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Who is to blame?
Betrayal of the Sinhala Nation by K. H. J. Wijayadasa. Reviewed by Hemantha Warnakulasuriya
One of the most outstanding civil servants of our time, K. H. J. Wijayadasa's book 'Betrayal of the Sinhala Nation' was launched on April 26. In 'Betrayal of the Sinhala Nation', Mr. Wijayadasa has shown that the Eastern Province was never the homeland of the Tamil people and the Interim Self Governing Authority (ISGA) proposals would ring the death knell to the Sinhala people.

These contentions will raise many an eyebrow and will clearly appeal to the constituency Mr. Wijayadasa caters for, which is the Sinhala Buddhist majority. On the other hand, the pacifists, who Wijayadasa derides as 'peace mongers', will dismiss the analogy in the book, on their pre-perceived contention that he is another Sinhala racist and uncompromising chauvinist, who is against any negotiated settlement. The independent and non-partisan reader will be confused and confounded as Mr. Wijayadasa asserts that the ISGA proposals should never be the basis for discussions.

Is ISGA a betrayal?
Nonetheless, having read the book more than once, I believe it is the duty of every citizen of the country, whether Sinhalese, Tamil or Muslim, to read the book and come to their own conclusions on whether the IGSA proposals are a betrayal of the Sinhala nation. No right-thinking person could reject Wijayadasa's contention that most politicians, who sing hosannas of the ISGA proposals, have either not read them or understood them or even analysed the implications.

It is a strange but important coincidence that H. L. de Silva, P.C. expressed similar sentiments on the peace accord, which has come to be termed as the precursor to the ISGA proposals. A few weeks before the launch of Wijayadasa's book, Mr. de Silva, addressing the convention of the Bar Association of Sri Lanka, inducting Desmond Fernando, P.C. as its new President, made a strong criticism of the Cease Fire Agreement and the subsequent peace process. "The CFA of 2002 overlooks a shortsighted confinement of military advantage and concessions to the rebel group with no productive safeguards to the interests of the state in the event of a resumption of the conflict. As far as state sovereignty is concerned, the worst feature of the CFA was the recognition that the rebels were to remain in exclusive control of the areas over which they were in armed possession while permitting them free access to government controlled areas in the North and East provincial areas and carry on, what was euphemistically termed, political work, which is only a short hand expression for the imposition of a totalitarian regime and eliminating all forms of dissent and opposition of the Tamil people in the so-called government controlled areas in the North East" he said.

Though Mr. Wijayadasa concludes that the ISGA proposals is tantamount to a virtual betrayal of the Sinhala nation, it is important to note that in the same constituency there are divergent views on whether the betrayal of the Sinhala nation came into being with the signing of the Cease Fire Agreement or with the ISGA proposals.

It is unreasonable to overlook the fact that H.L. de Silva, P.C. supported the taking over of the Ministries by the President, which resulted in a General Election and the defeat of the UNF government. Mr. Wijayadasa was closely associated with the UNP hierarchy when the Cease Fire Agreement was signed.

Mr. Wijayadasa on the other hand talks of the Cease Fire Agreement in laudatory terms and states that it was a significant achievement even though it was a one-sided document very much in favour of the Tamil terrorists. Then he adds that the UNP should be congratulated on it and the UPFA should be congratulated for hanging on to it. Mr. de Silva unequivocally calls the Cease Fire Agreement and the Peace Accord a horse-deal and totally partisan to the LTTE.

If the Cease Fire Agreement is a horse-deal, why did Mr. Wijayadasa applaud it? And, as Mr. de Silva asserts, if it would help the terrorists to gain control over the North and East and prepare themselves for an eventual war, which would lead them to a separate Eelam State, why do the politicians, whilst in the opposition, express similar views and somersaults, when in power, completely contradicting their original stand.

Distorting history
Many politicians, depending on which side they are, would call the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayagam Pact, Dudley Senanayake-Chelvanayagam Pact, the reasonable use of Tamil Bill, Sirimavo Bandaranaike-Thondaman Pact to defeat the UNP, as acts of betrayal of the Sinhala nation.

Mr. Wijayadasa, in his uninhibited anger and resentment against the Tamil terrorists, uses every cliche in his book to describe the LTTE and its supremo Prabhakaran as the archetypical terrorists. In doing so he sometimes distorts history. For example, he states "During this period of 20 years, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is said to be the most ruthless terrorist organisation in the world which got away with more murders than Hitler, including Buddhist monks, infants, women and children. They committed more genocide, irrespective of age, race, religion or language, than Pol Pot, of not only Sinhalese and Muslims but also Tamils who were politically opposed to them". Though there is no systematic accounting of the total number of persons killed by the Nazis or its supremo Hitler, during World War II, the closest study available shows that the total number of persons killed by Hitler and Pol Pot far exceeds the number killed by the LTTE or Prabhakaran.

Political assasinations
Wijayadasa asserts that the LTTE was responsible for the assassinations of the largest number of political leaders ever. Let us dispassionately analyse how the Sinhala majority reacted to these assassinations. The assassination of Lalith Athulathmudali was so well scripted and drafted by Pottu Amman, that even after local forensic experts and Scotland Yard investigators showed, without any manner of doubt, that the LTTE was responsible for the assassination, the Sinhalese leaders, including Mrs. Athulathmudali and Gamini Dissanayake, for petty political advantage lent dubious support to the LTTE by trying to establish, through a judicial circus called the Presidential Commission, that the UNP was responsible for this dastardly crime and to exonerate the LTTE of it.

Soon after President Premadasa was killed by the LTTE, the Sinhala nation lit crackers in joy, as if to pay a debt of gratitude to Prabhakaran for having killed the killer of Lalith Athulathmudali and Kobbekaduwa. Gamini Dissanayake, who ventured to vindicate the LTTE, was killed by the LTTE with several other Sinhala political leaders. But the Sinhala majority, as if to justify the dastardly crime, voted Chandrika Kumaratunga to power with the largest percentage ever polled by a Presidential candidate.

Before long, in another attempt to annihilate the Sinhala political leadership, the LTTE attempted to assassinate Mrs. Kumaratunga. When she was recovering from her injuries, Southern intellectuals made a pronouncement that she was not mentally fit to carry out the functions of the Presidency. Similarly, when Rajiv Gandhi was killed, India was furious. Jayalalitha, who was the most virulent critic of the LTTE after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, lost at the Parliamentary elections and the DMK, who openly supported the LTTE, won the Parliamentary elections and has become a crucial and important partner of the government of Sonia Gandhi and the Congress Party. Thus, the Indian government will not raise a finger to arrest Prabhakaran - a fugitive from justice, to keep their coalition intact.

Historical impact
One of the most important revelations made by Mr. Wijayadasa is to disprove the theory that the Eastern Province was a part of the traditional homeland of the Tamils. He should be commended for his research and collecting of other evidence, historical or otherwise, to prove that the Eastern Province was never the traditional homeland of the Tamils as claimed by the LTTE. Any political analyst should have the commitment to tell the whole truth, and then only can an independent person concur that the work is an act of sustained scholarship and research.

Mr. Wijayadasa has been able to debunk the theory of the Eastern Province being the traditional homeland of the Tamils. In the appendix to his book the Cease Fire Agreement (CFA), Interim Self Governing Authority (ISGA) and the Oslo Statement, are published.

Shared responsibility
Wijayadasa contends that the betrayal of the Sinhala nation is about to take place if the government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) agrees to negotiate with the LTTE on the ISGA proposals. Wijedasa's words echo in my ears: "The Sinhala 'peace mongers' have so far not realised that the ISGA is nothing but an invitation to the GOSL by the LTTE to discuss its own death and demise as precursor to the creation of the separate State of Tamil Eelam. The ISGA assumes that death is to take place quietly, unwept and unsung ..... Therefore I do not understand why the Sinhala politicians are bending forwards, backwards, sideways and falling prostrate before the warlord to handover the Eastern Province as well to the terrorists on a platter".

The Sinhala nation has been betrayed, firstly by the Kandyan chieftains through signing of a pact with the British on the March 2, 1815 and later by the Sinhala politicians on numerous occasions. The LTTE knows the ethos of these politicians who masquerade as leaders of the Sinhala people. The Sinhalese are equally responsible for having elected them.

It is the Sinhala leaders who, for the last twenty years, prevented a peaceful settlement of the ethnic issue and strengthened the hand of Prabhakaran. The Sinhala nation is equally responsible for the impasse as they have been partners of the betrayal.

When writing is also bearing witness
A Long Hot Day by Anne Ranasinghe (English Writers Co-operative, 2005). Reviewed by Sarojini Jayawickrama
Anne Ranasinghe's A Long Hot Day is a collection of her poems and prose, framed by two critical essays by Klaus Harpprecht and Professor Lenard Mars. Harpprecht's essay contextualises her writing in the socio-political milieu of Sri Lanka of the 1970s and '80s and of Germany in the years preceding and leading up to the Holocaust, tracing the way events in both countries impinge and impact on Ranasinghe. Mars' essay offers an insightful and sensitive analysis of her poetry, highlighting facets of her writing which have their genesis in her essentially diasporic situation.

A continuing thread that runs through her writings, whether poetry or prose, is the need for constant awareness of the potential of violence, terror, repression, evil and darkness in even the most innocuous-seeming happenings, and of the innate capacity of human beings for deep compassion as well as unimaginable cruelty and sadism. The defining moment when the everyday and normal can become skewed and metamorphosed into the sinister cannot be foreseen - we cannot predict 'at what dark point' the transformation could occur. It is her belief that vigilance and the collective memory is vital. In a wider sense her concern is with relations of power, with the imposition of power by the empowered on the less powerful; by the rulers on the ruled - state power imposed on the populace, or by a patriarchal society on a segment of the populace - as in 'Sati' where a woman is immolated and burnt against her will in conformity with the repressive norms of a society dominated by men.

Hybrid heritage
Ranasinghe is both insider and outsider - in the country in which she has lived for over fifty years, as well in Germany, the country of her birth. It is this liminal position, which hones her perceptions and insights on people and events, investing her with the power of detached observation that enables her to assess and evaluate, understand and access, the essence of things.

The insider/outsider dichotomy is generated from her first arrival in Ceylon in the 1950s as a young European woman married to a Ceylonese professor. In the microcosmic world of the family, she is wife, mother, and at the same time stepmother. To the step-children she was 'a European woman with strange habits - an enigma, guided by incomprehensible and troublesome principles and moreover incapable of speaking their language (Harpprecht). In the wider Sri Lankan society, she is a Jewish Sri Lankan - she has a Sri Lankan passport but is Jewish, 'the only Jew who is Sri Lankan. I consider that a rare distinction', says Ranasinghe. She is to use Mars' words, 'A German-born, English educated Sri Lankan Jewish Poetess', a phrase which highlights her hybrid heritage. She is multi-lingual; 'being multi-lingual does not only mean speaking more than one language', she says, 'it means accessing more than one mindset, experiencing multi-culturalism. And multi-culturalism is not just simply co-existence: it encompasses the ability to embrace and manage change, flexibility and acceptance of new ideas. (Rite of Passage).

Craftsmanship
Anne Ranasinghe does not regard her hybrid heritage as a negative value, rather as a rich resource. It lends her a sensitivity to cultures, and the ability to tap into mindsets of others who write in languages other than her own. In her translations, effortlessly switching from one language to another she captures the very essence of the writer; 'forges for each writer a consistent style that differs from the tones of her own voice' (Dr. Lakshmi de Silva, in 'Introduction', Mascot and Symbol).

In a thought provoking essay, Moonlight stuffed with straw, Ranasinghe asks, 'What then is translation? It is the writing of a poem or story or whatever in which a work of another language (or in an earlier form of one's own language) is the vitalising, shaping presence. It has to descend between the disparities of two languages to bring into focus their analogous and common characteristics.

Her translations embody this rationale. Most of us her readers, do not have the competence in the German language to understand without the mediation of the translator, Rainer Maria Rilke's Herbsttag, but this does not detract from our response to Ranasinghe's translation of it entitled Day in Autumn. It begins with an invocation to God to grant in autumn the fruition of summer's process of growth:

Command the last unripened grapes upon the vine
To swell, grant them of southern warmth a few more days,
Urge them towards fulfilment, and then grace
With a sweet richness the heavy purple wine.
The poem stands on its own. Ranasinghe's richly evocative words carry their own emotive charge.

The sequential organisation of the writings in A Long Hot Day seems at first to be rather random, but later reveals a thematic coherence. They reflect Ranasinghe's adeptness at expressing herself in a range of genres-poetry, critical prose, essays, translations and adaptations. They encapsulate the versatility of her craftsmanship.

The opening poem entitled I wonder whether they know joy seems at first simply descriptive of an everyday scene of a woman feeding the birds and squirrels that come to her garden. But as it progresses, a note of dissonance intrudes into the scene, the threatening, foreboding presence of the crows, predatory and cruel, 'with horrendous claws and sharp curving beaks'.

An interesting feature of the poem is the way in which the de-personalized, anonymous, 'migrant woman' is transformed to the first person 'I' in the second stanza. The almost imperceptible transition from 'migrant woman' to the personal identification as 'I' seems to replicate Ranasinghe's personal process of transformation from 'outsider' to 'insider', the gradual development of a sense of belonging as she becomes deeply engaged in issues which were surfacing in the country of her adoption.

A discussion of the poem from which the collection draws its title is germane for it encapsulates, one of her core concerns, the brutalisation of people by the manipulative deployment of ideology 'Report of a long hot day' describes the massacre of the Jews in Poland by the Reserve Police Battalion 101. The massacre begins in the early hours of the morning and is carried out mechanically and with precision.

At first
It was not easy for the reservists - after all
they are ordinary men from ordinary families
and shooting people in the back of the head.....
can be very messy (they were spattered with blood, bone splinters and bits of brain.
The studiedly rational tone hints at the qualms that may have assailed the conscience of the killers - at first.
But as the poem progresses, it charts the changes in the psyche of the killers:
But after a while they got used to it, and in the end
they competed with each other who could kill the most the fastest.

Truly personal
Personal experience is so inextricably interwoven with the political that they segue one into the other. The political seeps into her perception of personal experience, for on a subliminal plane the past is ever present in Ranasinghe's psyche.
It is in July 1983, a time engraved in most Sri Lankan minds, that Ranasinghe links the Nazi atrocities and the violence of July 1983. The link is not simply established through the comparable physical violence inflicted on human beings. It operates on a psychological level, the guilt which assailed those who stood by as passive observers when fellow human beings were tortured and their lives violated. Anne Ranasinghe herself experiences the guilt, not only for having survived the Nazi atrocities when family and friends' lives were extinguished in the concentration camps but,
when once more there is burning
the night sky bloodied, violent and abused
and I -though related
only by marriage - feel myself both victim and accused.

Religion plays a crucial role in Ranasinghe's poetry. Brought up in the Jewish faith, the cruel fate of her family and friends, 'the six million murdered dead' challenges her faith in religion and even in the very existence of God. In Ne 'ilah, a poem written to keep alive the memory of her friend Margot Kahn who did not survive the Holocaust, she passionately asks: 'Lord, where were you?'

Anne Ranasinghe's art has been defined essentially by her poetry. 'I have got stuck with the rather doubtful sobriquet of being primarily a "poet", she says, but 'in actual fact I am a writing jack of all trades'. In poetry one sees the quintessence of her creative art. Yet her prose writings which have not generally been scrutinized as intensely as her poetry, are stimulating "documents", thought provoking, and lucid. There is a representative selection of these writings in A Long Hot Day. One discerns in all of them the deep commitment for the writer to the issues she articulates so cogently and honestly. For instance, in The Heroic Non-Hero, which is a critical appraisal of Oskar Schindler's (familiar to us as the subject of Steven Spielberg's film 'Schindler's List) contribution to the rescue of the Jewish victims of the Nazis, she debunks the myths which surrounded him. Her writings are underpinned by concentrated scholarly research and a wide spectrum of reading.

Living in the past
Anne Ranasinghe has often been accused of dwelling obsessively on the past, not letting it go and moving on. As one German politician said of the Holocaust, Now it is enough, we'll draw a line through these events and forgot about them. Her answer to this exhortation is that she cannot 'because I believe that remembering the past is perhaps the only way in which we can prevent it from repeating itself in the future. She speaks too of the collusion of the majority of the German people with Hitler's regime, for what happened in Germany during those dark times could not have happened without the consent of the German population, whether voiced or unvoiced. It is the silence of the majority which created the conditions for the proliferation and continuation of Nazi terror.

In these times of local and global political unrest and upheaval, where civil discord, intolerance and other divisive forces are tearing societies and nations apart, A Long Hot Day is a passionate plea for compassion and understanding. Ranasinghe's voice, compellingly and unequivocally, asks for an engagement with human suffering. It speaks of the need for vigilance so that the 'dark point' when the fabric of society can be torn apart, may be foreseen and possibly averted. She inflects the importance of the collective memory, for as she reiterates in a poem in an earlier collection of her writings (Mascot and Symbol), 'memory is our shield our only shield against a recurrence of terror, violence, cruelty, fear and disaster. Remembering the past, not selectively, blotting out and expunging from memory what one wants to forget, but remembering it in its entirety, is a way of moving forward. For Anne Ranasinghe writing is also bearing witness.

What happened in Nazi Germany could happen again anywhere, as it has in comparable situations in our own country and elsewhere in the world and wherever intolerance and prejudice prevail.

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