Death of a President: rush to judgment

UNP’s Defeat-III

By Jayantha Somasundaram

“An attack upon a King is considered to be parricide against the state, and the jury and the witnesses, even the judges are the children. It is fit on that account that there should be a solemn pause before we rush to judgement”

Lord Chancellor Thomas Erskine

By 1993, the UNP had been wracked by internecine warfare that had seen its leader locked in a destructive frenzy.

On 23 April 1993, while addressing an election meeting Lalith Athulathmudali was shot and killed. His funeral was a replay of Denzil Kobbekaduwa’s; opposition supporters turned ugly, attacking supporters of Premadasa and his government. “The assassination of Lalith Athulathmudali has removed from the Sri Lankan scene the politician most hated by President Ranasinghe Premadasa. Few observers of Sri Lankan affairs were surprised at the speed with which the authorities discovered the corpse of the alleged gunman, who just happened to be carrying his identity papers which showed he was a member of the Tamil Tigers. Athulathmudali’s family were not impressed by the diligence of the police. They refused to permit either Premadasa or any of his cohorts to mourn at their house.” (The Independent, London 27/4/93)

“First they pick on an underworld gunman, reputedly the best marksman of the lot, and train him on the firing ranges of the STF. Then you kidnap an innocent helpless Tamil…when Athulathmudali is killed you bump off Ragunathan and dump him identity card and all, close to the spot where the shooting took place.” (Editorial The Observer 24/4/96)

“Scepticism was widespread and anti-government violence broke out during Athulathmudali’s funeral. Anonymous leaflets sent to embassies alleged that a government minister had hired two professional killers to do the job…After Premadasa’s death many Sri Lankans clearly felt that a kind of justice had been done.” (Far Eastern Economic Review 13/5/93)

Radhika Coomaraswamy recalled that Lakshman Kadirgamar “was loyal to friends – when Lalith Athulathmudali was assassinated he stood firmly by his widow, interrogating and questioning Scotland Yard as they had been put in charge of the investigations, insisting that it was not the LTTE but another force that had killed his friend.” (DBSJeyaraj.com 13/8/15)

Mrs Srimani Athulathmudali “called for a commission to probe her husband’s death because she believed that President Premadasa was the force behind the assassination.” (Daily News 13/1/98) On the basis of the commission’s findings four accused, including a UNP Provincial Council Minister and two members of the police were charged but were released in 2003 due to the lack of evidence.

Agence France-Presse reported on 7 October 1997, “An investigation into the killings of former minister Lalith Athulathmudali and army General Denzil Kobbekaduwa found that President Premadasa was “directly responsible for the two killings.”

Fatal Mistake

The assassinations of Athulathmudali and Kobbekaduwa were fatal mistakes. Both leaders commanded the loyalty of the military hierarchy, Athulathmudali going back to his time as Minster of National Security. Many in the military were bitter about Premadasa arming the LTTE. “Every time one of my men gets his leg blown off,” said an army captain in 1990,”I think of our president.” (Asiaweek 12/5/93)

The response was therefore immediate as it was devastating. A week after the Athulathmudali assassination on May Day, Premadasa, his supporters and his security detail including Ronnie Gunasinghe were killed in a massive bomb blast in Colombo. It was not an assassination. It was the obliteration of Premadasa by his detractors.

At the inquest DIG CID Amarasena Rajapaksa, who was an eye witness said, “I was under the impression that the President had been taken away to safety. That was because the President’s vehicle and his security staff (including Ronnie Gunasinghe) were missing.” Only Premadasa’s wristwatch survived.

Evidence if any was immediately removed. “A mysterious force ordered the washing of the murder scene as soon as my father was assassinated,” complained Premadasa’s son Sajith, “critical of the conduct of the UNP-led government after the assassination.” (BBC 31/8/05)

Premadasa’s supporters vented their fury on the opposition. “Opposition supporters in Mount Lavinia complained of attacks apparently by government supporters,” reported the London Times. “Mount Lavinia was the stronghold of Athulathmudali, who was assassinated just over a week ago. Lalith’s party had blamed the government for his murder.” Newsweek (10/5/93) said “Premadasa’s assassination may have been in retaliation for Athulathmudali’s.”

The Opposition celebrated. “When his death was announced hundreds across the country lit firecrackers,” reported Asiaweek (12/5/93) “Police were quick to blame the Tamil Tiger separatists for both assassinations. But many people suspected the President’s men killed Athulathmudali and these same people are ready to believe that Athulathmudali’s followers murdered the President in revenge.

“There is growing suspicion among grief-stricken Sri Lankans that the two political leaders … were killed by one another’s supporters,” concluded Asian commentator Andre Malan in The West Australian (4/5/93)

“A statement from the opposition party, the Democratic Front, issued by Gamini Dissanayake, a former government minister, said: “This is a culmination of a process of violence which has accumulated during the last four years (Premadasa was President of Sri Lanka from 2 January 1989 to 1 May 1993). The fact that very valuable men were victims of that violence will perhaps be the epitaph of this regime.” (The New York Times 2/5/93)

Premadasa’s death was not mere murder it was a political coup. The vacuous Wijetunga became President but it was Ranil Wickremesinghe, who stepped in as prime minister, retaking power for the UNP’s Govigama establishment. Every Premadasa loyalist from Cooray downwards was stripped of office. All Premadasas functionaries in the police from DIG A. C. Lawrence downwards were neutralised. Gamini Dissanayake returned to lead the UNP and the following year and was selected as the UNP candidate for the presidential election. However, Premadasa propagandists reserve their bitterest invective for Ranil, sensing that he was the fifth column planted by the Govigama establishment inside Premadasa’s inner circle.

Conspiracy Theories

On October 24th 1994 Gamini Dissanayake along with 53 others, many of them his close supporters, were killed by a bomb explosion. The Economist (29/10/94) speculated that “possible suspects include Sinhala Buddhist chauvinists (who assassinated Mrs Kumaratunga’s father in 1959), senior army officers (who tried to stage a military coup just before August parliamentary elections) and anti-Tiger paramilitary groups. After three decades of frequently controversial political activity, Mr Dissanayake also had made many enemies, some of them within the UNP itself. In most countries, such possibilities would be dismissed as conspiracy theories. But in Sri Lanka the customs of civilised democratic life have yet to recover from a decade of violence and dislocation.”

“Sri Lankan investigators have closed probes into the assassinations of Ranasinghe Premadasa and Gamini Dissanayake … while the Premadasa assassination probe was dropped as ‘there was no evidence to indict any of the suspects,’ the Dissanayake case was ‘abandoned’ as all the ‘files had been lost.’” (The Hindu 5/9/05)

The UNP had disintegrated in a brutal internecine struggle to the death which decimated its leadership. The party had effectively consumed itself. No one from the UNP has since been able to secure the presidency that Jayewardene crafted for his party. So, the first time it was a tragedy with the score in 1994 at half time reading one nil.

The UNP leadership devolved on Wickremesinghe while the Premadasa loyalists never returned to the UNP; they distanced themselves from the party. That is until Sajith Premadasa entered politics. He marked time for two decades waiting for Wickremesinghe to step down so that he could claim what he considered his birthright. When this prospect grew dimmer the tussle of the past began to re-emerge with a haunting familiarity.

After a shabby term in office the UNP handed Premadasa Junior a poisoned chalice in 2019, when he was given the UNP nomination for the Presidential Election. It was almost as if the UNP old guard wanted the young man to lose and discredit himself and thereby permanently undermining his claims to party leadership.

Nine months later when the Parliamentary Elections came around in August 2020 the UNP compelled Sajith Premadasa to go it on his own, denying him the political imprimatur of the Grand Old Party. Perhaps, the motive was to ensure that Premadasa failed a second time and would be humiliated and discredited so that his challenge to the prevailing UNP leadership would be squashed and rendered no longer credible.

But on August 5th the tables were cynically turned. While Premadasa and his freshly minted party proved no match for the Rajapaksa juggernaut, he emerged unquestioningly as the Leader of the Opposition in the Parliament to be. And it was Ranil Wickremesinghe and the UNP that suffered a crushing fatal defeat, greater than 1956; being virtually driven out of national politics.

It was almost as if history repeated itself, but this time as farce.

In August 2020, it is the final whistle and the score reads one each.

(Concluded)