Rajpal's Column

6th December 1998

Disturbing questions from Prins in exileThe Rajpal Abeynayake column

By Rajpal Abeynayake

. Prins Gunsekera may have been a maver- ick, but he was an insider. In this respect, his book (to me) on the JVP and attendant political violence in Sri Lanka does one better than say the works of Chandraprema and other authors on the subject. In the latter part of the book, The Lost Generation, Prins Gunasekera says that he cannot return from his exile in London because the present dispensation would not like the idea.

Or at least he says something to that effect. In an earlier chapter he reveals quite dramatically that the present President called Prins Gunasekera “one of the JVP people’’ when a human rights activist in Britain spoke of Prins Gunasekera’s activism.

Whether Prins Gunasekera stands on the good side of this government or on the bad side is irrelevant to the larger story that he details in his gripping and at times incredible account of the two successive JVP rebellions and the events that surrounded them. It is admittedly difficult to do justice to a book of this scope in one instalment, so here is saying that the real review will come later. This just is a foretaste which would be topical because the PA government has announced this week that the Attorney General will be prosecuting police officers who were guilty of “disappearances’’ during the JVP violence.

To make the long story short, Prins Gunasekera begins as a sympathiser of the JVP because he is convinced that the JRJ dispensation sent the JVP underground because of JRJ’s ugly political idea that they will be a convenient scapegoat for the 1983 riots. Between then, and the cataclysmic incidents of the second JVP uprising, ending in the absolute annihilation of the JVP is a very long story indeed. But, after he tells his story Prins Gunasekera writes the footnote which he ends by saying “Sada samaramu soyuro.’’ His conclusion is sharp and unambiguous and it is that the JVP leadership sent thousands of youth to their deaths with their two anti government campaigns.

So he nails the canard that he is a Wijeweeraite JVPer who empathised with the JVPs campaign of terminal terror . Believe it or not Prins Gunasekera is a humanist who both sympathised with the JVP for its predicament in being sent underground and is revolted by its methods and this is not said tongue in cheek because Gunasekera’s book bears out this representation of himself.

In the main, it is difficult not to agree with Gunesekera’s representation of events. His theory that the JVP connived with President Premadasa to bring him to power is for instance bolstered with some startling revelations each more startling than the other. Convincingly he explains that JRJ wanted power to pass onto anyone but Premadasa. His prescription was to dissolve parliament in the teeth of the JVP struggles and have Premadasa run scurrying for help in all directions and eventually lose the election. But, Premadasa was made aware of the plan from an inside source in Ward Place whose identity is not quite concealed, suffice to say that the man couldn’t have been closer to the President. Premadasa “descended on JR’’ like a ton of bricks the evening the dissolution of Parliament was to be announced and JR had to acquiesce in the face of this assault. He did not dissolve Parliament, the JVP campaign accelerated untrammelled and the rest is history.

If he says Premadasa connived with the JVP he also says that the JVP connived with Premadasa and that was a case of grand duplicity to connive with a leader of a capitalist party the JVP had tried to bring down. But that’s how the JVP gets demonised at least by default in Prins Gunasekera’s interpretation of of events.

The book in this way is fairly full of demons and each one makes the reader sicker in the stomach than the other. In the morass Prins Gunasekera comes out quite credibly as a genuine humanist even though of a maverick and perhaps idealistic temperament. But what’s more relevant is not his credibility but his avoidance of the fact that if the JVP was brutal they probably sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind.

It’s germane when the current context is considered and when police officers are facing indictment for the excesses of the JVP period. This was a time by which the word excess could have been defined and excesses there were legion some of the most conspicuous among them being the order by a Sandhurst trained Army Genral to “throw acid at the JVP boys who were trying to close shops.” Prins Gunasekera’s prescription is plain, he was a lawyer, and his chambers were populated by habeaus corpus lawyers who laid down their lives for their vocation. The author cries out for the imposition of the rule of law and shows that he is suitably revolted at a system in which the rule of law was held in suspension.

And the author is right. But he does not provide any answers about how the JVP brutality could have been met and whether if the JVP was brutal the system was supposed to have done any better? That’s a conundrum and it’s not the vocation of idealists to argue conundrums.

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