaping. I know of at least two student leaders, Dassanayake of the Peradeniya Arts Faculty and Ranjithan Gunaratnam of the Engineering Faculty (former convenor of the Inter University Student Federation) who recognised the party’s terrible, terrible faults but refused to leave the country on moral grounds. They were tortured and killed. I wonder what Somawansa has to say to their parents. Somawansa owes an explanation to all those who sacrificed so much in the name of the country, for all those who died fighting because they believed in people like him. It is not just about saying sorry. He has to reveal the details of his escape and his life thereafter. How and why did he escape in the middle of the aragalaya? Who gave refuge to this gun-toting saranagathaya? These are some of the questions that Somawansa has to answer. JVP supporters in the universities in the early nineties were fond of brushing aside demands for explanation thus: "If we had ten people, five were killed, three are in prison and it is unfair to ask questions from the two who are free". Nonsense! When a "revolutionary" party chooses a political path that contributes to the killing of 60,000 people, they are honour-bound to engage in self-criticism and to promise not to walk that tragic path again. The point is, those numbers are wrong. If one JVP supporter was killed, the other nine were innocent bystanders, their only crime being that they were born in the wrong decade. For you must know, Somawansa, that it was not just the JVP that suffered. Nothing you can offer can compensate for the loss of friends, lovers, loved-ones and the immense and lasting suffering that resulted from your party’s adventure which strengthened and entrenched capitalism. I don’t know what you did in Europe, what kind of lifestyle you led and what kind of resistance you offered to the violent processes of capital extraction and expansion. We paid a huge bill for your adventure and your theatrics. What part of that bill did you pay? In Kalutara, the "great leader" has promised that his party has not abandoned the idea of armed struggle. He said that if the law of the land was being violated, the JVP would seek a UN resolution to take up arms. This is not a joke. The political subtext of that statement is that the JVP is now a pawn of the USA (a claim that the Old Left has maintained for a long time), for the United Nations is for all practical purposes a creature of the United States. The JVP’s democratic costume, we need to understand therefore is just that, a costume. The creature that lives underneath those beautiful garments carries a loaded machine gun and who knows what else! Somawansa could not have been unaware of the JVP’s latest crime against the people of this country, the so-called parivasa arrangement with the PA. His party has arranged for the PA to go to the polls with the state machinery intact. The JVP is no longer harassed by PA thugs. The JVP has almost as much sway over the state media as has the PA. These are victories for the party. They also constitute telling defeats for democracy. Perhaps this is why the JVP, so keen on including an independent media commission in the 17th Amendment in the pre-parivasa days, virtually wrote it out as far as this election is concerned. In 1971 and in 1987-90, the JVP put our society and in particular the most vulnerable sections of it on probation. Today, through the parivasa, the JVP has once again put the people on probation. I think it is preposterous that the JVP is asking us to say "thank you". Somawansa, as the sole surviving member of the JVP’s terrorising politiburo, has to answer for all the fear, all the tears, all the losses, for every charred dream, for every shred of hope splattered with blood, for our lost tharunyaya, and other things besides. Time will tell us Somawansa’s exact location in the party hierarchy, the influence he wields within it and the extent to which the JVP has transformed itself at its ideological core (which by the way has always remained a closely guarded secret). Until such time, the sensible thing to do is to put the JVP on probation. It would be downright silly to offer them a blank cheque. This is no longer Tilvin Silva’s JVP. It is Somawansa Amarasinghe’s JVP. The blood of 6000 people are on his hands and it is not easily washed away. Only a nation committed to self-destruction will give such a man a second chance. External Link: http://www.lankanewspapers.com/news/2006/9/8501_2.html |
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