Have you heard of the Hokandara Wala (Pit)?
This
morning (Sunday, August 14, 2011), on my way to Malabe in a
three-wheeler, I stopped for breakfast at a wayside boutique in
Hokandara. A few stringhoppers with a white potato curry and sambol was
downed in a few minutes. Then a cup of plain tea. The opposite side of
the road was as pastoral as an urbanizing landscape could be. Paddy
fields and through them a newly tarred road that must have been little
more than a guru paara not too long ago. Tree-line at the far end and
above it all dawn yielding to the more insistent warmth of the rising
sun. Made for reflection.
At the back of my mind were thoughts of the long day ahead of me with
multiple writing assignments and all kinds of deadlines, a function to
attend in the evening and children to worry about. It was balm and I
soaked it all in. Until Upul, my friend and three-wheel driver began to
speak.
“This is the infamous Hokandara Wala (pit),” he said. I had
forgotten. He related how over 50 people were shot and dumped right
there, on the other side of the road.
House of death at Hokandara. File photo |
Crimes against humanity
“There was a family living in a house behind that clump of trees,” he
continued. “The father, mother and their daughter were all killed. They
sent an iron rod through the girl’s vagina”.
“Who killed them and why,” I asked.
“The Police. The JVP had tried to blow up a moving Police truck. They
had failed. The Police rounded up everyone who happened to be around,
including a fishmonger and killed them all. It helped propel Chandrika
Kumaratunga to power a few years later. The skeletal remains were
splashed across the newspapers during that election campaign.”
As we proceeded to Malabe, Upul told me other stories. How all the
young men went into hiding. How one person, forced to pour kerosene and
set fire to himself, did so but embraced the two gun-wielding men who
had ordered self-assassination, dragging them to death in a classic case
of dittadhamma vedaniya retribution or transgressions punished in
then-and-there.
Who perpetrated these crimes against humanity? Who turned
law-protectors into genocidal maniacs? Where are the commissions of
inquiry? Why weren’t there calls for ‘independent international
investigations?’ Were they not yet born, those who bandy around a sword
called R2P (Responsibility to Protect)?
Moral issues
Years ago, in 1987 March to be precise, a set of final year students
dragged some second year students of the Arts Faculty, Peradeniya
University, to a room in Jayatilleka Hall. At that time, Arts students
who opted to read for a special degree, were forced to be ‘freshers’
twice; once when they entered the Dumbara Campus in Polgolla and again
when they came to Peradeniya following the General Arts Qualifying
Examination. This lot didn’t care much for seniority and were not shy
about taking issue with seniors on ideological as well as moral issues.
They were marked for ‘re-ragging’.
The final year students tried to claim moral high ground, saying they
were being generous and would give the juniors the right to express
themselves. My friend Sisira Premashantha, a star athlete who hailed
from Nattandiya, now no more, said something that answers the above
questions that came to mind this morning as I re-visited the UNP-JVP
bheeshanaya of 1988-1990.
When I came to university I thought this was a place where the truth
triumphed. Now I know better. It’s not the truth that wins. It’s power.
Twenty five years later, almost, I can do no better than quote the
radical Fr. James Carney, better known as Padre Gaudalupe who ministered
to the rebels during the civil war in Honduras and is reported to have
been tortured and thrown to his death from a helicopter in 1983 on the
orders of General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, was awarded the Legion of
Merit by President Ronald Reagan, ‘for promoting democracy’ in Honduras
and whose portrait hangs in the Alumni Hall of Fame of the notorious
School of the Americas:
‘One decides to fight tyranny; it is unfair to expect one to deliver
victory!’
www.malindawords.blogspot.com
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