“For Brutus was Caesar’s angel”

Sambandan Natyam (The dance of the Palmyra sugar coated fairy if not the Trojan horse)

By Nallavan Sambandan

Sambandan is a very ‘nalla’ (good) man. He has provided SL a truth and reconciliation certificate from the TNA that amounts to a clearance of all its charges against the SL government and its peoples by his latest strategic decision. His earlier act was to be the mouth piece, propagandist, tale carrier, touchable kinsman of the fascist LTTE leaving him open to charges of collaborating with the sworn enemy of the state. He was never charged as he was actually a puppet and puppets even if they imitate Lord Haw Haw, the British traitor during WW2 who became a mouth piece for Hitler, are not subject to law. Sambandan’s selection of fascists in the Nazi mould as role models was obviously a light fantastic passing fancy even if it took 30 years to trip.
Sambandan’s TNA carried out a global campaign to blacken the SL state’s lawful response to the LTTE, an armed terrorist group. The TNA alleged that the state and its army was committing genocide, a holocaust, extermination of the Tamil people, raping their women, burning and starving et al. It said after the war while sitting on their comfortable back sides in the despised ‘air conditioned’ Colombo and not in the Wanni that the rescued 300,000 LTTE ‘human shields’ were being kept in ‘concentration’ not IDP camps. He has recanted all this in his reincarnation.
It further alleged that the SL state had been on a path of subjugating the Tamil people since Independence. It quite rightly pointed its wavering stubby fingers at 1977 when the then President JRJ said ‘If the Tamils want war they will have it’. Mind you this was not the insurgents who were being targeted but a specific SL community. Ranil W did not resist or protest that statement. JRJ sent his nephew Chief of Staff Brigadier Tissa Weeratunge (was it not nepotism Mr. Sambandan by the Uncle Nephew Party?) to Jaffna to conduct the ‘war’. The powers he was given out-stripped the powers of the incumbent army commander Maj Gen Denis Perera.

Flagrant politicization

There was no Chief of Defence Staff then to protest that his powers were being usurped either. Ranil kept the silence of the grave at this flagrant politicization of the army with his favourite ‘impunity’. Those powers included the suppression of the habeas corpus act which led immediately to the strategy of ‘bumping off’ suspected LTTE cadres and placing their severed heads on culverts in Jaffna, an outright campaign of counter terror. In 1981 the Jaffna library was burned to the ground, an act of barbarity that was compared to a similar act by the German army in WW1 in Louvain in 1914. (It was rebuilt by Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar whose assassination by the LTTE was not mourned by TNA and a well known section of the Sinhalese who now wish to claim a share in the defeat of the LTTE).
The war declaration eventually led to the killing of 13 soldiers in Tinnevely, Jaffna in 1983. It left hundreds of Tamils brutally killed, maimed, raped and homeless all over SL for no reason except that they were Tamils and most visibly in Colombo. Later armoured cars which were not allowed to go beyond Elephant Pass by Gen Denis Perera were inserted right into Jaffna town and did cause some serious concerns when they faced up to civil protests such as the classic ‘Jaffna Mothers’ marches to which the new army commander Weeratunge had no answer except the application of excessive, brutal and random force. The ghosts of Louvain where the Germans rampaged extensively for long after the burning of the library had come to haunt Jaffna in all their awesome ferocity. The visit of the German ambassador to Jaffna recently may have also been an ‘assessment’ if not a comparison.
SL after 1983 was considered a pariah state for nearly a decade. LTTE coffers filled up with contributions from the Tamil Diaspora as a result. The local capitalist kept media reveled in calling the post UNP government(s) a ‘banana republic’ to counter the ‘pariah’ charge. It revitalized the Diaspora. The ‘war’ or the ‘struggle’ had been irrevocably escalated. Later the bogey of mass poisoning, gassing and even the use of tactical nuclear weapons was considered by the LTTE.
Even if Sambandan has forgotten all this the Tamils have not, such was their agony.
The UNP spokes person Ananda Tissa de Alwis said it was the JVP that was responsible for the 1983 carnage and the next target would be the Christians. Maybe that was the plan but whose? The JVP quickly went under ground. It did not need Sherlock Holmes to reveal the real perpetrators.

Flaming fury

The JVP having well prepared itself emerged in all its flaming fury in 1988 to prove it had nothing against the Tamils (except those on the estates) by taking on what the Tamils called the Sinhala only army. It was responsible for the wanton, bestial, inhuman and cruel killing of 60,000 Sinhalese in just one year or over 150 a day. If the JVP had not been stopped then, there may soon have been no more Sinhalese to be killed. Genocide cannot be done by the same race but the JVP came very close to doing it. It had exceeded the LTTE’s efforts in terrorizing the Sinhalese.
For many years thereafter the army recruiting levels dropped dramatically.
This terror was supposed to be the JVP’s response to the presence of the IPKF that had been inducted by an acquiescing President JRJ. It however calculatingly but not surprisingly kept well clear of the IPKF and also of the LTTE. Confused and farcical behaviour is the forte of the JVP for which its rank and file was sacrificed. The TNA and the LTTE must have been delirious with joy. This 60,000 equaled the number killed (at 200 a year) in quelling the 30 year LTTE separatist war. Or was it quelled? Gen Fonseka himself did say that the LTTE would continue as insurgents and terrorists and that a threat exists even now as itinerant LTTE suicide bombers including one female were still open for business.
Will Sambandan say ‘sorry’ if one strikes? Fortunately intrepid and skilled formation and battalion commanders on the ground thought otherwise and completely destroyed the remnants of the LTTE.
Finally the Sunday Leader even announced to the world that the SL army ‘shot white flag surrendees’ at Nandi Kadal in Mullativu in the last stages of the war quoting as far as the international community and the UN were concerned, incredulously an impeccable source.
What now Sambandan? Will it be Et tu Brute (the actual words were “and you my son” - Brutus was Caesar’s son) or La Dolce Vita (sweet life) which has not been too harmful to you while 60,000 to 100,000 did the dying and the suffering? Who will Brutus be even though the oration at Colombo’s Lupercal has already been delivered by you?