Bones, bones, bones
April 8, 2013, 7:45 pmThere was a sense of elation written all over President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s face the other day upon receiving a sacred bone relic of the Enlightened One as seen in a picture we published yesterday. Prior to Saturday’s ceremony where it was presented to him by the spiritual head of Drupka Order of Tibetan Buddhism, he had taken part in the inauguration of a Pada Yathra by a group of foreign religious dignitaries in Kataragama.
The President may be blithely blissed out, so to speak, on the sacred bone relic from Tibet entrusted to him for protection, but he is obviously troubled by the bones of lesser humans dug out from a mass grave in Matale during the last few months. His recent Pada Yathra must have evoked his memories of a bygone era when he staged a different walk albeit by the same name all the way from Colombo to Kataragama besides many other protests such as Human Chain, Jana Gosha in the early 1990s as part of a human rights campaign which, inter alia, helped propel the SLFP to power.
Last week, the JVP, which claims that the skeletal remains in recently opened up mass grave are those of its activists tortured and killed during its second uprising, reminded President Rajapaksa of his human rights crusade and called upon him to order an investigation. And he has pledged to conduct a presidential investigation. However, the public have, over the years, lost faith in such probes most of which sadly turned out to be political witch hunts. Pointing out that, in 1994, President Chandrika Kumaratunga had a presidential investigation conducted into extrajudicial killings in the late 1980s, the JVP has asked for its pigeonholed report. This is the problem with all politically-motivated presidential inquiries; the presidents tend to do a David Copperfield (magician); they wave their executive wands and, hey presto, probe reports disappear into thin air. Only suckers wait for the final act of presidential magic shows or ‘the prestige’—reappearance of reports—which never comes to pass.
JVP General Secretary Tilvin Silva is reported to have pooh-poohed the promised presidential probe. Well, one cannot be faulted for being pessimistic about such inquiries given their history but isn’t it too early to pass judgment?
The persons whose skeletal remains were found in the Matale mass grave have not been identified and, therefore, no one could say for sure that they were JVP activists. One could only surmise that they were JVPers, going by the situation that prevailed in the country during the 1987-1990 period, but they could even have been innocent men put to a violent death on suspicion. The onus is on the government to do its best to identify the victims with the help of DNA testing and objects found in the grave such as rings and pieces of clothes and ensure that advanced dating methods will be used to determine when the victims were actually killed and buried.
Attack is said to be the best form of defence. The JVP seems to have adopted this method and gone on the offensive, taking as it does moral high ground in a bid to put the UNP and the government on the defensive. In so doing, it has apparently sought to cover up its own heinous crimes in the late 1980s. It has been blamed for killing thousands of intrepid dissenters who resisted its reign of terror, robbing the public and destroying 553 SLTB buses, 247 out of 545 agrarian centres and four paddy collecting facilities among other things. In April 2002, the then Deputy Finance Minister of the UNF government Bandula Gunawardena told the media that about half a ton of gold robbed by the JVP from the ordinary public during its second insurrection had been recovered and deposited with the Central Bank and it would be auctioned to raise funds to boost the national economy. The gold haul, he said, comprised 1,992 rings, 2,528 earrings, 1,042 chains and 294 sovereigns. This must be only a fraction of what was plundered by the outfit. Thus, it may be seen that the JVP also has a lot to answer for as regards the 1987-1990 period. It cannot get away with its crimes by pretending to be a victim and calling others perpetrators.