Violence in Jaffna and my departure from government service

by Sarath Amunugama
Excerpted from volume ii of his autobiography

With the TULF losing support of the youth, politics in the northern peninsula took a violent turn. Frustrated by educational policies of the Government and no longer dependent on the South for employment they looked to militant activity in the Palestine Liberation Organisation as a model for a new phase of anti-Sinhala agitatation. Many years later, Douglas Devananda told me that expatriate Tamils had contacted PLO representatives in London on their behalf and arranged military training in Lebanon.

By this time Indira Gandhi had staged a comeback and was using RAW to make contact with the leaders of the Tamil Militants like Uma Maheshwaran and Pathmanathan. Our intelligence gathering was poor and the Foreign Office under Hameed would not hear of offending his Middle Eastern ‘brothers’ as he called them. All this was compounded by stupid decisions of the JRJ Government.

As mentioned in an earlier chapter several young Sinhala officials posted to Jaffna had won the hearts of Tamil people. Lionel Fernando was a popular Government Agent. When his mother who lived in Jaffna with her son, died the whole city was decked in white and the public gave an emotional farewell. With a network of Peradeniya Tamil graduates and the multi-ethnic composition of the staff and students of Jaffna University Lionel was able to create an ambience of goodwill.

I remember teachers like Regi Siriwardene undertaking weekly train rides to Jaffna in order to promote goodwill even though he was badly ill. The best of Sinhala teachers were attached to the Oriental Faculty of Jaffna – Sucharitha Gamlath, Dharmasena Pathiraja and Sunil Ariyaratne among them. Pathiraja made a feature film entitled ‘Ponmani’ with Tamil actors and actresses. I reviewed for the English newspapers a Sinhala magazine which devoted a whole number to ‘Jaffna Literature’ which carried poems in all three languages.

Then without any explanation Lionel was transferred, overruling the objections of the Tamil MPs. All this was done to accommodate Doraisamy, a son of a former Speaker of the State Council. He was a retired officer of the Foreign Service and an inflexible and inefficient administrator who alienated the Jaffna public with his haughty ‘Diplomatic’ airs.

Even during the regime of Mrs. Bandaranike the popular G.A. Wimal Amarasekere was replaced by a nincompoop who planned to get back to Colombo every weekend to the bosom of his family. As his colleagues in the CAS we watched with mounting horror as he dismantled all the good work done by Wimal his predecessor.

In Trincomalee there was a GA, native to Galle district, who was a captive of the Sinhala mudalalis there. He was determined to sabotage every development project of the Tamil MPs. It came to such a pass that President JRJ had to send me as Ministry Secretary to survey and reserve the lands needed by the Tourist Board for future development and release lands for fisheries development which the GA had sabotaged. Later he was replaced by a more mature GA – Tissa Devendra – who with his long experience in land administration and genial personality managed to win the confidence of all the communities there.

The Home ministry did not appreciate the strategic importance of Trinco and looked on it as just another out station and sent juniors like the aforementioned GA. The country had to pay a heavy price for the negligence of the Secretary DBIPS Siriwardhana for whom these decisions were purely of a bureaucratic nature.

During the civil war the LTTE, conscious of the key strategic value of Trinco, wanted even to make it their capital. With the escalation of the fratricidal war Trincomalee became a garrison town. All the tourist development in Trinco that we had encouraged was washed out and later when on visiting Nilaveli I found only the charred shells of those beautiful hotels. In fact the army bundled us out fast because the LTTE guerillas were operating in the environs of Nilaveli and Uppaveli.

\Jaffna Library May 1981

The burning down of the Jaffna library is an ugly blot in the modern history of our country. It became a milestone in the deteriorating ethnic scenario. In a way, it became a powerful symbol of the irrationality that gripped both sides. Its long term disastrous effects on the image of the Sinhalese was incalculable. If the world opinion was to be turned against a Government no image could be more forceful than that of burning books and libraries.

It was to become a big minus in the propaganda war. I have always been a lover of books and have been lucky to have used several libraries during my life. In Kandy there was the famous Kandy Municipal library under its strict librarian Mr. Bhai. The Peradeniya University library under its librarians Somadasa and Ian Goonetileke was another refuge for us. In Colombo I frequented the Museum Library and Colombo Public Library which was managed by Ishwari Corea.

In Singapore I used the Singapore Museum Library with its collection of Colonial era documents. In Thailand I have researched Thai-Kandyan Kingdom relations in the well run Asia Society Library. I have used the British Museum Library and when in Harvard spent time regularly at the Widener library and the Peabody Museum. Thus the destruction of the Jaffna Library caused me and many of my like minded friends much grief and anguish. My Minister Anandatissa was also quite disturbed though many other so called intellectuals in the Cabinet did not protest. They were too engrossed in teaching the Tamils, with whom they socialized during the day, a lesson.

Why did this happen? For a long time poor Gamini Dissanayake was blamed for this debacle till a senior Police officer Edward Gunawardene gave the correct version in a newspaper article. At a political rally held in Jaffna by the TULF Tamil youth, three Sinhala Police constables who were sent to cover the event were manhandled and killed. Policemen who anyway had a fraught relationship in the peninsula had then gone on the rampage killing and assaulting people at random.

Then in a typical show of frustration they burnt down the Jaffna Library. We knew that the Jaffna Police were a disgruntled lot, many of them being sent to the north on punishment transfer. The Police had targeted the youth even during the time of Mrs. Bandaranaike. When a Tamil solidarity Conference was held the Police shut it down and pulled down a statue erected for ‘martyrs’. Thus Police–public relations had reached its nadir and the disastrous rampage was its result.

It gave a fillip to the armed youth who began by killing Tamil politicians associated with the UNP and the SUP. Even the supporters of the LSSP and the CP were not spared. The left had a strong organization in the peninsula and had contested elections there. P. Kandiah of the CP was returned and became the lone Tamil leftist in the 1956 Parliament. But with the SLFP-LSSP-CP coalition of 1970 the left lost its appeal among the Tamils. The only Tamil in the Cabinet was a nominated MP Kumarasuriyar who was a Colombo based engineer.

From then on things went from bad to worse. We were all shocked when the Sarvodaya leader for the North who tried to bring communities together was brutally killed. JRJ’s response to all this mayhem was to mobilize the army, under his relative ‘Bull’ Weeratunga, with a Churchillian written command to eliminate terrorism from the North at any cost. Cyril Mathew and his followers now brought a new dimension to the conflict by alleging that the Colombo Tamil businessmen in particular were supporting the militants either out of fear for their relatives who lived in the North or because they were sympathetic to their creed. Even when we talked to our Tamil friends they would occasionally refer to `our boys’. Looking back we see that all the ingredients for a conflagration were building up one by one.

The security forces and the Tamil youth were on a collision course. Tamil Parliamentarians were marginalized. Among the members of the TULF leadership, power was shifting to the radicals. Non-national players, particularly India, were being dragged into the fray. Our Foreign Ministry did not read the India factor correctly and were pursuing an anti-Indian approach, even going to the extent of lobbying Prime Minister Premadasa over the head of the President.

Very importantly militant youth in the North were being trained in India in the use of weapons though the Government did not know about it or could not do anything about it. All this came into the open when the reputed Indian Magazine ‘India Today’ broke the news that the Tamil militants were being trained in RAW in camps in Dehra Dun. In addition to the news they also published photographs of young Tamils undergoing weapons training.

All these elements came together in 1983 and with the blowing up of a military and police convoy by a landmine by the militants and the bringing of the bodies of the dead to Kanatte. Unprecedented violence directed at the Tamils erupted in July that year. Even JRJ biographers Wriggins and De Silva are unsure as to who ordered the taking of the bodies to Kanatte and the cause of the delay in dispatching them to the gravesite. The killings in the North and in Colombo marked a watershed in the ethnic conflict. The war that began in earnest lasted for nearly 30 years and blasted the future of the UNP regimes that followed and retarded all chances of spectacular economic growth which earlier seemed to be a distinct possibility.

Cultural Developments

One of the immediate consequences of the ethnic violence was the destruction by the Tamil insurgents of the TV and Radio transmission towers in Kokavil. This meant that we had to strengthen the signal from Colombo which was a second best choice. Equally during both LTTE and JVP insurrections our announcers and popular artistes were threatened and some were killed. But there were strong radio personalities like Mrs. Ratnam and Mrs. Ponmani Kulasingham who defied the terrorists and continued with their professional duties. Mrs. Kulasingham was later killed by the Tigers and Mrs. Ratnam migrated to Malaysia.

The SLBC still remained an important medium because TV was in its infancy. The Minister and I were keen to make it a more attractive medium by introducing new programmes. We made Amaradeva the head of the SLBC oriental music orchestra. New programmes bringing in literati like J.B. Dissanayake, Hemapala Wijewardene, Bandula Jayawardene and Tennekoon Vimalananda were greatly appreciated by the listening public.

We made arrangements to invite famous musicians like Ravi Shankar, Alla Rakkha, Nikhil Bannerjee and Vishnu Govind Jog to SLBC studios for performances. I had listened entranced by Ravi Shankar as a student at Peradeniya when he had a long music session together with Alla Rakkha on the tabla, at Hilda Obeyesekere Hall and was delighted to interact with him again. He had many friends in our country.

Very poignantly I had the opportunity to hear the maestro’s last performance. I was in Washington for an IMF meeting when I read of his farewell concert to be held in the Kennedy Centre. Tickets were sold out but our Ambassador in Washington Jaliya Wickremasuriya managed to get two tickets and we were part of the packed audience which heard Ravi Shankar and his daughter Anoushka play. It was a moving ceremony. He died a few months later but he remains in my memory as a fantastic musician and charming personality.

I had some difficulty with a Director of the SLBC that I had appointed. He was D. Rajendra, a senior SLAS officer who had retired as a Secretary. He was the son of Sir Waitialingam Doraisamy, a member the State Council who had been elected its Speaker. Rajendra was the brother of Doraisamy Junior who was GA Jaffna as I had mentioned earlier. He wanted total control of the Tamil Service of the SLBC much to the resentment of the professionals in the vision who were media specialists.

When as Secretary I warned him to be more conciliatory with the professional staff, he took it amiss and started quoting the SLBC Act to me. D. Rajendra was an argumentative type and was creating difficulties with the staff. I spoke to my Minister and had him removed from the Board. He appealed to the President but JRJ was not willing to interfere on his behalf. Rajendra left for Jaffna in a huff where he met a tragic end. During the Indian occupation of the North to battle the LTTE, he started arguing in his usual cantankerous manner with an Indian Jawan who shot him dead near the Jaffna Hospital. Tamil political leaders who depended on the IPKF for their own safety did not even attend his funeral. His death is only one of the hidden tales of the IPKF operation.

Family Matters

By 1982 I had completed five years as a Secretary. During this period our Ministry had undertaken many new projects including our successful introduction of television to the country. During this busy time I could not give my family the attention they deserved. My elder daughter Ramanika was 17-years old and was a good student in the science stream of Bishop’s College. I remember one prize giving at Bishop’s where she received her prize from Mrs. Elina Jayewardene.

The chief guest was JRJ who had started his schooling at Bishop’s. He introduced himself as the oldest old boy of Bishop’s. My younger daughter Varuni was 15-years old and the winner of the all island oratorical contest organized by the British College of Speech. They were both at an age when they could benefit from foreign schooling which was very much in vogue then as there were no International schools. Their richer classmates had been sent abroad by their parents who could spend lavishly on their progeny.

That option was not open to us public servants in those days. Today corruption is so rampant that politicians and public servants use their ill gotten gains to finance their children’s education abroad. In our time the only possibility was for us to find employment abroad, particularly in an International Agency which paid handsomely, for the education of children. I therefore thought it prudent to think of a spell abroad though I never contemplated the possibility of settling down in another country, as some of my colleagues had done.

Fortunately my parents were fit and healthy and well looked after in our ‘Mul Gedera’ in Nugawela by my sister and younger brother and their spouses. So the chances of a ‘soft landing’ abroad were good in my case. Fortunately two job offers were clearly in my horizon. One was the Secretary-Generalship of AMIC. The other was the post of Director of the newly created International Programme for the Development of Communication [IPDC] in UNESCO headquarters in Paris. I opted for the AMIC job.

I heard later that DBIPS Siriwardhana had been unhappy that I had written direct to the President (about my quitting government service). But since I was appointed Secretary by the President I did not see anything remiss in my sending my resignation letter direct to him. The President agreed and only requested me to see him at home before I left for Singapore. Once my appointment as Secretary General of AMIC was announced many of my friends wrote to congratulate me.

The most heartfelt farewell came from the tough and militant print workers. As I had mentioned earlier in this book, several pressing problems of the working men were solved by me with my Minister’s blessings. They had responded magnificently to the President’s call to print school text books which were issued free to all the school children in the country. The workers had gone all out to print these books on schedule even foregoing their overtime payments.

When following the general strike a large number of printing workers were dismissed I persuaded my Minister to take them back on the argument that we could not get trained workers to replace them. Their leader Wimalasena of the LSSP was very grateful as many other unionists not only lost their jobs but also could not face their members who were left with no income. Many such poor strikers committed suicide. Others lived for the rest of their lives in utter poverty.

When I became Finance Minister many years later I gave them a compensatory payment. But by that time many of them were dead. Colvin and Bernard Soysa visited me and Anandatissa in our office to thank us personally for our humanitarian gesture.

When Lalith Athulathmudali heard of my new assignment he very kindly undertook to write to some Singaporean Ministers who were his students in the Law faculty of Singapore University when he taught there. At this time I had many friends near Flower Road who were neighbours of Lalith.

The Abeywardenes, Lakshman Jayakody and ‘Bull’ Weeratunga’s family lived close to each other. Lalith was a frequent visitor and we got to know each other well. He had respect for CCS officers of my vintage and brought many of them, particularly old Royalists, into his Ministry.

Dharmasiri Pieris, an old Thurstanite and my contemporary at Peradeniya, was his efficient Permanent Secretary. As Secretary of Tourism I was an ex-officio board member of the Lanka Oberoi hotel which had been built by the State Trading Corporation which came under the purview of Lalith who was the Trade Minister. The Chairman of the Hotel Company – Asia Hotels Ltd – Ranjan Wijemanna and Deputy Chairman Razik Zarook were his close confidants.

So I had good relations with Lalith who was considered a stickler for protocol, but was good enough to write on my behalf to his student, Professor Jayakumar – a powerful Singaporean Minister. Lalith’s name opened many doors for me in Singapore. Jayakumar was very helpful and reminded me that we had met earlier in Lalith’s house in Flower Road when he had called on his former teacher. Lalith had impeccable academic qualifications having won degrees in law from Oxford and Harvard. He taught law in Israel and Singapore.