The Premakumar Gunaratnam Saga – a comedy of errors- the Government should reveal the truth to the people.
Posted on April 24th, 2012
Upali S. Jayasekera Courtesy The Island
The Premakumar Gunaratnam saga that generated a lot of media publicity and divergent views appears to be more of a comedy of errors.
One of the ƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ”¹…”Che GuevaraƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ¢-¾‚¢ brand revolutionaries, Premakumar Gunaratnam, described as an undercover operator, shying away from the public eye (may be the reason why the JVP spokesman recently said that they did not know a member by the name Premakumar Gunaratnam) ran away from the country after the 1989 insurrection holding Sri Lankan Passport under the name Ratnayake Mudiyanselage Dayal and surfaced as an Australian citizen under the name Noel Mudalige. He tied the nuptial knot with a Sri Lankan woman giving the name as Wanninayake Mudiyanselage Dascon (incidentally the name ƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ”¹…”DasconƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ¢-¾‚¢ is also that of a Portuguese army officer in our country during the colonialera,who wa the paramour of the then Queen, and was beheaded over the illicit love affair). His wife Champa Somaratna in Australia, was reported to have said that she not seen her husband (Dayal, Dascon, Premakumar or Noel?) since November 2006. Is it that Premakumar was hiding in Australian under a false name?
Premakumar Gunaratnam, as an Australian citizen arrived in Sri Lanka under the name Noel Mudalige and later showed up here as Premakumar Gunaratnam. What was he doing here? Visiting relatives?
All these came to be publicized due to an abduction story, which appears to have two sides. Gunaratnam and Atygalle were either actually as alleged, perhaps to be sent to the land of no return, as has happened to some others, taken away in white vans without number plates, but released after being questioned due to the Australian intervention or the kidnapping was staged since he wanted to leave the country since he feared that his life was in danger, or for some other reason better known to him.
The following issues should not remain without explanation.
1. How did Premakumar Gunaratnam get a Sri Lankan Passport under the name Ratnayake Mudiyanselage Dayal? Were the Birth Certificate and the NIC produced for the purpose faked? Did some official, for some reason or other, help him to obtain the Passport by illegal means?
2. How did the Sri Lankan Passport Holder Ratnayake Mudiyanselage Dayal obtain Australian citizenship and had an Australian Passport issued under the name Noel Mudalige? Were not the documents produced for the purpose faked? How did ne hoodwink the Australian authorities in that regard?
3. Did he dupe Champa Somaratna by marrying her under a false name Wanninayake Mudiyanselage Dascon? Or was she aware that he was doing so? If so is she not guilty of aiding and abetting in producing faked documents?
4. Was he sent here by a foreign country or foreign agent to engage in undercover activities in alliance with the LTTE leftovers to unsettle the country?
5. Why did he leave his Passport with the Australian Embassy when a foreign citizen should have his or her Passport to have lodging facilities and change foreign currency? Who funded him whilst in Sri Lanka?
6. Why did the Australian High Commissioner agree to keep his Passport in the custody of the Embassy, when it was known that he was an imposter?
7. Why was he ƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ”¹…”deportedƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ¢-¾‚¢ at the insistence of the Australian Embassy without being brought before Courts? “KarunaƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ¢-¾‚¢ was jailed in the UK.
The Government should reveal the truth to the people.
April 24th, 2012 at 1:12 pm
JVP has been always sabotaging and destructive party. JVP acts are almost like they are blind and they din’t know what they want to do.
Progressive Socialist party seems to another of those people.
Kumar Gunarathnam simply should not be allowed in Sri Lanka. IF he comes should be jailed.
April 24th, 2012 at 1:46 pm
I call him KUMARAYA because I don’t know his real name. The emotional plea by KUMARAYA’s mother, a retired teacher from Kegalle was heart wrenching. I wonder what she has to say to the family of DAYA PATHIRANA, whose life was terminated by a flick of a finger of RANJITHAN.
In late 1986 members of the JVP’s student union abducted the leader of the Independent Students Union (ISU) Daya Pathirana, to Kendelpitiya, and cut his throat. Pathirana was unarmed. He never carried a gun. He was a man of peace and abhorred guns. We can disagree with Daya Pathirana’s political views. But remember he believed in words and free expression. After his death, we saw the flood of JVP killings. JVP leaders had tasted blood, now they wanted more. Like me, those who lost a family member to JVP knows well. The suffering goes for three generations. Can we ever forget that terror, which KUMARAYA was hoping to restart in the South.
KUMARAYA has the same philosophy as Prabakaran and Kony of Uganda, ie, “While my family is safe and sound in luxury, let others to the killing and dying”. I feel sorry for those idiots who followed KUMARAYA. They were to be the vanguard of a future killing machine. Please don’t compare KUMARAYA to good old CHE. CHE could have had a life of luxury. He gave it up for his beliefs. He never killed unarmed civilians. But these rascals are in it for the money.
April 24th, 2012 at 5:48 pm
Gunaratnam is lucky! He is not a US citizen. On New Year’s Eve, with almost no mainstream media attention given to it, President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, or NDAA, into law codifying indefinite military detention without charge or trial into law for the first time in American history. The NDAA’s dangerous detention provisions would authorize the president — and all future presidents — to order the military to pick up and indefinitely imprison people captured anywhere in the world, far from any battlefield.
Obama’s administration, and all future administrations can now use the military to detain individuals, including political dissidents – even American citizens on US soil – without trial or formal charges. Without court involvement or a jury deciding you are actually guilty. And “detain” is really a euphemism for IMPRISON, of course, in a semi-secret military black site, without access to an attorney, potentially for life.
Obama also signed into law something which attacks American’s First Amendment rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of speech. The Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011, or Trespass Bill, signed into law by Barack Obama on March 9, 2012, “potentially makes peaceable protest anywhere in the US a federal felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.” More specifically, peaceful protest within proximity to those protected by the Secret Service, including presidential candidates and the President, may be a federal felony now.
Even worse a former high-ranking NSA official, who spent more than three decades within the spy agency, just recently came out in a nationally televised interview and asserted that more than 20 trillion of American citizens’ communications have been intercepted – mostly without a warrant or judicial review of any kind.
Furthermore, the NSA is now building a $2 billion data centre in Utah to crunch all of this data. In other words, $2 billion of American taxpayer dollars are going toward spying on American citizens within the US without warrant or court approval. This is not only an outlandish waste of money, it’s illegal.
Also reporters at ridiculously mainstream publication USA Today are now claiming that Pentagon-sponsored “propaganda contractors” have initiated a widespread character assassination and reputation destroying campaign against them.
Sri Lanka is way better than USA
April 24th, 2012 at 6:17 pm
Significantly, the JVP’s first victim was not a representative of the bourgeois state or the UNP which proscribed the JVP, but a radical student activist, with impeccable anti-UNP credentials— Daya Pathirana, the leader of the Independent Students Union (ISU) of the University of Colombo!
The Daya Pathirana assassination was a watershed in the JVP’s post-1983 history. It played a key role in deciding the nature and the trajectory of the JVP’s second insurgency.
Daya Pathirana pioneered the Independent Students Union (ISU) of University of Colombo during his study at the Faculty of Arts, University of Colombo. Pathirana as a very poor student, a radical Leftist, not a member of the old Left or the traditional Left. Although he was leftist, he vehemently opposed Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), the Marxist-Leninist political party which had almost total control over the student’s unions in Sri Lanka. Therefore he and the Independent Students Union led by him became the most serious threat to the JVP control. On December 15, 1986, he along with a colleague named Somasiri was abducted to a lonely spot off the Bolgoda Lake, Piliyandala. The abductors then began to torture him and Somasiri, demanding information about other student and left activists. This was interrupted by a group of pilgrims (as it was the full moon poya day) It saved the life of Somasiri. But Pathirana was cut-throat at the point of intervention and eventually succumbed to his wounds. JVP unleashed violence killing radical leftist figures like Daya Pathirana and Vijaya Kumaratunga in a bid to neutralize the threats from the left-wing politics itself.
What kind of revolutionaries follow, without any qualms, orders to cut throats of young fellow Leftists of similar social backgrounds – like Daya Pathirana of the ISU? What kind of Leftists destroy a computer centre in a University as they did at Ruhuna?
Marx had harsh words for the ‘idiocy of rural life’ and even harsher ones for the ‘flotsam and jetsam’ or the lumpen proletariat. The main force of the JVP and the backbone of its military section is a combination of the flotsam and jetsam of rural society, the most backward strata, with certain ingrained prejudices and complexes.
JVP cannot be simply seen as a part of the petty bourgeois youth rebellion which was endemic in the Third World in the post war period. In most of those countries – particularly in Latin America, but also in the Philippines – the guerrilla movements are morally and ethically far superior in their behaviour, to the system that they try to overthrow. If you take the 1988 offensive by the FMLN in San Salvador, you will find their treatment of the civilian population to have been exemplary. It is the state that resorted to aerial bombings against the civilian areas in San Salvador. On the other hand, the Salvadoran FMLN unilaterally declared an 11-day ceasefire extending from Christmas to New Year.
In Sri Lanka, not only were the civilian population, the professionals, the middle class people, the poor people, the working people, trapped by two armed vanguards (the state and the anti-state forces – LTTE & JVP) but the behaviour of the anti-state forces has been worse, from a moral, ethical, civilizational, cultural point of view than that of the state! The state has had to operate within a certain system. It has to run an economy, it has to get foreign aid, it has to get investment, therefore it is constrained to a certain degree by the need to have some shred of the rule of law. That is not the case with neo barbaric Pol Pots of Sri Lanka – JVP and LTTE.