Editorial Courtesy Ceylon Today

Could the genesis of the killings of the two Jaffna University students last week have been the July 26 clash between Tamil and Sinhalese students at the Jaffna University ostensibly because the University heads had agreed to demands that a late entry application, be dismissed, for a Kandyan dance to be included in the annual traditional orientation programme of that University?
Interestingly, Minister Lakshman Kiriella casually played that incident down dismissively with the statement that ‘these things happen everywhere’. Hardly the kind of response one expects from a responsible spokesman of the government.

While the mainline media failed to bring pictures of that clash to the public, several websites did so. The pictures were ugly. Among them were ones with Sinhala students brandishing clubs at the Tamil students and ample signs of blood being spilt. The Tamil diaspora and Tamil websites went to town with that incident before the first newspaper could hit the streets the next day.

That happened against the backdrop of still simmering racial tensions and a strident call for a Tamil Nationalist Renaissance spearheaded by the TNA and Tamil parties as well as the Tamil diaspora.

It also happened against a backdrop of pepped up efforts by the Tamils to turn the March 2017 UNHRC sessions into a lynch mob cry for the prosecution of former political leaders and services members for alleged war crimes at the end-game stages of the ethnic war back in 2009.

Getting things into perspective – let’s record the fact that had this government not come into power, the scenario at the UN – and UNHRC level to be specific – would be one in which we will be seeing the former government leaders and services leaders dragged into the vortex of a damning war crimes lynch party led by the outgoing UNSG Ban Ki-moon. They are today running around using that freedom to very foolishly drag down the incumbent government and bring themselves to a place in which they will be vulnerable to prosecution by an international Court.

As things stand, President Maithripala Sirisena has adroitly made some deft moves in the face of massive international pressure to save not just those former political leaders and services commanders from a damning war crimes trial, but has in that process dragged Sri Lanka out of that potential cesspit of shame.

It’s against the backdrop of this very real possibility that we saw five Policemen arrested over the deaths of two Jaffna University students last week, just hours after the visiting UNHRC envoy left after a week-long fact-finding visit to Sri Lanka, at the end of which she savaged the Lankan Government’s reconciliation efforts as being wholly inadequate.

So, were these two deaths a sentence taken out of an odious choreography scripted by the pro-liberationist Tamils (formerly known as the LTTE) in which the Lankan Police played a part they did not know was scripted for them? Or will we later come to know, as in the Jeyaraj Fernandopulle assassination, that at least one senior SSP played a pivotal role in facilitating that assassination and coordinated it in fact with LTTE activists?

This could be why despite the CID working on the case, the Police Commission also decided to launch its own independent probe into those deaths/killings to establish whether in fact they were avoidable deaths in that the Police did not have to shoot to kill two ostensibly fleeing students after a night out with friends.

Wisely, knowing how the then government of which he was Acting Defence Minister, shoved crime by the score under the carpet, the President assured TNA Leader Sampanthan that he would order an independent probe into the incident.
That independent probe is the one launched by the Police Commission.
Special Task Force troopers and Military Intelligence men had to be hurriedly deployed to ward off the danger of that violence pouring out into the streets.

In March this year, Tamil students were attacked by unidentified Sinhalese followed by Sinhala students in April assaulting a Tamil Security Guard at the University.

We then saw Sinhala students attacking Tamils at the Eastern University on 13 March this year too.
Could there be a subtle plan by extremist Sinhalese to use Sinhala university students as cat’s paws to trigger a racial crisis once again as a political tool to drag the government into a crisis it cannot handle?
On a recent occasion we saw President Sirisena postponing his planned visit to Batticaloa in July 2016 after a Sinhala mob attack at the venue which he was to visit.

Last week’s tragedy ‘happened’ just as President Sirisena was at a function with TNA Leader Sampanthan close by. Coincidence? It’s beginning to look like there is a pattern to this ‘coincidence’.