The white flag issue is buried

One thing that’s very good about Nalin de Silva is that even at the worst of times, he can often be guaranteed to speak the perspicuous truth.
In a voice that stands out of the Babel of static, Nalin de Silva recently wrote in a website piece, about the whole white-flag story that has been a lingering recurring narrative in the war’s aftermath.
Nalin de Siva offers a brilliantly out-of-the-box narrative about the white flag affair in which, according to some narrators, the civilian wing of the LTTE comprising of Pullidevan and Nadesan etc., approached the army to surrender with white flags, and were either shot dead by the Sri Lankan forces, or shot dead by the LTTE cadres who did not want them to give themselves up.
According to de Silva, these rather basic and linear narratives conceal what’s probably the real truth about the story. Says Silva that the planned stratagem of the LTTE was to, in plan A, somehow to smuggle out Pullidevan and other such LTTE top guns to some Western nation, where they would be able to proclaim Eelam and do untold damage to the Sri Lankan state, by fabricating stories about what ostensibly happened - according to them — in the final days of the war.
However, Silva then states that the conscious plan of the LTTE was, if plan A failed, to go with plan B, which was to get one LTTE leader to shoot the rest of the surrendering LTTE civilian leaders, so that a piece of tragic theatre is created, whereby the LTTE could charge the Sri Lankan state for war-crimes.
This kind of gallows end-game strategy cannot be put past the LTTE, which is notorious for its cyanide carrying cynical proclivities.
Silva’s narrative raises the possibility of the ghosts of the LTTE being with us even though the LTTE itself now may be as good as dead.
Somebody had written recently that the question of war crimes does not die and keeps recurring against the Sri Lankan state. But one might as well add that it does not die precisely because there is a dangerous media narrative that keeps the issue on the boil. This narrative is fuelled by tall stories and fabrications about the so-called white flag surrender issue by Eelam lobbyists.
We raise our hat to Nalin de Silva for seeing behind the tissue of lies that passes off for legitimate discourse. Of course most of us saw that the Tiger and the post-Tiger narrative about the white flag issue was flawed.
That’s the truth — but very few people went so far as to realize that there could have been an entirely pre-planned vicious attempt in the entire ‘surrender’’ drama, to ensnare Sri Lanka in a perpetual bind as far as the issue of “war crimes ‘’ is concerned.
The truth about the surrender issue should be relentlessly perused, and if Nalin de Silva is right, there must be a way of finding out whether his version was indeed the diabolical Tiger plan.
If it was, the game is up.
As Silva says, nobody can dismiss or pooh-pooh the notion that an organization that is so cynical as to give cyanide vials to teenage soldiers, cannot be so cynical as to stage a tragic surrender drama that is calculated to keep the Sri Lankan state in a bind in perpetuity over so-called “war crimes.”
The issue really is not which brigade was there under whose command when the so-called Tiger leaders came forward to surrender.
The issue is that one of their own had a motive to shoot them — a carefully planned motive - - and that therefore the whole theory about one or another Brigade of the Sri Lankan army shooting at these surrendees sounds so ludicrous, that the entire story falls flat.
This editorialist thinks that Nalin de Silva is the hero of the piece, to arrive at a conclusion that very probably is the truth or approximates the truth.
His perspicuous thinking puts him in the league of the ideologues of the effort against the LTTE —- those such as the late H. L. de Silva, and the ideologues who, through the praxis, deconstructed the LTTE piece by piece - - - such as the late Laxman Kadirgarmar, for instance.
It’s our opinion Silva has blown the lid off this whole war crimes projection against Sri Lanka, and the only thing that is left to do is to give his article such wide publicity in the local and then the international media that no Alston or Ban ki-Moon, or any other interloper, would be able ever to use the war crimes cry against this country again, without being laughed out of Court.