To: Expert committee to draft a new constitution (RC)
C. Wijeyawickrema, LL.B., Ph.D.

What we are doing now is dodging the issue of 13A, and criticising the 13A, which is very clearly part of their bottom-line. Instead, we are offering them strategic parts of our infrastructure like the East Container Terminal or the West Container Terminal, instead of dealing with the main issue, which is the 13A. It would seem like India would abstain yet again,”

                             Dayan  Jayatilleka, www.themorning.lk, March 7, 2021

Pasku bomb commission (PBC)

Who could have expected that a set of lawyers (aka PBC) commissioned to explore who were behind the Easter Sunday bombing,  exploding instead, their own <religious> bomb, against the Sinhala Buddhists? The Cardinal says the report is incomplete. The Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) leader Ven. Gnanasara says he will write a book to demonstrate how PBC report is a copy, almost verbatim,  of the evidence given by him. Sarath Fonseka, who should have been the minister handling security in the yahapalana cabal, says his  separate report attached to the parliamentary select committee report on the Pasku massacre, which was a cover-up to white wash the suspected Muslim ministers in the government from blame, had already done the job that the PBC report has reinvented! Someone said that the parliamentary sectoral oversight committee on national security, chaired by Malith Jayathilake, with JVP, TNA (Sumanthiran) and two Muslim members on it, recommended remedial actions which PBC has replicated.

PBC and BBS

I plan to write a separate essay on why PBC lawyers < hooked>  BBS to its report in such damaging tone, going to the extreme of recommending punitive action against the BBS monk. PBC lawyers thus gave the local and foreign anti-Buddhist lobby enough fodder to blame the Sri Lankan Buddhists as culprits of the Easter Sunday attack, diverting attention away from Islam-ISIS-Wahabi-Arabic connections behind it. One reason for this grave mistake, intentionally or unknowingly committed, is that PBC lawyers’ lack knowledge about Buddhism and about the Koran and different interpretations given to numerous sentences printed in it, with regard to promoting and propagating Islam. Therefore, there is a real danger in entrusting lawyers who have nothing but court experience, within an adversarial system of litigation, who do not know the history or geography of the country, to write reports affecting the destiny of Sinhale, which has 2,600 years of continuous recorded  heritage.  Logical or legal does not always mean just and fair.

Committee to draft a new constitution (2021)

This PBC debacle makes me worry about what is in store for the country with regard to the death-trap called the 13^th Amendment. According to Ven. Elle Gunawansa, a constitution is a collection of individual letters (akuru godak)! One can write the holiest constitution in the world, but in the hands of unholy men (in Buddhism panchaskandas inflicted with Loba-Dvesa-Moha), it becomes like a bundle of papers used by fish vendors to wrap fish. Considering how the black-white political establishment abused laws, law-making process, executing and adjudicating it, I am not interested in knowing what comes out as another draft constitutional document, unless it proposes an overhaul of the entire Euro-centric  governance system, operated by black-white politician class since 1948.   

The rule of law, freedom of speech, democracy, separation of powers, an independent judiciary and an impartial public service are all romantic fairy tales in books not just in ex-colonies but in most capitalist representative democracies in the world. In this context, the life and death issue for the Sinhala nation is how the Romesh Committee is going handle the 13-A hot political potato. This is not a complex issue anyway, if one takes a historical-geographical approach (history is past geography). There are two population divisions in the country.  Those who support 13-A and those who oppose it. The supporters can be identified as black-whites. The black-white phenomenon started from 1551, when the Sinhale got its first and last Catholic king. Those who oppose  it in 1987 and now in 2021 are Sinhala Buddhists. If there is even a remote possibility for a Tamil country with a UN seat and a Tamil flag, one cannot expect  the existence of  Tamil saints, even if they have Sinhala married partners, to oppose 13-A. Few people know that Lakshman Kadiragamar and Jeyaraj Fernandopulle supported the federal idea.

The Christian-Buddhist conflict began with the building of a church on the premises the Kotte Raja Maha Vihara, sponsored by the Catholic king. Since then the Sinhala Christians always stood with the foreigner on many conflicts that took place between the white rulers and the temple (the Sinhala Buddhists). Now in March 2021 there is a conflict between USA, India and some ex-colonial masters determined to balkanize the country on one hand and the temple (the Sinhala Buddhists) on the other.

Balkanization of Sinhale

The Romesh de Silva committee is a team of lawyers, except one, who is a geographer with repute. There is one lawyer known for his patriotic stand to protect the country from disintegrating. The other seven members are lawyers, and their views on social, political issues  are unknown by the people for whom they are preparing a constitutional draft. Who really selected them for this task, why there are no others with other academic qualifications, instead of the same old method why not at least one erudite monk on the committee, are some questions asked.

Were they political robots or have they expressed their views on socio-economic problems or on any other burning issue in Sri Lanka by way of research essays or newspaper articles? How many of them had exposure to history, geography, global geopolitics and  civics and especially the black-white politics in the country. For example, if PBC knew that after the pasku bombing, even Hisbulla and Asath Sally, among other Muslim leaders, publicly requested president Sirisena to release Ven. Gnanasara from prison, its report would not have treated the monk so cruelly.

MCC Trojan horse and the Geneva route

Tissa Vitharana APRC majority report in the past  had as signatories  a Christians husband-wife team, and nobody knows who selected them for that onerous task, on what grounds. My dilemma is whether the  seven lawyers on the Romesh Committee are in a position to see the trees as well as the forest. For example, could they see that the entire UNHRC drama against Sri Lanka is nothing but a determined effort to get the 13^th Amendment implemented in full. This is what Dayan Jayatilleka, the foreign affairs consultant to Sajith Premadasa, tells the world, as quoted above.

But Dayan hides many more as the father of 13-A plus project in Sri Lanka since the days that he had to escape to India with Vartharaja Perumal, the IPKF puppet. USA and UK are not interested in human rights or war crimes. They want to use UNHRC to get what they lost by way of an MCC trick/bait. If 13-A plus is snatched  by hook or by crook, then US and India could use Trinco severally or jointly to try to control China, with a future Colombo government struck in the mud. Trinco is not just a large natural harbor, it has under sea troughs (geologic faults) so deep that nuclear submarines can hide in them safe from enemy detection. Thinking of air warfare and land military bases, Sri Lanka is the location with the lowest gravity on earth.

Romesh Committee (RC) and Geography

History is past geography of a country. We need to know history to understand the present and plan for the future. Learning from history means the ability to take a holistic approach, not tunnel vision. In the past I have written so many essays against the 13-A path which was rejected by Prabhakaran, SLFP and the Sinhala Buddhists. It had the backing of Christians, Marxists, Tamil politicians and some Sinhala black-white politicians. In this essay, with my limited understanding  of the topic, I am taking a short geographical analysis especially for the benefit of the 8 lawyers of the RC.

Point of no return

The section of the population supporting 13-A has had different aims.

There are three categories.

*(1) Of course JRJ had to swallow it because of his unwise behavior as a senile old politician (fox). He put all his eggs in the American basket and got severely burnt. As a dictator-president he ruined everything he touched, whether it was a new Jayawardena parliament city in a marshy land  or a Victoria dam on top of a limestone bedrock. With his un-Buddhist approach to the Tamil separatist issue started in 1923/4, he got cornered with no escape other than a total surrender to Dixit and Rajiv. It was the Government of India Act of 1935 copied as 13-A. 

Nilakantha Sasthri, the Tamil historian once wrote that, the King Vijayabahu-I, saved Sinhale from becoming part of Tamilnad. Similarly, JRJ saved N-E and Malayanadu becoming an Indian colony, by surrendering to Dixit, because otherwise the Indian army with the blessings of USA would have occupied N-E, opening the door for a future Eelam. By kneeling down, he could ‘fool’ the Indian strategists, and plant a few loopholes to negate the disastrous impact of 13-A to balkanize the island. Unfortunately, presidents after him messed up and mismanaged it, even after a miraculous victory on May 18/19, 2009. Instead of Prabhakaran’s tiger tail for 30 years, Sinhala Buddhists are now holding Sumanthiran-Vigneswaran-Ponnambalam tails under the pressure from Indian, American and  white politicians manipulating UN agencies against them. Under these circumstances, whether a Gotabhaya presidency could deliver its one country-one law promise depends on what RC does with regard to 13-A. We know what the Orumitthanadu draft proposed, copying what Mrs. Chandrika’s 2000 draft or Tissa Vitharana’s APRC majority thing.

*(2) Apart from JRJ and his blind followers/prisoners, there exists a category who believe that by giving TNA what it asks, peace and honey will flow all over the country. Perhaps this was what SWRD thought when he signed the B-C pact with Chelvanayagam (1957) or later the Dudley-C pact (1965). Giving complete land powers to a set of politicians who wanted a Kosovo plan in 1949 or joined with the Dravidasthan plan in Madras that began in 1917, was nothing but pure and simple insanity. However, due to lack of all the information, the country has old and young generations (with no history or geography learning in schools) who think like Siri Sangabos and Vessantaras. They are like the proverbial crab  in the slowly warming water pot on fire. So many SLPP and SLFP members fall into this category, Vasudeva and Tissa Vitharana included.

In this category there are people who found 13-A as a gold mine to become rich and powerful, a lower tier of the Evil triangle (politician-officer-NGO) destroying the island, a classic example of the tragedy of the commons (rob anything for private enrichment). National level somebodies use this local nobodies for selfish political power games. For these PC monkeys democracy is only a razor blade.

*(3) But the likes of Wickramabahu and Nirmal Ranjith Devasiri are different. They want Tamils to have their own country. Sumanthiran and Sambandhan takes a more careful, reasonable-looking approach. They want a united, not a unitary state. They want power devolved in such a way that once given it cannot be taken back! Under the 13-A Sri Lanka is already a federal state. On this matter, the supreme court first said no and later said yes! UNP, JVP, Peratugamis, SJB of Sajith are all in this game, knowing very well that an Eelam path is beginning of the end of the Sinhala Buddhist heritage in the island. Dayan Jayatillake leads this dishonest  pack of Rosy Senanayake, Jehan Perera, Pakiyasoothy, Kumar David,  Mrs. Chandrika etc., who know clearly that balkanization is inevitable.

When Vigneswaran was given an opportunity, after Vartharaja Perumal, to run NP what did he do? He passed genocide resolutions and opposed Buddha statutes as well as coconut toddy coming to Jaffna, while the non-vellala people continue to live in abject poverty as shown by Arul Siddharthan, a Tamil Che Guerra on the rise, with his many videos. Even in the Diyawanna hotel, Ponnamabalam and Vigneswaran talk about Tamil genocide, forgetting that TNA got Tamils to vote en masse for Sarath Fonseka in 2010, who led the <genocidal> army to finish Prabakaran’s war in less than 3 years. With rapidly losing grip on innocent Tamils in Jaffna, TNA is more delusional now than ever before.  Otherwise how could they send a letter to the Expert Committee (RC) with the following contradictory sentence printed in the island newspaper on March 21, 2021: As already intimated to you orally and in writing, we are willing to evolve a settlement within the framework of a united, undivided and indivisible country: yet based on the principle of internal self-determination resulting in maximum possible devolution.”