On Saravanamuttu’s ‘limiting-clause’ on the LLRC

What does the date November 27, 2007 mean to Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu? What does the name UD Sarachchandra mean to him? What does ‘father’ mean to him? What does ‘daughter’ mean to him? I don’t know.

Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu is one among a bunch of people whose comments were solicited by a weekly newspaper on the recently constituted Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) which began sittings on August 11, 2010.

He says, not without cause, that such commissions have not really yielded things of great consequence. This of course doesn’t necessarily mean that all such commissions are meaningless.

He sees flaw in the fact that the LLRC is not empowered to investigate, but just collect information. He implies that the commission is a political tool and that its objectives are dishonest and dishonourable. His reasons for believe this to be a political project is the LLRC’s interest in the Ceasefire Agreement of 2002. He believes this is unnecessary.

Now many believe that the CFA was a horrendous mistake on the part of the then Government. If lessons are to be learnt then it is necessary to discuss mistakes, I believe.

Saravanamuttu was one of the loudest cheerleaders of the CFA. He whined like a wounded puppy when the CFA was abrogated. He screamed like one possessed for a ceasefire and it took the comprehensive defeat of the LTTE for his outfit, the Centre for Policy Alternatives to issue a rather-late-in-the-day and grudging ‘appreciation’, not that the LTTE was defeated of course, just that the conflict had come to an end. It is natural then for him to be upset about anyone inquiring about the CFA.

Saravanamuttu wants the LLRC to do certain things for him. He wants the LLRC to find out what happened in the last two months of the war. He thinks that we cannot ‘move forward’ by covering the aasanna avadiya (the recent past) with lies. Now I don’t think that truth or deceit has ever obstructed or spurred the ‘moving forward’. The CPA and Saravanamuttu insisted for years that the LTTE could not be defeated militarily. That was a lie. It didn’t stop a ‘moving forward’ that resulted in us living in a post-LTTE Sri Lanka did it? History doesn’t wait for any of us. It moves, sometimes in desired directions, sometimes towards tragedy. It is good to know of course and it is even better to know everything. This is why I find Saravanamuttu’s ‘limited option truth-seeking’ problematic.

Saravanamuttu makes a plea: ‘Tamil children who lost their fathers have a right to know how their fathers died.’ He is correct. They need to know how their fathers died, at whose hands, under what circumstances etc. They need to know how some ‘fathers’ got guns into their hands, who convinced them that theirs was a just cause and a legitimate ‘methodology’ etc. They need to know who went out of the way to hoodwink Tamil people into believing that the LTTE was invincible, that they could not be defeated and thereby made them believe Prabhakaran when he told them that victory was a few moments away when in fact had scripted violent death as the only possible eventuality barring evacuation by the Sri Lankan Security Forces.

Saravanamuttu would love the investigation to focus on the ‘last two months’. I think the LLRC should humour him by calling him up to offer evidence.

He would then be asked what the nearly 300,000 people held hostage by the LTTE in these two months ate/drank, whether or not they attempted to flee and how the LTTE responded to flee-attempt.

He would be asked whether or not he believes the CFA strengthened the LTTE militarily and/or politically and if this were the case, whether or not it had a direct impact on the ‘bloodiness’ of the final denouement.

He can be asked to submit all documents he has authored pertaining to the conflict so that his role as agent provocateur in the entire drama could be properly assessed and a report on this submitted to the Tamil children he’s so concerned about.

And at the end of the day, these Tamil children would also get to know about Sinhala children who are orphaned today because their fathers had to undergo greater risks to ensure that minimum civilian casualties occurred while carrying out the biggest hostage rescue operation in history. It is strange, isn’t that Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu doesn’t see these orphans? It is telling isn’t it? It is racist, wouldn’t you say?

Every child has to know about his/her father. It is not the case that only Tamil children were orphaned by the war and it is not true that the orphaning happened only during the last two months of the war. If we got past the orphaning of tens of thousands of children in 1988-89, then logically, we could get past this orphaning as well, but this doesn’t mean we need not to investigate or seek answers. The important thing to remember is not to be selective about it.

Saravanamuttu doesn’t seem to give a damn about UD Sarachchandra and the hundreds of thousands of such people who lost their children to LTTE butchery.

Maybe he doesn’t want those people to know about who killed their children and who were accessories after the fact of terrorism. Maybe he doesn’t want children to know that their fathers and mothers were killed by an organization he did his best to legitimate, an organization he insisted was part of solution and not part of problem.

I am willing to bet that Saravanamuttu didn’t know the answer to the first two questions posed at the beginning of this article. UD Sarachchandra is the father of a Grade 12 student of Piliyandala Maha Vidyalaya, Mahinsa Pradeepani, who was killed in an LTTE suicide attack in Nugegoda on November 27, 2007. Children need answers. Parents too.

Saravanamuttu’s limiting-clause is politically motivated. It is racist. It is intellectually dishonest. It is morally reprehensible. Should I add, ‘it is typical’?

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