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"Against violent oppression, violent resistance is moral"Interviewed by Juliette Perrier in GenevaAfrique-Asie, the leading French language periodical on Third World affairs and international politics from a Third World perspective, has in its current (April 2008) issue, a two page interview with and profile of Dr Dayan Jayatilleka, Sri Lanka's Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the UN in Geneva. The interview is part of a major feature on the global implications of the secession of Kosovo, entitled "Kosovo: The Balkanisation of the World?" Penning the famous founder editor Simon Malley's obituary in The Guardian, Victoria Brittain referred to Afrique-Asie as the main source of information on the Third World for a whole generation of Western journalists. What follows is a translation of the Afrique-Asie feature from French into English, by Dr. Subhashinie Punchihetti of the original report from Geneva by Juliette Perrier.
Reputed academic, author of "Fidel's Ethics of Violence", Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka is today the Ambassador of Sri Lanka to the United Nations in Geneva. He fervently defends the policy of his government against the Tamil Tigers, the secessionists of the North-East whom he describes as "Fanatics". "Against violent oppression, violent resistance is moral"Interviewed by Juliette Perrier
in Geneva
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| " The Tamil Tigers: Neo-barbarians who should be combated, if necessary, militarily." |
I would like to make another point. The anti-imperialist movement should
seriously reflect upon the breaking up of the ethno-federal system of
the former USSR and the former Yugoslavia. The Sri Lankan public is
quite aware of the conspiracy to divide Serbia by recognizing the secession
of Kosovo. Iraq's Kurdistan could perhaps be the next Kosovo. Today,
it is necessary to prevent centrifugal trends which try to destroy States.
An excessive decentralization should be avoided to the same extent as
we avoid an excessive centralization. The sovereignty of a State is
a necessary protection against projects of unipolarity, hegemony and
interventionism.
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A young
revolutionary
"I was a militant revolutionary and was condemned in absentia: I was in clandestinity. The police officer who was assigned to arrest me was the former chief of the special paramilitary police who had been trained in Israel. Had I been arrested, I would have either been judged and sentenced to prison for a long time or would have simply 'disappeared'. In fact, I was sentenced in absentia by the High Court of Colombo on 14 charges under the law on Prevention of Terrorism and Emergency legislation. I was mainly accused of conspiring to overthrow the government through violence. I was the accused number one. My motives were varied. I wanted to help the socialist revolution take place in my country. In the mid 1970s, while I was only a high school-leaving adolescent, I had already been arrested and questioned by the police for being involved with a secret armed revolutionary group organizing against an authoritarian and capitalist regime. While I was still very young, I had Marxist-Leninist, socialist and revolutionary ideas. I had been influenced by Vietnam, by Che and Fidel, by Lenin and Mao. During the events in 1968, I was able to travel through Europe with my parents. My father was an editor and a journalist and was a very well-known figure in South Asia. He took me to the Non-Aligned Movement's Conference in Cairo in 1964 when I was still a 7 year old. In 1965, I was in Indonesia, just before the coup d'Etat. My parents were invited by Dr. Subandrio, the foreign Minister of Sukarno on the occasion of an Afro-Asian solidarity meeting. My father was the last journalist to interview D. N. Aidit, the leader of the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party. After the massacre of the unarmed Indonesian communist movement and, later, the bloody overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, I was among those in the world who were convinced that the Right would not allow peaceful transformations. At the same time, having had the opportunity to be present when my father interviewed the "biggest terrorist in the world", at the time, Abu Nidal, in 1975 in Bagdad, I could also reflect on the issue of terrorism and the attacks against civilian targets. My revolutionary engagement in the 1980s
was concerned however with more urgent motives. I was striving
to overthrow a right-wing government which had, then, simply "postponed"
the legislative elections and had become an authoritarian or a
dictatorial regime. I also had a third objective: overcome ethnic
divisions in my country and stimulate a common revolutionary combat
which would reunite, on internationalist foundations, the Marxists
among the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils." |
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